Yes... It was a jab at Gore. Let me give you my view. Bush wants to cut funding for technology and education. The man preaches about the importance of education, however, he wants to stop a $120 million investment to merge technology with education. This would put internet into many schools and give computers to many schools that would otherwise not be able to afford them. Anyone who is pro-technology and knows the issues can clearly see that your pocketbook is more protected by Gore than Bush. More technology, more jobs for techies.
Bush also is against abortion and is pro-christian right wing, pro prayer, and wants to shove his values on America. You may not want your games censored, however, I don't want religion rammed down my throat. I may believe in the bible just like the next guy but who say's I want Bush Christianity becoming the state religion. This is where McCain would have gotten my vote over Gore even... He was a republican for economic freedom and nothing more.
Abortion is nobody elses business except the mother in question. Prohibition of any kind on a moral basis has not worked and will never work - look at the 18th ammendment and the fiasco that followed. Bush talks about boosting funds to fight the drug war!!!!! Here is a man who wants to fight a war that will NEVER end and wants to cut funding to education. How bout cutting funding to the drug war and funneling that money into education so that children can be better taught the woes of drug use. It will take a cultural change for people to stop abusing harmful substances - not force, not govt, not laws, not even jailtime.
Btw, I live in TX and I can tell you that prisons here are filling up with non-violent offenders faster than you can blink . Tougher drug laws are putting non-violent offenders in jail and when that happens some rapist/murderer/child molester gets let out early on parole. The majority of Americans are delighted by his "hometown" goodness and "charm". Well, he is a hard-headed hypocrite. I've lived in this damned state and I can tell you some of the things he's done. You may well know that Texas takes the lead in the US for the number of executions. Bush might have given one reprieve and that is all. A man who's possible innocence was in question was not given a second chance to prove this. Bush reacted saying Texas has "adequately answered innocence or guilt" in this death penalty case. After the execution, it was determined that the man might have well been innocent from DNA evidence.
I'll end my rant here. Most of you who are Computer/IT professionals please consider what Al Gore really meant with his now infamous words - He helped the internet along with government funding. Gore/Lieberman while still not great, are technology friendly. Sure the democrats have censorship issues, but bush/cheney and party, technologically and culturally illiterate, will take America one giant step backwards.
Platypus, this is very important info... Thanks for the post.
"KDE2 is built with exception handling disabled by default (luckily), only khtml library, which uses exceptions is built with enabled exception handling, at least in theory. But I had problems when building shanpshots, and had to disable exception handling "by force" (on Bourne shell):"
posted on dot.kde.org by fura.
If this is indeed true then we need not worry as much. I don't want to waste my precious memory. If anyone knows more about exception handling or how to compile KDE2 without exception handling then please post. We need this kind of info.
Actually, I'm American and I have watched Canadian Bacon - probably one of the stupidest movies I've ever seen. However, The part where John Candy looks across the river at Canada and sees a beautiful landscape is kind of humorous. The part when he gets back on his boat and crosses back over to the US and sees nasty smog producing factories is even more humorous. I saw this movie about a month before I went from Texas to Detroit, Michigan to visit a friend.
When we were on the bridge, crossing the river that separates the two countries, I finally realized that the Canadian Bacon movie was no joke. On the Canadian side, I saw a beautiful boardwark alongside the river, nice landscaped flowers and trees, and people strolling. Looking back at the American side, I saw smokestacks, factories, nasty railyards and general ugliness. Mind you, I have been to Montreal and Vancouver before so this was really no surprise to me. However, seeing the stark contrast on the two sides of the river was a surprise. It was at that point I convinced myself that I was a Canadian trapped in an American body! Well, maybe, but, I have really enjoyed every trip I have taken to Canada. The country is beautiful, the people friendly, and damn that maple syrup sure tastes great. It sure beats the corn syrup imitation crap we have here.
At any rate, I will definately be going back to Canada for another visit someday. I can definately see why Canada has been voted the best country in the world to live by the UN. Oh, and another thing, If you see some fat guy coming across the river in a motorboat, it's not me!
Yes, the corporations in conjunction with their buyout of congress has led to a sad situation indeed. Reverse engingeering, and I don't think I need to cite the many obvious examples here, is necessary for the forward movement of mankind and technology. Should the govt/corporate America decide, via DMCA or otherwise, to limit our ability to do this, technology will suffer. Not because people will stop hacking, but because derivative works will become illegal.
And this is a sad fact indeed. As an American I can only shake my head in disgust at what the MPAA has done in their arrest of Johanson. The US is losing all respect for another country's sovereignty. The MPAA is in bed with government and this makes my head spin. The thought that they can go into another country and arrest a non-US citizen is truly amazing. As far as I know, the DMCA is not internationally applicable - yet anyway. This is an American law and had Johanson lived in the US, this would be a different story. The US govt/mpaa trying to enforce our laws beyond our borders is complete bullshit!!!!
How is this any different from an Indian Salman Rushdie getting official death threats from the Iranian government because his book somehow insults Islam. Another country trying to export its laws.
The US has become to imperialist in nature. Another example of this would be the Helms-Burton Act. The HBA allows US companies to sue foreign companies that trade with Cuba. They justify this on the basis that these companies are dealing with property nationalized by Fidel Castro which once belonged to American companies. Opponents to the HBA point out that the US is trying to make/impose its own restrictions on foreign businesses, a policy highly resented throughout the world.
There are many other amazing things the US can do but many others that it can't.(or would rather simply ignore) For example, college students are tricked into vacationing to Nicarauga and when leaving, tricked into carrying cocaine out. These young students are then caught by Nicaraugan officials and held in the most deplorable of conditions, yet the US govt. says they can do nothing. They do nothing because only a persons life is at stake and not the psycho-somatic welfare of a corporation. How nice, as an American I can be assured that my country will do nothing to protect me outside it's borders. Yet, I am assured that foreigners outside of these borders are not immune to US laws. This spells hypocrisy.
The US helped the poor Kuwaiti's because of their oil and nothing more.... Bush sr. claimed to be doing this because of human righs.... yea right! Millions of Bosnians were imprisioned and treated not much differently than Jews in Nazi Germany and the US considers this an internal conflict and decides not to interfere. Translation - there is no oil in Bosnia, therefore we will have no economic benefits in freeing a suppressed people.
The DMCA, UCITA, Helms-Burton Act, and many others are clearly acts to put American corporations in more control. It's about control, control, and even more control. It's about their pocketbooks and strongarming anybody who gets in the way.
I agree with your sentiments wholeheartedly. However, this only applies in the US and a few other countries. Many countries charge per minute phone charges for local calls and this could cut down costs for these types of users. I really don't like the idea of metering in general, however it may have some applicability in certain situations.
I posted the parent post.... I just installed Quake 3 and played on the net... Damn... It is nice and smooth. I also installed realplayer 7 and watched slackertv at 220kbs. GNU utilities like vi, gcc, autoconf, etc.. were installed and now I'm very pleased. I only wish I could mount the nfs share on my linux box! There is a mount command, but for some reason I'm not able to mount the share... oh well... back to the drawing board for qnx.
I must say I enjoy the "alternative" OS's. I've installed and used many different OS's just for the fun of it and to get an idea of what else is out there. Currently I still like Linux the best as far as non-M$ OS's go. I have installed and played with Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BeOS, Linux, and QNX.
Actually, I'm using QNX right now. I must admit, it is indeed a snappy platform. There is no drag and drop support and the applications are limited. I do like the GUI and it's responsiveness. This is what a realtime OS is all about. I'm currently doing a network install of RealPlayer 7, Doom, Quake 3, and some GNU utilities. Configuration of my soundcard happened automatically and configuring my NIC and my graphics settings were a snap.
I hope that an alternative OS convention comes near my area. I know many who would attend such an event. At any rate, I'll keep on playing till my hearts content!
well, I would not pay $15 per month but $5 is resonable. However, there are a few problems with this as well. I can't stand downloading songs that are halfway ripped leaving the remainder only to be cut off at the chorus. If there were a way to guarantee clean rips from the Industry itself then I might consider it. Downloading from some guys drive across the state is a free for all. I'm not guaranteed that the song will be in perfect condition. Paying Napster 5 bucks a month is more like a piracy tax. Much the same as how the cost of piracy is built into the cost of blank tapes and CDR's. If they want to justify piracy through this kind of tax then so be it. They won't be able to do this with gnutella though. If they are serious about a subscription service then they will setup a web-based site where one can pay a monthly fee for leech access to their files and leech access to Napster.
Keep in mind that this is a single machine with a single processor. This is not a load-balanced set of servers. I am truly impressed with FreeBSD as a server OS. I have yet to see an NT server perform such a feat. This is probably the reason Hotmail has not been moved onto an NT server. I am a linux user and a loyal one too. However, I think most of us who use linux should not forget the contributions the BSD's have made to UNIX as a whole.
The University of California, Berkeley used Unix as a research system. It also had a DARPA grant to develop and implement the Arpanet protocols, which became TCP/IP. Companies such as Cisco, Frontier, NetManage, and others based their initial products on implementations of Berkeley TCP/IP.
Many features we nowadays take for granted were introduced on BSD and only later adopted by AT&T and other vendors: the vi screen editor, the termcap terminal capability database and the curses screen manipulation library, csh, job control, long file names, symbolic links, TCP/IP networking, the socket interface, various r* utilities, etc...
Keep in mind also, the BSD crowd and the linux crowd have similar goals and aspirations. We both like our respective OS's because they are free and open. We both like our OS's because they are both UNIX, whether the Open Group allows you to call it that or not. Both groups know that either a demon or a penguin can break windows with no trouble at all. Sure, there is the BSD vs. SysV argument and others, but who cares. We are on the same side and we should be learning from eachother instead of starting a flamefest. If you see an honest, educated post about why someone prefers BSD to Linux or vice versa, you should respect their opinion and try to understand why (some feature here) is important in their world view. I am personally looking forward to getting an extra box so I can start learning more about the BSD's.
...and the same has been said for president clinton. Anyone who is in bed with government uses this kind of argument in debate or interogation. Why - because it saves your ass. It was interesting to me that Valenti either said "I have no idea what you're talking about," or he dodged the questions Lessig was asking by answering him with a sermon of how stealing is wrong or what the law of the land is. Of course this all depends on what the definition of "is" is. He very seldom answered the questions asked of him.
I would tend to agree with the parent post to some degree that Valenti is smart and chooses to act like an old money tycoon with no concept of how things work outside his oilfield. I'm sure that when it comes to technology, he is not very techno-inclined, however, he is not completely illiterate either. He has obviously chosen to protect the interest of his wallet and the industry he leads rather than be "fair" to the consumer. Only time will tell if our rights to fair use will be upheld or destroyed through draconian laws like the DMCA.
"I think that XFS and JFS should both be integrated with it. ext3fs is only useful for scared admins, as it has none of the basic speed advantages of the others"
XFS is a journaling system on it's own and it is SGI's crown jewel achievement - It does not need to be integrated in any way with ext3 as that is not the goal here. Eventually XFS on linux will be used with CFXS which is journaling with clustering which ext3 does not support. XFS on IRIX is one of the fastest journaling file systems on the market and it scales incredibly high. No other Journaling system for linux, not even reiserfs, can match the speed or scalability of sgi's xfs.
On a side note, I use reiser on my box at home and I'm very pleased with it. It is not however, as fast or as scalable on an enterprise scale as XFS. For more info on XFS please see http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/papers/xfs_GPL.pdf
The specs are impressive. While the code is beta, they hope to achieve the same level of performance on linux as has already been achieved on IRIX.
Well... while I agree that KDE or GNOME will be used by the majority, myself included, the minority may prefer something different. Also, more choice is good and that is not a bad thing. XFce is not about competing with GNOME or KDE... There is no competition here... people who like it will use it.
I believe people who have come from a SunOS, Solaris, and HP-UX background to use XFce because it provides them with an interface which is very very similar to CDE. On the other hand, KDE and GNOME will help users with a windows background to make the transition more easily to linux.
We have to keep in mind that linux is about choice. Sure GNOME vs. KDE battle will always be there but so will enlightenment, blackbox, fvwm, afterstep, openlook, sawfish, etc... We must also remember that raw linux is the command line, yet another choice for how users interact with their boxes.
Interesting... you live in dallas... I live in the mid-cities close to Fort Worth and I have @home as well... my provider is charter communications. I am very happy with @home here. The only time the cable connection went down was because a tornado ripped thru downtown Fort Worth and lines went down... Otherwise, I have had no connection problems.. I usually download above 200kB per second. I even hit a sustained rate of 700kB one time and I was shocked. That 700 kiloBytes(not bits) per second!
Otherwise, I have heard stories much like your own where weekly downtime seems to be a norm. I helped a friend of mine configure his IDSL connection which is slow as molasses and he had to wait god knows how long to get that. I really think the level of service for DSL vs. cable varies from area to area. Who is your local cable company? Maybe, in your case, DSL is the better choice.
Well.. This is a beta release however, I attended one of those sgi linux university road tours and I watched a presentation on XFS as it exists for IRIX systems. The specs are truly amazing. Right now ReiserFS might be the way to go but tomorrow XFS will rule. XFS is SGI's crown jewels and they are GPLing it! This means high availability for linux. Databases running on linux using XFS will be the king of the crop.
The performance of most UNIX filesystems significantly degrades as the number of entries per directory grows - Not with XFS. You could have a directory with thousands of entries and due to the B-trees table structure the lookup and response time is not much different if you only had a few entries.
On IRIX XFS is capable of handling files as large as a million terabytes. XFS is a 64bit file system and offers near raw i/o performance. XFS will bring linux the filesystem stability it needs to be considered an enterprise OS. While IRIX can boast these numbers it will be a little while before linux can. On the other hand, I am happy with ReiserFS on my home desktop. There are people who use ReiserFS on their servers. The enterprise will be very happy with XFS on Linux.
The timing of this post is immaculate... You see, yesterday I spent the better part of the evening trying to get my friends 144kb connection up and working. The Covad guys came and installed the connection and left. They didn't tell my friend that they would not provide a network card. They also told him and told me that the connection was 144kByte per second... Can you imagine the letdown after we finally got it running!
The configuration of the DSL router was a pain in the ass. Calling up his ISP didn't help either and they didn't seem to understand that the IP address I was trying to get working was the routers IP address not the PC's address. After explaining that the router gave addresses via DHCP and the router needed to be configured for bridging and IP routing using mac encapsulation he became even more inept and confused. He said "we normally don't do router configuration...Let me see if I can schedule covad to come back out there." Luckily I ignored everything he told me and managed to get the router up and running.
My friend is not happy that he's paying $50 a month for 144kb IDSL while I pay $38 a month for full blown @home cable service. For some reason, the cable people don't respond to his emails or they say they don't know if it is available in his area. Strangely enough, I live 2 minutes away and I have @home. @home took a year to install my connection but I wouldnt trade it for anything! I regularly download over 200KByte per second.
Here's the kicker... FreeDSL offers 144kb connections in our area but you have to endure a banner add. The bigger kicker.. He found out about FreeDSL availability the same day he had IDSL installed. He is not a happy camper, but really, the thing that upsets him the most - Covad and Internet America lied to him... They told him that their service is faster than ADSL... They told him it was faster than cable... they told him it was 144KByte per second when in fact it is 144Kbit per second... After spending all kinds of money on installation, the headaches, the letdown, the distortion of truth, I really don't blame him for being upset. He told me he is going to cancel IDSL, get a refund, and switch to FreeDSL... I hope it works out for him.
While I agree that RHCE may have people trapped in the redhat sandbox unable to cope with non redhat distros, this certainly is not the case for LPI or GNU Sair. GNU Sair has levels of certification as does LPI and they are vendor neutral. The GNU Sair seems to be a bit more in depth certification of the two. I highly doubt you'll see paper MLCE's like you see paper MCSE's. The *nix learning curve scares those types of people away. People who learn linux do some for the love of the OS, not because they saw a "make $50k now" add in the paper. In addition, the MLCE is GNU Sair's top level. The lowest level, LCA, is more difficult to attain than an MCSE. By the time someone is LPIC-3 or MLCE, they'll know their shit.
I've also seen sample questions from these exams which range from easy to difficult. Some of the questions depend on your actually having experience to be able to answer the questions. I don't believe the linux exams are heading down the MCSE highway. We won't see exams retired every two years - I mean *nix doesn't change THAT much! Plus, this gives linux guru's credibility in the "eyes" of companies. In the end, we know, that experience is the best teacher, not a piece of paper. However, this piece of paper is going to take more work to earn than the MCSE. I guarantee it!
hmmm... interesting theory here. I don't believe that rpm's were made for this intended purpose, but you do have a point. Debian upgrades are a breeze compared to rpm distro's. Once Debian is installed there is nothing but upgrade from there. Just point apt-get to the right place and there you go. Redhat might not like it if people only bought a distro once and then just apt-get distupgdraded it from there.
Debian, being completely non-commercial does not have this concern. I don't use Debian as my desktop because it's not as cutting edge as I like, however, if you run it as a server it minimizes administration hassles and it makes maintaining your box much easier.
"But I totally disagree with going after his OS maker and FTP software writer. That is just plain DUMB."
I hope you are trying to be funny. Taco is also trying to be funny! IF you have been keeping up with the napster case you would see a humorous irony in his statement... He in no way meant for people to take him literally. Hello? I think you need to get back in the game.
Hmmm... You are trolling and I shouldn't even respond to a mindless sheep like yourself but I feel I have no choice but to ventilate. It seems that you are the one who is godless and un-american. You are a product of a culture you can't explain... You are in a prison you can not see or smell or touch. Yeah, I know, I ripped off morpheus here.
The vast majority, not all, but most people who watch TV, keep up with the NFL, popular sports and the like think they are living in the real world... The truth is, that those people are sadly caught in a vicious cycle... they are brought up not to think and to follow mindlessly.
People talk about how football is SO American and if you don't like baseball, apple pie, chevy, or some popular mindless activity you are unamerican. I would argue, however, that the inverse is true. America was founded by people who were trying to escape the very thing that America has become -- a mindless society. America, when it was young, was a promising land for inventors, scientists, and freethinkers like our own founding fathers - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson.
It really is disturbing that Americans are becoming more mindless day by day. Succumbing to media, advertising, and hype. Marx said "religion is an opium." Well, I say NFL, and competative sports in general are the opiums of today's society. How many American's know who wrote the declaration of Independence? A survey of today's high school teens showed that only a handfull even knew that it was Thomas Jefferson. However, the same teens knew who won what games and what so and so's batting average was.
And godless you say? You are the one who worships an oversized steroid pumping jock. You are the one who obsesses about a game. A GAME!!!
The world would turn whether they existed or not. I don't watch football and I don't give a damn about them and my life mysteriously continues. The problem with people like you who are trapped in the popular culture is that you can't see past the barrier that society has created for you. The "real" world is not concerned with such trivialities. You can't fathom someone not caring about football and it's truly sad you can't see past that barrrier. You're personal growth will be stunted as a result. I'm not saying don't like football... just realize that it is a fruitless pursuit.
Finally, you have let society define who you are. And since you are so hopelessly trapped in the system you are doing everything in your power to defend it. You are scared of people who don't watch football because deep down inside it bothers you that someone thinks. It bothers you that some guy out there has a productive life without succumbing to the pressures you did to be "normal." There are many more like me who just don't give a rat's ass about NFL, NBA, NHL, or some other time wasting activity. I hope that one day you'll come to grips with your inability to break away from that golden cage you are trapped in.
Unfortunately it seems our liberties are slowly being trickled away. What was once a free United States is now becoming a police state. The fourth amendment which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of property has already gone by the wayside.
Consider this, Of the drug war's many assaults on American civil liberties, perhaps the most extreme is what is called civil asset forfeiture. Ordinarily, property is only seized after its owner is charged and convicted of a crime and the property can be shown to be the fruits of that crime. Civil asset forfeiture, however, does away with the need to prove the owner's guilt. To seize any sort of property, police simply have to show that the property was somehow connected to illegal drugs. To do that, the police must meet only a civil law standard of proof -- a far lower standard than that required to convict someone of a crime. It doesn't matter if the owner of the property is never convicted of a crime, or never even charged with a crime. In 80 per cent of forfeitures, in fact, charges are never laid. -- From the media awareness project.
Hmmm.. Sounds scary.... what if you own a hotel and someone does a drug deal or smokes dope on your property, however you have no knowledge of this(most hotel owners would be violating privacy if they had cameras in every room). Can they take away your property? You bet, this scenario has already happened!!!
Now there are exceptions to the fourth amendment - What's stopping the government from making exceptions to the first amendment or any other for that matter. Imagine, not being able to say "drugs should be legal." Hmmm. Now people can't express their opinions... What's next, you can have freedom of religion as long as that religion is Christianity? maybe Judeaism? We are slowly becoming a country which does not deserve to be called America - we are losing our freedoms.
We have a choice in this next election.... Republican party, Democratic party, Third party, or Boston Tea Party. Our rights are precious and "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." -- Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution.
"So the MPAA is cutting out part of linux's marketshare. "
Hmmm... Maybe Redhat, Caldera, Suse, etc... Should sue the MPAA for lost profits. After all, didn't Bell telephone go after people who used non-Bell phones and equipment and, of course, they were broken up as a result. Seems like the MPAA has a type of monopoly here - one has to use an MPAA approved DVD player. It could take a sharp legal team to make the historical comparison between Bell telephone and the MPAA. Anyone who uses a copyright to gain a monopoly loses the right to that copyright. Ah but the DMCA would need to be overturned first... Anyone with legal expertise out there? How could this be tackled?
When Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, said in 1982 - new technology (vhs tapes) "is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." Yet today, so much revenue is the result of vhs tapes being sold... casette tapes were even shunned because people could tape off of the radio. Why is this man still the president of the MPAA? The statistics have shown that vhs and casette tapes helped the industry.
When Lars went after napster he generated more publicity for napster than he probably intended. I know many who learned of napster due to Lars. The MPAA publicized DeCSS when the went after Johansen... They are trying to fight the war the old fasioned way and it's not working... When will they wake up. They're shooting themselves in the foot. This 2600 case no doubt brought more attention to DeCSS. The MPAA hypocrites are bringing more attention to that which they are so desperately trying to hide from the public. Wouldn't it have been better for them to take a wait and see attitude?
New technologies are always feared by the tyrants and control freaks of capitalism. The market advances only when it's free of restraints. Would the MPAA have made billions of dollars of vhs tapes? NO... they would not be as rich as they are today. If Linux users could watch DVD's then they would buy DVD's. Unfortunately this is about Control.
The MPAA wants you to be a consumer droid... buying what they tell you to buy, watching what they tell you to watch, and watching it their way - through their system. I'm sorry, but if you look at the recent past, you will see that when consumers could choose how to watch, listen to, or enjoy their media the MPAA was financially successful. Now with the advent of HDTV, they want to stop you from recording shows because "it's digital." So what, people can record movies off cable now. After watching a few taped episodes of the Discovery Channel I would even consider getting cable. The more someone is exposed to samples of a product, the better the chance that they would buy that product. When will the MPAA get it!
While I agree with you that Sony America and the sony record label is screwing people, it would be kind of hard to blame the entire corporation. I mean, there are many competative factions within a corporation that don't always agree with eachother. The Sony Record Label sells CD's, Sony Japan sells mini-discs, sony somebody sells the "music clip" that plays mp3's.
Doesn't it seem odd? A corporation who vehemently opposes mp3's or digital recording is selling a "music clip" and mini-disc players. Well it's not odd at all - example, Uniden corp. makes radar guns for state and local police depts and it also makes the radar detectors you buy to detect those very radar guns. Then, they make radar guns with vg-2 chips to detect radar detectors and then they turn around and make stealth radar detectors that have antivg-2 chips.
Sony is no different here. Sony pushed the minidisc player which does record digitally into the hands of many. The minidisc format is more popular than CD's in Japan and it is pretty popular in Europe. However, when minidisc were to be marketed in the states the riaa, which the sony label is a part of, complained big time stunting the growth of that market. It is truly a shame because minidisc kicks ass.
If there is money to be made, a corporation will do whatever is necessary. Remember that different parts of the corporation may not necessarily be in accordance with eachother. Sony obviously see's that there is money to be made with the "music clip" mp3 player. If you are mad at sony, stop buying music on their label.
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Yes... It was a jab at Gore. Let me give you my view. Bush wants to cut funding for technology and education. The man preaches about the importance of education, however, he wants to stop a $120 million investment to merge technology with education. This would put internet into many schools and give computers to many schools that would otherwise not be able to afford them. Anyone who is pro-technology and knows the issues can clearly see that your pocketbook is more protected by Gore than Bush. More technology, more jobs for techies.
Bush also is against abortion and is pro-christian right wing, pro prayer, and wants to shove his values on America. You may not want your games censored, however, I don't want religion rammed down my throat. I may believe in the bible just like the next guy but who say's I want Bush Christianity becoming the state religion. This is where McCain would have gotten my vote over Gore even... He was a republican for economic freedom and nothing more.
Abortion is nobody elses business except the mother in question. Prohibition of any kind on a moral basis has not worked and will never work - look at the 18th ammendment and the fiasco that followed. Bush talks about boosting funds to fight the drug war!!!!! Here is a man who wants to fight a war that will NEVER end and wants to cut funding to education. How bout cutting funding to the drug war and funneling that money into education so that children can be better taught the woes of drug use. It will take a cultural change for people to stop abusing harmful substances - not force, not govt, not laws, not even jailtime.
Btw, I live in TX and I can tell you that prisons here are filling up with non-violent offenders faster than you can blink . Tougher drug laws are putting non-violent offenders in jail and when that happens some rapist/murderer/child molester gets let out early on parole. The majority of Americans are delighted by his "hometown" goodness and "charm". Well, he is a hard-headed hypocrite. I've lived in this damned state and I can tell you some of the things he's done. You may well know that Texas takes the lead in the US for the number of executions. Bush might have given one reprieve and that is all. A man who's possible innocence was in question was not given a second chance to prove this. Bush reacted saying Texas has "adequately answered innocence or guilt" in this death penalty case. After the execution, it was determined that the man might have well been innocent from DNA evidence.
I'll end my rant here. Most of you who are Computer/IT professionals please consider what Al Gore really meant with his now infamous words - He helped the internet along with government funding. Gore/Lieberman while still not great, are technology friendly. Sure the democrats have censorship issues, but bush/cheney and party, technologically and culturally illiterate, will take America one giant step backwards.
Platypus, this is very important info... Thanks for the post.
"KDE2 is built with exception handling disabled by default (luckily), only khtml library, which uses exceptions is built with enabled exception handling, at least in theory. But I had problems when building shanpshots, and had to disable exception handling "by force" (on Bourne shell):"
posted on dot.kde.org by fura.
If this is indeed true then we need not worry as much. I don't want to waste my precious memory. If anyone knows more about exception handling or how to compile KDE2 without exception handling then please post. We need this kind of info.
Actually, you are right... I need to get out of TX!!!!!
Actually, I'm American and I have watched Canadian Bacon - probably one of the stupidest movies I've ever seen. However, The part where John Candy looks across the river at Canada and sees a beautiful landscape is kind of humorous. The part when he gets back on his boat and crosses back over to the US and sees nasty smog producing factories is even more humorous. I saw this movie about a month before I went from Texas to Detroit, Michigan to visit a friend. When we were on the bridge, crossing the river that separates the two countries, I finally realized that the Canadian Bacon movie was no joke. On the Canadian side, I saw a beautiful boardwark alongside the river, nice landscaped flowers and trees, and people strolling. Looking back at the American side, I saw smokestacks, factories, nasty railyards and general ugliness. Mind you, I have been to Montreal and Vancouver before so this was really no surprise to me. However, seeing the stark contrast on the two sides of the river was a surprise. It was at that point I convinced myself that I was a Canadian trapped in an American body! Well, maybe, but, I have really enjoyed every trip I have taken to Canada. The country is beautiful, the people friendly, and damn that maple syrup sure tastes great. It sure beats the corn syrup imitation crap we have here. At any rate, I will definately be going back to Canada for another visit someday. I can definately see why Canada has been voted the best country in the world to live by the UN. Oh, and another thing, If you see some fat guy coming across the river in a motorboat, it's not me!
Yes, the corporations in conjunction with their buyout of congress has led to a sad situation indeed. Reverse engingeering, and I don't think I need to cite the many obvious examples here, is necessary for the forward movement of mankind and technology. Should the govt/corporate America decide, via DMCA or otherwise, to limit our ability to do this, technology will suffer. Not because people will stop hacking, but because derivative works will become illegal.
And this is a sad fact indeed. As an American I can only shake my head in disgust at what the MPAA has done in their arrest of Johanson. The US is losing all respect for another country's sovereignty. The MPAA is in bed with government and this makes my head spin. The thought that they can go into another country and arrest a non-US citizen is truly amazing. As far as I know, the DMCA is not internationally applicable - yet anyway. This is an American law and had Johanson lived in the US, this would be a different story. The US govt/mpaa trying to enforce our laws beyond our borders is complete bullshit!!!!
How is this any different from an Indian Salman Rushdie getting official death threats from the Iranian government because his book somehow insults Islam. Another country trying to export its laws.
The US has become to imperialist in nature. Another example of this would be the Helms-Burton Act. The HBA allows US companies to sue foreign companies that trade with Cuba. They justify this on the basis that these companies are dealing with property nationalized by Fidel Castro which once belonged to American companies. Opponents to the HBA point out that the US is trying to make/impose its own restrictions on foreign businesses, a policy highly resented throughout the world.
There are many other amazing things the US can do but many others that it can't.(or would rather simply ignore) For example, college students are tricked into vacationing to Nicarauga and when leaving, tricked into carrying cocaine out. These young students are then caught by Nicaraugan officials and held in the most deplorable of conditions, yet the US govt. says they can do nothing. They do nothing because only a persons life is at stake and not the psycho-somatic welfare of a corporation. How nice, as an American I can be assured that my country will do nothing to protect me outside it's borders. Yet, I am assured that foreigners outside of these borders are not immune to US laws. This spells hypocrisy.
The US helped the poor Kuwaiti's because of their oil and nothing more.... Bush sr. claimed to be doing this because of human righs.... yea right! Millions of Bosnians were imprisioned and treated not much differently than Jews in Nazi Germany and the US considers this an internal conflict and decides not to interfere. Translation - there is no oil in Bosnia, therefore we will have no economic benefits in freeing a suppressed people.
The DMCA, UCITA, Helms-Burton Act, and many others are clearly acts to put American corporations in more control. It's about control, control, and even more control. It's about their pocketbooks and strongarming anybody who gets in the way.
I agree with your sentiments wholeheartedly. However, this only applies in the US and a few other countries. Many countries charge per minute phone charges for local calls and this could cut down costs for these types of users. I really don't like the idea of metering in general, however it may have some applicability in certain situations.
I posted the parent post.... I just installed Quake 3 and played on the net... Damn... It is nice and smooth. I also installed realplayer 7 and watched slackertv at 220kbs. GNU utilities like vi, gcc, autoconf, etc.. were installed and now I'm very pleased. I only wish I could mount the nfs share on my linux box! There is a mount command, but for some reason I'm not able to mount the share... oh well... back to the drawing board for qnx.
I must say I enjoy the "alternative" OS's. I've installed and used many different OS's just for the fun of it and to get an idea of what else is out there. Currently I still like Linux the best as far as non-M$ OS's go. I have installed and played with Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BeOS, Linux, and QNX.
Actually, I'm using QNX right now. I must admit, it is indeed a snappy platform. There is no drag and drop support and the applications are limited. I do like the GUI and it's responsiveness. This is what a realtime OS is all about. I'm currently doing a network install of RealPlayer 7, Doom, Quake 3, and some GNU utilities. Configuration of my soundcard happened automatically and configuring my NIC and my graphics settings were a snap.
I hope that an alternative OS convention comes near my area. I know many who would attend such an event. At any rate, I'll keep on playing till my hearts content!
cheers
No it's not an SMP machine...
Here is some of the information from the config.txt file on the server:
"Since so many people ask us about the configuration of wcarchive, here's the
scoop:
wcarchive.cdrom.com is an Intel architecture PC machine running the FreeBSD
operating system.
Its configuration is as follows:
Micron NetFRAME 9201 system, consisting of:
One 500MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU w/512K L2 cache
4GB of main memory (16 * 256MB 50ns ECC EDO DIMMs)
1 Adaptec AHA-2940U2W PCI single-channel wide Ultra-2 SCSI controller
2 Adaptec AHA-3940AUW PCI dual-channel wide UltraSCSI controller
1 Intel Pro/100+ PCI 100Mbps Fast Ethernet controller
1 Bay Networks Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter"
cheers.
well, I would not pay $15 per month but $5 is resonable. However, there are a few problems with this as well. I can't stand downloading songs that are halfway ripped leaving the remainder only to be cut off at the chorus. If there were a way to guarantee clean rips from the Industry itself then I might consider it. Downloading from some guys drive across the state is a free for all. I'm not guaranteed that the song will be in perfect condition. Paying Napster 5 bucks a month is more like a piracy tax. Much the same as how the cost of piracy is built into the cost of blank tapes and CDR's. If they want to justify piracy through this kind of tax then so be it. They won't be able to do this with gnutella though. If they are serious about a subscription service then they will setup a web-based site where one can pay a monthly fee for leech access to their files and leech access to Napster.
Keep in mind that this is a single machine with a single processor. This is not a load-balanced set of servers. I am truly impressed with FreeBSD as a server OS. I have yet to see an NT server perform such a feat. This is probably the reason Hotmail has not been moved onto an NT server. I am a linux user and a loyal one too. However, I think most of us who use linux should not forget the contributions the BSD's have made to UNIX as a whole.
The University of California, Berkeley used Unix as a research system. It also had a DARPA grant to develop and implement the Arpanet protocols, which became TCP/IP. Companies such as Cisco, Frontier, NetManage, and others based their initial products on implementations of Berkeley TCP/IP.
Many features we nowadays take for granted were introduced on BSD and only later adopted by AT&T and other vendors: the vi screen editor, the termcap terminal capability database and the curses screen manipulation library, csh, job control, long file names, symbolic links, TCP/IP networking, the socket interface, various r* utilities, etc...
Keep in mind also, the BSD crowd and the linux crowd have similar goals and aspirations. We both like our respective OS's because they are free and open. We both like our OS's because they are both UNIX, whether the Open Group allows you to call it that or not. Both groups know that either a demon or a penguin can break windows with no trouble at all. Sure, there is the BSD vs. SysV argument and others, but who cares. We are on the same side and we should be learning from eachother instead of starting a flamefest. If you see an honest, educated post about why someone prefers BSD to Linux or vice versa, you should respect their opinion and try to understand why (some feature here) is important in their world view. I am personally looking forward to getting an extra box so I can start learning more about the BSD's.
cheers.
...and the same has been said for president clinton. Anyone who is in bed with government uses this kind of argument in debate or interogation. Why - because it saves your ass. It was interesting to me that Valenti either said "I have no idea what you're talking about," or he dodged the questions Lessig was asking by answering him with a sermon of how stealing is wrong or what the law of the land is. Of course this all depends on what the definition of "is" is. He very seldom answered the questions asked of him.
I would tend to agree with the parent post to some degree that Valenti is smart and chooses to act like an old money tycoon with no concept of how things work outside his oilfield. I'm sure that when it comes to technology, he is not very techno-inclined, however, he is not completely illiterate either. He has obviously chosen to protect the interest of his wallet and the industry he leads rather than be "fair" to the consumer. Only time will tell if our rights to fair use will be upheld or destroyed through draconian laws like the DMCA.
"I think that XFS and JFS should both be integrated with it. ext3fs is only useful for scared admins, as it has none of the basic speed advantages of the others"
f
XFS is a journaling system on it's own and it is SGI's crown jewel achievement - It does not need to be integrated in any way with ext3 as that is not the goal here. Eventually XFS on linux will be used with CFXS which is journaling with clustering which ext3 does not support. XFS on IRIX is one of the fastest journaling file systems on the market and it scales incredibly high. No other Journaling system for linux, not even reiserfs, can match the speed or scalability of sgi's xfs.
On a side note, I use reiser on my box at home and I'm very pleased with it. It is not however, as fast or as scalable on an enterprise scale as XFS. For more info on XFS please see http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/papers/xfs_GPL.pd
The specs are impressive. While the code is beta, they hope to achieve the same level of performance on linux as has already been achieved on IRIX.
Well... while I agree that KDE or GNOME will be used by the majority, myself included, the minority may prefer something different. Also, more choice is good and that is not a bad thing. XFce is not about competing with GNOME or KDE... There is no competition here... people who like it will use it.
I believe people who have come from a SunOS, Solaris, and HP-UX background to use XFce because it provides them with an interface which is very very similar to CDE. On the other hand, KDE and GNOME will help users with a windows background to make the transition more easily to linux.
We have to keep in mind that linux is about choice. Sure GNOME vs. KDE battle will always be there but so will enlightenment, blackbox, fvwm, afterstep, openlook, sawfish, etc... We must also remember that raw linux is the command line, yet another choice for how users interact with their boxes.
Interesting... you live in dallas... I live in the mid-cities close to Fort Worth and I have @home as well... my provider is charter communications. I am very happy with @home here. The only time the cable connection went down was because a tornado ripped thru downtown Fort Worth and lines went down... Otherwise, I have had no connection problems.. I usually download above 200kB per second. I even hit a sustained rate of 700kB one time and I was shocked. That 700 kiloBytes(not bits) per second!
Otherwise, I have heard stories much like your own where weekly downtime seems to be a norm. I helped a friend of mine configure his IDSL connection which is slow as molasses and he had to wait god knows how long to get that. I really think the level of service for DSL vs. cable varies from area to area. Who is your local cable company? Maybe, in your case, DSL is the better choice.
Well.. This is a beta release however, I attended one of those sgi linux university road tours and I watched a presentation on XFS as it exists for IRIX systems. The specs are truly amazing. Right now ReiserFS might be the way to go but tomorrow XFS will rule. XFS is SGI's crown jewels and they are GPLing it! This means high availability for linux. Databases running on linux using XFS will be the king of the crop.
The performance of most UNIX filesystems significantly degrades as the number of entries per directory grows - Not with XFS. You could have a directory with thousands of entries and due to the B-trees table structure the lookup and response time is not much different if you only had a few entries.
On IRIX XFS is capable of handling files as large as a million terabytes. XFS is a 64bit file system and offers near raw i/o performance. XFS will bring linux the filesystem stability it needs to be considered an enterprise OS. While IRIX can boast these numbers it will be a little while before linux can. On the other hand, I am happy with ReiserFS on my home desktop. There are people who use ReiserFS on their servers. The enterprise will be very happy with XFS on Linux.
The timing of this post is immaculate... You see, yesterday I spent the better part of the evening trying to get my friends 144kb connection up and working. The Covad guys came and installed the connection and left. They didn't tell my friend that they would not provide a network card. They also told him and told me that the connection was 144kByte per second... Can you imagine the letdown after we finally got it running!
The configuration of the DSL router was a pain in the ass. Calling up his ISP didn't help either and they didn't seem to understand that the IP address I was trying to get working was the routers IP address not the PC's address. After explaining that the router gave addresses via DHCP and the router needed to be configured for bridging and IP routing using mac encapsulation he became even more inept and confused. He said "we normally don't do router configuration...Let me see if I can schedule covad to come back out there." Luckily I ignored everything he told me and managed to get the router up and running.
My friend is not happy that he's paying $50 a month for 144kb IDSL while I pay $38 a month for full blown @home cable service. For some reason, the cable people don't respond to his emails or they say they don't know if it is available in his area. Strangely enough, I live 2 minutes away and I have @home. @home took a year to install my connection but I wouldnt trade it for anything! I regularly download over 200KByte per second.
Here's the kicker... FreeDSL offers 144kb connections in our area but you have to endure a banner add. The bigger kicker.. He found out about FreeDSL availability the same day he had IDSL installed. He is not a happy camper, but really, the thing that upsets him the most - Covad and Internet America lied to him... They told him that their service is faster than ADSL... They told him it was faster than cable... they told him it was 144KByte per second when in fact it is 144Kbit per second... After spending all kinds of money on installation, the headaches, the letdown, the distortion of truth, I really don't blame him for being upset. He told me he is going to cancel IDSL, get a refund, and switch to FreeDSL... I hope it works out for him.
While I agree that RHCE may have people trapped in the redhat sandbox unable to cope with non redhat distros, this certainly is not the case for LPI or GNU Sair. GNU Sair has levels of certification as does LPI and they are vendor neutral. The GNU Sair seems to be a bit more in depth certification of the two. I highly doubt you'll see paper MLCE's like you see paper MCSE's. The *nix learning curve scares those types of people away. People who learn linux do some for the love of the OS, not because they saw a "make $50k now" add in the paper. In addition, the MLCE is GNU Sair's top level. The lowest level, LCA, is more difficult to attain than an MCSE. By the time someone is LPIC-3 or MLCE, they'll know their shit.
I've also seen sample questions from these exams which range from easy to difficult. Some of the questions depend on your actually having experience to be able to answer the questions. I don't believe the linux exams are heading down the MCSE highway. We won't see exams retired every two years - I mean *nix doesn't change THAT much! Plus, this gives linux guru's credibility in the "eyes" of companies. In the end, we know, that experience is the best teacher, not a piece of paper. However, this piece of paper is going to take more work to earn than the MCSE. I guarantee it!
hmmm... interesting theory here. I don't believe that rpm's were made for this intended purpose, but you do have a point. Debian upgrades are a breeze compared to rpm distro's. Once Debian is installed there is nothing but upgrade from there. Just point apt-get to the right place and there you go. Redhat might not like it if people only bought a distro once and then just apt-get distupgdraded it from there.
Debian, being completely non-commercial does not have this concern. I don't use Debian as my desktop because it's not as cutting edge as I like, however, if you run it as a server it minimizes administration hassles and it makes maintaining your box much easier.
"But I totally disagree with going after his OS maker and FTP software writer. That is just plain DUMB."
I hope you are trying to be funny. Taco is also trying to be funny! IF you have been keeping up with the napster case you would see a humorous irony in his statement... He in no way meant for people to take him literally. Hello? I think you need to get back in the game.
Hmmm... You are trolling and I shouldn't even respond to a mindless sheep like yourself but I feel I have no choice but to ventilate. It seems that you are the one who is godless and un-american. You are a product of a culture you can't explain... You are in a prison you can not see or smell or touch. Yeah, I know, I ripped off morpheus here.
The vast majority, not all, but most people who watch TV, keep up with the NFL, popular sports and the like think they are living in the real world... The truth is, that those people are sadly caught in a vicious cycle... they are brought up not to think and to follow mindlessly.
People talk about how football is SO American and if you don't like baseball, apple pie, chevy, or some popular mindless activity you are unamerican. I would argue, however, that the inverse is true. America was founded by people who were trying to escape the very thing that America has become -- a mindless society. America, when it was young, was a promising land for inventors, scientists, and freethinkers like our own founding fathers - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson.
It really is disturbing that Americans are becoming more mindless day by day. Succumbing to media, advertising, and hype. Marx said "religion is an opium." Well, I say NFL, and competative sports in general are the opiums of today's society. How many American's know who wrote the declaration of Independence? A survey of today's high school teens showed that only a handfull even knew that it was Thomas Jefferson. However, the same teens knew who won what games and what so and so's batting average was.
And godless you say? You are the one who worships an oversized steroid pumping jock. You are the one who obsesses about a game. A GAME!!!
The world would turn whether they existed or not. I don't watch football and I don't give a damn about them and my life mysteriously continues. The problem with people like you who are trapped in the popular culture is that you can't see past the barrier that society has created for you. The "real" world is not concerned with such trivialities. You can't fathom someone not caring about football and it's truly sad you can't see past that barrrier. You're personal growth will be stunted as a result. I'm not saying don't like football... just realize that it is a fruitless pursuit.
Finally, you have let society define who you are. And since you are so hopelessly trapped in the system you are doing everything in your power to defend it. You are scared of people who don't watch football because deep down inside it bothers you that someone thinks. It bothers you that some guy out there has a productive life without succumbing to the pressures you did to be "normal." There are many more like me who just don't give a rat's ass about NFL, NBA, NHL, or some other time wasting activity. I hope that one day you'll come to grips with your inability to break away from that golden cage you are trapped in.
Unfortunately it seems our liberties are slowly being trickled away. What was once a free United States is now becoming a police state. The fourth amendment which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of property has already gone by the wayside.
Consider this, Of the drug war's many assaults on American civil liberties, perhaps the most extreme is what is called civil asset forfeiture. Ordinarily, property is only seized after its owner is charged and convicted of a crime and the property can be shown to be the fruits of that crime. Civil asset forfeiture, however, does away with the need to prove the owner's guilt. To seize any sort of property, police simply have to show that the property was somehow connected to illegal drugs. To do that, the police must meet only a civil law standard of proof -- a far lower standard than that required to convict someone of a crime. It doesn't matter if the owner of the property is never convicted of a crime, or never even charged with a crime. In 80 per cent of forfeitures, in fact, charges are never laid. -- From the media awareness project.
Hmmm.. Sounds scary.... what if you own a hotel and someone does a drug deal or smokes dope on your property, however you have no knowledge of this(most hotel owners would be violating privacy if they had cameras in every room). Can they take away your property? You bet, this scenario has already happened!!!
Now there are exceptions to the fourth amendment - What's stopping the government from making exceptions to the first amendment or any other for that matter. Imagine, not being able to say "drugs should be legal." Hmmm. Now people can't express their opinions... What's next, you can have freedom of religion as long as that religion is Christianity? maybe Judeaism? We are slowly becoming a country which does not deserve to be called America - we are losing our freedoms.
We have a choice in this next election.... Republican party, Democratic party, Third party, or Boston Tea Party. Our rights are precious and "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." -- Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution.
"So the MPAA is cutting out part of linux's marketshare. "
Hmmm... Maybe Redhat, Caldera, Suse, etc... Should sue the MPAA for lost profits. After all, didn't Bell telephone go after people who used non-Bell phones and equipment and, of course, they were broken up as a result. Seems like the MPAA has a type of monopoly here - one has to use an MPAA approved DVD player. It could take a sharp legal team to make the historical comparison between Bell telephone and the MPAA. Anyone who uses a copyright to gain a monopoly loses the right to that copyright. Ah but the DMCA would need to be overturned first... Anyone with legal expertise out there? How could this be tackled?
When Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, said in 1982 - new technology (vhs tapes) "is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." Yet today, so much revenue is the result of vhs tapes being sold... casette tapes were even shunned because people could tape off of the radio. Why is this man still the president of the MPAA? The statistics have shown that vhs and casette tapes helped the industry.
When Lars went after napster he generated more publicity for napster than he probably intended. I know many who learned of napster due to Lars. The MPAA publicized DeCSS when the went after Johansen... They are trying to fight the war the old fasioned way and it's not working... When will they wake up. They're shooting themselves in the foot. This 2600 case no doubt brought more attention to DeCSS. The MPAA hypocrites are bringing more attention to that which they are so desperately trying to hide from the public. Wouldn't it have been better for them to take a wait and see attitude?
New technologies are always feared by the tyrants and control freaks of capitalism. The market advances only when it's free of restraints. Would the MPAA have made billions of dollars of vhs tapes? NO... they would not be as rich as they are today. If Linux users could watch DVD's then they would buy DVD's. Unfortunately this is about Control.
The MPAA wants you to be a consumer droid... buying what they tell you to buy, watching what they tell you to watch, and watching it their way - through their system. I'm sorry, but if you look at the recent past, you will see that when consumers could choose how to watch, listen to, or enjoy their media the MPAA was financially successful. Now with the advent of HDTV, they want to stop you from recording shows because "it's digital." So what, people can record movies off cable now. After watching a few taped episodes of the Discovery Channel I would even consider getting cable. The more someone is exposed to samples of a product, the better the chance that they would buy that product. When will the MPAA get it!
While I agree with you that Sony America and the sony record label is screwing people, it would be kind of hard to blame the entire corporation. I mean, there are many competative factions within a corporation that don't always agree with eachother. The Sony Record Label sells CD's, Sony Japan sells mini-discs, sony somebody sells the "music clip" that plays mp3's.
Doesn't it seem odd? A corporation who vehemently opposes mp3's or digital recording is selling a "music clip" and mini-disc players. Well it's not odd at all - example, Uniden corp. makes radar guns for state and local police depts and it also makes the radar detectors you buy to detect those very radar guns. Then, they make radar guns with vg-2 chips to detect radar detectors and then they turn around and make stealth radar detectors that have antivg-2 chips.
Sony is no different here. Sony pushed the minidisc player which does record digitally into the hands of many. The minidisc format is more popular than CD's in Japan and it is pretty popular in Europe. However, when minidisc were to be marketed in the states the riaa, which the sony label is a part of, complained big time stunting the growth of that market. It is truly a shame because minidisc kicks ass.
If there is money to be made, a corporation will do whatever is necessary. Remember that different parts of the corporation may not necessarily be in accordance with eachother. Sony obviously see's that there is money to be made with the "music clip" mp3 player. If you are mad at sony, stop buying music on their label.