We do have problems now. Which is why every residential Internet user is having to use NAT to connect more than one device to their always-on Internet connection, and why things like VoIP boxes (that require transparent two-way connectivity) require special ways of setting them up rather than just plugging into an Ethernet port in the wall.
We think we don't have problems because we're so used to jumping through the hoops, and even coming up with rationalizations for the mess we have ("Oh, but NAT gives me security because if my computer can't be connected to the Internet then it's completely impossible totally for a viroworm to assplode the packet fragmentation flag!")
We do have problems. If you don't think we do, fire up the configuration page of your router, and take a look at the "DMZ" and "port redirection" pages.
Something to bear in mind. The data centers are going to run anyway. They're going to store the information on a computer anyway. It doesn't matter what the saving is for not having the bill printed, that will always be saved.
The interesting thing is this was true forty years ago too. Your phone bill was processed by a mainframe and stored on massive loops of tape, but it was stored. Your bank records were stored on massive loops of tape, but they were stored. What's changed since then has been massive advances in random access mass storage technology coupled with the availability of an online network and the local processing capabilities needed to present data on a local screen.
Everything you need to switch to paperless already exists. It's infrastructure that's running anyway, and consuming power, regardless of whether you choose to use it. There is no negative environmental impact by going paperless.
What? Apple never had anything to do with HD DVD. They backed Blu-ray from the beginning. I don't believe they produced software for either format though.
In the real world, everything has different prices depending on demand. The "Everything should be 99c" thing may simplify things, but it's hardly fair, either to the labels or to us. Apple was trying to force both the record labels and customers to do something completely ridiculous in the name of simplicity, and consider "The Birdie Song" to have the same value as "Bohemian Rhapsody".
I appreciate like most of Slashdot you have a hate-on for the labels, and therefore consider anything the labels want to do as wrong, but Apple was on the wrong side here.
Generally speaking, I'm unaware of a single operating system environment where you're allowed to remove the critical shell user-interface element completely.
In Windows, you can't remove the Start button or taskbar. In Mac OS X, you can't remove the menu bar or dock. In Mac OS 1-9, you can't remove the menu bar or Finder.
In GNOME, the system is controlled using panels. You add widgets to control the environment by bringing up a context menu on an available panel. Without at least one panel, you can't control anything. Unlike the aforementioned operating systems (Windows excepted) you can, at least, hide this remaining user interface element - right click on it, bring up "Properties", and select the "auto-hide" option. And like most operating systems, GNOME will hide everything temporarily if an application - a game, a media player - requests it.
So I'm not sure what your objection is. You don't want to be able to control GNOME? Why have a DE at all if that's the case?
but I am not convinced it advanced FOSS's cause very far. After all, Windows users benefit as well, and most don't care about open source.
Firefox is a cross platform browser that runs on Free operating systems as well as proprietary ones. What makes it valuable is that it's enormously popular on Windows. Without that popularity, it's fair to say that most websites would be tied to the default Windows browser, Internet Explorer, and all alternative platforms, be they proprietary - like Mac OS X - or Free, like GNU/Linux - would have little access to the bulk of content on the 'net.
Effectively, without Firefox (or some other Free Software browser doing what Firefox has done) it would not be possible to use Ubuntu as an every day desktop system, except for some very limited applications. Firefox more than anything else has made GNU/Linux "ready for the desktop".
And could you clarify your "counter argument"? I see you saying most people only have one cable provider, but I fail to see how that's a counterargument here. That other ISP's exist doesn't really have anything to do with cable internet service.
Could you clarify your objection? Hulu.com et al do not require cable Internet access specifically, just broadband Internet access. If Time Warner is saying "You can use the Internet instead of our cable TV service to watch your favorite shows", then many will use AT&T, Earthlink, or even one of the multitude of pre-WiMAX WISPs, to watch TV, bypassing Time Warner completely. So the argument "Time Warner doesn't care because you'll just use its Internet service to watch TV" doesn't really stand up.
Note sure why you were modded Funny, as it's a good point.
The major counterargument is that most locales have more ISPs available than cable/satellite operators, and many people in practice only have one cable/satellite operator available (the cable company) because while technically they can use satellite if they so wish, in practice the local residents association has made it an unpleasant experience to do so. (For instance, the Condo I used to live in had an association that forbid drilling holes in the wall to allow coax through, or attaching a dish to a wall. You had to watch satellite with the door open and the dish on a temporary stand.
Even where people have the choice, many people have cable TV only, choosing to have the Internet from another operator. AT&T, for instance, pushes DSL + Cellular + Home phone line combinations.
If users can get the content they actually want via Hulu.com and a DSL connection, then they're not going feel as if they need the cable service. At all. So it's not in TW's best interests to encourage people to see the Internet as a great alternative to cable TV.
The original reason for M$ was because Microsoft BASIC allowed for one or two letter variable names, and a dollar on the end made it a string variable, so it was a kind of geeky in-joke. Unfortunately, Micro$oft is of the childish "all they care about is money" variety, and I suspect most people using M$ use it as an abbreviation for Micro$oft, rather than "MS as a variable name. For my next trick, there are only 10 types of people in the world, those who get binary and those who..." {etc}
No, the reason why must own the copyright is so they can relicense the code under licenses other than the LGPL. They've done this once already, with the move to the LGPLv3.
I'm not aware of a single instance in which they've taken code a third party developed for OOo and contributed the copyrights to Sun for this purpose, and turned around and distributed it in StarOffice but not OOo. What you're claiming strikes me as FUD to prevent developers from contributing to OOo.
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Kind of a shame, I was hoping they were integrating the Digital Research Mac-like User Interface system for DOS (and the Atari ST) into the kernel, just to annoy purists...
Before this argument gets out of hand, bear in mind the original poster said "So three authors should be key here. Not the whole ball of wax but an abstraction of what these authors present". He wasn't suggesting kids should be forced to read Knuth.
While there was an attempt back in the PowerPC days to add support for CPU emulation to WINE, by integrating the QEmu project, when Apple ditched the PowerPC series for ix86, that development effort pretty much ended.
So at this stage, WINE needs to run on an ix86 CPU to work effectively. The iPhone uses an ARM CPU, which does not support the ix86 instruction set. Even if Apple allowed WINE to run on an iPhone (currently it would violate the rules unless bundled with a closed app that works as the entry point for the WINE app and doesn't result in anything outside of the WINE libraries and application itself from being executed), it would not be effective as a way to run Windows apps on the iPhone platform.
The arguments for drug prohibition are mostly moral, while the arguments for copyright are mostly pragmatic. Even the US Constitution spells out the purely practical justification for copyright's existence.
While the constitution does formulate a practical justification for copyright, if you think that the arguments for copyright are "mostly pragmatic" then you're not listening to those promoting stronger copyright laws. In the 21st Century, and indeed as long as I've lived, the bulk of arguments made for copyright have been moral. The argument is that an artist deserves to have control over how his or her work is used (even if that control includes the right to delegate that responsibility to a publisher, who, after all, is generally responsible for providing the up-front financing for the work. Publishers in many ways are glorified banks, with the difference that an artist who "defaults" on an advance doesn't suffer any consequences beyond not seeing any further money.)
This is primarily why you see copyright laws proposed today that call for extensions that go on well beyond an artist's death. If practicality was the driving force of copyright, copyright laws would last twenty to forty years, and a balance would be struck between the control needed to fund the work and the ability of, say, computer companies to also make money.
I'm pretty sure that just jumbling the letters around isn't covered by fair use, especially when it's fairly obvious you're a cheap knock-off of the real thing.
Let's hope the RIAA sends MediaSentry after these ARIA people and forces them to pay a $5,000 fine for blatant copyright infringement...
It's "open" but it's not one of those operating systems that people are going to WANT to switch from Windows.
Why? The only serious issue with OpenSolaris I can think of is a lack of third party support, which is because OpenSolaris doesn't have a wide install base. If some major manufacturer, say Toshiba, of, say, laptop computers was to provide it pre-installed, then that might change.
OpenSolaris has a number of differences to, say, Ubuntu, which are very attractive, notably the ZFS file system. For Enterprise use, where all the critical applications (the Apache suite and virtually everything that runs over it, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Samba, Various IMAP daemons, various MTAs, etc) are all supported natively, and it works well as a Xen domain, the support for ZFS makes it arguably a superior option to RHEL, and having the option of having it run as a desktop environment helps administrators use the same tools locally and remotely.
There's no legitimate reason to suggest it's not something people would want in preference to Windows. It's a solid operating system with a strong pedigree, a decent level of support, and some extremely nice features.
I haven't had any problem with wireless network cards, but I assume you mean drivers are hard for some cards, which actually is true of Windows too.
As far as "download a program and install it", I'm flabbergasted anyone would compare the Ubuntu experience (for supported apps, use Applications->Add/Remove, for unsupported download a.deb and double click on it) negatively to the Windows experience.
The only time it's hard is if the third party software doesn't bundle a.deb, preferring to distribute as source or something similar. But the same is a PITA under Windows, more of one indeed because Windows doesn't ship with a development environment.
Software installation is one area where the major free GNU/Linux distributions are eating Window's lunch. I'm almost inclined, given the clean uninstall they generally give you, to suggest that they're slightly better than Mac OS X, although some Mac OS X applications literally just need dragging to the Applications folder to install them, and deleting to uninstall them, which is better.
Surely you care if it affects how you can use the file system?
FUSE is a great tool for reading non-native discs as a user, but that's where it ends. If you'd prefer your operating system to use a specific file system for itself, FUSE cannot do that. How the file system is implemented does matter.
...requires possession of a copy, which is illegal under the DMCA.
for the purpose of exercising your rights to make backup copies and to space or time shift your media, is not.
You don't have those rights.
Fair use is a defense, not a right. It only applies to copyright infringement. You can use it as a defense against a charge of copyright infringement, but you can't use it against any other charges against you. The DMCA introduces a new tier of offenses that are not copyright infringement, and, no, fair use is not a defense for those offenses.
Sorry.
The only reason 90% of geeks who use VLC as a DVD player aren't in trouble is because it'd be too much of a PITA to prosecute them with virtually no positive comeback for the studios.
What you're proposing is a kludge. Something that's not like Windows tweaked and configured and squeezed into a bizarre fitting corset to make it look more like Windows.
A better option is ReactOS. ReactOS is a free software operating system based upon the Windows design, intended to be compatible with Windows. If you want something Windows-like while still benefiting from the free software philosophy, that's probably what you want.
Blu-ray doesn't support Managed Copy properly, largely due to it adopting it fairly late in the game, resulting in a mix of discs that support it, and a mix of discs that do, making it impossible for manufacturers to advertise features that rely upon the feature being supported by all discs. The result is that no manufacturer is going to bother, and the studios - somewhat ironically considering it was their intransigence that caused the delays making it part of the standard - are having to offer so-called "digital copies" on discs instead.
HD DVD did support the feature from the beginning, but HD DVD is dead. Arguably HD DVD is dead because they supported features like MMC and rejected features like region encoding and mandatory encryption, resulting in less honest studios like Fox refusing to have anything to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
We do have problems now. Which is why every residential Internet user is having to use NAT to connect more than one device to their always-on Internet connection, and why things like VoIP boxes (that require transparent two-way connectivity) require special ways of setting them up rather than just plugging into an Ethernet port in the wall.
We think we don't have problems because we're so used to jumping through the hoops, and even coming up with rationalizations for the mess we have ("Oh, but NAT gives me security because if my computer can't be connected to the Internet then it's completely impossible totally for a viroworm to assplode the packet fragmentation flag!")
We do have problems. If you don't think we do, fire up the configuration page of your router, and take a look at the "DMZ" and "port redirection" pages.
Something to bear in mind. The data centers are going to run anyway. They're going to store the information on a computer anyway. It doesn't matter what the saving is for not having the bill printed, that will always be saved.
The interesting thing is this was true forty years ago too. Your phone bill was processed by a mainframe and stored on massive loops of tape, but it was stored. Your bank records were stored on massive loops of tape, but they were stored. What's changed since then has been massive advances in random access mass storage technology coupled with the availability of an online network and the local processing capabilities needed to present data on a local screen.
Everything you need to switch to paperless already exists. It's infrastructure that's running anyway, and consuming power, regardless of whether you choose to use it. There is no negative environmental impact by going paperless.
What? Apple never had anything to do with HD DVD. They backed Blu-ray from the beginning. I don't believe they produced software for either format though.
Sold out? By offering tiered pricing? Really?
In the real world, everything has different prices depending on demand. The "Everything should be 99c" thing may simplify things, but it's hardly fair, either to the labels or to us. Apple was trying to force both the record labels and customers to do something completely ridiculous in the name of simplicity, and consider "The Birdie Song" to have the same value as "Bohemian Rhapsody".
I appreciate like most of Slashdot you have a hate-on for the labels, and therefore consider anything the labels want to do as wrong, but Apple was on the wrong side here.
' = "Look out! There's an "S" coming!"
Generally speaking, I'm unaware of a single operating system environment where you're allowed to remove the critical shell user-interface element completely.
In Windows, you can't remove the Start button or taskbar. In Mac OS X, you can't remove the menu bar or dock. In Mac OS 1-9, you can't remove the menu bar or Finder.
In GNOME, the system is controlled using panels. You add widgets to control the environment by bringing up a context menu on an available panel. Without at least one panel, you can't control anything. Unlike the aforementioned operating systems (Windows excepted) you can, at least, hide this remaining user interface element - right click on it, bring up "Properties", and select the "auto-hide" option. And like most operating systems, GNOME will hide everything temporarily if an application - a game, a media player - requests it.
So I'm not sure what your objection is. You don't want to be able to control GNOME? Why have a DE at all if that's the case?
It's the number one killer of domestic cats.
Mwaah mwaaaaaaaaaah.
Firefox is a cross platform browser that runs on Free operating systems as well as proprietary ones. What makes it valuable is that it's enormously popular on Windows. Without that popularity, it's fair to say that most websites would be tied to the default Windows browser, Internet Explorer, and all alternative platforms, be they proprietary - like Mac OS X - or Free, like GNU/Linux - would have little access to the bulk of content on the 'net.
Effectively, without Firefox (or some other Free Software browser doing what Firefox has done) it would not be possible to use Ubuntu as an every day desktop system, except for some very limited applications. Firefox more than anything else has made GNU/Linux "ready for the desktop".
Could you clarify your objection? Hulu.com et al do not require cable Internet access specifically, just broadband Internet access. If Time Warner is saying "You can use the Internet instead of our cable TV service to watch your favorite shows", then many will use AT&T, Earthlink, or even one of the multitude of pre-WiMAX WISPs, to watch TV, bypassing Time Warner completely. So the argument "Time Warner doesn't care because you'll just use its Internet service to watch TV" doesn't really stand up.
Note sure why you were modded Funny, as it's a good point.
The major counterargument is that most locales have more ISPs available than cable/satellite operators, and many people in practice only have one cable/satellite operator available (the cable company) because while technically they can use satellite if they so wish, in practice the local residents association has made it an unpleasant experience to do so. (For instance, the Condo I used to live in had an association that forbid drilling holes in the wall to allow coax through, or attaching a dish to a wall. You had to watch satellite with the door open and the dish on a temporary stand.
Even where people have the choice, many people have cable TV only, choosing to have the Internet from another operator. AT&T, for instance, pushes DSL + Cellular + Home phone line combinations.
If users can get the content they actually want via Hulu.com and a DSL connection, then they're not going feel as if they need the cable service. At all. So it's not in TW's best interests to encourage people to see the Internet as a great alternative to cable TV.
The original reason for M$ was because Microsoft BASIC allowed for one or two letter variable names, and a dollar on the end made it a string variable, so it was a kind of geeky in-joke. Unfortunately, Micro$oft is of the childish "all they care about is money" variety, and I suspect most people using M$ use it as an abbreviation for Micro$oft, rather than "MS as a variable name. For my next trick, there are only 10 types of people in the world, those who get binary and those who..." {etc}
Pornography is usually defined in practice, legally, as something that turns on a Judge.
Just saying.
No, the reason why must own the copyright is so they can relicense the code under licenses other than the LGPL. They've done this once already, with the move to the LGPLv3.
I'm not aware of a single instance in which they've taken code a third party developed for OOo and contributed the copyrights to Sun for this purpose, and turned around and distributed it in StarOffice but not OOo. What you're claiming strikes me as FUD to prevent developers from contributing to OOo.
CmdrTaco, you are a fucking moron. Just saying. .
So we're not going to be able to integrate OpenOffice.org into the Linux kernel? Damn it! That'd have been awesome!
Kind of a shame, I was hoping they were integrating the Digital Research Mac-like User Interface system for DOS (and the Atari ST) into the kernel, just to annoy purists...
Before this argument gets out of hand, bear in mind the original poster said "So three authors should be key here. Not the whole ball of wax but an abstraction of what these authors present". He wasn't suggesting kids should be forced to read Knuth.
While there was an attempt back in the PowerPC days to add support for CPU emulation to WINE, by integrating the QEmu project, when Apple ditched the PowerPC series for ix86, that development effort pretty much ended.
So at this stage, WINE needs to run on an ix86 CPU to work effectively. The iPhone uses an ARM CPU, which does not support the ix86 instruction set. Even if Apple allowed WINE to run on an iPhone (currently it would violate the rules unless bundled with a closed app that works as the entry point for the WINE app and doesn't result in anything outside of the WINE libraries and application itself from being executed), it would not be effective as a way to run Windows apps on the iPhone platform.
Sorry.
While the constitution does formulate a practical justification for copyright, if you think that the arguments for copyright are "mostly pragmatic" then you're not listening to those promoting stronger copyright laws. In the 21st Century, and indeed as long as I've lived, the bulk of arguments made for copyright have been moral. The argument is that an artist deserves to have control over how his or her work is used (even if that control includes the right to delegate that responsibility to a publisher, who, after all, is generally responsible for providing the up-front financing for the work. Publishers in many ways are glorified banks, with the difference that an artist who "defaults" on an advance doesn't suffer any consequences beyond not seeing any further money.)
This is primarily why you see copyright laws proposed today that call for extensions that go on well beyond an artist's death. If practicality was the driving force of copyright, copyright laws would last twenty to forty years, and a balance would be struck between the control needed to fund the work and the ability of, say, computer companies to also make money.
I'm pretty sure that just jumbling the letters around isn't covered by fair use, especially when it's fairly obvious you're a cheap knock-off of the real thing.
Let's hope the RIAA sends MediaSentry after these ARIA people and forces them to pay a $5,000 fine for blatant copyright infringement...
Why? The only serious issue with OpenSolaris I can think of is a lack of third party support, which is because OpenSolaris doesn't have a wide install base. If some major manufacturer, say Toshiba, of, say, laptop computers was to provide it pre-installed, then that might change.
OpenSolaris has a number of differences to, say, Ubuntu, which are very attractive, notably the ZFS file system. For Enterprise use, where all the critical applications (the Apache suite and virtually everything that runs over it, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Samba, Various IMAP daemons, various MTAs, etc) are all supported natively, and it works well as a Xen domain, the support for ZFS makes it arguably a superior option to RHEL, and having the option of having it run as a desktop environment helps administrators use the same tools locally and remotely.
There's no legitimate reason to suggest it's not something people would want in preference to Windows. It's a solid operating system with a strong pedigree, a decent level of support, and some extremely nice features.
I haven't had any problem with wireless network cards, but I assume you mean drivers are hard for some cards, which actually is true of Windows too.
As far as "download a program and install it", I'm flabbergasted anyone would compare the Ubuntu experience (for supported apps, use Applications->Add/Remove, for unsupported download a .deb and double click on it) negatively to the Windows experience.
The only time it's hard is if the third party software doesn't bundle a .deb, preferring to distribute as source or something similar. But the same is a PITA under Windows, more of one indeed because Windows doesn't ship with a development environment.
Software installation is one area where the major free GNU/Linux distributions are eating Window's lunch. I'm almost inclined, given the clean uninstall they generally give you, to suggest that they're slightly better than Mac OS X, although some Mac OS X applications literally just need dragging to the Applications folder to install them, and deleting to uninstall them, which is better.
Surely you care if it affects how you can use the file system?
FUSE is a great tool for reading non-native discs as a user, but that's where it ends. If you'd prefer your operating system to use a specific file system for itself, FUSE cannot do that. How the file system is implemented does matter.
You don't have those rights.
Fair use is a defense, not a right. It only applies to copyright infringement. You can use it as a defense against a charge of copyright infringement, but you can't use it against any other charges against you. The DMCA introduces a new tier of offenses that are not copyright infringement, and, no, fair use is not a defense for those offenses.
Sorry.
The only reason 90% of geeks who use VLC as a DVD player aren't in trouble is because it'd be too much of a PITA to prosecute them with virtually no positive comeback for the studios.
What you're proposing is a kludge. Something that's not like Windows tweaked and configured and squeezed into a bizarre fitting corset to make it look more like Windows.
A better option is ReactOS. ReactOS is a free software operating system based upon the Windows design, intended to be compatible with Windows. If you want something Windows-like while still benefiting from the free software philosophy, that's probably what you want.
Blu-ray doesn't support Managed Copy properly, largely due to it adopting it fairly late in the game, resulting in a mix of discs that support it, and a mix of discs that do, making it impossible for manufacturers to advertise features that rely upon the feature being supported by all discs. The result is that no manufacturer is going to bother, and the studios - somewhat ironically considering it was their intransigence that caused the delays making it part of the standard - are having to offer so-called "digital copies" on discs instead.
HD DVD did support the feature from the beginning, but HD DVD is dead. Arguably HD DVD is dead because they supported features like MMC and rejected features like region encoding and mandatory encryption, resulting in less honest studios like Fox refusing to have anything to do with it.
Fuck 'em.