imagine makers of a small live CD who doesn't make money off his work just shares it. paying for bandwith to host.iso s would be cost prohibitative.Same thing with smaller distributions and install.iso s, and other free software makers who have large file sizes, and not the money to pay for bandwith. World of Warcraft also uses a variant of Bittorrent to distribute the 12 gigabyte game client to its 12 million subscribers.
torrents are the technical solution to the/. effect. It prevents a small yet emerging company/idea/software from being flooded off the web if they go viral, as every additional downloader is an uploader, shifting the burden of sharing large files.
me too dude. I grew up with/. AND REMEMBER THE 90s, and its one of the primary things shaping my world view of technology. I'm no longer a nerdy little 15 year old, or as dedicated to computers, but my heart will always be with the FOSS commmunity, and geeks/hackers will always be the protaganist on such matters. I remember slashdot covering every last dirty trick microsoft used to discredit gnu/linux and free/open source software and movements, and all those who used it. I remember the days of BSoDs were daily even with a tuned computer. I remember the pipe dream of broadband to the house and linux desktops.
At the healm of this FUD, disinformation, attacks, set ups, discreditation was then VP of Microsoft, Steve Balmer. Beady eye'd, short tempered, and ruthless. underneath him where an army of recent college graduates suckered into working for MS, brainwashed from the ground up to be company men, then used and abused, paid next to nothing until they rage quit, only to be replaced with the next batch. The term "going viral" was coined by this very same "Steve Balmer" when he described linux as a virus in the 1990s. Oh how we turned it around on him.
Today microsoft is on the ropes, Mint/Ubuntu makes easy to INSTALL, easy to use, high qualty desktops. Drivers are baked into the kernel. Modern desktops used better anti-aliasing on fonts than windows. Plug and play works with udev, and usage of linux on a daily basis is not only feasable, more more desirable. Consumer broadband is the norm, hard drives are measured in terabytes, media formats play on all computers, and work better on linux. We have mainstream driver support for both nVidia AND ATI in linux, as well as native flash builds, not to mention open source gnash works reasonably well. Wine hit version 1.0 and works reasonably well. PCs are now 64 bit and more powerful than any SPARC, MIPS, ARM, or ALPHA chip, all previously its betters. We've got multiple cores, serious raid controllers, and 256bit AES encryption built into consumer class CPUs and chipsets.
We got everything we ever dreamed of from those days. The last symbolic bit is the proffesional career end of microsoft's "Minister of Truth". Of which we will sing, "ding dong, the witch is dead" when this happens.
So there are a lot of new faces who don't seem to remember this. Can we at least get some old school nerd solidarity. Remember how things where. Remember who was responsible.
p.s. in the 1990s, Apple was the running joke of the computer world. They were always this closed, this fanatical, this closed, this evil. No one took them seriously because OS classic was a joke, macs didn't run ethernet so you couldn't use them on company LANs, and only ran appletalk for a long time. They didn't have anything like "shared libraries" until OS 7/8 and that ran really bad, as third party software would conflict and bring a machine to its knees.(there was a media machine where I used to go to school running pro-tools and some CD burning software that used to crash 75% of the time at boot, extensions conflicted.) The best stuff came for the PC software and hardware wise, exception of high end media software. Some of it like pro-tools is just as much garbage as macs where.(pro-tools despite being the gold standard in audio editing sucked, bad, unstable, and very primitive compared to cool edit, on par with open source audacity.) Mac users where rabidly fanatical and really didn't care about Apple's authoritatrian style. Something that didn't translate well to the rest of the general population.
So I think that we should take a page out of the japaneese book
Mr Balmer, please comitt sepuku.
P.S. Thanks for the FUD in the 1990s. With your truely fanatical frothing at the mouth leadership style I can only imagine how microsoft fails at recruiting top engineers, and keeps making crappy products.
Here is a man who's rage problems are so great and leadership problems suck so much he resembles a movie villian. Teslee from tank girl to be exact. Every last anarchist's hideous stereotypical depiction of "capitalist" leadership.
what made the enterprise so exciting was "Warp Speed" accomplished by a "Warp Drive"....
so, for the tune of $1 Trillion dollars, why re-create a ship, who's entire design merits is based on asthetics of Hollywood, and without its most important part, the faster than light "Warp Drive" and self sustaining matter/anti-matter reaction that can power it almost indefinately.
While I am a big fan of the TV shows and movies, and I very much for space exploration, this is bogus. Step back into reality dude. A real life model of the USS enterprise is nothing more than a gimmick. At the cost of $1 trillion its an unaffordable gimmick for ANYONE.
Mabey when space technology advances in 50-60 years, if it does(space age is OVER), it'd make a very nice concept for a space cruise liner. One giant gimmick, where you dress the crew up in star trek inspired uniforms, and treat the guests to a retro-futuristic ride through space with 60s music and dance parties, stage acting, and gimmicky goodness.
I love the/., the great thing about nerds, is that given enough of them you have subject matters on everything, simply based on laws of statistics.(there is a one in whatever chance of a particular nerd being subject matter expect in field X)
There have been a large number of shrewd advertisements and FUD posing as science and technology articles, but the commentors are damn good at sorting through whats, what.
Microsoft made CRAP technology in the 1990s with little concerns about the end user, then suppresed any competition by law suits, hissy fits, FUD, threats, and buyouts, sabotage, sometimes of a questionable nature.
They where trying not only to use their crappy software, but to LIKE it.
Now, google is not perfect, specificly big questions about their monitoring and privacy policies. They are hardly microsoft. While they certainly copy other ideas, they for the most part make great products, little bugs, treat their programmers well(MS used to run a sweat shop for nerds in the 1990s), and don't use their market position to prevent people from making competing products or services.
but that is NOT what happening. The FBI is supplying ALL the materials, bombs, guns, explosive vests. None of the suspects are making anything. The FBI encourages people who are doing nothing more than bitching and moaning to take criminal action that leads to their arrest, after supplying all the materials.
Its been done before with drugs too. They have agents befriend someone in a bar, keep talking about having large amounts of drugs to sell, and ask the person if they know anyone. Then introduce another person to the victim who wants to buy large amounts of drugs. Keep on asking about the other and business. When the person finally introduces both agents they arrest him as a major drug dealer.
What did this person do? could have been an obnoxious critic, friends with the wrong, people, wrong place wrong time. By the time they get done ruining his reputation, he barely has any option than to plead for 20 years and is buried.
Why? Drum up statistics to show "enforcement" is working and needs more money and budget cannot be cut. Additionally its a great way to conviently get rid of mal-contents.
Is belieze so bad he needs a a bunch of weapons for security. then he mentions the massive donations he's made to the police in the past.....
Indicates past corruption. Why did he move to belize in the first place. From what everyone keeps telling me, large english speaking ex-pat community and few places left with no extradition laws. The new "mexico".
I am still waiting for the day we see QAM and QPSK and its variants with lightwaves like we do now for electrical and wireless connections.
imagine 4 bits per cycle, then imagine 16 or 32 or some other power of 2. Then we can apply a sort of Frequency Division multiplexing with diffrent colored lights, so for a single strand of fiber times that by 4.
Last year there was an article about thumb sized atomic clocks with the ACCURACY to potentially make this feasaible.
Petabyte+ class single cable link anyone?
Oh, and I remember how famously obnoxious IrDa was to use. a few feet? sheeeeeet, the devices had to be virtually touching and you needed software that supported the link. Might as well use a null modem, and cary the cable. Before the age of USB sticks, readily available residential grade ethernet products, etc, but AFTER the age where the 1.44mb floppy disk was relatively useful, transfering files between computers was a royal pain in the ass to begin with.
except these people are obviously not part of any organizations, and lack any sort of skill to come close. No one had to talk the mafia, corrupt politicians, arm traffickers and embezzlers into doing whatever bad shit they do.
In the above cases such members have already committed crimes they commit again in front of the feds. These are people who the FBI talks into committing, and sometimes BRIBES into committing crimes for the sake of having people to catch.
No, your rounding up whatever idiots are stupid enough to fall for it, letting convicted felons off the hook for co-operation, all to publicly show your "doing something about terrorism", to skew statistics and public opinion in your favor.
Your not catching anyone capable of carrying out an attack, but your talking people into such attacks for the purpose of arresting them, because a real investigation would be hard. Any organization with brains will spot them a million miles away and tell their operatives to steer clear, if not use them to get off the hook for actual serious charges. Again, they pick people who are poor, and less than intelligent who can barely make a good defense, or pay for one, then bury them with the weight of the system, and fear from the public. This is a racket.
Further down the line, this tactic will be used to silence internal dissent, convince one member of a group to commit terrorism, and then round up every other member of the group, and place every other person of said ideology under watch, and then use a whole myriad of confusing, contradictory and seldom enforced or known rules to arrest them. Then say how much you've done to "fight terrorism".
Most of these stories involve bribing the "victim" of the entrapment with as much as $125,000. In reality, how many poor people would doing something heinous for such a bribe. I don't think its insanity to believe most $9/hour for life dead end job, no career people would at least consider it. Especially after being talked into it. Stuck in a dead end job, bills, debt. Then bribe someone with enough money to get them back on their feet only to convict them.
I agree, the FBI is making up these attacks to request a larger budget and more power. Also to cover up their own mistakes.
I could only imagine a plot to blow up a Jewish synagouge right before election time would sway a vote, when Jews are known to be a vocal, politically active minority. Want the Jewish vote? make a plot to blow up a synagouge, and then warn them about "terrorists".
You know what this is, a fucking racket. Like the mafia used to walk into the corner deli and demand "protection money", to protect the store from theives and criminals. They called this racketeering. The FBI is shaking people down for protection money.
I run linux mint on my desktop everyday all day. I don't know when the last time you ran a linux desktop is, but modern ones are very good, and very stable, and for the most part it does plug and play better than windows (read most drivers baked into kernels).
Setup was easy with a GUI installer, that you could just kinda click through, either replacing your main OS, or installing it side by side. Setup automaticly installs LightDM Desktop manager(GUI login screen), and boots to a gnome 3 desktop.
no configuration was needed to get the sound working, to print, and three years before Apple had the "app store" Ubuntu had the "software center" for one click installs, which is present in mint, a derrivative. It even scans for, and prompts you if you want to install propretary drivers automaticly, and both nVidia, and AMD both have good native drivers for linux.
Its far easier to use and setup than windows XP, and I have no idea about vista or 7 because I never installed them on a machine.
I'll make a further point, my technologically incompetant friend not only runs linux mint, but installed it himself on his computer, by himself. He cannot install windows though. He can't put together a webber grill (one screw, three legs).
Now, if you'd said you needed mainstream application support like Photoshop, AVID, or those other applications that only run native in on MAC/Windows, I'd understand, but I don't want to hear from anyone configuring a linux box is too much of a pain, or even hard, herin 2012 AD
which is probably what they are doing in the first place, who knows what might have come up at the trial. Just imagine if they asked Chris Dodd to take the stand, being a former senator, how many people could his testimony indite?
but didn't you hear, he signed a declaration saying he strongly disagreed with it. Every last one of his followers is running around like a chicken with their head cut off say he was doing something about it.
No, 85% of your post is a whole mess of over-emotional stupid, making half ass stabs at solving obvious problems with no clear solutions, or comically fail options that'd make problems worse.
Oh and you forgot about freedom of speech, press, media, especially protecting the rights of dissidents, enforcing privacy rights, oh and of course the ever present natural limits of all rights....when they impinge on someone elses rights.
This right here, is what scares me about corporate America. Why in fuck is your boss so controlling and touchy feely about your personal life. Does anyone in apple see anything wrong with this? I could NEVER work for a company like this. I couldn't imagine anyone who would? How low of a self image do you have to have to enjoy this. Its bad enough giving them 40 hours of your week, but letting them run your life when you are not working for them? Telling you where to go, private parties, and venues "for your own protection". Expecting you to live in a closed world based around your company. The days of the pullman car company are back folks. Next thing you know apple employees will be payed in company scrip.
Or mabey they are just sick of loosing iphone prototypes...
"A Pentium II 450 Mhz running Dragon Naturally Speaking on XP circa 1999 interprets your voice just as well as Google Voice or Siri (given similar microphones / adc's), the difference has entirely been in the guesses the software makes when it doubts recognition of a word within a phrase. A propagation of high quality mics and adc's into phones versus a crap Labtec mics on 90's era PC's constitutes the rest of the difference."
EXACTLY!!!
all apple did was package it up nice with wolfram alpha.
my motorola razr v3 has voice search too.
Slashdot Mirror
this.
torrents are the technical solution to the /. effect. It prevents a small yet emerging company/idea/software from being flooded off the web if they go viral, as every additional downloader is an uploader, shifting the burden of sharing large files.
before Balmer was CEO, he was VP under gates in the 1990s. He is every bit responsible for where MS is today.
At the healm of this FUD, disinformation, attacks, set ups, discreditation was then VP of Microsoft, Steve Balmer. Beady eye'd, short tempered, and ruthless. underneath him where an army of recent college graduates suckered into working for MS, brainwashed from the ground up to be company men, then used and abused, paid next to nothing until they rage quit, only to be replaced with the next batch. The term "going viral" was coined by this very same "Steve Balmer" when he described linux as a virus in the 1990s. Oh how we turned it around on him.
Today microsoft is on the ropes, Mint/Ubuntu makes easy to INSTALL, easy to use, high qualty desktops. Drivers are baked into the kernel. Modern desktops used better anti-aliasing on fonts than windows. Plug and play works with udev, and usage of linux on a daily basis is not only feasable, more more desirable. Consumer broadband is the norm, hard drives are measured in terabytes, media formats play on all computers, and work better on linux. We have mainstream driver support for both nVidia AND ATI in linux, as well as native flash builds, not to mention open source gnash works reasonably well. Wine hit version 1.0 and works reasonably well. PCs are now 64 bit and more powerful than any SPARC, MIPS, ARM, or ALPHA chip, all previously its betters. We've got multiple cores, serious raid controllers, and 256bit AES encryption built into consumer class CPUs and chipsets.
We got everything we ever dreamed of from those days. The last symbolic bit is the proffesional career end of microsoft's "Minister of Truth". Of which we will sing, "ding dong, the witch is dead" when this happens.
So there are a lot of new faces who don't seem to remember this. Can we at least get some old school nerd solidarity. Remember how things where. Remember who was responsible.
p.s. in the 1990s, Apple was the running joke of the computer world. They were always this closed, this fanatical, this closed, this evil. No one took them seriously because OS classic was a joke, macs didn't run ethernet so you couldn't use them on company LANs, and only ran appletalk for a long time. They didn't have anything like "shared libraries" until OS 7/8 and that ran really bad, as third party software would conflict and bring a machine to its knees.(there was a media machine where I used to go to school running pro-tools and some CD burning software that used to crash 75% of the time at boot, extensions conflicted.) The best stuff came for the PC software and hardware wise, exception of high end media software. Some of it like pro-tools is just as much garbage as macs where.(pro-tools despite being the gold standard in audio editing sucked, bad, unstable, and very primitive compared to cool edit, on par with open source audacity.) Mac users where rabidly fanatical and really didn't care about Apple's authoritatrian style. Something that didn't translate well to the rest of the general population.
http://tinypic.com/r/k99ctw/6
Here is a man who's rage problems are so great and leadership problems suck so much he resembles a movie villian. Teslee from tank girl to be exact. Every last anarchist's hideous stereotypical depiction of "capitalist" leadership.
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_chair_at_fing_google.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aQ6W2nFlN8
so, for the tune of $1 Trillion dollars, why re-create a ship, who's entire design merits is based on asthetics of Hollywood, and without its most important part, the faster than light "Warp Drive" and self sustaining matter/anti-matter reaction that can power it almost indefinately.
While I am a big fan of the TV shows and movies, and I very much for space exploration, this is bogus. Step back into reality dude. A real life model of the USS enterprise is nothing more than a gimmick. At the cost of $1 trillion its an unaffordable gimmick for ANYONE.
Mabey when space technology advances in 50-60 years, if it does(space age is OVER), it'd make a very nice concept for a space cruise liner. One giant gimmick, where you dress the crew up in star trek inspired uniforms, and treat the guests to a retro-futuristic ride through space with 60s music and dance parties, stage acting, and gimmicky goodness.
There have been a large number of shrewd advertisements and FUD posing as science and technology articles, but the commentors are damn good at sorting through whats, what.
depends on how warm... I ride a motorcycle. I could use some better warm underwear. Especially if it doesn't need electricity
They where trying not only to use their crappy software, but to LIKE it.
Now, google is not perfect, specificly big questions about their monitoring and privacy policies. They are hardly microsoft. While they certainly copy other ideas, they for the most part make great products, little bugs, treat their programmers well(MS used to run a sweat shop for nerds in the 1990s), and don't use their market position to prevent people from making competing products or services.
Apple if anything is the new microsoft.
Everyone knows apple perfectly secure and doesn't get viruses. amidoingitrite macfags?
Its been done before with drugs too. They have agents befriend someone in a bar, keep talking about having large amounts of drugs to sell, and ask the person if they know anyone. Then introduce another person to the victim who wants to buy large amounts of drugs. Keep on asking about the other and business. When the person finally introduces both agents they arrest him as a major drug dealer.
What did this person do? could have been an obnoxious critic, friends with the wrong, people, wrong place wrong time. By the time they get done ruining his reputation, he barely has any option than to plead for 20 years and is buried.
Why? Drum up statistics to show "enforcement" is working and needs more money and budget cannot be cut. Additionally its a great way to conviently get rid of mal-contents.
Is belieze so bad he needs a a bunch of weapons for security. then he mentions the massive donations he's made to the police in the past..... Indicates past corruption. Why did he move to belize in the first place. From what everyone keeps telling me, large english speaking ex-pat community and few places left with no extradition laws. The new "mexico".
imagine 4 bits per cycle, then imagine 16 or 32 or some other power of 2. Then we can apply a sort of Frequency Division multiplexing with diffrent colored lights, so for a single strand of fiber times that by 4.
Last year there was an article about thumb sized atomic clocks with the ACCURACY to potentially make this feasaible.
Petabyte+ class single cable link anyone?
Oh, and I remember how famously obnoxious IrDa was to use. a few feet? sheeeeeet, the devices had to be virtually touching and you needed software that supported the link. Might as well use a null modem, and cary the cable. Before the age of USB sticks, readily available residential grade ethernet products, etc, but AFTER the age where the 1.44mb floppy disk was relatively useful, transfering files between computers was a royal pain in the ass to begin with.
except if you read the article, the FBI is enticing people to comitt terrorism.
In the above cases such members have already committed crimes they commit again in front of the feds. These are people who the FBI talks into committing, and sometimes BRIBES into committing crimes for the sake of having people to catch.
Your not catching anyone capable of carrying out an attack, but your talking people into such attacks for the purpose of arresting them, because a real investigation would be hard. Any organization with brains will spot them a million miles away and tell their operatives to steer clear, if not use them to get off the hook for actual serious charges. Again, they pick people who are poor, and less than intelligent who can barely make a good defense, or pay for one, then bury them with the weight of the system, and fear from the public. This is a racket.
Further down the line, this tactic will be used to silence internal dissent, convince one member of a group to commit terrorism, and then round up every other member of the group, and place every other person of said ideology under watch, and then use a whole myriad of confusing, contradictory and seldom enforced or known rules to arrest them. Then say how much you've done to "fight terrorism".
Most of these stories involve bribing the "victim" of the entrapment with as much as $125,000. In reality, how many poor people would doing something heinous for such a bribe. I don't think its insanity to believe most $9/hour for life dead end job, no career people would at least consider it. Especially after being talked into it. Stuck in a dead end job, bills, debt. Then bribe someone with enough money to get them back on their feet only to convict them.
Oh, wait, I think these jokes are done now
I could only imagine a plot to blow up a Jewish synagouge right before election time would sway a vote, when Jews are known to be a vocal, politically active minority. Want the Jewish vote? make a plot to blow up a synagouge, and then warn them about "terrorists".
You know what this is, a fucking racket. Like the mafia used to walk into the corner deli and demand "protection money", to protect the store from theives and criminals. They called this racketeering. The FBI is shaking people down for protection money.
Setup was easy with a GUI installer, that you could just kinda click through, either replacing your main OS, or installing it side by side. Setup automaticly installs LightDM Desktop manager(GUI login screen), and boots to a gnome 3 desktop.
no configuration was needed to get the sound working, to print, and three years before Apple had the "app store" Ubuntu had the "software center" for one click installs, which is present in mint, a derrivative. It even scans for, and prompts you if you want to install propretary drivers automaticly, and both nVidia, and AMD both have good native drivers for linux.
Its far easier to use and setup than windows XP, and I have no idea about vista or 7 because I never installed them on a machine.
I'll make a further point, my technologically incompetant friend not only runs linux mint, but installed it himself on his computer, by himself. He cannot install windows though. He can't put together a webber grill (one screw, three legs). Now, if you'd said you needed mainstream application support like Photoshop, AVID, or those other applications that only run native in on MAC/Windows, I'd understand, but I don't want to hear from anyone configuring a linux box is too much of a pain, or even hard, herin 2012 AD
which is probably what they are doing in the first place, who knows what might have come up at the trial. Just imagine if they asked Chris Dodd to take the stand, being a former senator, how many people could his testimony indite?
he could have veto'ed it in protest with the same effect sending a stronger message, if not delaying its action and causing real disruption.
its like having cake and eating it too right?
Oh and you forgot about freedom of speech, press, media, especially protecting the rights of dissidents, enforcing privacy rights, oh and of course the ever present natural limits of all rights....when they impinge on someone elses rights.
Or mabey they are just sick of loosing iphone prototypes...
"A Pentium II 450 Mhz running Dragon Naturally Speaking on XP circa 1999 interprets your voice just as well as Google Voice or Siri (given similar microphones / adc's), the difference has entirely been in the guesses the software makes when it doubts recognition of a word within a phrase. A propagation of high quality mics and adc's into phones versus a crap Labtec mics on 90's era PC's constitutes the rest of the difference." EXACTLY!!! all apple did was package it up nice with wolfram alpha. my motorola razr v3 has voice search too.