Commercials: I wouldn't mind seeing them go the way of the dinosaur. They are a very crude way of collecting revenue, and as technology improves, we can afford to impliment more finely grained payment controls.
Why on Earth would I want this? Because it just makes me sick thinking of all the crappy content I pay for by virtue of buying products from the sponsers. Sure, I could stop drinking (for example) Pepsi, but what if I like like Pepsi? If I only pay for quality programming, maybe all the other crap will disappear.
Commercials are about 28 seconds longer than they need to be anyway. It's so annoying how they mercilessly try to drum messages into my head.
Would any of you ever, ever watch something as stupid as "Glutton Bowl" if it was funded by you, rather than advertisers?
As a mandrake club member, I think there would be twice as many members if they had a members-only FTP mirror.
I know I would join if they had this. I think this could be a pretty good way to get money from the ISO downloaders without having to do something silly like charge-per-downloads, which would probably scare away most users.
A lot of people keep saying this, but what on Earth does that mean? It seems to me that people just want Mandrake to conjure up something (boxed sets, support, etc.) and slap a price tag on it. I don't think this is necessarily any better than getting "donations" from users, other than the fact that businesses prefer fixed payments up front.
The word "donations" is misleading anyway. I'll bet most people who send money to Mandrake are themselves Mandrake users, who consider the money not a donation, but a form of belated payment. I myself use Mandrake Linux, and am considering joining the Mandrake Club (whatever it's called). I certainly don't mind paying. I was never under the illusion that Linux distributions are truely free (in that they require money and manpower to produce).
In conclusion, I think getting donations (aka belated payments) from users is a perfectly fine survival plan. As for business plans, well, I don't know.
On the one hand, there are no anonymous posters to clog up stories with [mostly] useless comments. On the other hand, the stories themsleves are all useless today. CmdrTaco, why not try blocking anonymous posters on some other day too - just to see how it works?
After six months I noticed the drive is somewhat noisy and later the noise became unbearable for me.
I think this is universal. I've noticed this happen to Fujitsu, Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital drives that I've owned (3.5, 17, 80, 120 GB, respectively).
this why you rip your DVD to a CD and keep the DVD safe.
But then why buy the DVDs in the first place? Why not buy MPEG4-encoded videos on CDs. Of course, I know why: no one sells them. So I guess my question is, why doesn't anyone sell nice, cheap MPEG4 "Video CDs"?
That's a good point. I'm pretty sure there is a long waiting list for transplant hearts - just because most donors want to hang on to their hearts while they are still living!
As for the money, why doesn't the main character just rob a bank? That's practically the same thing, as far as the situation goes. Hold up a hospital. Hold up a bank.
And I'll have to agree with JonKatz here. Even if Health Care is a big mess, I don't believe that all doctors are evil bean-counters. Even the "bean-counters" themselves are doing their best to do their jobs (as I'd like to believe). Portraying them as evil doesn't really help us see or solve the problem. It's the system, not the people implimenting it.
XFS? Are you sure? XFS requires a pretty drastic kernel patch last I checked.
Yes, indeed. They must be kernel patch-happy over at Mandrake because they do in fact have XFS available as of Mandrake 8.1. I'm using it on my computers now. Works great, as far as I can tell.
Before I switched to Mandrake 8.1, I was using RedHat 7.1 with the XFS install program from SGI. The thing I like about Mandrake is that XFS is already included. My XFS partition moved over to the new installation with no trouble.
Plus, they compile Samba with XFS support - so you can manipulate the ACLs from NT/2000/XP machines. (To do that with Red Hat, I had to recompile. No big deal, but I like having it taken care of.)
Actually, I saw a documentary about this about two years ago... They tried all kinds of fake signatures, in one case they even used a smiley... Almost all payments were carried out just fine...
Yeah, but if someone forges a check from you, and you tell the bank, "I never wrote that check!" The bank can check the signature. If it's a smiley, I think they'll believe you.
And Netscape had been giving away their browser for free, as well
Netscape didn't start giving the browser away to everybody until quite a bit after Microsoft started. The license did allow free downloads for academic use (students, faculty, etc.), but you were supposed to buy it from them otherwise.
I remember this because I downloaded Netscape (version 2.0? 3.0?) sometime in 1995/1996, when I was still in high school, and I actually read the license because I was worried about complying with it. I remember IE was free, but it was crummy.
It may be a de facto standard, but it is a closed standard. Being closed makes it hard to be useful as a standard, don't you think? AFAIK, everyone else who uses the Word.doc format(s) in an application had to reverse-engineer the.doc format first. And no one has reverse-engineered it all yet.
I don't much care if Word is closed-source or not. But I sure think it would be nice if the file format were an open format. If that were the case, other applications could easily be written to use it.
Even better would be if Microsoft used an open format that was agreed upon by some standards-making body - instead of constantly changing its own "standard" to try and stay ahead of the competition.
And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a million dollars.
Format shmormat. In order for the market to decide, we need to define a [level] playing field for companies to compete on. I think that the audio/video formats should be a part of this definition.
And what the heck is wrong with the already-standardized MPEG2 anyway?
Until one of my users got an email with an attachment that would just execute itself from the preview pane, no matter what the security settings were.
This happened to me! Twice. However, for me it was Mozilla on Linux. I got some strange email with a subject line that was simply "Re: ". I clicked on the message, and the preview window starts to "render" the message by informing me it's about to execute an exe (OK/Cancel?). Now, I wasn't too worried about trying to run Windows executables on Linux. I just hit cancel and went on with my life.
BUT...what the heck is going on here???? Is this a worm trying to exploit this MS problem? Or is it even an MS-only problem? I'm guessing that Mozilla on Windows would have executed whatever it was in the message as happily as Outlook would have!
You're not a hacker, you're a fucking grease monkey.
Hey, computer geeks stole the word "hacking" from the grease monkeys (AFAIK). Before it was ever applied to computers it used to be used exactly as this guy does: "hacking" his motercycles.
I'll bet most users (open-source or otherwise) don't pay attention to any of the licenses for their software. I know people who will pirate MS Word or Windows XP if it suits them, or use GPL-licensed Linux and utilities, or BSD-licensed whatever, etc. They haven't read anything. If they can get their hands on the software, that's enough for them.
I myself have skimmed the GPL, and some of other propriatary licenses. (I've read a lot of arguments on Slashdot too.) I have the general idea of them all, I try to abide by them, and that's about it.
Not only that, but when "the government" contracts out software work, one of the terms of the contract is that the source code is to be delivered with the product. At least, in the Department of Defense it's like that. I think.
I would hope, that for any kind of national security database, that a similar policy would be followed. And I'm not really against such a national database either. The Federal Government, several state goverments, and local governments already have lots of information on me. Who cares if they can access it more efficiently and cheaply?
Isn't the whole Internet about information? Why on Earth would we need a.info TLD? And what is wrong with www.visa.com? I'm all for new TLDs. but these don't seem to fit in at all with what we have already.
There is one plus that I can think of. Maybe people will start to realize that not everything is a "dot com".
Another funny lego movie is Legos are not Enough. [umich.edu] I saw this at a film festival, and it beat out all the other 'serious' films, even though it was made by a bunch of engineering students whereas its competition was made by people who wore a lot of black clothing.
Holy crap! That's me! That's us!
This certainly explains all the sudden congestion on our cable modem line. Everyone is trying to download our movie at once. I literally just ran up the stairs to tell my roommates (whom I made the movie with) that we were being Slashdotted. Wow.
I had thought about submiting our site (and movie) to Slashdot before. After all, the editors seem to be suckers for "LEGOmation" stories. I thought better of it, though. So, thank you for posting Mr. Anonymous Coward, sir. (Who are you, btw?)
For the record, though, we aren't all engineers. Two of us are studying Computer Engineering. One is studying Architecture, and the other is studying History. Also, let me just quickly mention that we won awards at that film festival for "Best of Show" and "Most Original."
Check out our website. It's actually http://4guys1brain.cjb.net/, but I had to move it when our port 80 got blocked due to Code Red.
OK, I'm all over the road at this point. I apologize for this rambling, slightly offtopic post, but I think I'm going to hit submit anyway...
Any license is a good license. People (artists and consumers) don't realize that there's more than one way to distribute music.
As far as I know, music is sold today without any license agreement of any kind. It's all implied - and the music companies can make up whatever they want later. In fact, I'll bet they could make a case that no one but them can legally listen to any CD sold to date! Why? Because no one ever explicitly entered into a license agreement.
Even if the OAL is "too free", it will nicely suit as being the opposite of current practice. And something more moderate will show up later.
The reason these "free-for-all," unlicensed devices such as (cordless phones) work so well is simply because they are low-powered. For example, I was just reading that the FCC limits the power of CB radio transmitters to 4 Watts. Four Watts! Of course! That's why there's not much interference from other devices.
This won't work at all for stations that are trying to broadcast over a 50 mile radius.
Oh, and all those "unlicensed" bands are, in fact, licensed. Maybe not to you. I'm not sure how it works, but the FCC has to approve all the devices sold in the U.S.
I've been curious about this kind of gravity since I first saw 2001. Couldn't you be "weightless" anywhere in such a ship, not just in the center? As long as you initially aren't touching any part of it, there's no way it can act on you. It isn't real gravity, so the ship won't pull you down, right? The rotating part will just zoom around you.
Wouldn't it be rather easy, depending on the speed of rotation, to get into a state of weightlessness? Just run against the rotation, until you are moving at the same speed, opposite direction, then push off a little. Presto! Weightlessness! This would only work in a giant wheel, though. Not the tether thing.
As far as the U.S. is concerned, the laws are already available online. See the Public Laws page. For state laws, I suggest finding the homepage of your legislature (on, say, Google). They'll probably have a link to the online database if it exists. For example: Michigan's Compiled Laws.
I vaugely remember the copyright issue you mentioned. I doubt copyright issues will prevent the government from publishing it's own laws. At least, I really hope that's the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on Earth would I want this? Because it just makes me sick thinking of all the crappy content I pay for by virtue of buying products from the sponsers. Sure, I could stop drinking (for example) Pepsi, but what if I like like Pepsi? If I only pay for quality programming, maybe all the other crap will disappear.
Commercials are about 28 seconds longer than they need to be anyway. It's so annoying how they mercilessly try to drum messages into my head.
Would any of you ever, ever watch something as stupid as "Glutton Bowl" if it was funded by you, rather than advertisers?
Didn't C3PO also say this? That's what annoys me.
I know I would join if they had this. I think this could be a pretty good way to get money from the ISO downloaders without having to do something silly like charge-per-downloads, which would probably scare away most users.
A lot of people keep saying this, but what on Earth does that mean? It seems to me that people just want Mandrake to conjure up something (boxed sets, support, etc.) and slap a price tag on it. I don't think this is necessarily any better than getting "donations" from users, other than the fact that businesses prefer fixed payments up front.
The word "donations" is misleading anyway. I'll bet most people who send money to Mandrake are themselves Mandrake users, who consider the money not a donation, but a form of belated payment. I myself use Mandrake Linux, and am considering joining the Mandrake Club (whatever it's called). I certainly don't mind paying. I was never under the illusion that Linux distributions are truely free (in that they require money and manpower to produce).
In conclusion, I think getting donations (aka belated payments) from users is a perfectly fine survival plan. As for business plans, well, I don't know.
On the one hand, there are no anonymous posters to clog up stories with [mostly] useless comments. On the other hand, the stories themsleves are all useless today. CmdrTaco, why not try blocking anonymous posters on some other day too - just to see how it works?
I think this is universal. I've noticed this happen to Fujitsu, Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital drives that I've owned (3.5, 17, 80, 120 GB, respectively).
But then why buy the DVDs in the first place? Why not buy MPEG4-encoded videos on CDs. Of course, I know why: no one sells them. So I guess my question is, why doesn't anyone sell nice, cheap MPEG4 "Video CDs"?
As for the money, why doesn't the main character just rob a bank? That's practically the same thing, as far as the situation goes. Hold up a hospital. Hold up a bank.
And I'll have to agree with JonKatz here. Even if Health Care is a big mess, I don't believe that all doctors are evil bean-counters. Even the "bean-counters" themselves are doing their best to do their jobs (as I'd like to believe). Portraying them as evil doesn't really help us see or solve the problem. It's the system, not the people implimenting it.
Yes, indeed. They must be kernel patch-happy over at Mandrake because they do in fact have XFS available as of Mandrake 8.1. I'm using it on my computers now. Works great, as far as I can tell.
Before I switched to Mandrake 8.1, I was using RedHat 7.1 with the XFS install program from SGI. The thing I like about Mandrake is that XFS is already included. My XFS partition moved over to the new installation with no trouble.
Plus, they compile Samba with XFS support - so you can manipulate the ACLs from NT/2000/XP machines. (To do that with Red Hat, I had to recompile. No big deal, but I like having it taken care of.)
Yeah, but if someone forges a check from you, and you tell the bank, "I never wrote that check!" The bank can check the signature. If it's a smiley, I think they'll believe you.
Netscape didn't start giving the browser away to everybody until quite a bit after Microsoft started. The license did allow free downloads for academic use (students, faculty, etc.), but you were supposed to buy it from them otherwise.
I remember this because I downloaded Netscape (version 2.0? 3.0?) sometime in 1995/1996, when I was still in high school, and I actually read the license because I was worried about complying with it. I remember IE was free, but it was crummy.
I don't much care if Word is closed-source or not. But I sure think it would be nice if the file format were an open format. If that were the case, other applications could easily be written to use it.
Even better would be if Microsoft used an open format that was agreed upon by some standards-making body - instead of constantly changing its own "standard" to try and stay ahead of the competition.
And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a million dollars.
And what the heck is wrong with the already-standardized MPEG2 anyway?
This happened to me! Twice. However, for me it was Mozilla on Linux. I got some strange email with a subject line that was simply "Re: ". I clicked on the message, and the preview window starts to "render" the message by informing me it's about to execute an exe (OK/Cancel?). Now, I wasn't too worried about trying to run Windows executables on Linux. I just hit cancel and went on with my life.
BUT...what the heck is going on here???? Is this a worm trying to exploit this MS problem? Or is it even an MS-only problem? I'm guessing that Mozilla on Windows would have executed whatever it was in the message as happily as Outlook would have!
Hey, computer geeks stole the word "hacking" from the grease monkeys (AFAIK). Before it was ever applied to computers it used to be used exactly as this guy does: "hacking" his motercycles.
I myself have skimmed the GPL, and some of other propriatary licenses. (I've read a lot of arguments on Slashdot too.) I have the general idea of them all, I try to abide by them, and that's about it.
I would hope, that for any kind of national security database, that a similar policy would be followed. And I'm not really against such a national database either. The Federal Government, several state goverments, and local governments already have lots of information on me. Who cares if they can access it more efficiently and cheaply?
Can anyone explain why this patch wouldn't work after a copy and paste? Is it just a whitespace issue?
There is one plus that I can think of. Maybe people will start to realize that not everything is a "dot com".
Holy crap! That's me! That's us!
This certainly explains all the sudden congestion on our cable modem line. Everyone is trying to download our movie at once. I literally just ran up the stairs to tell my roommates (whom I made the movie with) that we were being Slashdotted. Wow.
I had thought about submiting our site (and movie) to Slashdot before. After all, the editors seem to be suckers for "LEGOmation" stories. I thought better of it, though. So, thank you for posting Mr. Anonymous Coward, sir. (Who are you, btw?)
For the record, though, we aren't all engineers. Two of us are studying Computer Engineering. One is studying Architecture, and the other is studying History. Also, let me just quickly mention that we won awards at that film festival for "Best of Show" and "Most Original."
Check out our website. It's actually http://4guys1brain.cjb.net/, but I had to move it when our port 80 got blocked due to Code Red.
OK, I'm all over the road at this point. I apologize for this rambling, slightly offtopic post, but I think I'm going to hit submit anyway...
I think the number of companies is just fine. But there are still too many incompatibilities between their "technologies."
As far as I know, music is sold today without any license agreement of any kind. It's all implied - and the music companies can make up whatever they want later. In fact, I'll bet they could make a case that no one but them can legally listen to any CD sold to date! Why? Because no one ever explicitly entered into a license agreement.
Even if the OAL is "too free", it will nicely suit as being the opposite of current practice. And something more moderate will show up later.
This won't work at all for stations that are trying to broadcast over a 50 mile radius.
Oh, and all those "unlicensed" bands are, in fact, licensed. Maybe not to you. I'm not sure how it works, but the FCC has to approve all the devices sold in the U.S.
Wouldn't it be rather easy, depending on the speed of rotation, to get into a state of weightlessness? Just run against the rotation, until you are moving at the same speed, opposite direction, then push off a little. Presto! Weightlessness! This would only work in a giant wheel, though. Not the tether thing.
I vaugely remember the copyright issue you mentioned. I doubt copyright issues will prevent the government from publishing it's own laws. At least, I really hope that's the case.