This "news" is up there with the recent non-annoucement of eBay leaving Google for Microsoft. A bunch of self-appointed-gurus-of-the-industry are saying they have good knowledge that company X is running from Google to Microsoft. Seriously, why would company X run to a company that is notorious for embracing others and then destroying them? It would be like a fly, fleeing from another fly, straight in to a spiders web for safety. WTF.
Screw it. I'm making news today: Microsoft dumping MSN in favor of Google. a dozen or so Microsoft execs, who will remain anonymous, point out that their search engine is not generating the revenue they original thought it would and feel that they can better tie the new Vista operating system with Google desktop Search.
The mass media is being assaulted with silly stuff like Iran. I would guess this is more of a "look over here while I do this over there" strategy. And people are generally ignorant to the threat this poses since they actually believe this is being used to fight terrorism or child porn.
Yahoo will give up anything a government asks for. They don't even question why a government would want some piece of information. I wish entities like the ACLU would go after Yahoo and make them start, at least, pausing and thinking before they act.
Well, at least Detriot is a real place. The "Sunni Triangle" is about as real as the Bermuda Triangle. Dangerous? Hell, it's probably hard to find any place in Iraq that's not dangerous right now with a damn civil war going and the Turks looking like they are gonna open a can of whoop-ass on the Kurds again.
Because if you didn't your friend would never receive his letter.
Post office, not post box.
Yes in an ideal world everything we would ever want to know would be right there at our fingertips
And we shouldn't aim for anything less.
we would but need to ask the question to have a queue forming of people clamouring to provide us with the answer.
Hey, why not? I share answers to people's questions all the time. Why should someone NOT want to be helpful to others? It would be a anti-social behaviour to not help others in need.
The difference is that most people pay for support for Windows or Mac software
Actually no, they don't. Very few people drop the $35 and call Microsoft.
Linux users generally end up using forums and newsgroups to find answers to their questions. It's in these areas that these people often times experience people, like yourself, who display anti-social behaviors.
Yes, not helping others is anti-social. People are generally repulsed by individuals with anti-social characteristics. Anti-social behaviour ranks up there with poor personal hygene.
It is important for people to learn how to figure things out for themselves. What TMM suggests here will lead to people that are unable and unwilling to experiment with software. Half of what I have learned regarding software has been trial and error.
Why? Why should users spend hours researching something JUST because you did? Sure, they will learn much more about what they are doing in the process but this, to most users, is unacceptable. Here's a silly real world example: say I wanted to send a letter to a friend in another city. Why should I learn how the post office operates in order to send the letter?
People who use Windows and Mac computers have other things to do with their lifes than tinker with getting something to work on the computer. Computers, to the vast majority of computer users, is a tool to fit an end and not a hobby or occupation.
I would say that's more in your corner since you don't seem to understand how open source, or businesses for that matter, work.
aying an army of lawyers to ensure that they CAN release in the first place.
This would only be the case if NVidia or ATI contained software code from outside, and closed source, parties. This doesn't require lawyers to figure out, just a quick question to members from their respective driver coding staff.
Paying thier developers to clean up the code base before release
Why? Who cares if it's "dirty"? Companies have been dumping crap code on FOSS developers for years.
Paying thier developers while they now unquestionably spend time liasing with the new open source developers
The company's (ATI or NVidia) developers don't have to do anything with the FOSS developers. Why should they?
Paying thier support staff when people using modified drivers ring up because stuff isn't working
Well, on this one you just don't understand NVidia or ATI. Neither gives good support for Linux. NVidia has an online forum that may be occasionally frequented by NVidia staff (aka zander). ATI gives this useless link:
What your talking about I covered under "elven magic". It's a myth that there is some special code that can not be easily duplicated. This is because programming languages are finite in complexity and change only occasionally. This is why software patents are ridiculous. ATI and NVidia chips, on the other hand, probably do contain secrets that competitors would be interested in.
A buggy driver will make the entire package, including the hardware, look bad.
Who told NVidia to release a buggy driver? Where are these bugs coming from? I guess you are trying to say that by releasing the source code, that somehow the drivers will become owned and released by FOSS developers. That's just silly. NVidia can release the code and control the content at the same time. They don't have to donate it to the FOSS community.
The simple fact that FOSS developers have not been able to produce good GPU drivers despite reverse-engineering demonstrates the level of complexity involved.
Your right. Maybe the GPU manufacturers would just release the code the FOSS developers wouldn't have to write programs in the dark.
hange thier business models and practices (which is expensive to thier eyes)
I would think that both NVidia and ATI are smart enough to know that releasing their product's source code cost would cost them about $0. This is more of a control issue for them. The higher ups probably think that their IT guys are putting elven magic in those drivers that, if released to the public, would give their competitors some sort of edge. Its just a fear thing really.
Interesting thing about Aero is it prevents OpenGL from working at full speed (www.opengl.org for details). I'm curious if this "pirate" switch to turn of Aero will make OpenGL run correctly? And if so, I wonder how hard it would be to make a legit copy of Windows think its pirated.
well you can re-snatch that job back by offering to work at a lower wage.
Ignorance must be bliss. You ever hear of a company called Tata? It's probably the largest Indian outsourcing firm. Seen them contracting at a medical company once. They brought in 20 guys on H1Bs. Guys. Not women or families. Their wives and children stay in India. Anyways, they bunked up at six people per apartment. They were paid $500 a month each.
Okay, I have a wife and two kids. Say I offer to do the same job these guys are doing, but like you said demand lower wages so I work for $400 a month. Apartments where I live run minimum of $750 per month. What were you saying: no more million dollar mortgage or luxury car? Your right, at $400 a month it's impossible to have a car or a house and still eat!
But being a techie, you might understand the laws of nature.
Nature and Techies? Your not from around here are you?
You can lobby as much you want and have protectionist laws passed.
Protectionist laws? Did you know there have been laws about ILLEGAL immigrants for years? Who would have thought that ILLEGAL immigrants would do something ILLEGAL. Why don't these people go back and LEGALLY apply for citizenship like thousand of LEGAL immigrants do every year? There is a process and a LEGAL way for citizenship that they are refusing to abide to. What next? Pedophiles and murderers go on marches because they feel that their crimes shouldn't be crimes or punishable? Yeah, I don't know what country you are from but here in the U.S. we try to abide by the laws of the land.
Similarly, as long as there's work here in US, people will come down here.
Thats easy to correct: you jail Americans for hiring ILLEGAL immigrants. Watch those jobs disappear in a hurry.
Bullshit back at ya. Remember a few months back the fiasco of the Sony DRM rootkit? There is no law preventing companies from installing DRM material on your computer without your knowledge. And lets say, in the not so distant future, a particular DRM program was built to download huge quantities of advertisements to your computer, use the internet connection as a relay for the corporation that produced the media, and generally make your computer completely useless. We call these "zombies" nowadays but lets say corporations start making them too. They can't do that right? Again, no law. Now add in hardware DRM, which is here today, and you can't even uninstall this crap from your computer. No, formatting the hard drive will result in you having to purchase a new copy of Windows (install CDs are non-existant and it's a one time install per purchase service plan with Microsoft in the future). Replacing the harddrive will not work since the onboard DRM has registered THAT harddrive as the only valid harddrive. You are left with having to replace pretty much all the guts to the PC in order to remove the DRM that you installed because you bought a product.
All this is for what exactly? Why are we heading in this direction? This is all to prevent software/media duplication? WTF. Hell, wouldn't be easier to just prevent the sell of recordable media in the U.S.? Oh, wait, that won't allow corporations to get CONTROL. They must have CONTROL.
Wait till the new guest worker program goes in to effect. Yeah, you probably thought it was all about Mexicans picking potatoes out in some farm out west, right? Wrongo. With the new guest worker program, H1B visas are no longer required. Employers can just ship in boatloads of Indians and Chinese to do your job for about 1/4 of the cost. I don't care how skilled you think you are, theres someone who will jump off that boat and say they can do the same job for much less.
President Bush will try to make you think this is all about people working jobs that Americans won't do. He's right. We, as natural born Americans, find it hard to work at wages way below the poverty line.
What can you do to stop this? Write to your two senators and tell them to put a halt to the "guest worker" program. Sure, we have jobs to do and can't go marching around the streets today like the immigrants, but we need to find the time to stop this before it gets out of hand.
Oh and by the way, Windows has a "safe"(well, safer) operating mode in the form of a user account, but nobody uses it because it's a PITA, so everybody stays in supervisor mode and bad things happen.
Actually most people run with the version of Windows that came installed on their computer. And these accounts are, from the best of my knowledge, always Admin.
It's another amazing day on Slashdot. First, a person is told to RTFA and continues to not read the article in question (thus missing why they were told to RTFA). Then, a little turd doesn't notice that the "pro's" and "con's" I am referring to are coming from said poster and tries to correct MY grammar. I'm not a grammar queer (such as nugneant) but in this case those mistakes were intentional. Stop being lazy and read before you write people.
Do you know what RTFA means? If you would have done that, as the parent poster stated, you would have noticed the title:
"Republicans defeat Net neutrality proposal"
That is the same title as the title on the post in Slashdot.
so that the topics of conversation following it up would be more along the lines of the pro's and con's of net neutrality
These have already been discussed on Slashdot, and in other sources, for months now. What rock have you been sleeping under?
Net Neutrality: Pro's: Internet stays as is. Con's: Telcoms can't charge fees based on traffic types and popularity. This is what the Telcoms refer to as "Google's Free Lunch" where Google is making money on the Internet and the Telcom's want a piece of the action.
In the real world it would be like this:
You start a simple bakery and have a single supplier for your flour. As time passes, the bakery becomes a huge hit in town. Demand increases and the shop grows along with profits. Then, one day, the flour supplier comes to you and demands a percentage of the bakery's profits or he will stop supplying flour. You look for another flour supplier, but they are all just outside the domain of this single flour sales person and have agreements with him to not directly compete in his territory (competition would reduce profits). So, besides paying for the flour, a percentage of the actual profits from the bakery's sales have to go to the flour salesman in order to stay in business.
Well, some will tell you its good for competition. They are lieing.
Others will say why their desktop is superior because it has feature X. These people are just ignorant.
Some may even go into KDE being coded in C++ which is superior, or the reverse from Gnomers who think C is superior. These people need to go outside and get some sun, take a deep breath, and go find a real hobby.
The rest of us know the truth is that it doesn't really matter.
The judge said "no" to subpoenas for Microsoft to gather certain information from some its large competitors. The judge felt that the case was outside the juristiction of the United States. And if you think about it, the "E" in EU is for Europe which is not a part of the U.S. that last time I looked.
I don't know about "made" in the USA but there are plenty of computers "assembled" in the USA. The United States is not a 100% free trade market player (no country is), so there are tariffs and costs to shipping in a complete product compared to just getting parts. China is the same. Try starting a business there, you will find that you have to have a shop in China doing x% of your business to the country. It's a good idea that the U.S. should do for ALL trades since it does the following:
1. Slows growth of trade defiticits, or even makes it decline 2. Creates new local jobs
Bad effects:
1. Product increase in price. The Walmartians will scream in horror when they can't buy the latest cheap electronic garbage from Tiawan to replace the unit they bought two weeks early that broke. Oh Well.
Why mark the parent as Troll since you are actually agreeing with him/her? Did you really mean to say the reverse with "mod parent up"? As the parent said, and you agreed with, presidential canidates seem to work in the order of the "Good Ole Boys" network.
Slashdot Mirror
This "news" is up there with the recent non-annoucement of eBay leaving Google for Microsoft. A bunch of self-appointed-gurus-of-the-industry are saying they have good knowledge that company X is running from Google to Microsoft. Seriously, why would company X run to a company that is notorious for embracing others and then destroying them? It would be like a fly, fleeing from another fly, straight in to a spiders web for safety. WTF.
Screw it. I'm making news today: Microsoft dumping MSN in favor of Google. a dozen or so Microsoft execs, who will remain anonymous, point out that their search engine is not generating the revenue they original thought it would and feel that they can better tie the new Vista operating system with Google desktop Search.
In other news, Novell looks to purchase IBM.
The mass media is being assaulted with silly stuff like Iran. I would guess this is more of a "look over here while I do this over there" strategy. And people are generally ignorant to the threat this poses since they actually believe this is being used to fight terrorism or child porn.
Yahoo will give up anything a government asks for. They don't even question why a government would want some piece of information. I wish entities like the ACLU would go after Yahoo and make them start, at least, pausing and thinking before they act.
Oh please, enlighted one, tell us of this haven in Iraq where people walk the streets without fear with happy-to-be-democratic smiles on their faces?
Well, at least Detriot is a real place. The "Sunni Triangle" is about as real as the Bermuda Triangle. Dangerous? Hell, it's probably hard to find any place in Iraq that's not dangerous right now with a damn civil war going and the Turks looking like they are gonna open a can of whoop-ass on the Kurds again.
Because if you didn't your friend would never receive his letter.
Post office, not post box.
Yes in an ideal world everything we would ever want to know would be right there at our fingertips
And we shouldn't aim for anything less.
we would but need to ask the question to have a queue forming of people clamouring to provide us with the answer.
Hey, why not? I share answers to people's questions all the time. Why should someone NOT want to be helpful to others? It would be a anti-social behaviour to not help others in need.
The difference is that most people pay for support for Windows or Mac software
Actually no, they don't. Very few people drop the $35 and call Microsoft.
Linux users generally end up using forums and newsgroups to find answers to their questions. It's in these areas that these people often times experience people, like yourself, who display anti-social behaviors.
Yes, not helping others is anti-social. People are generally repulsed by individuals with anti-social characteristics. Anti-social behaviour ranks up there with poor personal hygene.
It is important for people to learn how to figure things out for themselves. What TMM suggests here will lead to people that are unable and unwilling to experiment with software. Half of what I have learned regarding software has been trial and error.
Why? Why should users spend hours researching something JUST because you did? Sure, they will learn much more about what they are doing in the process but this, to most users, is unacceptable. Here's a silly real world example: say I wanted to send a letter to a friend in another city. Why should I learn how the post office operates in order to send the letter?
People who use Windows and Mac computers have other things to do with their lifes than tinker with getting something to work on the computer. Computers, to the vast majority of computer users, is a tool to fit an end and not a hobby or occupation.
You are very naieve.
e ptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=300
I would say that's more in your corner since you don't seem to understand how open source, or businesses for that matter, work.
aying an army of lawyers to ensure that they CAN release in the first place.
This would only be the case if NVidia or ATI contained software code from outside, and closed source, parties. This doesn't require lawyers to figure out, just a quick question to members from their respective driver coding staff.
Paying thier developers to clean up the code base before release
Why? Who cares if it's "dirty"? Companies have been dumping crap code on FOSS developers for years.
Paying thier developers while they now unquestionably spend time liasing with the new open source developers
The company's (ATI or NVidia) developers don't have to do anything with the FOSS developers. Why should they?
Paying thier support staff when people using modified drivers ring up because stuff isn't working
Well, on this one you just don't understand NVidia or ATI. Neither gives good support for Linux. NVidia has an online forum that may be occasionally frequented by NVidia staff (aka zander). ATI gives this useless link:
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?d
What your talking about I covered under "elven magic". It's a myth that there is some special code that can not be easily duplicated. This is because programming languages are finite in complexity and change only occasionally. This is why software patents are ridiculous. ATI and NVidia chips, on the other hand, probably do contain secrets that competitors would be interested in.
A buggy driver will make the entire package, including the hardware, look bad.
Who told NVidia to release a buggy driver? Where are these bugs coming from? I guess you are trying to say that by releasing the source code, that somehow the drivers will become owned and released by FOSS developers. That's just silly. NVidia can release the code and control the content at the same time. They don't have to donate it to the FOSS community.
The simple fact that FOSS developers have not been able to produce good GPU drivers despite reverse-engineering demonstrates the level of complexity involved.
Your right. Maybe the GPU manufacturers would just release the code the FOSS developers wouldn't have to write programs in the dark.
hange thier business models and practices (which is expensive to thier eyes)
I would think that both NVidia and ATI are smart enough to know that releasing their product's source code cost would cost them about $0. This is more of a control issue for them. The higher ups probably think that their IT guys are putting elven magic in those drivers that, if released to the public, would give their competitors some sort of edge. Its just a fear thing really.
Interesting thing about Aero is it prevents OpenGL from working at full speed (www.opengl.org for details). I'm curious if this "pirate" switch to turn of Aero will make OpenGL run correctly? And if so, I wonder how hard it would be to make a legit copy of Windows think its pirated.
It's against many, many laws to install a rootkit on certain federally-owned computers.
It does? Can you give me a reference to a single one of these many laws?
Here's a good site on rootkits: http://www.rootkit.com/.
Wikipedia has some good stuff to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit
That's not correct in the general case.
No, it's still the case since there is NO LAW that forbids hidden installation of DRM. Again: there is no law.
because it will inevitably find its way on the computers owned by the federal governemt.
What?! Are you like 12 years old? Who do you think passed the DCMA?
well you can re-snatch that job back by offering to work at a lower wage.
Ignorance must be bliss. You ever hear of a company called Tata? It's probably the largest Indian outsourcing firm. Seen them contracting at a medical company once. They brought in 20 guys on H1Bs. Guys. Not women or families. Their wives and children stay in India. Anyways, they bunked up at six people per apartment. They were paid $500 a month each.
Okay, I have a wife and two kids. Say I offer to do the same job these guys are doing, but like you said demand lower wages so I work for $400 a month. Apartments where I live run minimum of $750 per month. What were you saying: no more million dollar mortgage or luxury car? Your right, at $400 a month it's impossible to have a car or a house and still eat!
But being a techie, you might understand the laws of nature.
Nature and Techies? Your not from around here are you?
You can lobby as much you want and have protectionist laws passed.
Protectionist laws? Did you know there have been laws about ILLEGAL immigrants for years? Who would have thought that ILLEGAL immigrants would do something ILLEGAL. Why don't these people go back and LEGALLY apply for citizenship like thousand of LEGAL immigrants do every year? There is a process and a LEGAL way for citizenship that they are refusing to abide to. What next? Pedophiles and murderers go on marches because they feel that their crimes shouldn't be crimes or punishable? Yeah, I don't know what country you are from but here in the U.S. we try to abide by the laws of the land.
Similarly, as long as there's work here in US, people will come down here.
Thats easy to correct: you jail Americans for hiring ILLEGAL immigrants. Watch those jobs disappear in a hurry.
Bullshit back at ya. Remember a few months back the fiasco of the Sony DRM rootkit? There is no law preventing companies from installing DRM material on your computer without your knowledge. And lets say, in the not so distant future, a particular DRM program was built to download huge quantities of advertisements to your computer, use the internet connection as a relay for the corporation that produced the media, and generally make your computer completely useless. We call these "zombies" nowadays but lets say corporations start making them too. They can't do that right? Again, no law. Now add in hardware DRM, which is here today, and you can't even uninstall this crap from your computer. No, formatting the hard drive will result in you having to purchase a new copy of Windows (install CDs are non-existant and it's a one time install per purchase service plan with Microsoft in the future). Replacing the harddrive will not work since the onboard DRM has registered THAT harddrive as the only valid harddrive. You are left with having to replace pretty much all the guts to the PC in order to remove the DRM that you installed because you bought a product.
All this is for what exactly? Why are we heading in this direction? This is all to prevent software/media duplication? WTF. Hell, wouldn't be easier to just prevent the sell of recordable media in the U.S.? Oh, wait, that won't allow corporations to get CONTROL. They must have CONTROL.
a) They are thousands of miles away.
Wait till the new guest worker program goes in to effect. Yeah, you probably thought it was all about Mexicans picking potatoes out in some farm out west, right? Wrongo. With the new guest worker program, H1B visas are no longer required. Employers can just ship in boatloads of Indians and Chinese to do your job for about 1/4 of the cost. I don't care how skilled you think you are, theres someone who will jump off that boat and say they can do the same job for much less.
President Bush will try to make you think this is all about people working jobs that Americans won't do. He's right. We, as natural born Americans, find it hard to work at wages way below the poverty line.
What can you do to stop this? Write to your two senators and tell them to put a halt to the "guest worker" program. Sure, we have jobs to do and can't go marching around the streets today like the immigrants, but we need to find the time to stop this before it gets out of hand.
Oh and by the way, Windows has a "safe"(well, safer) operating mode in the form of a user account, but nobody uses it because it's a PITA, so everybody stays in supervisor mode and bad things happen.
Actually most people run with the version of Windows that came installed on their computer. And these accounts are, from the best of my knowledge, always Admin.
It's another amazing day on Slashdot. First, a person is told to RTFA and continues to not read the article in question (thus missing why they were told to RTFA). Then, a little turd doesn't notice that the "pro's" and "con's" I am referring to are coming from said poster and tries to correct MY grammar. I'm not a grammar queer (such as nugneant) but in this case those mistakes were intentional. Stop being lazy and read before you write people.
Do you know what RTFA means? If you would have done that, as the parent poster stated, you would have noticed the title:
"Republicans defeat Net neutrality proposal"
That is the same title as the title on the post in Slashdot.
so that the topics of conversation following it up would be more along the lines of the pro's and con's of net neutrality
These have already been discussed on Slashdot, and in other sources, for months now. What rock have you been sleeping under?
Net Neutrality:
Pro's: Internet stays as is.
Con's: Telcoms can't charge fees based on traffic types and popularity. This is what the Telcoms refer to as "Google's Free Lunch" where Google is making money on the Internet and the Telcom's want a piece of the action.
In the real world it would be like this:
You start a simple bakery and have a single supplier for your flour. As time passes, the bakery becomes a huge hit in town. Demand increases and the shop grows along with profits. Then, one day, the flour supplier comes to you and demands a percentage of the bakery's profits or he will stop supplying flour. You look for another flour supplier, but they are all just outside the domain of this single flour sales person and have agreements with him to not directly compete in his territory (competition would reduce profits). So, besides paying for the flour, a percentage of the actual profits from the bakery's sales have to go to the flour salesman in order to stay in business.
This is known as extortion in the real world.
People don't want to merge. Why?
Well, some will tell you its good for competition. They are lieing.
Others will say why their desktop is superior because it has feature X. These people are just ignorant.
Some may even go into KDE being coded in C++ which is superior, or the reverse from Gnomers who think C is superior. These people need to go outside and get some sun, take a deep breath, and go find a real hobby.
The rest of us know the truth is that it doesn't really matter.
The UK is a major player in the EU, but so is France and Germany. Any right-winger knows that those two countries hate us.
The judge said "no" to subpoenas for Microsoft to gather certain information from some its large competitors. The judge felt that the case was outside the juristiction of the United States. And if you think about it, the "E" in EU is for Europe which is not a part of the U.S. that last time I looked.
I don't know about "made" in the USA but there are plenty of computers "assembled" in the USA. The United States is not a 100% free trade market player (no country is), so there are tariffs and costs to shipping in a complete product compared to just getting parts. China is the same. Try starting a business there, you will find that you have to have a shop in China doing x% of your business to the country. It's a good idea that the U.S. should do for ALL trades since it does the following:
1. Slows growth of trade defiticits, or even makes it decline
2. Creates new local jobs
Bad effects:
1. Product increase in price. The Walmartians will scream in horror when they can't buy the latest cheap electronic garbage from Tiawan to replace the unit they bought two weeks early that broke. Oh Well.
Why mark the parent as Troll since you are actually agreeing with him/her? Did you really mean to say the reverse with "mod parent up"? As the parent said, and you agreed with, presidential canidates seem to work in the order of the "Good Ole Boys" network.