I have to say that makes the entire -American thing even more stupid in my view. FWIW though, I know plenty of self-described Italian Americans.
I'm as desperate to be inoffensive in ordinary speech as the next guy, but if the "difference" between me and the person next to me is ultimately that our skins have different hues, why can't we limit it to that, rather than attempt to tie someone down to a continent they have no connections to.
Pfffffft that's old hat, my new CPU uses Wi-fi to connect to the motherboard. That's way more modern than your fancy "Soldered" or "Connected via pins" CPUs that are so twenty minutes ago.
FWIW, I was born in Britain and emigrated to the US. When I became a citizen I became an American, not a friggin British-American.
(I guess I should add an "America? Hell Yeah!" and "Love it or leave it" here, although I still have some of my British reserve so I don't really feel that comfortable saying either of those things.)
Quite. In my experience, most large corporations, and quite a few small ones, have memos lying around reporting a forthcoming sale to Google. Only last week there was a near riot when Exxon corporation nearly released their's.
It also seems to ask the wrong question. A torrent of a movie is surely not, usually, a replacement for a cinema visit - yes, I know some might use it to get a feel for a movie that's not out on DVD yet, but in general if you're happy watching something on a 12" 16 color CGA* monitor, you're not thinking in terms of a cinematic experience.
But a torrent might be a decent replacement for a DVD.
What's the difference between using this protocol and, uh, just disabling HTTP on your webserver? Or, from a user standpoint, just making sure you're using HTTPS via the URL?
Fox News isn't affected by this case. I'd also add that I doubt the FCC will take action unless and until News Corp is taken to court and convicted in the US.
- A US company is not allowed to bribe foreign officials as a matter of US criminal law.
- News Corporation's British "news" papers, The Sun and The News of the World, bribed UK policemen, violating that US law
- The FCC doesn't allow entities that violate the law criminally to own TV broadcast networks. Hence the purpose of this story.
- Fox News, which is what the GP was talking about, is not a TV broadcast network. So no, it's not at issue here, like the GP said.
- The Fox network (The Simpsons, Family Guy, etc) is a TV broadcast network. This is what, in theory, Rupert Murdoch may be required to give up.
It'd be "trying to discredit Murdoch again". The Fox that this story is talking about is related corporately, but otherwise is disconnected to, Fox News. It is hated by many people on Slashdot though, not because of any rightist anti-science bias (it's a relatively apolitical channel, and people like Matt Goering and Seth MacFarlane do, actually, use their 30 minutes a week to occasionally poke at the right-wing) but because it cancelled their favorite show. Normally that's "Firefly", but occasionally it's something else, like the awful, promising, yet ultimately awful, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.
I'm sure the MATE people can update their code to use the version 3 libraries with or without GNOME's "official" help. That's pretty much how FOSS works.
I think this is a good move by GNOME. I have to say I've been bothered by the reports that the fallback mode is going to be removed, I'm not a fan of Unity or GNOME Shell, but at the same time I'd like my desktop to be modern, supported, and able to run modern software without it appearing to be be a hack.
This sounds like the start of the right approach to get a proper desktop back for GNOME users who want one.
More-over, it also provides the GNOME project with a way out. They've kind of painted themselves in to a corner with GNOME Shell. I'm finding it very hard to believe that there's a significant contingent of people out there who prefer it, or Unity, to a desktop. An officially supported set of "extensions" can, over time, turn into an official GNOME next generation desktop project, without having to admit that maybe GNOME Shell was not quite what was needed right now.
To be honest, other than constantly using the word "rootkit", I don't see any references to getting root via this "kit". And the link (this one: https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-linux-rootkit-emerges-112012) looks like it was written by a computer program pulling random sentences from a malware description and turning it into an article.
I'm going to wait for the dup, hopefully it'll link to an Ars Technica article or something else relatively reputable.
FWIW, can we stop the "oceans and water on Mars" thing? It would hardly be "Earth" shattering news that evidence exists of that, there's a crapload of water at the poles (that was widely thought until 2005, when it was confirmed by radar, and water was subsequently sampled in the soil by Pheonix in 2008), and most models have pointed towards oceans at some point in Mars's distant past anyway.
We're up to version 16 now, so I can't be one of those people otherwise I'd have said "It's fixed in the nightly build if you'd just download and install some untested software *rolls eyes* you people suck and are so unfair!" rather than "I found the memory problems with Firefox disappeared in version ten."
I did seriously find that version ten made a huge difference. I actually was in an argument with a Mozilla engineer on/. for a while at around that time, the engineer absolutely convinced I was wrong/seeing something he couldn't/etc, me seeing Firefox grind to a halt in 2G of RAM if I so much as opened a PDF in Acrobat (not via Firefox, just via Acrobat) on a Ubuntu machine.
Not to say you can't find problems, but I find more with Chrome these days than with Firefox. I'm sure it doesn't help that HTML5 and things like auto-playing, unblockable, HTML5 video have come into being at just the moment Firefox started major memory suckage.
I found the memory problems with Firefox disappeared in version ten.
As far as the rest goes, some random thoughts:
- The key selling point of FirefoxOS is that it's relatively lightweight in hardware requirements compared to Android et al.
- Android and iOS are, to a certain extent, over-engineered. When Google's "reference design" phones (Nexus series) have battery lives measured in hours rather than days, with no sign that Google even gives a rat's ass (a Google exec was quoted as saying he carries around a spare battery for his Galaxy Nexus. The Nexus 4 doesn't even offer the option!) then it's fairly clear that light hardware requirements are a good thing.
- FirefoxOS should encourage the development of HTML5 apps - HTML5 makes it relatively easy to create persistent apps that are stored on your device after being loaded once, can tell when you're offline, and can store information offline. These will work under iOS and, to a lesser extent, Android (I'm not sure why Android feels the need to make using HTML5 apps without a wrapper awkward.)
That said:
- There's a substantial difference in hardware requirements at the moment between Gingerbread and post-ICS Android operating systems. It appears that Google and the phone manufacturers aren't actually decommissioning Gingerbread at this stage. It's not impossible to imagine Google actually creating Android 2.4 at this stage, a version designed for lower end devices.
- Android is an excellent operating system and it has mindshare. It's where developers who aren't iFanbois want to be.
- HTML5 is, like its predecessors, a kludgy environment when it comes to software development. Building a user interface using the DOM makes OpenGL look like an elegant API.
I'm going to sit this one out. I think it's nice Firefox are working on this, but it seems to me that it's existence should be a wake-up call to Google and Apple that they are, on one level at least, producing sub-optimal operating systems. If I worked at Google I'd be looking into whether some of Google's post 4.0 work could be rolled back into the 2.x branch, and I'd be seriously looking at whether the 2.x branch could be made even more efficient than it already is. I love Jellybean, especially 4.2, but I'd happily sacrifice some of the newer features for a usable battery life.
I'd be surprised if ME3 doesn't work under GNU/Linux already (via Wine, of course.) ME1 and ME2 work out-of-the-box and are indistinguishable from themselves running under Windows. (Haven't actually bought ME3 because I was disappointed with ME2, hence I haven't tested it)
I've had very few problems with games under Wine. Some games, such as GTA-IV, require patches in the form of customized DLLs, which also strip out some functionality, such as multiplayer. But of the games in my library, thus far only SM Alpha Centauri, and Saints Row 2 and 3 are problematic.
With respect, while we can agree to disagree with whether Metro is a good tablet UI or not, or whether it should be written under the assumption that we're all going to be using tablets, the major difference between it and GNOME is that Microsoft appears to have a direction it's taking the UI in, while I'm still unsure why, exactly, GNOME made the drastic changes it did at 3.0. Yeah, I know part of it was "Well, we're going to need to be more tablet friendly", but it's not exactly a vision of anything, tablet or desktop based.
Microsoft at least has a chance because it's appears to have some idea of what it's trying to do. Time will tell if that was a good idea or not.
However, from an ideological perspective, the GOP is more closely aligned with the ethos that could back copyright reform than the Democratic party: GOP cares about things like defense spending and big oil, and takes a "get off my lawn" attitude. Democratic party is backed by entertainment and software industries pretty heavy.
I don't think that's true, you're saying ideological differences but then looking at who's supporting them.
The ideological difference, to be honest, is that the Republicans tend to favor any laws that established businesses are benefitting from and tend to reject laws that businesses feel ties their hands. And that means that they're not likely to liberalize copyright law any time soon, even if the stereotypes ("Hollywood is infested by liberals and they want copyrights!") seem to go against that.
Remember too that the Republicans do, actually, get overwhelming support from the content industries. Just because Alec Baldwin and Jessica Alba support President Obama doesn't change the fact that these people's bosses overwhelmingly tend to support Republicans (even leaving aside the fact that outspoken Republican actors and actresses aren't, actually, as rare as Republicans like to pretend.) Ask Rupert Murdoch or Steve Burke, or Sumner Redstone how they'd feel about a liberalization of copyrights.
There is, and always has been, a simple solution: give the Jewish people Texas instead, and after a delay to give everyone time to move out, nuke the entire Jerusalem area from orbit. Several times.
Texas only sucks because it's full of Texans. And rattlesnakes, but if Mossad were as ruthless with rattlesnakes as they are with Israel's enemies, there's no reason to believe that would be a long term problem.
In every sense, this would be a win-win. With the "Holy land" turned into a radioactive uninhabitable wasteland, nobody will want it any more and Texas might actually become a useful part of the world (as opposed to an area we tolerate because it provides oil.)
The problem is that too many people look at the solution to the problems in Israel as just being a matter of siding with one side or another, rather than looking at the broad picture.
The issue isn't classification, it's that the people behind the distribution may not have the right to distribute the package in the first place.
For two examples, look at how most distributions dealt with Java prior to the GPL, and how they currently work with Flash. Those with long memories can also recall the issues with Netscape (3 & 4, not Mozilla) which had similar problems, albeit at a time when package repos were still a relatively new concept.
1. You're correct that it runs under Linux. Unfortunately Linux is not the same thing as "The operating system commonly known as Linux", which we'd call GNU/Linux if it wasn't for the fact that would be kowtowing to a Dirty Smelly Hippie(tm). Android is not GNU/Linux, it has a significantly different API. It merely shares the same kernel.
2. Netflix is compiled code, and is compiled for ARM. Your Ubuntu desktop, on the other hand, is an Intel machine. So yes, you'll require a device emulator as you said. But it's going to be slow, and it's an emulator, so why use it?
3. The Netflix program is only downloadable from Google Play, contains DRM, and - if it's not already - may check the device it's on in the future.
The Android Netflix app is, in some ways, a proof of concept. The existence of the app proves that there's no good reason to prevent users of other operating systems from using Netflix. The C++ code is going to run happily under GNU/Linux as long as certain APIs are provided. The Dalvik code likewise. Unfortunately, it's not a solution in itself, just proof a solution could be made available.
That said, perhaps Motorola's move into Intel-based Android devices might push things along a little.
Slashdot Mirror
Even worse, NASA only got these telescopes because someone accidentally mistyped "NSA" on the PO...
I have to say that makes the entire -American thing even more stupid in my view. FWIW though, I know plenty of self-described Italian Americans.
I'm as desperate to be inoffensive in ordinary speech as the next guy, but if the "difference" between me and the person next to me is ultimately that our skins have different hues, why can't we limit it to that, rather than attempt to tie someone down to a continent they have no connections to.
Pfffffft that's old hat, my new CPU uses Wi-fi to connect to the motherboard. That's way more modern than your fancy "Soldered" or "Connected via pins" CPUs that are so twenty minutes ago.
FWIW, I was born in Britain and emigrated to the US. When I became a citizen I became an American, not a friggin British-American.
(I guess I should add an "America? Hell Yeah!" and "Love it or leave it" here, although I still have some of my British reserve so I don't really feel that comfortable saying either of those things.)
Quite. In my experience, most large corporations, and quite a few small ones, have memos lying around reporting a forthcoming sale to Google. Only last week there was a near riot when Exxon corporation nearly released their's.
Ah, but I believe you had 16 colors in text mode! mplayer -vo aa torrent.mpg ;-)
There are just wars, but no civilized ones.
It also seems to ask the wrong question. A torrent of a movie is surely not, usually, a replacement for a cinema visit - yes, I know some might use it to get a feel for a movie that's not out on DVD yet, but in general if you're happy watching something on a 12" 16 color CGA* monitor, you're not thinking in terms of a cinematic experience.
But a torrent might be a decent replacement for a DVD.
* exaggeration for comic and rhetorical effect.
Then so is torture. And war.
What's the difference between using this protocol and, uh, just disabling HTTP on your webserver? Or, from a user standpoint, just making sure you're using HTTPS via the URL?
Fox News isn't affected by this case. I'd also add that I doubt the FCC will take action unless and until News Corp is taken to court and convicted in the US.
Yep, you're missing pretty much everything.
- A US company is not allowed to bribe foreign officials as a matter of US criminal law.
- News Corporation's British "news" papers, The Sun and The News of the World, bribed UK policemen, violating that US law
- The FCC doesn't allow entities that violate the law criminally to own TV broadcast networks. Hence the purpose of this story.
- Fox News, which is what the GP was talking about, is not a TV broadcast network. So no, it's not at issue here, like the GP said.
- The Fox network (The Simpsons, Family Guy, etc) is a TV broadcast network. This is what, in theory, Rupert Murdoch may be required to give up.
It'd be "trying to discredit Murdoch again". The Fox that this story is talking about is related corporately, but otherwise is disconnected to, Fox News. It is hated by many people on Slashdot though, not because of any rightist anti-science bias (it's a relatively apolitical channel, and people like Matt Goering and Seth MacFarlane do, actually, use their 30 minutes a week to occasionally poke at the right-wing) but because it cancelled their favorite show. Normally that's "Firefly", but occasionally it's something else, like the awful, promising, yet ultimately awful, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.
I'm sure the MATE people can update their code to use the version 3 libraries with or without GNOME's "official" help. That's pretty much how FOSS works.
I think this is a good move by GNOME. I have to say I've been bothered by the reports that the fallback mode is going to be removed, I'm not a fan of Unity or GNOME Shell, but at the same time I'd like my desktop to be modern, supported, and able to run modern software without it appearing to be be a hack.
This sounds like the start of the right approach to get a proper desktop back for GNOME users who want one.
More-over, it also provides the GNOME project with a way out. They've kind of painted themselves in to a corner with GNOME Shell. I'm finding it very hard to believe that there's a significant contingent of people out there who prefer it, or Unity, to a desktop. An officially supported set of "extensions" can, over time, turn into an official GNOME next generation desktop project, without having to admit that maybe GNOME Shell was not quite what was needed right now.
To be honest, other than constantly using the word "rootkit", I don't see any references to getting root via this "kit". And the link (this one: https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-linux-rootkit-emerges-112012) looks like it was written by a computer program pulling random sentences from a malware description and turning it into an article.
I'm going to wait for the dup, hopefully it'll link to an Ars Technica article or something else relatively reputable.
FWIW, can we stop the "oceans and water on Mars" thing? It would hardly be "Earth" shattering news that evidence exists of that, there's a crapload of water at the poles (that was widely thought until 2005, when it was confirmed by radar, and water was subsequently sampled in the soil by Pheonix in 2008), and most models have pointed towards oceans at some point in Mars's distant past anyway.
We're up to version 16 now, so I can't be one of those people otherwise I'd have said "It's fixed in the nightly build if you'd just download and install some untested software *rolls eyes* you people suck and are so unfair!" rather than "I found the memory problems with Firefox disappeared in version ten."
I did seriously find that version ten made a huge difference. I actually was in an argument with a Mozilla engineer on /. for a while at around that time, the engineer absolutely convinced I was wrong/seeing something he couldn't/etc, me seeing Firefox grind to a halt in 2G of RAM if I so much as opened a PDF in Acrobat (not via Firefox, just via Acrobat) on a Ubuntu machine.
Not to say you can't find problems, but I find more with Chrome these days than with Firefox. I'm sure it doesn't help that HTML5 and things like auto-playing, unblockable, HTML5 video have come into being at just the moment Firefox started major memory suckage.
I found the memory problems with Firefox disappeared in version ten.
As far as the rest goes, some random thoughts:
- The key selling point of FirefoxOS is that it's relatively lightweight in hardware requirements compared to Android et al.
- Android and iOS are, to a certain extent, over-engineered. When Google's "reference design" phones (Nexus series) have battery lives measured in hours rather than days, with no sign that Google even gives a rat's ass (a Google exec was quoted as saying he carries around a spare battery for his Galaxy Nexus. The Nexus 4 doesn't even offer the option!) then it's fairly clear that light hardware requirements are a good thing.
- FirefoxOS should encourage the development of HTML5 apps - HTML5 makes it relatively easy to create persistent apps that are stored on your device after being loaded once, can tell when you're offline, and can store information offline. These will work under iOS and, to a lesser extent, Android (I'm not sure why Android feels the need to make using HTML5 apps without a wrapper awkward.)
That said:
- There's a substantial difference in hardware requirements at the moment between Gingerbread and post-ICS Android operating systems. It appears that Google and the phone manufacturers aren't actually decommissioning Gingerbread at this stage. It's not impossible to imagine Google actually creating Android 2.4 at this stage, a version designed for lower end devices.
- Android is an excellent operating system and it has mindshare. It's where developers who aren't iFanbois want to be.
- HTML5 is, like its predecessors, a kludgy environment when it comes to software development. Building a user interface using the DOM makes OpenGL look like an elegant API.
I'm going to sit this one out. I think it's nice Firefox are working on this, but it seems to me that it's existence should be a wake-up call to Google and Apple that they are, on one level at least, producing sub-optimal operating systems. If I worked at Google I'd be looking into whether some of Google's post 4.0 work could be rolled back into the 2.x branch, and I'd be seriously looking at whether the 2.x branch could be made even more efficient than it already is. I love Jellybean, especially 4.2, but I'd happily sacrifice some of the newer features for a usable battery life.
I'd be surprised if ME3 doesn't work under GNU/Linux already (via Wine, of course.) ME1 and ME2 work out-of-the-box and are indistinguishable from themselves running under Windows. (Haven't actually bought ME3 because I was disappointed with ME2, hence I haven't tested it)
I've had very few problems with games under Wine. Some games, such as GTA-IV, require patches in the form of customized DLLs, which also strip out some functionality, such as multiplayer. But of the games in my library, thus far only SM Alpha Centauri, and Saints Row 2 and 3 are problematic.
With respect, while we can agree to disagree with whether Metro is a good tablet UI or not, or whether it should be written under the assumption that we're all going to be using tablets, the major difference between it and GNOME is that Microsoft appears to have a direction it's taking the UI in, while I'm still unsure why, exactly, GNOME made the drastic changes it did at 3.0. Yeah, I know part of it was "Well, we're going to need to be more tablet friendly", but it's not exactly a vision of anything, tablet or desktop based.
Microsoft at least has a chance because it's appears to have some idea of what it's trying to do. Time will tell if that was a good idea or not.
Here's an idea, why don't you leave Slashdot and return to studying for your MBA or whatever it is douchebags do these days?
I don't think that's true, you're saying ideological differences but then looking at who's supporting them.
The ideological difference, to be honest, is that the Republicans tend to favor any laws that established businesses are benefitting from and tend to reject laws that businesses feel ties their hands. And that means that they're not likely to liberalize copyright law any time soon, even if the stereotypes ("Hollywood is infested by liberals and they want copyrights!") seem to go against that.
Remember too that the Republicans do, actually, get overwhelming support from the content industries. Just because Alec Baldwin and Jessica Alba support President Obama doesn't change the fact that these people's bosses overwhelmingly tend to support Republicans (even leaving aside the fact that outspoken Republican actors and actresses aren't, actually, as rare as Republicans like to pretend.) Ask Rupert Murdoch or Steve Burke, or Sumner Redstone how they'd feel about a liberalization of copyrights.
There is, and always has been, a simple solution: give the Jewish people Texas instead, and after a delay to give everyone time to move out, nuke the entire Jerusalem area from orbit. Several times.
Texas only sucks because it's full of Texans. And rattlesnakes, but if Mossad were as ruthless with rattlesnakes as they are with Israel's enemies, there's no reason to believe that would be a long term problem.
In every sense, this would be a win-win. With the "Holy land" turned into a radioactive uninhabitable wasteland, nobody will want it any more and Texas might actually become a useful part of the world (as opposed to an area we tolerate because it provides oil.)
The problem is that too many people look at the solution to the problems in Israel as just being a matter of siding with one side or another, rather than looking at the broad picture.
The issue isn't classification, it's that the people behind the distribution may not have the right to distribute the package in the first place.
For two examples, look at how most distributions dealt with Java prior to the GPL, and how they currently work with Flash. Those with long memories can also recall the issues with Netscape (3 & 4, not Mozilla) which had similar problems, albeit at a time when package repos were still a relatively new concept.
There are several problems with this:
1. You're correct that it runs under Linux. Unfortunately Linux is not the same thing as "The operating system commonly known as Linux", which we'd call GNU/Linux if it wasn't for the fact that would be kowtowing to a Dirty Smelly Hippie(tm). Android is not GNU/Linux, it has a significantly different API. It merely shares the same kernel.
2. Netflix is compiled code, and is compiled for ARM. Your Ubuntu desktop, on the other hand, is an Intel machine. So yes, you'll require a device emulator as you said. But it's going to be slow, and it's an emulator, so why use it?
3. The Netflix program is only downloadable from Google Play, contains DRM, and - if it's not already - may check the device it's on in the future.
The Android Netflix app is, in some ways, a proof of concept. The existence of the app proves that there's no good reason to prevent users of other operating systems from using Netflix. The C++ code is going to run happily under GNU/Linux as long as certain APIs are provided. The Dalvik code likewise. Unfortunately, it's not a solution in itself, just proof a solution could be made available.
That said, perhaps Motorola's move into Intel-based Android devices might push things along a little.