Vint Cerf wrote the forward, where he argues it is the responsibility of every citizen to test the truth of information on the Web
That's what I've always thought! Finally, I have an argument for downloading and checking if the audio data in that mp3 truly represent what its filename (i.e. the "information" we see when using P2P software) suggest, since it is the responsibility of every citizen. Take that, RIAA!:-D
I've actually heard of a piece of script code that will use the DirectX AlphaImageLoader to view PNG's perfectly fine in IE without any addons having to be downloaded (the functionality is built-in in IE), but still display the image as a regular picture on other browsers, like Mozilla-based browsers and Opera.
But this is what you/can't/ do. Follow the link and look at the screenshot. The characters and buildings look/identical/ to those in WC2.
That's because they use the Warcraft II data files in that case. They don't need to do that, and can use different files. Sure, the engine might work very closely and that might be why a simple name change doesn't suffice. It isn't due to the graphics in any case, since you need to own the game to use those.
Could be because it's not called "Civilization Free" or something like that. "Civ" is just a shorthand that might not look as obviously connected to the *craft games as a game with the -craft suffix. Or they're just not as interested as hunting that game down.
Hmm, the error message seem to have changed now then. I got an IIS 6.0 404 error page. In typical Microsoft style... Check this out:
(at the bottom of the page)
Technical Information (for support personnel)
Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 404.
Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative Tasks, and About Custom Error Messages.
Haha... *IQ drops a few levels* Ya Im teh tech support guy and I'll search teh intraweb for HTTP and 404 to see waht tis is all about!?!?111
Yes, I probably didn't make myself clear enough about it. I'm saying that this law might be created to spread fear, but not be very enforced. And that's a pretty useless law IMHO.
Hmm... There are way too many pages in the proposal to check it out from work, so I still wonder if the newspapers got it all wrong when saying Peer-to-Peer software will be made illegal. That's my largest problem with this proposal, if true. I don't have anything against laws against actions if they're sensible (i.e. spreading copyrighted material without approval from the copyright holder), but hunting down software belonging to a genre that shouldn't be illegal at all, since they don't violate any laws and both can be and is used for legal purposes, seems like going way too far. Especially smaller music groups could be hurt by this since it's very cheap for them to spread their music and get recognized in the public this way (they of course give full permission for everyone to download their music). But if we're not even allowed to use a program to download it with, that could pose a problem.
- It will still be allowed to make a "few" copies of CD/DVD's for personal use, and also to use VCR's and similar devices.
- You will only be allowed to copy parts of a book (right now, I suppose you can copy entire books), to prevent the large scale copying of those especially on universities.
- A quote from the swedish minister of justice: "We have not done this to meet the demands of the international movie and music companies. Ultimately, it is about preserving earlier views on copyrights, and when the technology evolves, so need the laws to do."
- The penalty for violating them by sending or receiving illegal copies on the internet will normally be fines. If it's about organized violations (read: warez groups, etc), the penalty can be prison for up to two years. The law will mostly be used to give copyright holders a right to demand compensation from the person violating the law.
- The swedish minister of justice hope that these laws will frighten people from using file sharing software. He admitted that the law will not get a high priority by the swedish judicial system, and continued: "It's not like the police will run into peoples' homes to look for these things. It is also obvious that some persons will continue, but that is not a reason to not do anything".
So it seems like this will be another low-priority law that won't be very enforced, which mostly just adds unnecessary complexity and "grey zones" to the judical system.:-( The minister of justice even admits the law is created to spread fear (!). It's a very controversial law that judge people before they violate it (much like the discussed $4 CD fees) and I especially don't like how they seem to be willing to ban an entire software genre (P2P software). Amazing...
Also, WinFS is no file system like FAT and NTFS. It's just a service running on top of NTFS.
It's really funny how they try to compare it with a file system, since they're just looking at NTFS with a layer giving the user an easier time to do certain things.
"A 1974 Council of Europe resolution says "a newspaper, a periodical, a radio or television broadcast" must offer a right of reply. Most European countries have enacted that right, with a German law--compiled by the U.K. nonprofit group Presswiseâ"that offers a typical example: A publisher is "obliged to publish a counter-version or reply by the person or party affected."
It would be cool if they had a stable non-beta version with international characters around 1.5 years ago, but I don't think I'm going back to Trillian... I can't say I've seen a single new major feature added to Trillian since 10 September 2002 when 1.0 ("Pro") and 0.74 was released either. I could only see new "ICQ2Go" support, but that's not much to go wild about.:-)
It would be great for the PNG format if IE introduced this since it would become more useful. But I doubt a Service Pack will introduce much more than bugfixes and minor features. I think tabbed browsing and sidebars are too major to come in a Service Pack.
Hehe, yes, they're evil and have some hideous hardware gizmo's to just run the software. Blah... I hate those crazy licensing schemes -- I mean, how hard is it to grab a pirated AutoCAD if you want one. Not hard at all, so it just make things problematic to those who aren't pirates.
But all this and what you said, doesn't really change the point the Anonymous Coward was making. Linux is still behind in some markets like this. But what's being done with productivity tools like OpenOffice makes the future look bright. But unfortunately, until that future, it's no Linux here either. Only AutoCAD and various tools for geographic information systems for Windows. But it would be really cool to try out something else.
This is just as wrong as if a country mandated 80% Microsoft. Mandate open file formats and protocols, but don't mandate people or agencies MUST use a specific type of software.
Why have I a feeling you aren't a system administrator? Can't you imagine the chaos if some government/company would use different software down to not only the different departments, but the individuals? Where the software does the same job, so there's no reason to use different software.
I can see the average support call:
"Hey, I was going to send my PowerPoint presentation to the guys at (some place), but they're using something they call PythonPoint and can't open my PPT files. What should I do now?"
Then one could of course recommend the guy to save it as a PDF with PDFWriter, which would give him basically the same thing as what PythonPoint would generate (a PDF). But then he would only be able to edit the presentation at his PowerPoint machine since PythonPoint use XML as input format. And they'd have to cross their fingers if the Windows PDF happened to be generated in a way for PythonPoint's extended PDF viewer to offer its full functionality.
So the company would probably quickly decide "Hey, let's all use PowerPoint or PythonPoint for increased flexibility and not have to install both software on some demo computers since different departments could've used different software". They'd also save education costs since they would have to worry about one less software.
And I think that's what the Brazil government already did...
They're not making it mandatory for everyone, but 80%. I have a feeling these 80% are people who only really need some basic Office tools and other common software. They've then made it mandatory for everyone to use a specific kind software which is open source as well. I can't see anything wrong with that.
But I *can* see something wrong with letting every individual choose which software they wish to run on each computer. I wouldn't like to be system administrator for those.
After all, Microsoft won't release another stand-alone browser for Windows either. They're really pushing for an operating system that let you browse the Internet instead, where perhaps the browser component of the OS might happen to be called Internet Explorer. The browser in Windows Longhorn will probably not be downloadable separately, and Microsoft will get complete freedom to do whatever they wish to do in that browser to make it necessary to upgrade to Longhorn to use certain services.
And according to this news post...
"Ironically, they also say that they can't compete with Apple, because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system."
I guess there's the proof; they can't integrate the browser into the OS on a Mac. So long, Apple.
Not that I think Mac users will suffer a huge loss. Perhaps it will even turn the tide in a positive way since webmasters will no longer have an excuse to make IE-only sites if they wish to make it run on Mac's. Sure, Mac users are in minority, but they're not in such a small minority that I would suggest any serious web developer to simply ignore them.
Not really -- it doesn't support international characters from other IM's correctly, that's said to be due to poor UTF-8 support (which pretty much all other IM's support and use). This bug has been silently ignored by the developers for around a year by now. For example messages received from ICQ Lite has its international characters removed
This for a commercial software.
Miranda is both free (as in beer) and open source, and has no problems whatsoever with international characters, while also offering far more plugins than both Trillian and Gaim.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying I have to stick with TAR? *sigh* Hmm... Actually, I'm considering moving to AVI for that extra bit of compression.
Vint Cerf wrote the forward, where he argues it is the responsibility of every citizen to test the truth of information on the Web
:-D
That's what I've always thought! Finally, I have an argument for downloading and checking if the audio data in that mp3 truly represent what its filename (i.e. the "information" we see when using P2P software) suggest, since it is the responsibility of every citizen. Take that, RIAA!
I've actually heard of a piece of script code that will use the DirectX AlphaImageLoader to view PNG's perfectly fine in IE without any addons having to be downloaded (the functionality is built-in in IE), but still display the image as a regular picture on other browsers, like Mozilla-based browsers and Opera.
Like if Slashdot currently used alpha channels...
Same old shitty jelly/toothpaste-look with "cool" horizontal stripes all over the GUI. Seems like this is still treated as "news" though. :-P
But this is what you /can't/ do. Follow the link and look at the screenshot. The characters and buildings look /identical/ to those in WC2.
That's because they use the Warcraft II data files in that case. They don't need to do that, and can use different files. Sure, the engine might work very closely and that might be why a simple name change doesn't suffice. It isn't due to the graphics in any case, since you need to own the game to use those.
Could be because it's not called "Civilization Free" or something like that. "Civ" is just a shorthand that might not look as obviously connected to the *craft games as a game with the -craft suffix. Or they're just not as interested as hunting that game down.
(at the bottom of the page)
Technical Information (for support personnel)
Haha... *IQ drops a few levels* Ya Im teh tech support guy and I'll search teh intraweb for HTTP and 404 to see waht tis is all about!?!?111
RIAA sure does everything in their power to annoy people... Windows 2003... *sigh* ;-)
PLUS one Disgusting? Hmm, yeah that will sure take care of all the goatse links. :-O
Yes, I probably didn't make myself clear enough about it. I'm saying that this law might be created to spread fear, but not be very enforced. And that's a pretty useless law IMHO.
Hmm... There are way too many pages in the proposal to check it out from work, so I still wonder if the newspapers got it all wrong when saying Peer-to-Peer software will be made illegal. That's my largest problem with this proposal, if true. I don't have anything against laws against actions if they're sensible (i.e. spreading copyrighted material without approval from the copyright holder), but hunting down software belonging to a genre that shouldn't be illegal at all, since they don't violate any laws and both can be and is used for legal purposes, seems like going way too far. Especially smaller music groups could be hurt by this since it's very cheap for them to spread their music and get recognized in the public this way (they of course give full permission for everyone to download their music). But if we're not even allowed to use a program to download it with, that could pose a problem.
This is from an article at Aftonbladet (swedish);
:-( The minister of justice even admits the law is created to spread fear (!). It's a very controversial law that judge people before they violate it (much like the discussed $4 CD fees) and I especially don't like how they seem to be willing to ban an entire software genre (P2P software). Amazing...
- It will still be allowed to make a "few" copies of CD/DVD's for personal use, and also to use VCR's and similar devices.
- You will only be allowed to copy parts of a book (right now, I suppose you can copy entire books), to prevent the large scale copying of those especially on universities.
- A quote from the swedish minister of justice: "We have not done this to meet the demands of the international movie and music companies. Ultimately, it is about preserving earlier views on copyrights, and when the technology evolves, so need the laws to do."
- The penalty for violating them by sending or receiving illegal copies on the internet will normally be fines. If it's about organized violations (read: warez groups, etc), the penalty can be prison for up to two years. The law will mostly be used to give copyright holders a right to demand compensation from the person violating the law.
- The swedish minister of justice hope that these laws will frighten people from using file sharing software. He admitted that the law will not get a high priority by the swedish judicial system, and continued: "It's not like the police will run into peoples' homes to look for these things. It is also obvious that some persons will continue, but that is not a reason to not do anything".
So it seems like this will be another low-priority law that won't be very enforced, which mostly just adds unnecessary complexity and "grey zones" to the judical system.
So, This would be something similiar to #mkefs -j /dev/hda1 where "-j" adds journaling support on top of ext2?
Yes, I think this is a good comparison, at least from what we know now.
Also, WinFS is no file system like FAT and NTFS. It's just a service running on top of NTFS.
It's really funny how they try to compare it with a file system, since they're just looking at NTFS with a layer giving the user an easier time to do certain things.
SCO: "And we will hold IBM ransom for..."
(dramatic music)
SCO: "One MILLION dollars."
Number 2: (clears throat)
SCO: "Sorry... I mean... One hundred... BILLION dollars!"
Yup, that sounds pretty much like SCO's style.
Is this a requirement for newspapers in Europe?
;-)):
From the article (RTFA
"A 1974 Council of Europe resolution says "a newspaper, a periodical, a radio or television broadcast" must offer a right of reply. Most European countries have enacted that right, with a German law--compiled by the U.K. nonprofit group Presswiseâ"that offers a typical example: A publisher is "obliged to publish a counter-version or reply by the person or party affected."
It would be cool if they had a stable non-beta version with international characters around 1.5 years ago, but I don't think I'm going back to Trillian... I can't say I've seen a single new major feature added to Trillian since 10 September 2002 when 1.0 ("Pro") and 0.74 was released either. I could only see new "ICQ2Go" support, but that's not much to go wild about. :-)
It would be great for the PNG format if IE introduced this since it would become more useful. But I doubt a Service Pack will introduce much more than bugfixes and minor features. I think tabbed browsing and sidebars are too major to come in a Service Pack.
Hehe, yes, they're evil and have some hideous hardware gizmo's to just run the software. Blah... I hate those crazy licensing schemes -- I mean, how hard is it to grab a pirated AutoCAD if you want one. Not hard at all, so it just make things problematic to those who aren't pirates.
But all this and what you said, doesn't really change the point the Anonymous Coward was making. Linux is still behind in some markets like this. But what's being done with productivity tools like OpenOffice makes the future look bright. But unfortunately, until that future, it's no Linux here either. Only AutoCAD and various tools for geographic information systems for Windows. But it would be really cool to try out something else.
This is just as wrong as if a country mandated 80% Microsoft. Mandate open file formats and protocols, but don't mandate people or agencies MUST use a specific type of software.
Why have I a feeling you aren't a system administrator? Can't you imagine the chaos if some government/company would use different software down to not only the different departments, but the individuals? Where the software does the same job, so there's no reason to use different software.
I can see the average support call:
"Hey, I was going to send my PowerPoint presentation to the guys at (some place), but they're using something they call PythonPoint and can't open my PPT files. What should I do now?"
Then one could of course recommend the guy to save it as a PDF with PDFWriter, which would give him basically the same thing as what PythonPoint would generate (a PDF). But then he would only be able to edit the presentation at his PowerPoint machine since PythonPoint use XML as input format. And they'd have to cross their fingers if the Windows PDF happened to be generated in a way for PythonPoint's extended PDF viewer to offer its full functionality.
So the company would probably quickly decide "Hey, let's all use PowerPoint or PythonPoint for increased flexibility and not have to install both software on some demo computers since different departments could've used different software". They'd also save education costs since they would have to worry about one less software.
And I think that's what the Brazil government already did...
They're not making it mandatory for everyone, but 80%. I have a feeling these 80% are people who only really need some basic Office tools and other common software. They've then made it mandatory for everyone to use a specific kind software which is open source as well. I can't see anything wrong with that.
But I *can* see something wrong with letting every individual choose which software they wish to run on each computer. I wouldn't like to be system administrator for those.
After all, Microsoft won't release another stand-alone browser for Windows either. They're really pushing for an operating system that let you browse the Internet instead, where perhaps the browser component of the OS might happen to be called Internet Explorer. The browser in Windows Longhorn will probably not be downloadable separately, and Microsoft will get complete freedom to do whatever they wish to do in that browser to make it necessary to upgrade to Longhorn to use certain services.
And according to this news post...
"Ironically, they also say that they can't compete with Apple, because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system."
I guess there's the proof; they can't integrate the browser into the OS on a Mac. So long, Apple.
Not that I think Mac users will suffer a huge loss. Perhaps it will even turn the tide in a positive way since webmasters will no longer have an excuse to make IE-only sites if they wish to make it run on Mac's. Sure, Mac users are in minority, but they're not in such a small minority that I would suggest any serious web developer to simply ignore them.
This doesn't really come as a surprise...
:-)
Trillian Pro: Currently 26 plugins
Miranda: Currently 167 plugins
Granted, Trillian supports a couple more IM's out of the box, but Miranda do have a large and very active plugin developing community.
Not really -- it doesn't support international characters from other IM's correctly, that's said to be due to poor UTF-8 support (which pretty much all other IM's support and use). This bug has been silently ignored by the developers for around a year by now. For example messages received from ICQ Lite has its international characters removed
This for a commercial software.
Miranda is both free (as in beer) and open source, and has no problems whatsoever with international characters, while also offering far more plugins than both Trillian and Gaim.