Remember that many websites are run as a business, for example reviews sites, and sites that host large game patches/demos. While google ads are damn good and work well for everyone, having large amounts of people downloading 500MB patches is going to be rather expensive.
Pop-ups are taking the piss, and are overly-intrusive, but if a site is providing a decent service at no direct financial cost, then it's totally fair for the user to have a few midly annoying adverts on the screen.
An interesting point. It could very well be cheaper for Dell and all to bundle OpenOffice with their machines instead of MS Office, and include Firefox by default simply because it's a better browser.
I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft start only giving discounts to companies that don't bundle Firefox/OpenOffice, and it all ends up in court (again)?
I'm running gentoo (but I'm not a zealot.. I don't think). It was quite handy to know that acrobat 7 was in portage.
Obviously though, mentioning gentoo or portage seems to upset you. If the original poster had said "This has been available in SUSE 9.3 for like a month now", I bet you wouldn't have had a problem.
There's only one thing more annoying than gentoo zealots, and that's people who whine about any mention of gentoo.
The article title is very misleading - from the summary:
Eighty percent of the 2,500 respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens.
Banning people from publishing the personal details of others is perfectly fair. This is nothing to do with 'unsuitable' content. While the article goes into more detail this appears to be more about privacy than regular censorship based on mature content. This just appears to be slashdot trying to kick off a load of censorship arguments and get more ad hits.
Absolutely. SPARC hardware may not be fast relative to an x86 box, but it's insanely reliable, and works damn well. Kind of a shame that they're being replaced with dirt-cheap crap like Dell machines.
If you're correct (and it would be the most likely possibility), then the 'evidence' may not stand up in a court of law. Those students could even have to give evidence in court to verify the logs.
There's the interesting aspect of what would happen to those students who were spying for the RIAA. Fellow students would certainly be seeking vengence.
It depends. If you downloaded it straight off an FTP server, I would hope to hell they wouldn't do shit. If you got it off a P2P program, you'd probably be cut off (depending on how smart the filtering technology was), considering you would be in the minority of legal users.
Nothing to worry about though. This latest piece of insanity is going down the pan along with the idea of making computers that self-destruct.
I totally agree with you. For every remake, there is absolutely always someone who liked the original, but hates it with a passion. A good example of this would be Dr Who. I thought it was really well done, but other people utterly despised it.
If you don't like the restrictions, simply don't buy it. If you really want music, pirate it. Don't bother breaking DRM - it'll just be updated and you'll end up annoying both the consumers and the music industry. In the long run little will be achieved.
Anything like Trusted Computing however, which pushes DRM in your face is fair game though.
There were some absolute bastards who registered azureus.org a while ago (seems to have changed now), and offered a version of Azureus which came bundled with spyware. Hopefully this sort of practice of exploiting free/open software doesn't become too popular.
It seems unlikely that they're doing it voluntarily. Maybe they came to an agreement with the people behind PearPC in order to keep the whole thing out of court?
You get a whole article in places like slashdot devoted to your virus, and if you're lucky, a mention on the news. It's anonymous fame for people with nothing better to do.
It's hooked up to the chipset, not the motherboard. That means a RAID array created on eg. a Silicon Image 3114 RAID controller can be transfered onto any motherboard with the same chipset.
And besides, using mdadm under Linux to create a RAID array out of the same drives using exactly the same configuration will work fine. I've tried it.
Maybe we should outlaw FTP - that could also be used to distribute copyrighted material illegally.
Don't give them ideas. If pirating stuff off FTP becomes popular, we could end up with crazy lawsuits, port 21 firewalled off (yes I know that wouldn't stop it) and other crazy ideas.
However, in a way, you can see why they're doing it. Suing individual users is totally futile, and it would be easier for them to take out the whole file-sharing system itself. Going to be an interesting lawsuit if they try and take out bittorrent - one of the only file-sharing tools that has a very large legal userbase. The whole situation is one giant mess, which could take years and years before the users and the content producers come to some sort of 'arrangement'.
The only true way to demolish spam is to kill the profit by stoping sales dead.
That would certainly be the best option. The problem is however, that it probably won't work. There are too many selfish people out there who will happily purchase from spam and not give a shit that they are paying to a company that causes problems for a large amount of other people. They will also have no idea how much spamming can be bought from the profit of one transaction (ie a lot).
That, and the Internet is a very good way for people with any sort of sexual problem to buy a 'solution' for it without the embarassment of going to a shop.
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to stop absolutely all zombie nets. Even with a 'secure' OS, there's always going to be some idiot who'll happily type his/her root password into a trojan. The zombie problem really lies with the ISPs cutting them off, not Microsoft.
I think there was an article quite a while ago where some asshole was claiming that OSS developers are "unqualified amateurs". Guess what? Many of the people who managed to write operating systems in assembler in a few K in the 80s were also "unqualified amateurs".
Seriously, maybe he should try going to PC World (in the UK), and getting the "Qualified" "Professional" staff there to help him? Many "professionals" are random people with no experience who have been put on some useless training course.
You'd really struggle to emulate an N64 on the PSP. Not just because the controls don't match too well, but because it almost certainly doesn't have the processing power to pull it off.
A Genesis/SNES emulator would totally kick ass though. If someone gets Linux onto the PSP, you can count on it happening too.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that many websites are run as a business, for example reviews sites, and sites that host large game patches/demos. While google ads are damn good and work well for everyone, having large amounts of people downloading 500MB patches is going to be rather expensive.
Pop-ups are taking the piss, and are overly-intrusive, but if a site is providing a decent service at no direct financial cost, then it's totally fair for the user to have a few midly annoying adverts on the screen.
An interesting point. It could very well be cheaper for Dell and all to bundle OpenOffice with their machines instead of MS Office, and include Firefox by default simply because it's a better browser.
I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft start only giving discounts to companies that don't bundle Firefox/OpenOffice, and it all ends up in court (again)?
I'm running gentoo (but I'm not a zealot.. I don't think). It was quite handy to know that acrobat 7 was in portage.
Obviously though, mentioning gentoo or portage seems to upset you. If the original poster had said "This has been available in SUSE 9.3 for like a month now", I bet you wouldn't have had a problem.
There's only one thing more annoying than gentoo zealots, and that's people who whine about any mention of gentoo.
The article title is very misleading - from the summary:
Eighty percent of the 2,500 respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens.
Banning people from publishing the personal details of others is perfectly fair. This is nothing to do with 'unsuitable' content. While the article goes into more detail this appears to be more about privacy than regular censorship based on mature content. This just appears to be slashdot trying to kick off a load of censorship arguments and get more ad hits.
Absolutely. SPARC hardware may not be fast relative to an x86 box, but it's insanely reliable, and works damn well. Kind of a shame that they're being replaced with dirt-cheap crap like Dell machines.
There have definitely been articles relating to OpenSSH et all, and getting exactly the same amount of critism.
Note that "Vulnerabilities in TCP/IP Could Allow Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service (893066)" is pretty damn serious though.
If you're correct (and it would be the most likely possibility), then the 'evidence' may not stand up in a court of law. Those students could even have to give evidence in court to verify the logs.
There's the interesting aspect of what would happen to those students who were spying for the RIAA. Fellow students would certainly be seeking vengence.
It depends. If you downloaded it straight off an FTP server, I would hope to hell they wouldn't do shit. If you got it off a P2P program, you'd probably be cut off (depending on how smart the filtering technology was), considering you would be in the minority of legal users.
Nothing to worry about though. This latest piece of insanity is going down the pan along with the idea of making computers that self-destruct.
I totally agree with you. For every remake, there is absolutely always someone who liked the original, but hates it with a passion. A good example of this would be Dr Who. I thought it was really well done, but other people utterly despised it.
ARM, POWER and SPARC are all RISC architectures. x86 architecture is the only remaining CISC architecture implemented in modern CPUs today (I think).
The only reason x86 is so popular is for compatibility reasons. IBM has shown RISC can perform at least as well.
Apple probably haven't paid their full subscription to congress. A few donations from them and this will all go away.
If you don't like the restrictions, simply don't buy it. If you really want music, pirate it. Don't bother breaking DRM - it'll just be updated and you'll end up annoying both the consumers and the music industry. In the long run little will be achieved.
Anything like Trusted Computing however, which pushes DRM in your face is fair game though.
There were some absolute bastards who registered azureus.org a while ago (seems to have changed now), and offered a version of Azureus which came bundled with spyware. Hopefully this sort of practice of exploiting free/open software doesn't become too popular.
It seems unlikely that they're doing it voluntarily. Maybe they came to an agreement with the people behind PearPC in order to keep the whole thing out of court?
You get a whole article in places like slashdot devoted to your virus, and if you're lucky, a mention on the news. It's anonymous fame for people with nothing better to do.
It's hooked up to the chipset, not the motherboard. That means a RAID array created on eg. a Silicon Image 3114 RAID controller can be transfered onto any motherboard with the same chipset.
And besides, using mdadm under Linux to create a RAID array out of the same drives using exactly the same configuration will work fine. I've tried it.
Maybe we should outlaw FTP - that could also be used to distribute copyrighted material illegally.
Don't give them ideas. If pirating stuff off FTP becomes popular, we could end up with crazy lawsuits, port 21 firewalled off (yes I know that wouldn't stop it) and other crazy ideas.
However, in a way, you can see why they're doing it. Suing individual users is totally futile, and it would be easier for them to take out the whole file-sharing system itself. Going to be an interesting lawsuit if they try and take out bittorrent - one of the only file-sharing tools that has a very large legal userbase. The whole situation is one giant mess, which could take years and years before the users and the content producers come to some sort of 'arrangement'.
The only true way to demolish spam is to kill the profit by stoping sales dead.
That would certainly be the best option. The problem is however, that it probably won't work. There are too many selfish people out there who will happily purchase from spam and not give a shit that they are paying to a company that causes problems for a large amount of other people. They will also have no idea how much spamming can be bought from the profit of one transaction (ie a lot).
That, and the Internet is a very good way for people with any sort of sexual problem to buy a 'solution' for it without the embarassment of going to a shop.
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to stop absolutely all zombie nets. Even with a 'secure' OS, there's always going to be some idiot who'll happily type his/her root password into a trojan. The zombie problem really lies with the ISPs cutting them off, not Microsoft.
Almost certainly. Believable though, and would raise some interesting points if it was true.
Do you believe there should be such a restriction? Talk to your Congressman, not us.
No, I really, really don't. Not more fucking restrictions!
Seriously, if some loony wants to cause rouble on a plane, they will. You can make a weapon out of absolutely anything.
I think there was an article quite a while ago where some asshole was claiming that OSS developers are "unqualified amateurs". Guess what? Many of the people who managed to write operating systems in assembler in a few K in the 80s were also "unqualified amateurs".
Seriously, maybe he should try going to PC World (in the UK), and getting the "Qualified" "Professional" staff there to help him? Many "professionals" are random people with no experience who have been put on some useless training course.
While we're on the subject of that, why do they not let nail clippers through security, but let you take glass bottles on to the plane?
You'd really struggle to emulate an N64 on the PSP. Not just because the controls don't match too well, but because it almost certainly doesn't have the processing power to pull it off.
A Genesis/SNES emulator would totally kick ass though. If someone gets Linux onto the PSP, you can count on it happening too.