Tell that to NTP, the company that successfully sued RIM, the makers of the Blackberry. They had an idea, and "squatted" on it. No, wait, they probably PATENTED the idea, squatted on it, waiting for someone else to bring it to market and be successful, then they probably tried to extort RIM, and, failing that, took it to the courts, and made out like bandits. It was basically a software patent. Latest estimates on how this will shake out put the award at one (1) BILLION dollars. So, yeah, they had nothing left, but it still worked out pretty well for them.
Just checked it again, and about half the images were porn. VERY explicit. Someone's SERIOUSLY bagging this report for some sort of ulterior motive. I mean, we could get into a discussion about how "random" jwz has made his application, but I think his point was to be truely random.
If the internets were only 1%, you'd almost never see anything pornographic there, right? Just watch that for a few minutes. You'll see something exciting. I just went there, and saw an image of a hard-core 3-way.
"Oh no, god forbid you have to change your strategy in a 10 year old game. People, get a grip."
That's really the point, though, isn't it? It's a 10-year-old game that people still love and play in droves simply BECAUSE it was set up so well to begin with. The people who are complaining are saying, hey, if it ain't broke...
I just spent a month in Europe, including a week and a half in England. They have laws protecting anything but the smallest saplings from any sort of damage. It's supposed to protect their historical landscape. You can't even trim or cut down trees IN YOUR OWN YARD without approval from their equivalent of the city council. The fact that this tree was on PUBLIC land on INCREASES the agitation they would feel about kids tearing a limb or two off of it.
The tree business is just one example. Most new construction in the country uses brick on the exterior, and tile on the roof, so that everything matches the buildings that have already been standing for hundreds of years. It's all part of their culture to preserve their heritage.
So, the police have just done exactly what their laws say ought to have been done. Slashdot needs to be arguing about the culture that promotes this sort of thinking, which results in this sort of law and behavior.
Personally, I feel that it won't be very long in the future when using cash is the mark of someone suspicious. (It already is, in large quantities and in certain places -- bought an airline ticket with cash lately?) That is, anyone using cash to purchase anything from food to movie tickets will be forced through additional scrutiny, not to mention odd looks from "honest" people (using their Visa cards as God intended).
I'm an American who just spent a month in Europe. Every time I used a credit card, the merchant had to drag out some combersome piece of equipment to complete the transaction. Everyone over there is using "chipped" credit cards which only need tapped on their normal "scanner." Seems to me that this would be ripe for fraud. (Not that signing a receipt is any proof of anything here in the States, but everyone over there checked my signature against the card.)
I predict that it will only be a few more years until this practice explodes here. (I notice McDonald's is already doing it.) At that point, it will be about 2 minutes until the credit card companies "suggest" that the chip to be physically implanted into people for the prevention of fraud. They already lose billions every year due to this, so it's a no-brainer justification.
Where would such a chip make sense to implant? The hand? It would make "swiping" the chip pretty easy. I saw a news program (on the plane back from Europe) that had an interview with a man and his girlfriend who had done away with all their keys in favor of chips implanted in their hands. Seems convenient, doesn't it?
This situation sounds familiar. Hrm. Where could I have heard of something like this? Oh yeah. Revelation 13:16,17: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."
I don't understand who "the beast" is that will "causeth all" in this context, but it's clear that the stage is set for the fulfillment of this prophecy.
One more thing. Note that the book of Revelation concerns itself with events centered around Israel's fight to exist as a country. It's NOT a coincidence that the prophecies therein are possibly fulfillable for the first time at this point in history.
I see no innovation and no reason to upgrade if you are still using Windows.
I totally "get" all the comments here. I'm someone who has been a computer administrator since the time of Windows 3.1, and I've been personally waiting for this Cairo feature for the 10 years Microsoft has dangled that particular carrot. I find the situation... laughable. I made the switch to Linux on the desktop about 7 years ago. While it's taken some time to get there, I find that I don't need Windows to do ANYTHING any longer...
Except play games.
I've tried many different versions of Wine and Cedega. While the engine works even better than Windows on some games, I'm having trouble getting the ones I want to play to work. (For instance, Cedega doesn't -- and won't -- support PunkBuster for playing Battlefield 2 online.) So I keep a Windows partition for games, and this is where Microsoft is going to screw me. The one "innovation" that (so far as I'm reading in the comments) no one has addressed is that Microsoft is going to upgrade DirectX to 10, and this will only be available in Vista.
Well, you know what? That's fine by me, because I'm done with the following the stupid paradigm of video gaming on a PC. The enormous hassle it's gotten to be, what with hardware upgrades, software upgrades, patch after patch on Windows (mostly just to phone home and report my activities), the patches for the games, the driver problems and, certainly not least, the crashes! You can have it. I'm not changing anything about my setup at this point. If I can't play a game on this computer right now, I'm not upgrading. I really want to play Crysis, but I'm sure it won't play on this box, and I'm not going to buy a new computer to run it. (Well, it might play, but I'll have to "dumb down" the game so much, it won't look any better than Far Cry.)
So the people making Crysis need to make sure it'll run on a Wii, because, when I buy new hardware to play video games, it's not going to be 1) Microsoft or 2) cost enough to buy a new computer anyway (Sony). On top of all the other hassles I've already stated, I've got two young kids now, and they want to play video games too. Getting them up and running on a PC is a hassle. Consoles are much easier to just pop in a game and play. So, yeah, I'm looking to buy a Wii.
Excellent. That's exactly right. Just be sure to include the costs when comparing all of this. So... while you're right that you're comparing entire up-and-running, productive systems, the Linux one is still free (or, say, $60 for SuSE) versus the Windows one, which is now into the low thousands of dollars. Go ahead, keep adding things to comparison: firewalls, chat clients, web browsers, application servers, infrastructure services. All free. All included. And now you're talking about, literally, tens of thousands in licensing fees with Microsoft. And, in the case of any Linux distro I'm familiar with, all these packages are kept up to date with each other for security patches. And all the drivers (except nVidia, grrr) get updated with a new kernel. Truly one-stop-shopping.
About 7 years ago, I counted up that I had personally spent several thousand dollars on Microsoft products. I don't believe in pirating this stuff. Rather, when I thought about the kind of money I had been spending, and EXTRAPOLATED to what I'd spend in the future, I backtracked to the fact that I knew Linux pretty well, and I decided to make the switch. I've used Linux as my desktop as well as my servers since then. (And my first question to my local Mac-head was whether the new Mac's could triple boot OSX, Windows, and Linux.) I used Linux at work for years until my latest boss told me specifically that I couldn't run Linux. (I asked, if I was getting my job done, what it mattered. He didn't have much of an answer, but I let it drop.)
Since that time (Windows & Office 2000), the only money I given Microsoft has been the $15 co-pay for Windows XP that I got while attending the local college. At the time, I also got Office XP and MSDN Student Ed. for free. (Did I subsidize Microsoft with my tuition? Well, my employer did.) Yesterday, someone asked me to pirate a copy of Office for someone else, because that person didn't want to pay $400 to go buy a copy. I said no way. That's the whole point. Microsoft gets away with their practices because deals like the one with colleges, but that's a lot of money to a person who does volunteer work! That's the deal. It IS unfair. If you don't like it, then rightly be upset with Micrsoft's stranglehold on the market and do something about it. I told him to download OpenOffice and stick it on a CD for this other person. If 100% compatibility is worth hundreds of dollars to you, more power to you. But it's not to me, and I'm hoping that more people come to see it that way.
The whole business is stupid on the face of it. Like other search results, which are weighted based on their relative linkings, they ought to report the news results, and let the popularity of the sources speak for themselves. Right-thinking and right-speaking people will do the filtering. They won't link to idiots. I'm a far right-winger. I read LGF and MM almost daily. I've never heard of the sites that are being argued about here. I'm not particularly worried about what they have to say. The fact that Google feels it's incumbent upon THEM to remove them from their news crawl is telling about THEIR politics, and makes me LESS inclined to respect what they are telling me whenever they say ANYthing.
Thanks for pointing to the article. I had heard this before, but had not read about it in depth.
What's interesting to me, as a Bible-believing Christian, is how one academic can make his career on a hypothesis such as this. He's basically spent his entire life in the pursuit of undermining the thought that "slaves" built the pyramids. In support of this, the only two pieces of evidence that I can read from this article are 1) that some graffiti inside the pyramids referred to, perhaps, "holy" people that led the efforts, and 2) that the camp that housed the what-seemed-to-be-skilled laborers were well fed.
Now, I understand his point about a civilization who wanted to honor their leader -- who, in terms of their religion -- represented an earthly vessel for the highest god of their pantheon. To me, that makes a lot of sense, and the comparison to an Amish barn raising seems apt, in that context.
But I still don't see how someone can look at just the 2 previously mentioned pieces of evidence, and come away with a conclusion that, no, contrary to thousands of years of common understanding, slaves had nothing to do with the construction of not just the pyramids, but most of the massive structures of Egypt in general. (I love how the article leads with how this idea is "rooted firmly in the popular imagination." No editoral lede there, huh?)
It would seem much MORE likely to look at this article and come away with a conclusion that the teams LEADING the effort -- who would naturally have been Egyptian -- would have made their mark on the buildings, and that the SKILLED laborers, whether they were Egyptian or Semitic, would have been well taken care of. They would HAVE to have eaten well to do good work. As far as the guy's initial supposition goes, he still hasn't figured out where "all the people" lived. He's still looking for where the rest of them lived. How can you not conclude that they must have lived in non-permanent structures, in what must have been sub-optimal conditions for living in a desert? Again, the actual evidence being uncovered (or NOT uncovered, as the case may be) points to slave labor factoring prominently into the equation.
The reason I thought that it was really interesting to see an actual article on this was because it's rumbled around in the back of my mind for awhile, and I had forgotten it. The way it came up years ago, i.e. the way it was reported, I would have thought that they found the grave yard where they buried the workers, did some DNA testing, and PROVED their case. Not so. Now I've looked for myself, and, if this is the best evidence, then color me even more convinced of the story, uh, just about everyone has believed for, uh, just about all of recorded history.
I think it's just another case of someone who wanted funding and a name, and came up with a shocking supposition to get them. Now he seems to be justifying the expense and the effort on the thinnest of evidence.
The gaming site for members of the Democratic Underground.
You can have it.
You know, I remember a time when there weren't a lot of politics on Slashdot. And, if anything, the stuff that was modded up was solidly libertarian. Eh, maybe I was just young and naive. Now it's gotten bad enough that I no longer browse Slashdot; I merely come over occasionally because of an interesting link from Diggdot. Now I'm finding that about half the time, I'm regretting even that.
I've moved back largely to console games. It just isn't worth an hour or two of hassle to play a game that is legally purchased.
You've really hit the nail on the head, here. I've been a huge PC gamer for about 15 years now. In fact, I just spent last Saturday evening at a friend's house playing some games, and his teenage son could not get over my vast collection of games. (I introduced him to Outlaws for the first time, and he loved it!) After all this time, though, I find I'm getting more and more put out with gaming on a PC. However, it's not even about the DRM for me. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I know that's the topic in this discussion, but if we're talking about the hassles of PC gaming, let's talk about:
Patching the game If you haven't played in a couple months, and the game's less than 5 years old, you'd probably better check on a patch. Just last Saturday, we were playing UT2004... there's been a patch released in the past few months.
Driver updates Be sure to keep these up to date as well, or face blue screens.
Upgrades Whether you're trying to improve performance, or add new functionality, I think most "gamers" are the type to hack their boxes, and it gets to be a hassle. And sometimes, your machine is out of commission when you "just want to play a game."
Obsolesence Speaking of upgrades, I can't. My machine is a dual Athlon XP with a GeForce 6600GT. It might play the games coming out now, but, if it does, I'll have to shut off enough of the eye candy so as to make it look like a game that was -- wait for it -- released 3 years ago!
Adding to these are the hassles of dragging the machine someplace else to play at a LAN party. Is it anyone else's fault but mine that I've spent money putting together a dual, and just spent money making a MythTV PVR, and now can't put $1000 toward a new gaming rig? No. That's just how I chose to spend my money. But it means I've also implicitly chosen not to play the latest, greatest games.
What I'm saying, after all these years, is that I'm fine with that. Maybe it's that I'm getting older. Maybe. But I think it's just economics. Not just money, but the entire picture. The total hassle. When you buy a console. That's it. You might buy some nice controllers, maybe a better A/V cable, but that's about it. I'm ready for that kind of simplicity. Just pop in a DVD, and play. No drivers, no patches, no hassle.
Inevitably, someone will argue that, with games like Half-Life 2 / Counter Strike Source, the PC platform is moving to a console-like model already, and I would agree. But the big difference here is that a PC, as a hardware platform, is such a difficult, fast-moving target to hit, and game makers are doing their best, but the experience will always be more "optimized" on a platform. Not better overall, necessarily, but it will take better advantage of the platform.
And, on top of that, the platform will be subsidized! What's the latest figure on how many hundreds Microsoft is losing per XBox 360? And how much is Sony estimated to lose per PS3? I think I can get with that! Sure the controls suck, but I can get used to them!
There's another discussion going on about Vista and EFI, and I think it's missing the point. Microsoft doesn't care about whether Vista will run on Mac hardware. That's a strawman. Think about it. What's actually, truly new about Vista? That's right. Nothing except eye candy. And... your friend and mine: DRM. Microsoft doesn't want Vista to run on anything but a platform that they can "trust" down to the bare metal. If you haven't been paying attention, all the whining about TCPA or whatever it's called has had the exact same effect as did all the whining about the CPU identifier. Zippo. It's been going into our hardware for years now. And Vista will exploit all of
We've always heard that one reason we need DRM is to ensure that, just in case a copy "gets out," it's degenerate in some fashion. But with iTunes music, the best you get is digitally compressed tracks. You never even have access to a lossless encoding, should you desire that. True, most people agree that the AAC format sounds good. (I don't know. I have an iPod, but only use it for MP3's I've converted from my master OGG collection.) And, true, CD tracks themselves are digital, but only a true audiophile will claim that vinyl's analog sounds better. (But then you get analog noise...) In any case, CD's have much better resolution than AAC. My point is that when you buy an iTune, you've been saddled with DRM, and GOTTEN NOTHING IN RETURN for it.
Seems to me that someone who really wanted the public to "get" DRM would create a system that, instead of punishing you or limiting you, would offer you a way to get help in case you lost your digital content due to a hard drive crash or something. I'd like to see iTunes offer the capability to re-download everything you've already paid for. I don't know. Maybe this is already there, and I just don't know it, but I certainly haven't heard about it.
No, no. That's the entire point of DRM. Piracy is a straw man. What person, having bought an iPod, and collected some music tracks, is going to say, screw it, I'm throwing away this investment, and going with some other service? No, they want to be able to access their whole collection on whatever device they have. That means they stay with an iPod, and with iTunes. It's classic Microsoftian tactics. DRM keeps people locked in APPLE'S DRM-ed vertical stack. That's EVERYONE'S strategy with DRM.
Re:Rabbit hole goes deeper -- existing HDTVs w/ co
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The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly. These companies pushing all of these DRM schemes have got the technical people in a fuss because of libertarian platitudes, when they know just as well as anyone else that it won't prevent piracy. It's the hardware stupid. They keep pushing this stuff in order to SELL MORE HARDWARE. And if they manage to push a PARTICULAR brand of DRM, then they've LOCKED YOU INTO the whole line of THEIR products, or their PARTNERS' PRODUCTS. Once you decide you just have to have the Matrix Trilogy on Blu-Ray to play on your 100" plasma HDTV, then you've just lined the pockets of a particular group of people within the hardware world. And even if another manufacturer wants to jump onto that bandwagon, and sell compatible hardware, they're going to have to pay the first group a HEFTY fee to do so. Ultimately, it's about VENDOR LOCK-IN. I don't think these people care a whit about your STUPID "PIRACY." Vote with your dollars accordingly.
Twenty years? Try about 2000. BUT! It's only now that we have the technology to put some "thing" in the hand or forehead that could be used to "buy or sell." And, if you've been paying attention to this sort of thing, you would see that there's been a lot of activity on this front over the past few years that hasn't made mainstream media, or Slashdot either, for that matter. All the pieces are in place, but I personally don't believe that identification will be the avenue where it becomes commonplace. I think there will be too much resistance to a government-sponsored move to this sort of thing. I could rightly claim that it violates my freedom of religion. No, I think it's all about credit fraud.
Think about it. We're already to a point with credit cards that, in some places, you can just tap the machine with your card, and get authorization. If someone steals your card, they don't even have to sign anything now. (And not that this was a deterent anyway, but that's another web page.) But the point is that we're removing any vestiges of a two-factor system of authentication. Once this is gone, and credit fraud rises commesurately with it, the credit companies are going to demand to go back to a second "factor," and this will be the obvious technology to do that with. In fact, they'll say, it's two factors in one, and just as fast as the previous system. And then what started out as a good idea will then become legislated. Like the DMCA.
I do expect that Transgaming will implement it for Linux; soon Linux will be a very viable gaming platform.
Ha! That's a good one. I was just cleaning up some email folders, and noticed that my experimentation with Transgaming's product goes back to late 2002. I'm still waiting for a SINGLE GAME I'm interested in to be playable with their product. It varies by title, but I've kept a Windows partition around because Transgaming -- despite their valiant attempts -- just ain't there yet.
Just to be clear, the latest saga is BF2. Transgaming has done a fine job making it work with their product. The graphics and sound all run fine. Maybe even better than in Windows. But IT DOESN'T SUPPORT PUNKBUSTER. BF2 is only interesting to me if I can play on a registered server, so I'm out. And I expect more and more online games to use -- if not this particular software, then other -- various sorts of similar methods to try to ensure fair play.
The problem is that this whole class of "middleware" sees things like Cedega as a hack, and will never allow them to work. You might think that Transgaming could partner with EvenBalance to allow their particular product to work, but then the cheat-makers could just get their code to "look" like Cedega to PunkBuster. So I don't see this happening.
Of course, with my track record for IT-industry predictions, I should probably go invest in both EvenBalance and Transgaming right now. YMMV.
Is this the EFF losing, or is this just corruption of the courts?
You have completely missed the point. The courts are upholding LAWS. Laws that have gotten passed at the behest of big business in CONGRESS. You want different outcomes on this sort of stuff (q.v. "broadcast flag"), vote for different people, lobby Congress yourself, take out some advertising, start a grassroots campaign... The options are varied depending on your commitment to change.
Me? I just live without. But I'd be doing that anyway. In my opinion, "big media" can KEEP the stupid tripe they try to monopolistically shove down our throats.
Loki ate itself from the inside out. It was a failure of their management, not of their business model. Every time this comes up, I have to say this, one, to dispel the myth, and, two, hoping that someone, somewhere will try again. Story.
Man, if there were EVER an article that Slashdotters weren't going to RTFA...
They *still* don't sync with Evolution
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Palm's Mistakes
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· Score: 1
I've had a PilotPro, a V, a Vx, a Tungsten T, a Tungsten C, and now a Treo 600. Ever since the first version, I've been able to sync the thing with Outlook. Back in the early days, if you weren't careful, it would dupe everything with the sync. I haven't seen that in quite a long time, but then, I've been using Linux as my main desktop for about 6 or 7 years now. I don't understand people's complaints in this thread about problems sync'ing with Windows.
What I *do* have a problem with is the ability to sync the cotton-pickin' things with LINUX. This has been NOTHING BUT A NIGHTMARE SINCE DAY ONE. I'm sorry if the people who wrote pilot-link are listening. In the early days of Palm Linux sync'ing, I suppose it fit the bill quite nicely. However, since the invention of the USB cradle connection, all bets have been off. Just getting your kernel configured right was a major hassle. And when THAT settled down, I guess I missed the meeting where we all thought that "udev" was supposed to save everyone from their sins, and THIS became a whole NEW hassle to deal with.
When Evolution appeared, I believed the hype. I really thought it would be the Outlook killer it was billed as. I run the latest released version on Gentoo everyday, and I love it; don't get me wrong. But gnome-pilot -- the software underneath that sync's with a Palm device -- is HORRIBLY BUSTED. I managed to get a good first sync just the other day, but after that, look, just forget it. The evolution-data-server went into a loop, and started adding literally thousands of blank tasks in Evo before I killed it. The really stupid part of this is that this is a known problem that's been around SINCE IT BECAME POPULAR TO BUNDLE THIS CRAP WITH DISTROS.
Not only that, but you'll lose the category information from EVERYTHING in your Pilot. Note, too, that there's no "memo" functionality in Evolution. (Though there seems to be at least a one-way sync to get those memos to a flat files on your system.)
I realize that it's my right -- nay, DUTY, some here will inevitably argue -- to fix this myself. But I've got other projects I'm programming, thank you very much, and I don't have the time to hack on this, let alone get up to speed with what people on the development list admit is a very tough codebase to learn. (Yes, that means I've at least sized up the effort to do this.)
I really thought that Palms would be the one thing where we Linux users could keep away from Microsoft. With the open API's and dev kits, the start with pilot-link and the hope of Evolution, I really thought that it would eventually become better to sync with Linux instead of Windows. But it has totally failed to materialize, and I think that sucks. Sorry to rant. I suppose it doesn't matter if I do or don't complain about it, though, because I seem to be the only person that cares.
I still sync with JPilot. Thank goodness for JPilot. It's a decent Palm Desktop knockoff. Unfortunately, I've never cared for that either. But it's what I have, and it doesn't screw up the data. That, and DateBook, provide an OK system to use, regardless of desktop sync. But the contrast is very, very stark. We've had at least workable sync with Outlook for TEN YEARS now. We still have nothing comparable on Linux.
Well, given the +4 and +5 commentary on Slashdot these days, 90% of the posters and moderators here would be in favor of 49 of those 50 channels RIDICULING BUSH 24/7. Yes, yes. Of course. Number 50 would be Fox News. And that's JUST what I'm talking about. So, given this, I doubt he's going to be very sympathetic when it comes to things people like "us" care about given "our" level of support for his administration. Face it, there comes a time for ALL of us that we simply start ignoring the people in our lives who have nothing positive to say.
Why are those your "stark and clear" choices? I know, for example, that there are solutions from Novell, SuSE, and Sun, without even thinking about it. Are there more factors involved here than just "we need a directory?" Given a clean sheet of paper, I'd be using eDirectory, since it's completely (according to the marketing papers -- I've never used it) cross-platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to NTP, the company that successfully sued RIM, the makers of the Blackberry. They had an idea, and "squatted" on it. No, wait, they probably PATENTED the idea, squatted on it, waiting for someone else to bring it to market and be successful, then they probably tried to extort RIM, and, failing that, took it to the courts, and made out like bandits. It was basically a software patent. Latest estimates on how this will shake out put the award at one (1) BILLION dollars. So, yeah, they had nothing left, but it still worked out pretty well for them.
Just checked it again, and about half the images were porn. VERY explicit. Someone's SERIOUSLY bagging this report for some sort of ulterior motive. I mean, we could get into a discussion about how "random" jwz has made his application, but I think his point was to be truely random.
http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/
If the internets were only 1%, you'd almost never see anything pornographic there, right? Just watch that for a few minutes. You'll see something exciting. I just went there, and saw an image of a hard-core 3-way.
"Oh no, god forbid you have to change your strategy in a 10 year old game. People, get a grip."
That's really the point, though, isn't it? It's a 10-year-old game that people still love and play in droves simply BECAUSE it was set up so well to begin with. The people who are complaining are saying, hey, if it ain't broke...
I just spent a month in Europe, including a week and a half in England. They have laws protecting anything but the smallest saplings from any sort of damage. It's supposed to protect their historical landscape. You can't even trim or cut down trees IN YOUR OWN YARD without approval from their equivalent of the city council. The fact that this tree was on PUBLIC land on INCREASES the agitation they would feel about kids tearing a limb or two off of it.
The tree business is just one example. Most new construction in the country uses brick on the exterior, and tile on the roof, so that everything matches the buildings that have already been standing for hundreds of years. It's all part of their culture to preserve their heritage.
So, the police have just done exactly what their laws say ought to have been done. Slashdot needs to be arguing about the culture that promotes this sort of thinking, which results in this sort of law and behavior.
I'm an American who just spent a month in Europe. Every time I used a credit card, the merchant had to drag out some combersome piece of equipment to complete the transaction. Everyone over there is using "chipped" credit cards which only need tapped on their normal "scanner." Seems to me that this would be ripe for fraud. (Not that signing a receipt is any proof of anything here in the States, but everyone over there checked my signature against the card.)
I predict that it will only be a few more years until this practice explodes here. (I notice McDonald's is already doing it.) At that point, it will be about 2 minutes until the credit card companies "suggest" that the chip to be physically implanted into people for the prevention of fraud. They already lose billions every year due to this, so it's a no-brainer justification.
Where would such a chip make sense to implant? The hand? It would make "swiping" the chip pretty easy. I saw a news program (on the plane back from Europe) that had an interview with a man and his girlfriend who had done away with all their keys in favor of chips implanted in their hands. Seems convenient, doesn't it?
This situation sounds familiar. Hrm. Where could I have heard of something like this? Oh yeah. Revelation 13:16,17: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."
I don't understand who "the beast" is that will "causeth all" in this context, but it's clear that the stage is set for the fulfillment of this prophecy.
One more thing. Note that the book of Revelation concerns itself with events centered around Israel's fight to exist as a country. It's NOT a coincidence that the prophecies therein are possibly fulfillable for the first time at this point in history.
I see no innovation and no reason to upgrade if you are still using Windows.
I totally "get" all the comments here. I'm someone who has been a computer administrator since the time of Windows 3.1, and I've been personally waiting for this Cairo feature for the 10 years Microsoft has dangled that particular carrot. I find the situation... laughable. I made the switch to Linux on the desktop about 7 years ago. While it's taken some time to get there, I find that I don't need Windows to do ANYTHING any longer...
Except play games.
I've tried many different versions of Wine and Cedega. While the engine works even better than Windows on some games, I'm having trouble getting the ones I want to play to work. (For instance, Cedega doesn't -- and won't -- support PunkBuster for playing Battlefield 2 online.) So I keep a Windows partition for games, and this is where Microsoft is going to screw me. The one "innovation" that (so far as I'm reading in the comments) no one has addressed is that Microsoft is going to upgrade DirectX to 10, and this will only be available in Vista.
Well, you know what? That's fine by me, because I'm done with the following the stupid paradigm of video gaming on a PC. The enormous hassle it's gotten to be, what with hardware upgrades, software upgrades, patch after patch on Windows (mostly just to phone home and report my activities), the patches for the games, the driver problems and, certainly not least, the crashes! You can have it. I'm not changing anything about my setup at this point. If I can't play a game on this computer right now, I'm not upgrading. I really want to play Crysis, but I'm sure it won't play on this box, and I'm not going to buy a new computer to run it. (Well, it might play, but I'll have to "dumb down" the game so much, it won't look any better than Far Cry.)
So the people making Crysis need to make sure it'll run on a Wii, because, when I buy new hardware to play video games, it's not going to be 1) Microsoft or 2) cost enough to buy a new computer anyway (Sony). On top of all the other hassles I've already stated, I've got two young kids now, and they want to play video games too. Getting them up and running on a PC is a hassle. Consoles are much easier to just pop in a game and play. So, yeah, I'm looking to buy a Wii.
And, Microsoft, you can blame yourselves.
Excellent. That's exactly right. Just be sure to include the costs when comparing all of this. So... while you're right that you're comparing entire up-and-running, productive systems, the Linux one is still free (or, say, $60 for SuSE) versus the Windows one, which is now into the low thousands of dollars. Go ahead, keep adding things to comparison: firewalls, chat clients, web browsers, application servers, infrastructure services. All free. All included. And now you're talking about, literally, tens of thousands in licensing fees with Microsoft. And, in the case of any Linux distro I'm familiar with, all these packages are kept up to date with each other for security patches. And all the drivers (except nVidia, grrr) get updated with a new kernel. Truly one-stop-shopping.
About 7 years ago, I counted up that I had personally spent several thousand dollars on Microsoft products. I don't believe in pirating this stuff. Rather, when I thought about the kind of money I had been spending, and EXTRAPOLATED to what I'd spend in the future, I backtracked to the fact that I knew Linux pretty well, and I decided to make the switch. I've used Linux as my desktop as well as my servers since then. (And my first question to my local Mac-head was whether the new Mac's could triple boot OSX, Windows, and Linux.) I used Linux at work for years until my latest boss told me specifically that I couldn't run Linux. (I asked, if I was getting my job done, what it mattered. He didn't have much of an answer, but I let it drop.)
Since that time (Windows & Office 2000), the only money I given Microsoft has been the $15 co-pay for Windows XP that I got while attending the local college. At the time, I also got Office XP and MSDN Student Ed. for free. (Did I subsidize Microsoft with my tuition? Well, my employer did.) Yesterday, someone asked me to pirate a copy of Office for someone else, because that person didn't want to pay $400 to go buy a copy. I said no way. That's the whole point. Microsoft gets away with their practices because deals like the one with colleges, but that's a lot of money to a person who does volunteer work! That's the deal. It IS unfair. If you don't like it, then rightly be upset with Micrsoft's stranglehold on the market and do something about it. I told him to download OpenOffice and stick it on a CD for this other person. If 100% compatibility is worth hundreds of dollars to you, more power to you. But it's not to me, and I'm hoping that more people come to see it that way.
The whole business is stupid on the face of it. Like other search results, which are weighted based on their relative linkings, they ought to report the news results, and let the popularity of the sources speak for themselves. Right-thinking and right-speaking people will do the filtering. They won't link to idiots. I'm a far right-winger. I read LGF and MM almost daily. I've never heard of the sites that are being argued about here. I'm not particularly worried about what they have to say. The fact that Google feels it's incumbent upon THEM to remove them from their news crawl is telling about THEIR politics, and makes me LESS inclined to respect what they are telling me whenever they say ANYthing.
What we really need around here is a [-1] "Asked for it" mod. I just want to oblige people whenever and wherever I can, you know?
Thanks for pointing to the article. I had heard this before, but had not read about it in depth.
What's interesting to me, as a Bible-believing Christian, is how one academic can make his career on a hypothesis such as this. He's basically spent his entire life in the pursuit of undermining the thought that "slaves" built the pyramids. In support of this, the only two pieces of evidence that I can read from this article are 1) that some graffiti inside the pyramids referred to, perhaps, "holy" people that led the efforts, and 2) that the camp that housed the what-seemed-to-be-skilled laborers were well fed.
Now, I understand his point about a civilization who wanted to honor their leader -- who, in terms of their religion -- represented an earthly vessel for the highest god of their pantheon. To me, that makes a lot of sense, and the comparison to an Amish barn raising seems apt, in that context.
But I still don't see how someone can look at just the 2 previously mentioned pieces of evidence, and come away with a conclusion that, no, contrary to thousands of years of common understanding, slaves had nothing to do with the construction of not just the pyramids, but most of the massive structures of Egypt in general. (I love how the article leads with how this idea is "rooted firmly in the popular imagination." No editoral lede there, huh?)
It would seem much MORE likely to look at this article and come away with a conclusion that the teams LEADING the effort -- who would naturally have been Egyptian -- would have made their mark on the buildings, and that the SKILLED laborers, whether they were Egyptian or Semitic, would have been well taken care of. They would HAVE to have eaten well to do good work. As far as the guy's initial supposition goes, he still hasn't figured out where "all the people" lived. He's still looking for where the rest of them lived. How can you not conclude that they must have lived in non-permanent structures, in what must have been sub-optimal conditions for living in a desert? Again, the actual evidence being uncovered (or NOT uncovered, as the case may be) points to slave labor factoring prominently into the equation.
The reason I thought that it was really interesting to see an actual article on this was because it's rumbled around in the back of my mind for awhile, and I had forgotten it. The way it came up years ago, i.e. the way it was reported, I would have thought that they found the grave yard where they buried the workers, did some DNA testing, and PROVED their case. Not so. Now I've looked for myself, and, if this is the best evidence, then color me even more convinced of the story, uh, just about everyone has believed for, uh, just about all of recorded history.
I think it's just another case of someone who wanted funding and a name, and came up with a shocking supposition to get them. Now he seems to be justifying the expense and the effort on the thinnest of evidence.
The gaming site for members of the Democratic Underground.
You can have it.
You know, I remember a time when there weren't a lot of politics on Slashdot. And, if anything, the stuff that was modded up was solidly libertarian. Eh, maybe I was just young and naive. Now it's gotten bad enough that I no longer browse Slashdot; I merely come over occasionally because of an interesting link from Diggdot. Now I'm finding that about half the time, I'm regretting even that.
You've really hit the nail on the head, here. I've been a huge PC gamer for about 15 years now. In fact, I just spent last Saturday evening at a friend's house playing some games, and his teenage son could not get over my vast collection of games. (I introduced him to Outlaws for the first time, and he loved it!) After all this time, though, I find I'm getting more and more put out with gaming on a PC. However, it's not even about the DRM for me. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I know that's the topic in this discussion, but if we're talking about the hassles of PC gaming, let's talk about:
If you haven't played in a couple months, and the game's less than 5 years old, you'd probably better check on a patch. Just last Saturday, we were playing UT2004... there's been a patch released in the past few months.
Be sure to keep these up to date as well, or face blue screens.
Whether you're trying to improve performance, or add new functionality, I think most "gamers" are the type to hack their boxes, and it gets to be a hassle. And sometimes, your machine is out of commission when you "just want to play a game."
Speaking of upgrades, I can't. My machine is a dual Athlon XP with a GeForce 6600GT. It might play the games coming out now, but, if it does, I'll have to shut off enough of the eye candy so as to make it look like a game that was -- wait for it -- released 3 years ago!
Adding to these are the hassles of dragging the machine someplace else to play at a LAN party. Is it anyone else's fault but mine that I've spent money putting together a dual, and just spent money making a MythTV PVR, and now can't put $1000 toward a new gaming rig? No. That's just how I chose to spend my money. But it means I've also implicitly chosen not to play the latest, greatest games.
What I'm saying, after all these years, is that I'm fine with that. Maybe it's that I'm getting older. Maybe. But I think it's just economics. Not just money, but the entire picture. The total hassle. When you buy a console. That's it. You might buy some nice controllers, maybe a better A/V cable, but that's about it. I'm ready for that kind of simplicity. Just pop in a DVD, and play. No drivers, no patches, no hassle.
Inevitably, someone will argue that, with games like Half-Life 2 / Counter Strike Source, the PC platform is moving to a console-like model already, and I would agree. But the big difference here is that a PC, as a hardware platform, is such a difficult, fast-moving target to hit, and game makers are doing their best, but the experience will always be more "optimized" on a platform. Not better overall, necessarily, but it will take better advantage of the platform.
And, on top of that, the platform will be subsidized ! What's the latest figure on how many hundreds Microsoft is losing per XBox 360? And how much is Sony estimated to lose per PS3? I think I can get with that! Sure the controls suck, but I can get used to them!
There's another discussion going on about Vista and EFI, and I think it's missing the point. Microsoft doesn't care about whether Vista will run on Mac hardware. That's a strawman. Think about it. What's actually, truly new about Vista? That's right. Nothing except eye candy. And... your friend and mine: DRM. Microsoft doesn't want Vista to run on anything but a platform that they can "trust" down to the bare metal. If you haven't been paying attention, all the whining about TCPA or whatever it's called has had the exact same effect as did all the whining about the CPU identifier. Zippo. It's been going into our hardware for years now. And Vista will exploit all of
We've always heard that one reason we need DRM is to ensure that, just in case a copy "gets out," it's degenerate in some fashion. But with iTunes music, the best you get is digitally compressed tracks. You never even have access to a lossless encoding, should you desire that. True, most people agree that the AAC format sounds good. (I don't know. I have an iPod, but only use it for MP3's I've converted from my master OGG collection.) And, true, CD tracks themselves are digital, but only a true audiophile will claim that vinyl's analog sounds better. (But then you get analog noise...) In any case, CD's have much better resolution than AAC. My point is that when you buy an iTune, you've been saddled with DRM, and GOTTEN NOTHING IN RETURN for it.
Seems to me that someone who really wanted the public to "get" DRM would create a system that, instead of punishing you or limiting you, would offer you a way to get help in case you lost your digital content due to a hard drive crash or something. I'd like to see iTunes offer the capability to re-download everything you've already paid for. I don't know. Maybe this is already there, and I just don't know it, but I certainly haven't heard about it.
No, no. That's the entire point of DRM. Piracy is a straw man. What person, having bought an iPod, and collected some music tracks, is going to say, screw it, I'm throwing away this investment, and going with some other service? No, they want to be able to access their whole collection on whatever device they have. That means they stay with an iPod, and with iTunes. It's classic Microsoftian tactics. DRM keeps people locked in APPLE'S DRM-ed vertical stack. That's EVERYONE'S strategy with DRM.
Exactly. These companies pushing all of these DRM schemes have got the technical people in a fuss because of libertarian platitudes, when they know just as well as anyone else that it won't prevent piracy. It's the hardware stupid. They keep pushing this stuff in order to SELL MORE HARDWARE. And if they manage to push a PARTICULAR brand of DRM, then they've LOCKED YOU INTO the whole line of THEIR products, or their PARTNERS' PRODUCTS. Once you decide you just have to have the Matrix Trilogy on Blu-Ray to play on your 100" plasma HDTV, then you've just lined the pockets of a particular group of people within the hardware world. And even if another manufacturer wants to jump onto that bandwagon, and sell compatible hardware, they're going to have to pay the first group a HEFTY fee to do so. Ultimately, it's about VENDOR LOCK-IN. I don't think these people care a whit about your STUPID "PIRACY." Vote with your dollars accordingly.
Twenty years? Try about 2000. BUT! It's only now that we have the technology to put some "thing" in the hand or forehead that could be used to "buy or sell." And, if you've been paying attention to this sort of thing, you would see that there's been a lot of activity on this front over the past few years that hasn't made mainstream media, or Slashdot either, for that matter. All the pieces are in place, but I personally don't believe that identification will be the avenue where it becomes commonplace. I think there will be too much resistance to a government-sponsored move to this sort of thing. I could rightly claim that it violates my freedom of religion. No, I think it's all about credit fraud.
Think about it. We're already to a point with credit cards that, in some places, you can just tap the machine with your card, and get authorization. If someone steals your card, they don't even have to sign anything now. (And not that this was a deterent anyway, but that's another web page.) But the point is that we're removing any vestiges of a two-factor system of authentication. Once this is gone, and credit fraud rises commesurately with it, the credit companies are going to demand to go back to a second "factor," and this will be the obvious technology to do that with. In fact, they'll say, it's two factors in one, and just as fast as the previous system. And then what started out as a good idea will then become legislated. Like the DMCA.
Well, anyway. Just one person's opinion.
Ha! That's a good one. I was just cleaning up some email folders, and noticed that my experimentation with Transgaming's product goes back to late 2002. I'm still waiting for a SINGLE GAME I'm interested in to be playable with their product. It varies by title, but I've kept a Windows partition around because Transgaming -- despite their valiant attempts -- just ain't there yet.
Just to be clear, the latest saga is BF2. Transgaming has done a fine job making it work with their product. The graphics and sound all run fine. Maybe even better than in Windows. But IT DOESN'T SUPPORT PUNKBUSTER. BF2 is only interesting to me if I can play on a registered server, so I'm out. And I expect more and more online games to use -- if not this particular software, then other -- various sorts of similar methods to try to ensure fair play.
The problem is that this whole class of "middleware" sees things like Cedega as a hack, and will never allow them to work. You might think that Transgaming could partner with EvenBalance to allow their particular product to work, but then the cheat-makers could just get their code to "look" like Cedega to PunkBuster. So I don't see this happening.
Of course, with my track record for IT-industry predictions, I should probably go invest in both EvenBalance and Transgaming right now. YMMV.
And now we see where some of the problem lies.
Checking and balancing is the job of the SUPREME court.
You have completely missed the point. The courts are upholding LAWS. Laws that have gotten passed at the behest of big business in CONGRESS. You want different outcomes on this sort of stuff (q.v. "broadcast flag"), vote for different people, lobby Congress yourself, take out some advertising, start a grassroots campaign... The options are varied depending on your commitment to change.
Me? I just live without. But I'd be doing that anyway. In my opinion, "big media" can KEEP the stupid tripe they try to monopolistically shove down our throats.
Loki ate itself from the inside out. It was a failure of their management, not of their business model. Every time this comes up, I have to say this, one, to dispel the myth, and, two, hoping that someone, somewhere will try again. Story.
Man, if there were EVER an article that Slashdotters weren't going to RTFA...
I've had a PilotPro, a V, a Vx, a Tungsten T, a Tungsten C, and now a Treo 600. Ever since the first version, I've been able to sync the thing with Outlook. Back in the early days, if you weren't careful, it would dupe everything with the sync. I haven't seen that in quite a long time, but then, I've been using Linux as my main desktop for about 6 or 7 years now. I don't understand people's complaints in this thread about problems sync'ing with Windows.
What I *do* have a problem with is the ability to sync the cotton-pickin' things with LINUX. This has been NOTHING BUT A NIGHTMARE SINCE DAY ONE. I'm sorry if the people who wrote pilot-link are listening. In the early days of Palm Linux sync'ing, I suppose it fit the bill quite nicely. However, since the invention of the USB cradle connection, all bets have been off. Just getting your kernel configured right was a major hassle. And when THAT settled down, I guess I missed the meeting where we all thought that "udev" was supposed to save everyone from their sins, and THIS became a whole NEW hassle to deal with.
When Evolution appeared, I believed the hype. I really thought it would be the Outlook killer it was billed as. I run the latest released version on Gentoo everyday, and I love it; don't get me wrong. But gnome-pilot -- the software underneath that sync's with a Palm device -- is HORRIBLY BUSTED. I managed to get a good first sync just the other day, but after that, look, just forget it. The evolution-data-server went into a loop, and started adding literally thousands of blank tasks in Evo before I killed it. The really stupid part of this is that this is a known problem that's been around SINCE IT BECAME POPULAR TO BUNDLE THIS CRAP WITH DISTROS.
Not only that, but you'll lose the category information from EVERYTHING in your Pilot. Note, too, that there's no "memo" functionality in Evolution. (Though there seems to be at least a one-way sync to get those memos to a flat files on your system.)
I realize that it's my right -- nay, DUTY, some here will inevitably argue -- to fix this myself. But I've got other projects I'm programming, thank you very much, and I don't have the time to hack on this, let alone get up to speed with what people on the development list admit is a very tough codebase to learn. (Yes, that means I've at least sized up the effort to do this.)
I really thought that Palms would be the one thing where we Linux users could keep away from Microsoft. With the open API's and dev kits, the start with pilot-link and the hope of Evolution, I really thought that it would eventually become better to sync with Linux instead of Windows. But it has totally failed to materialize, and I think that sucks. Sorry to rant. I suppose it doesn't matter if I do or don't complain about it, though, because I seem to be the only person that cares.
I still sync with JPilot. Thank goodness for JPilot. It's a decent Palm Desktop knockoff. Unfortunately, I've never cared for that either. But it's what I have, and it doesn't screw up the data. That, and DateBook, provide an OK system to use, regardless of desktop sync. But the contrast is very, very stark. We've had at least workable sync with Outlook for TEN YEARS now. We still have nothing comparable on Linux.
Well, given the +4 and +5 commentary on Slashdot these days, 90% of the posters and moderators here would be in favor of 49 of those 50 channels RIDICULING BUSH 24/7. Yes, yes. Of course. Number 50 would be Fox News. And that's JUST what I'm talking about. So, given this, I doubt he's going to be very sympathetic when it comes to things people like "us" care about given "our" level of support for his administration. Face it, there comes a time for ALL of us that we simply start ignoring the people in our lives who have nothing positive to say.
Why are those your "stark and clear" choices? I know, for example, that there are solutions from Novell, SuSE, and Sun, without even thinking about it. Are there more factors involved here than just "we need a directory?" Given a clean sheet of paper, I'd be using eDirectory, since it's completely (according to the marketing papers -- I've never used it) cross-platform.