Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back... will be ridiculous
It's ridiculous now, if you live in an urban area. Why not walk to the store and back? If you're able-bodied and live less than a couple of miles from the town centre, you have no excuse. No wonder the Western world is becoming so fat and lazy.
Or is it possible that no college or university EVER teaches currently marketable skills and only teach stuff that's several years out of date?
Universities are institutions of learning, not [language du jour] programmer factories. The generic skills that one learns at university ought to be transferrable to any language.
We were taught Pascal at university. No-one uses Pascal in the Real World (unless you count Delphi); the point was to give us instruction in how to program in a procedural language. In our concurrency class, we used SR. I'd never heard of it before, and I'll never use it again, but I gained an appreciation of thread-safety that has since helped me when writing Java and C# programs in the Real World. We were taught C++ (albeit badly; the instructor was useless) in the object orientation course. I haven't used C++ professionally at all, but I have certainly applied the OO techniques that we learned.
I did my final-year project in Java, teaching myself as I went. I was able to do this easily because it's a simple language with simple syntax, and my classes had given me generic skills that were transferrable to it. This is what education is all about.
The day that universities turn into Windows programmer factories will be a sad day for education.
I gave up compiling ACPI support into my kernel a while ago. On a machine that doesn't get suspended/hibernated, it seemed to provide no appreciable benefit other than automatically shutting the system down when I pressed the power button, and I can live without that. Now it looks as if my ACPI-less kernel also has the happy side-effect of protecting me from a potential exploit. Nice.
Because I know that somehow my religious beliefs that I want to teach to my children will not be taught according to how I believe.
Happened to me, that did. I'm a Baptist from a family of Baptists. The primary school I attended was affiliated with the local Anglican parish church.
One day at school (in year 3, IIRC), we were taught about baptism. However, this wasn't the baptism by full immersion that I'd witnessed in church; this was some deal with a priest sprinkling water over a baby's head. From my eight-year-old point of view, the teacher was talking nonsense. I think I must've asked my parents a lot of confused questions after school that day!
Transformers are equally culpable of silently sipping power.
No kidding. The global Energon crisis is all their fault. I have it on good authority that the standby mode on Megatron's fusion cannon consumes a gigawatt every second.
Also, would it be legal to write such a media player, release it under a non-GPL3 licence, but link it against glibc to run on a GNU/Linux system?
Current versions of glibc are released under the GPL2, with a "linking exception" that permits non-GPL software to be linked against it. (From my point of view, this seems functionally equivalent to the LGPL; IANAL, mind you). Will future GPL3-licenced versions of glibc include code implementing DRM in the "linking exception"? Or will code implementing DRM be denied permission to link against glibc under any circumstances?
Would've been "Hexium", surely? "Pentium" and "Hexium" are both derived from Greek words. If you want "Sexium", the predecessor would've had to have been "Quinquium", from Latin.
if 4 people mod a comment +1 Insightful, somebody mods it -1 flamebait, and then someone else mods it +1 insightful, the person who modded it 'against the grain' could be punnished by somehow being less likely to get mod points again.
That might just encourage and perpetuate groupthink, though. For example, in an article about Linux security issues, someone might post a wisecrack about Windows' security record. The majority of mods might mod it +1 Funny, but one or two might justifiably mod it -1 Troll or -1 Offtopic. Why should they be punished for doing their jobs? Sure, the post might well be funny, but it might also be trolling, and almost certainly offtopic.
1/ Strip attribution. Make all submissions effectively AC. If the story is submitted by a registered user, maybe send them a private message indicating that it was their submission that got the story posted; that way, they get a nice warm feeling. But to the rest of Slashdot, the source of the story is unknown, and is thus not a discussion point.
2/ If a submission points to a blog entry with a couple of paragraphs of waffle accompanying a link to a real news site, Slashdot should link directly to that real news site. That way, we get to read and discuss the real story, not some wannabe pundit's opinions of the story. This doesn't need to be hard and fast, of course; if the pundit's opinions are really insightful and worthy of Slashdot's attention, then maybe the Slashdot summary could link to the blog as well as to the real story.
Yup. It saddens me greatly that this country has an international reputation for restraint and civility, yet one only has to flick through the gutter press to realize that this is far from the case.
Government is supposed to exist for the benefit of the population, not the other way around. Therefore, if a majority of the population oppose an existing law, the law is probably wrong. So if the majority of the population think that sharing music is acceptable, the law should probably reflect that. Record labels and some musicians may disagree, but they're not the majority.
(Of course, this whole argument breaks down when one considers some of the things that a large proportion of the population would dearly love to legalize. If the tabloid-reading majority had their way, we'd have an immediate end to immigration, public lynching of suspected paedophiles, and all manner of other entertainment).
"Removing" a bootloader from the MBR isn't quite the same as removing a file. It's more a case of overwriting an old MBR with a new one. So if you want a bootloader to have this feature, the bootloader would have to have some concept of what to replace itself with.
Debian provides an "mbr" package that can be used as a generic MBR for almost any OS. The idea is that you install LILO/GRUB/whatever into the boot sector of the bootable partition rather than into the MBR itself; the generic MBR then just loads that rather than being a full bootloader in its own right. This may also be what the MBR written by "fdisk/mbr" does, but I'm not a Windows expert, so I don't know.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is very possible, I don't know much about anything besides Linux and Star Trek), the Windows version of VLC will presumably keep on working, doing all the decoding in software using libdvdcss. So people will still be able to use it to view their legitimately-acquired foreign DVDs.
I'm also considering making a dupe of this post later in the conversation.
I could almost have saved you the bother with my reply, because I've also used the bathroom and had a nice meal today. However, it wouldn't quite be a dupe because I didn't install a new monitor. Instead, I did a load of laundry and ironing, and packed my suitcase for a trip tomorrow.
In terms of TVs and other consumer hardware, this might not hurt too much - it's all made by the Japanese and Koreans anyway.
Until some hypothetical future US administration starts strongarming foreign nations into passing similar legislation in the name of "globalization", "harmonization" or some other such rubbish. Any nations refusing to comply will be punished with strict trade tariffs.
Bad American laws have a habit of becoming bad international laws. It's happened with, for example, the EUCD (European equivalent of the DMCA), and the new British anti-terror laws. I have no doubt at all that it'll happen again.
Of course they want to spread the Gospel. They're a church. They're not trying to hide it, either; it's not as if they're converting people at the point of a sword, or being dishonest about their motives. And why should they not tell people about something they consider vitally important? Whether or not you believe their message to be true, they do, and they sincerely believe that everyone needs to hear it. And if it falls on deaf ears, they'll help you anyway. Their mission isn't "repent, or we won't give you assistance".
the successor to the BBC, the Acorn Archimedes. I know at least 1 person who had one, so its market share can't have been zero!
The Archie was also very popular in British schools in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The secondary school I attended had a load of them, and RISC OS was my first exposure to a graphical user interface. (My first reaction to it was "huh? What's this? Where's the black screen with lines and lines of text?")
I'm in two minds about those things. On the one hand, anonymity is very, very good; on the other hand, one of my users was getting harrassed by some jerk, and when I blocked his incoming emails, he took to using anonymous remailers instead. I ended up blocking the remailers he was using by blocking any address matching "mixmaster@*".
So, as a user, I love freely available anonymity; but as a sysadmin, I demand that people be accountable for what they want to say if they want to send mail to my users.
Or will my ISP simply be forced to snoop all the SMTP traffic I generate? And what if I start using TLS for SMTP connections?
Either: 1/ they'll block outgoing port 25, forcing you to smarthost through their server. Their server won't support TLS. Or: 2/ they'll just turn a blind eye. The law doesn't compel end users to send data through ISPs' servers, and they can't be subpoenaed for data that they don't have.
Can't speak for Evolution, but in GIMP (which I assume uses the same file selector), you can click in the file selection panel and then just start typing a path. As soon as you start typing, a little window with a text widget opens. You can type a path to a dotted directory there (/home/foo/.bar or whatever), and then the file selector will let you browse to it.
Ya, it sucks, but hey, it's a workaround at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back ... will be ridiculous
It's ridiculous now, if you live in an urban area. Why not walk to the store and back? If you're able-bodied and live less than a couple of miles from the town centre, you have no excuse. No wonder the Western world is becoming so fat and lazy.
-Stephen, missing the point of the article
Or is it possible that no college or university EVER teaches currently marketable skills and only teach stuff that's several years out of date?
Universities are institutions of learning, not [language du jour] programmer factories. The generic skills that one learns at university ought to be transferrable to any language.
We were taught Pascal at university. No-one uses Pascal in the Real World (unless you count Delphi); the point was to give us instruction in how to program in a procedural language. In our concurrency class, we used SR. I'd never heard of it before, and I'll never use it again, but I gained an appreciation of thread-safety that has since helped me when writing Java and C# programs in the Real World. We were taught C++ (albeit badly; the instructor was useless) in the object orientation course. I haven't used C++ professionally at all, but I have certainly applied the OO techniques that we learned.
I did my final-year project in Java, teaching myself as I went. I was able to do this easily because it's a simple language with simple syntax, and my classes had given me generic skills that were transferrable to it. This is what education is all about.
The day that universities turn into Windows programmer factories will be a sad day for education.
-Stephen
I gave up compiling ACPI support into my kernel a while ago. On a machine that doesn't get suspended/hibernated, it seemed to provide no appreciable benefit other than automatically shutting the system down when I pressed the power button, and I can live without that. Now it looks as if my ACPI-less kernel also has the happy side-effect of protecting me from a potential exploit. Nice.
-Stephen
No kidding. If I ever see "leverage the blogosphere" in a story summary, I fear I may spontaneously combust.
-Stephen
Because I know that somehow my religious beliefs that I want to teach to my children will not be taught according to how I believe.
Happened to me, that did. I'm a Baptist from a family of Baptists. The primary school I attended was affiliated with the local Anglican parish church.
One day at school (in year 3, IIRC), we were taught about baptism. However, this wasn't the baptism by full immersion that I'd witnessed in church; this was some deal with a priest sprinkling water over a baby's head. From my eight-year-old point of view, the teacher was talking nonsense. I think I must've asked my parents a lot of confused questions after school that day!
-Stephen
Transformers are equally culpable of silently sipping power.
No kidding. The global Energon crisis is all their fault. I have it on good authority that the standby mode on Megatron's fusion cannon consumes a gigawatt every second.
-Stephen
Then, they should break into Slashdot and fix the spelling of "grammar" in your comment ;-)
-Stephen
Also, would it be legal to write such a media player, release it under a non-GPL3 licence, but link it against glibc to run on a GNU/Linux system?
Current versions of glibc are released under the GPL2, with a "linking exception" that permits non-GPL software to be linked against it. (From my point of view, this seems functionally equivalent to the LGPL; IANAL, mind you). Will future GPL3-licenced versions of glibc include code implementing DRM in the "linking exception"? Or will code implementing DRM be denied permission to link against glibc under any circumstances?
-Stephen
Would've been "Hexium", surely? "Pentium" and "Hexium" are both derived from Greek words. If you want "Sexium", the predecessor would've had to have been "Quinquium", from Latin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_prefix
</pedant>
-Stephen
if 4 people mod a comment +1 Insightful, somebody mods it -1 flamebait, and then someone else mods it +1 insightful, the person who modded it 'against the grain' could be punnished by somehow being less likely to get mod points again.
That might just encourage and perpetuate groupthink, though. For example, in an article about Linux security issues, someone might post a wisecrack about Windows' security record. The majority of mods might mod it +1 Funny, but one or two might justifiably mod it -1 Troll or -1 Offtopic. Why should they be punished for doing their jobs? Sure, the post might well be funny, but it might also be trolling, and almost certainly offtopic.
-Stephen
1/ Strip attribution. Make all submissions effectively AC. If the story is submitted by a registered user, maybe send them a private message indicating that it was their submission that got the story posted; that way, they get a nice warm feeling. But to the rest of Slashdot, the source of the story is unknown, and is thus not a discussion point.
2/ If a submission points to a blog entry with a couple of paragraphs of waffle accompanying a link to a real news site, Slashdot should link directly to that real news site. That way, we get to read and discuss the real story, not some wannabe pundit's opinions of the story. This doesn't need to be hard and fast, of course; if the pundit's opinions are really insightful and worthy of Slashdot's attention, then maybe the Slashdot summary could link to the blog as well as to the real story.
Just my penny's worth.
-Stephen
Sure it is. It's a site for angsty teenagers to share pictures of themselves looking miserable.
-Stephen
Are you British?
Yup. It saddens me greatly that this country has an international reputation for restraint and civility, yet one only has to flick through the gutter press to realize that this is far from the case.
-Stephen
Government is supposed to exist for the benefit of the population, not the other way around. Therefore, if a majority of the population oppose an existing law, the law is probably wrong. So if the majority of the population think that sharing music is acceptable, the law should probably reflect that. Record labels and some musicians may disagree, but they're not the majority.
(Of course, this whole argument breaks down when one considers some of the things that a large proportion of the population would dearly love to legalize. If the tabloid-reading majority had their way, we'd have an immediate end to immigration, public lynching of suspected paedophiles, and all manner of other entertainment).
-Stephen
"Removing" a bootloader from the MBR isn't quite the same as removing a file. It's more a case of overwriting an old MBR with a new one. So if you want a bootloader to have this feature, the bootloader would have to have some concept of what to replace itself with.
/mbr" does, but I'm not a Windows expert, so I don't know.
Debian provides an "mbr" package that can be used as a generic MBR for almost any OS. The idea is that you install LILO/GRUB/whatever into the boot sector of the bootable partition rather than into the MBR itself; the generic MBR then just loads that rather than being a full bootloader in its own right. This may also be what the MBR written by "fdisk
-Stephen
Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is very possible, I don't know much about anything besides Linux and Star Trek), the Windows version of VLC will presumably keep on working, doing all the decoding in software using libdvdcss. So people will still be able to use it to view their legitimately-acquired foreign DVDs.
-Stephen
I'm also considering making a dupe of this post later in the conversation.
I could almost have saved you the bother with my reply, because I've also used the bathroom and had a nice meal today. However, it wouldn't quite be a dupe because I didn't install a new monitor. Instead, I did a load of laundry and ironing, and packed my suitcase for a trip tomorrow.
Thanks for telling us all about your day!
-Stephen
In terms of TVs and other consumer hardware, this might not hurt too much - it's all made by the Japanese and Koreans anyway.
Until some hypothetical future US administration starts strongarming foreign nations into passing similar legislation in the name of "globalization", "harmonization" or some other such rubbish. Any nations refusing to comply will be punished with strict trade tariffs.
Bad American laws have a habit of becoming bad international laws. It's happened with, for example, the EUCD (European equivalent of the DMCA), and the new British anti-terror laws. I have no doubt at all that it'll happen again.
-Stephen
Of course they want to spread the Gospel. They're a church. They're not trying to hide it, either; it's not as if they're converting people at the point of a sword, or being dishonest about their motives. And why should they not tell people about something they consider vitally important? Whether or not you believe their message to be true, they do, and they sincerely believe that everyone needs to hear it. And if it falls on deaf ears, they'll help you anyway. Their mission isn't "repent, or we won't give you assistance".
-Stephen
There were also some great games on it including a fantastic version of Elite
All those wasted lunch hours playing Elite on the school Archies... ahhhh, memories...
-Stephen
the successor to the BBC, the Acorn Archimedes. I know at least 1 person who had one, so its market share can't have been zero!
The Archie was also very popular in British schools in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The secondary school I attended had a load of them, and RISC OS was my first exposure to a graphical user interface. (My first reaction to it was "huh? What's this? Where's the black screen with lines and lines of text?")
-Stephen
Use anonymous remailers.
I'm in two minds about those things. On the one hand, anonymity is very, very good; on the other hand, one of my users was getting harrassed by some jerk, and when I blocked his incoming emails, he took to using anonymous remailers instead. I ended up blocking the remailers he was using by blocking any address matching "mixmaster@*".
So, as a user, I love freely available anonymity; but as a sysadmin, I demand that people be accountable for what they want to say if they want to send mail to my users.
-Stephen
Or will my ISP simply be forced to snoop all the SMTP traffic I generate? And what if I start using TLS for SMTP connections?
Either:
1/ they'll block outgoing port 25, forcing you to smarthost through their server. Their server won't support TLS.
Or:
2/ they'll just turn a blind eye. The law doesn't compel end users to send data through ISPs' servers, and they can't be subpoenaed for data that they don't have.
-Stephen
Can't speak for Evolution, but in GIMP (which I assume uses the same file selector), you can click in the file selection panel and then just start typing a path. As soon as you start typing, a little window with a text widget opens. You can type a path to a dotted directory there (/home/foo/.bar or whatever), and then the file selector will let you browse to it.
Ya, it sucks, but hey, it's a workaround at least.
-Stephen
Muscle memory. I've been using Emacs-like editors since my early teens. The key sequences are practically reflex actions.
-Stephen