"If you became employed by Research In Motion, would that be a RIM Job?"
Not too long ago, RIM had a big info/recruitment session at my university. They booked one of the nicer halls on campus and had a big talk with all kinds of food, refreshments, demos, etc. I even got a look at one of their in-development PDA devices.
I did apply for a couple of the jobs they posted, and shortly thereafter they cancelled all job postings. Something about company finances being tight. Go figure...
"Let me get this straight... you want MS to stop giving away bundled software for free so competitors (many of whom are free..i.e.Open Office [openoffice.org]) can compete?"
The bundled microsoft software tried to force you to use their codecs and their 'standards' which are not interoperable. Their 'free' programs cost a lot more than nothing in the long run because they lock you into their world. Those free tools from competitors are often interoperable. (Realplayer is an exception, I use realplayer as often as I use WMP, which is 'never.') You can get the source to OpenOffice and make your own program that reads and writes the format.
We're not complaining about the bundling itself, we're complaining about the fact that the bundling forces hordes of unknowing users to be locked into a microsoft world. If MSFT's free tools worked with open standards, there would be no complaints.
This is why MSFT's 'radio' argument is invalid. They said that nobody claimed that auto manufacturers were uncompetitive because they 'bundled' a certain type of radio with their products, so why is MSFT being hounded? The answer of course is that a bundled Ford radio does not force you to listen only to radio stations that paid for a 'Ford FM Radio Transmitter license'.
"The poor spoiled kid that wants to overthrow the US government and provides blueprints to build small thermonuclear devices on his website. The poor thing, he got 1 year in jail."
In my senior physics class, it was always a tradition that the teacher would provide instructions on how to make a crude nuclear device that would level half a city. The main ingredients are a couple kg of plutonium and some dynamite. I still have the instructions at home in my old physics binder.
Now this was not in the USA and overthrowing anything was not part of the discussion. Seriously, all you need to make a crude nuclear device is a physics grad student and the ingredients. I wonder how long it will be before there is no distinction between knowing how to make a nuke and actually making and deploying one. It certainly would make practically every university level physics graduate a 'terrorist.'
"Racial profiling is evil, so let's submit 90-year old caucasian women to strip searches, just like that nice Saudi gentleman over there. All in the name of social equality."
Evil it is. I am from a brown skinned family (west indian) and whenever my cousins come through Pearson Airport (Toronto,) being sent to the the up-close-and-personal security room has been time-honoured tradition since 9/11.
Re:From a European viewpoint
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Linking Dangerously
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"From a European viewpoint inciting the overthrow of a government is just asking for trouble."
Isn't the whole point of having the Right to Bear Arms to give the people the ability to overthrow the government should it falter from the Nation's Founding Principles?
"I know it's tough for some people to understand, but there are a lot of good people in big businesses. Just because you disagree with the actions of one of their business units doesn't mean that the entire company is evil."
It is interesting that you are assuming that I am trying to voice disapproval over Disney's actions or suggest that they are evil when I said nothing of the sort.
"Simple folder naming convention like Program Files, Document and settings, (what the heck does var, etc, proc mean anyway?) etc..."
The solution to this can be found in Mac OS X and also in your post:
"A way to do everything graphically (yes I know that we have unmatched power on the command line but doing things graphically works for everyone)"
The graphical file managers should not be able to see/etc,/var,/pub and so on. You can only get to those on OS X when you're poking around in the console. Such a thing would probably work when making a linux distro for general people as well.
"Internet Connection Sharing (yes it would be very helpful)"
Linux already has this. Maybe you're looking for a better GUI for ICS;-)
"NTFS write support (would help people out)"
I'm still trying to figure out NTFS read support. Hm, I only seem to use linux on my main box when I need it for a programming course or something. It's been a little while since I've looked into this.
" I can feel the slashdotters' brains explode with conflict."
Disney is just doing what it has always tried to do: Increase shareholder value. If they had decided that it was more cost effective to run all of their workflow on windows they would have done it. Linux is the best of the money according to them so they use it.
"There are no longer caps on the Sympatico High Speed service, and line speed has been bumped from 1 Mb/s to 1.5 Mb/s in Ontario"
I just wish they'd increase the service area to some more rural locations. The only thing available in my area (rural area near kitchener) is 28.8 dialup. Fscking long phone loops play into this. I am considering getting some techs together and starting a wISP to fix this.
"Is there something that these power supplies contribute towards overall system stability that "cheap" ones don't? Are they really worth the money?"
If you've got weak voltages on the PSU rails, it can kill your HDDs. Some people lose drive after drive and never consider that their voltages are out of spec. Also, if your cheap PSU shorts on the DC side, say goodbye to your drives and maybe your motherboard and everything plugged into it.
The thing that bothers me the most about the various coalitions against the 'theft' of intellectual property is that they always seem to assume that 1 downloaded copy == 1 lost sale. It's probably this argument sold to PHBs by skillful salesmen that gets things like macrovision and safecast out to the masses.
" Isn't it easier just to run DOS in VMWare or Virtual PC?"
VMWare will still cost you a pretty penny and it's not open source like ScummVM.
And it's probably faster to use ScummVM too because once you set up your shortcut or whatever the equivalent is on your platform then you just click it and it starts instantly instead of having to wait for the whole VM to boot up.
"BTW you can purchase it anytime during that first year. You dont have to buy it with the computer."
This is true, BUT there is one small catch:
Your original warranty is 1 year with 90 days of phone-in support. My iBook 800 without apple care is now 5 months old. Last week the hard drive went south (or so I thought, it was running bittorrent for about 2 weeks straight and after cooling off it has run fine for the last week.)
After the hard drive started clacking, I phoned AppleCare, knowing that the notebook was under warranty. The guy wouldn't give me any help unless I either bought AppleCare or agreed to pay a $49 per call service fee because I was out of the 90 day warranty period. If I opted for the 1-time fee and it turned out that it was a real live hardware problem then the fee would be waived.
I opted for the AppleCare because I was going to get it anyway. Since the Apple hard drive diagnostic turned up no problems and the drive wasn't clicking, he decided it was not guaranteed to be a hardware problem but acknowledged that it such a thing was still possible. Just for the record, I've run 50+ hours of bittorrent again after that with no problems.
So essentially, unless you are completely sure it's a hardware problem, you can't phone Apple for free outside 90 days of your purchase.
If you just need an intro level starter to SQL and you've never even written a query before, you can't do much better than the free tutorials at SQLCourse.com. As long as you're generally adept at using computers and it doesn't scare you to learn a new language, it will definitely give you a good start.
This is how I first cut my teeth in SQL, but I only developed 'real' skills when I started writing SAS code on a huge solaris system when I worked for a bank.
"Some USB Flash memories allow Password Protection. Is there Linux support for this feature? A Manufacturer says it only works on Windows, but I find it hard to believe that noone has used that."
The password support requires a driver. I doubt that linux drivers are available. The solution would be to get a flash drive that does not have some closed source proprietarty security method and PGP your files instead.
I just got my own USB dongle drive because my iBook has no floppy. Just to avoid confusion, I'll say this: As far as I'm concerned, USB Key Drives, Thumb Drives, Keychain drives, dongle drives are all the same things: Just a small usb dongle with flash memory hardwired into them.
For the dongle drives, you have to consider the following: A lot of them 'support' USB 2.0 but only work at USB 1.1 speeds. If the drive reads and writes in the range of 4-6 megaBYTES/s then it is a true USB 2.0 drive. My Lexar Jumpdrive 2.0 Pro 256 MB is true USB 2.0. I love this tiny thing and I would definitely buy one again. But it is annoying to crawl around to the back of my desktop and plug it in.
Of course the downside with dongle drives is you can't upgrade them. You could get yourself something like a JumpDrive Trio into which you can install and swap MMC cards, Secure Digital cards and Sony Memory Sticks. This gives you dongle functionality and size upgradeability. Honestly I don't like fumbling around with little flash cards so I did not buy one of these.
A downside to both of these things is that for win98 machines you need a special driver installed (that won't fit on one floppy) to access the drive. But otherwise they are plug'n'play compatible over WinME, Win2k, XP, MacOS X and maybe Linux, I have not tried it.
"Right, when you do a search in Kazaa you search for stuff you haven't heard of. Oh, wait, if you haven't heard of it, how do you search for it? *? This arguement/justificatation just doesn't cut it."
Because you can search based on category. I don't need to recant all the stories that get posted on slashdot about how people buy CDs from bands they never would have heard of if it wasn't for kazaa.
"Yes, when some engineers in China do something good and useful, like create a new, free video standard, one should cheer them on for that and encourage them."
RTFA. It is not royalty-free, but certainly less expensive than MPEG.
"So instead of hurting big time labels and rich artists you're going to pirate the music of the poorer independent artists. They rely even more on whatever small income they can make from selling 5-10 thousand CDs in a regional market. Pirating their music doesn't help them, but buying their CD off of cdbaby.com or somewhere does."
By increasing the percentage of non-RIAA artists available on kazaa, it means that more people will find out about and listen to indie music. More people will hear it, like it, and listen to CDs.
Which songs are most pirated right now? Probably the ones from the bands with the most CD sales. More exposure = more people wanting the music = more sales.
I have taken a look around the CD Baby site and there are certainly a few artists whom I would like to check out. The problem is the fscking import laws in Canada which will probably tack on stupid tariffs and make me pay GST and PST as well as charge me for their security offers opening the package to make sure I am not shipping terrorist evil terrorist materials. It really annoys me and if it wasn't for that, I would have ordered a bunch of CD Baby discs already.
"Hell, for all we know they could be using xor encryption or some such crap. I don't trust any encryption algorithm that I can't see. "
True. But if the RIAA wants to get at your files they would have to circumvent the encrpytion. Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't that be breaking the DMCA?
"Because of stuff like this, seems like the best way to control the problem is to control what software gets installed on the machines in your office, and don't let users install software. I know that's pretty hard, and makes extra work for the admins."
This is not difficult. Just don't let them run as administrator.
"Are you fucking serious? Really. Have you ever had a job before? You can't go around firing people for petty reasons like instant messaging"
Instant messaging could be considered to be inappropriate use of company resources. That's pretty serious. It's also a security vulnerability because someone could send you a trojan. Violating the company's security policies is pretty serious too. Aren't there rules about the logging of business communications? Could the company get in trouble with the SEC if they don't properly log everything like IMs? Yes, employees could get into big trouble for using MSN IM. It's not such a petty little thing.
" So which iBook port and what kind of cable does one use to do this?" (DVD playing without macrovision)
I used that regular video-out port with the apple video-out adapter that gives you composite and s-video with a standard composite video cable with an RCA connector. (I had to buy the apple adapter separately though, it did not come with the machine.) I connected the composite to the TV and used a headphone -> RCA adapter to get a stereo audio signal into the TV, again with standard RCA audio cables.
Then set the notebook up to do video mirroring, opened the DVD in VLC and hit play. It worked nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
Not too long ago, RIM had a big info/recruitment session at my university. They booked one of the nicer halls on campus and had a big talk with all kinds of food, refreshments, demos, etc. I even got a look at one of their in-development PDA devices.
I did apply for a couple of the jobs they posted, and shortly thereafter they cancelled all job postings. Something about company finances being tight. Go figure...
The bundled microsoft software tried to force you to use their codecs and their 'standards' which are not interoperable. Their 'free' programs cost a lot more than nothing in the long run because they lock you into their world. Those free tools from competitors are often interoperable. (Realplayer is an exception, I use realplayer as often as I use WMP, which is 'never.') You can get the source to OpenOffice and make your own program that reads and writes the format.
We're not complaining about the bundling itself, we're complaining about the fact that the bundling forces hordes of unknowing users to be locked into a microsoft world. If MSFT's free tools worked with open standards, there would be no complaints.
This is why MSFT's 'radio' argument is invalid. They said that nobody claimed that auto manufacturers were uncompetitive because they 'bundled' a certain type of radio with their products, so why is MSFT being hounded? The answer of course is that a bundled Ford radio does not force you to listen only to radio stations that paid for a 'Ford FM Radio Transmitter license'.
In my senior physics class, it was always a tradition that the teacher would provide instructions on how to make a crude nuclear device that would level half a city. The main ingredients are a couple kg of plutonium and some dynamite. I still have the instructions at home in my old physics binder.
Now this was not in the USA and overthrowing anything was not part of the discussion. Seriously, all you need to make a crude nuclear device is a physics grad student and the ingredients. I wonder how long it will be before there is no distinction between knowing how to make a nuke and actually making and deploying one. It certainly would make practically every university level physics graduate a 'terrorist.'
"Racial profiling is evil, so let's submit 90-year old caucasian women to strip searches, just like that nice Saudi gentleman over there. All in the name of social equality."
Evil it is. I am from a brown skinned family (west indian) and whenever my cousins come through Pearson Airport (Toronto,) being sent to the the up-close-and-personal security room has been time-honoured tradition since 9/11.
Isn't the whole point of having the Right to Bear Arms to give the people the ability to overthrow the government should it falter from the Nation's Founding Principles?
It is interesting that you are assuming that I am trying to voice disapproval over Disney's actions or suggest that they are evil when I said nothing of the sort.
The solution to this can be found in Mac OS X and also in your post:
"A way to do everything graphically (yes I know that we have unmatched power on the command line but doing things graphically works for everyone)"
The graphical file managers should not be able to see /etc, /var, /pub and so on. You can only get to those on OS X when you're poking around in the console. Such a thing would probably work when making a linux distro for general people as well.
"Internet Connection Sharing (yes it would be very helpful)"
Linux already has this. Maybe you're looking for a better GUI for ICS ;-)
"NTFS write support (would help people out)"
I'm still trying to figure out NTFS read support. Hm, I only seem to use linux on my main box when I need it for a programming course or something. It's been a little while since I've looked into this.
Disney is just doing what it has always tried to do: Increase shareholder value. If they had decided that it was more cost effective to run all of their workflow on windows they would have done it. Linux is the best of the money according to them so they use it.
I just wish they'd increase the service area to some more rural locations. The only thing available in my area (rural area near kitchener) is 28.8 dialup. Fscking long phone loops play into this. I am considering getting some techs together and starting a wISP to fix this.
If you've got weak voltages on the PSU rails, it can kill your HDDs. Some people lose drive after drive and never consider that their voltages are out of spec. Also, if your cheap PSU shorts on the DC side, say goodbye to your drives and maybe your motherboard and everything plugged into it.
The thing that bothers me the most about the various coalitions against the 'theft' of intellectual property is that they always seem to assume that 1 downloaded copy == 1 lost sale. It's probably this argument sold to PHBs by skillful salesmen that gets things like macrovision and safecast out to the masses.
VMWare will still cost you a pretty penny and it's not open source like ScummVM.
And it's probably faster to use ScummVM too because once you set up your shortcut or whatever the equivalent is on your platform then you just click it and it starts instantly instead of having to wait for the whole VM to boot up.
This is true, BUT there is one small catch:
Your original warranty is 1 year with 90 days of phone-in support. My iBook 800 without apple care is now 5 months old. Last week the hard drive went south (or so I thought, it was running bittorrent for about 2 weeks straight and after cooling off it has run fine for the last week.)
After the hard drive started clacking, I phoned AppleCare, knowing that the notebook was under warranty. The guy wouldn't give me any help unless I either bought AppleCare or agreed to pay a $49 per call service fee because I was out of the 90 day warranty period. If I opted for the 1-time fee and it turned out that it was a real live hardware problem then the fee would be waived.
I opted for the AppleCare because I was going to get it anyway. Since the Apple hard drive diagnostic turned up no problems and the drive wasn't clicking, he decided it was not guaranteed to be a hardware problem but acknowledged that it such a thing was still possible. Just for the record, I've run 50+ hours of bittorrent again after that with no problems.
So essentially, unless you are completely sure it's a hardware problem, you can't phone Apple for free outside 90 days of your purchase.
This is how I first cut my teeth in SQL, but I only developed 'real' skills when I started writing SAS code on a huge solaris system when I worked for a bank.
The password support requires a driver. I doubt that linux drivers are available. The solution would be to get a flash drive that does not have some closed source proprietarty security method and PGP your files instead.
For the dongle drives, you have to consider the following: A lot of them 'support' USB 2.0 but only work at USB 1.1 speeds. If the drive reads and writes in the range of 4-6 megaBYTES/s then it is a true USB 2.0 drive. My Lexar Jumpdrive 2.0 Pro 256 MB is true USB 2.0. I love this tiny thing and I would definitely buy one again. But it is annoying to crawl around to the back of my desktop and plug it in.
Of course the downside with dongle drives is you can't upgrade them. You could get yourself something like a JumpDrive Trio into which you can install and swap MMC cards, Secure Digital cards and Sony Memory Sticks. This gives you dongle functionality and size upgradeability. Honestly I don't like fumbling around with little flash cards so I did not buy one of these.
A downside to both of these things is that for win98 machines you need a special driver installed (that won't fit on one floppy) to access the drive. But otherwise they are plug'n'play compatible over WinME, Win2k, XP, MacOS X and maybe Linux, I have not tried it.
And no, I don't work for Lexar Media.
Well those dongle drives come in sizes up to 4 GB but they are only economical up to the 256-512 MB range. If that is enough for you, then go for it!
You can also get USB enclosures for 2.5" notebook hard drives. Get one, put a 20G drive in it and carry it around.
Because you can search based on category. I don't need to recant all the stories that get posted on slashdot about how people buy CDs from bands they never would have heard of if it wasn't for kazaa.
RTFA. It is not royalty-free, but certainly less expensive than MPEG.
By increasing the percentage of non-RIAA artists available on kazaa, it means that more people will find out about and listen to indie music. More people will hear it, like it, and listen to CDs.
Which songs are most pirated right now? Probably the ones from the bands with the most CD sales. More exposure = more people wanting the music = more sales.
I have taken a look around the CD Baby site and there are certainly a few artists whom I would like to check out. The problem is the fscking import laws in Canada which will probably tack on stupid tariffs and make me pay GST and PST as well as charge me for their security offers opening the package to make sure I am not shipping terrorist evil terrorist materials. It really annoys me and if it wasn't for that, I would have ordered a bunch of CD Baby discs already.
This can be done if you know how.
True. But if the RIAA wants to get at your files they would have to circumvent the encrpytion. Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't that be breaking the DMCA?
This is not difficult. Just don't let them run as administrator.
Either that or folks doing it are still under the radar ;-)
Instant messaging could be considered to be inappropriate use of company resources. That's pretty serious. It's also a security vulnerability because someone could send you a trojan. Violating the company's security policies is pretty serious too. Aren't there rules about the logging of business communications? Could the company get in trouble with the SEC if they don't properly log everything like IMs? Yes, employees could get into big trouble for using MSN IM. It's not such a petty little thing.
I used that regular video-out port with the apple video-out adapter that gives you composite and s-video with a standard composite video cable with an RCA connector. (I had to buy the apple adapter separately though, it did not come with the machine.) I connected the composite to the TV and used a headphone -> RCA adapter to get a stereo audio signal into the TV, again with standard RCA audio cables.
Then set the notebook up to do video mirroring, opened the DVD in VLC and hit play. It worked nicely.