As Slyck said, the TPB folks said the police wasn't 100% sure the confiscated computers had any illegal material on them.
I wonder if this is an attempt/hope that they'll have carried actual infringing material on the server to set a crime in stone. I mean, if all they needed was some stupid.torrent hashes, they could've done this months earlier?
The premature departure of ThePirateBay.org marks a significant turning point in the BitTorrent community.
Well, it's a web site taken down in a battle against a movement in modern society. Yes, it was a popular web site, but are we really calling the Suprnova take down the same in retrospect? All good that did was spawning many others.
Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi While the DVD re-edits of these are slightly better than the theatrical re-edits from a couple years before, they are still deeply flawed. Han still "dodges" a laser. The Jabba scene is still redunandant, still repeats dialog from the Greedo scene, and still has that stupid slapstick moment of Han stepping on Jabba's tail. Empire's re-edit fares slightly better, but syncing the Emperor with the one from Jedi and the prequels was, I feel, a bad choice, necessitated only by a need to keep things consistant with the prequels. The new ending sequence in Jedi was a mess... The Death Star effect was changed for the worse, and the tribal festivities of the corny "Yub Nub" song was replaced with something considerably less inspiring.
The force of Nostalgy is strong in this one.:-S
Seriously, when one start calling polish for movie consistency bad, and actually using the proper actor for the Emperor, I personally think one is going too far.
But, again, Nostalgy is the only truly powerful Force in the Star Wars universe.
Reading through the comments on this forum so far, looks like Rob got it right. About 1/3 like it a lot, about 1/3 think it's good but they're reflexively resistant, and about 1/3 sounding like country music singers and how they "long for the old one".:-)
Agreed, that's indeed a very good rating from a bunch of mostly pessimist comic book-guy style geeks.:-)
From the message, I can't say he was looking for overly "mentally stimulating" things to do (although these are of course useful as well, besides this topic). If you have to pick between TV, reading and playing a MMORPG to make friends and socialize, I'd recommend MMORPG's. The problem with the other two is the isolation, and many MMORPG players don't even play the game too much, but rather just hang out with friends in the games and talk about daily events.
It's not just that they're feature packed and I don't want to pay for stuff I won't use, but it's that these features I don't use cause such complexity in the software that the phone can hang during the most trivial tasks. A phone should never ever lock up, and they can take away any feature besides actual phoning to remedy that IMHO.
Vietnam (90%), Zimbabwe (90%), Indonesia (87%), China (86%), and Pakistan (86%). The countries with the lowest piracy rates were the United States (21%), New Zealand (23%), Austria (26%), and Finland (26%).
I'll wonder if they can see the common denominator among the piracy levels and these countries.
Looks to me like high piracy goes for less rich countries.
Wow, could BSA's issues have mostly to do with too expensive software, rather than a general evilness among people?
You are also going to take a lot of flak for this not being open source software. Remember, you are releasing to Linux and if you want to keep your Google is not an evil company image with Linux users you are going to have to eventually open up the source and probably GPL it if you actually expect people to use it.
Funny, I see most Linux users thinking quite highly of nVidia for consistently delivering reasonably good Linux drivers. Seriously, software doesn't have to be open source, it's as simple as that. And if you think it must be, I have to wonder how many alternative open source image managers there are for Linux for you to pick from? This software is good for choice, especially for the Linux users who don't mind closed source applications.
A 17-year-old student who posted on his blog site that he was being bullied and threatened by the Plainfield School District will face an expulsion hearing this week, a local attorney said.
Hehe, his point is hence proven.;-)
I hope there's some intervention for this though. If schools can expel students that don't share their opinions, where's society going then? They have their duty to teach their students; no more, no less. But in corporate America, I suppose the PR machinery for schools are more important anyway...
Having just gotten back from China I can tell you that ANYTHING you want on DVD is available for a BUCK.
Yes, that goes for DVD recordables too.
Seriously, what makes China that different? Piracy is rampant pretty much everywhere. It's just that pirated material is sold there. Good for those who're lazy enough, but I can't say it's hard to let a computer stay on over the night and spend a few minutes burning your own high quality pre-release DVD.
In Guangzhou lot of people have 50+ inch plasma Hi-Def TVs.
Yes, so? People have that in Sweden (where you come from?) too...? My sister has one for example. Hardly shocking. Well, it is if you believe all of China still are some kind of poor population, but that's not really the case anymore.
I'm sure they will pirate Blu-Ray when it comes out.
Yes, and I'm sure that will also be distributed to homes via BT sites too.
As you're a Swede, you already know we have very cheap 100 Mbps connections over here, with The Pirate Bay going strong, so only the sky is the limit as for pirated material here if that's what you wish to do. No need to travel and impress yourself by going to China?
Yeah. Since I defended MS in a post above, I still want to say that Vista hasn't been overly impressive to me. This is most likely because the goof ups during development that forced MS to largely restart their project sometime in 2004 with the Windows Server 2003 codebase instead of the XP one. So while Vista has been in development at least since 2002, it actually doesn't have that many uninterrupted development years behind it. And I think it shows -- as cut features, delays, and still an unimpressive final product. It's not that it looks horrible to me, but it's just playing catch up with where an OS like OS X has been for years. In terms of UI, desktop search, media management, "gadgets", and much more. This, along with its attempt to enforce a Un*x style security with User Access Control and only in part succeeding, makes it feel like an OS of maybe around 3 years back in evolution.
IE 7 and WMP 11 are also listed as features, but these will be released for Windows XP as well, and should clearly not be a purchase incentive for Vista alone, for anyone. Funny enough, these are among the most visible changes to the end-user.
The Sidebar isn't something I'd like to consume desktop real estate, and desktop searchers are available for free for a much larger range of Windows operating systems, with far more features than Windows Desktop Search seem to include. Again, you can get it today for XP, and they work great.
There are many more examples (Antispyware when people have already got used to the free Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, etc), and I think that's risks you run into when trying to add value by bundling stuff.
Vista do have OS-level improvements though (Wikipedia article listing of new features), but I feel most of the news are in more bundles and upgraded apps. So personally, being a user who actually know how to download and secure my OS, I think I'll have most need of Vista when those DirectX 10-only games start to arrive.
Yes, I agree. When the tester has his own hardware failing, and he even brings it up in the article (why should I care for you failing to even use your equipment!?), it doesn't lend much credibility to the reviewer.
I picture a clueless journalist thinking "oh, and upgrade should work!", crashing his system, formatting the whole thing, and finding out "oh, I forgot to check drivers are available before trying all this!", becoming pissed off, and writing an angry article.:-p
Vista might be the beginning of the end for Microsoft in the OS realm.
What makes you think this? Your quotes even agrees on things that you believe have been missing for way too long, and you agree that organization is nice, and elsewhere there's a lot of OK's which I take as neutral remarks not telling it's horrible features.
If Microsoft will fail in the OS realm with their OEM deals, that would need a completely devastating turn of events that would have to pretty much shock the world at the problems with it, with MS not being able to release patches for whatever problems there were in months. That would spell trouble. Until Microsoft released a new service pack or OS fixing the stuff. Then people would just look at that failure like they do with Windows Me, like they also managed to sell despite being far less stable than its predecessor.
I think this article is spot on the issues coming from an as imprecise term as "beta". On Google services, Beta often doesn't end up meaning anything more than "new" to end users because they're usually very solid, and can also remain in beta for years without anything even happening to them. In computer software, the same can sometimes apply, but others use "beta" with the older definition at least when developing large applications, like Microsoft. A "beta" that means "don't run this in anything like production systems".
He has these things to say when excluding his whining:
- I was given a pre-beta 2 release but will call it "Beta 2" in this article. - I can't install this "Beta 2" on my Lenovo ThinkPad X60 laptop. - I know beta software can be quirky. - I couldn't run an automated upgrade from XP. - I could run a clean install, but not all drivers are available yet, like that to my wireless card. - A clean install will not let you keep old drivers. - Install on Computer #2 failed because my clock battery was too old. - Install on Computer #3 failed because my hard drive crashed early on. - With Microsoft support help, I now have Vista running to some extent on my laptop.
Now, is this in any possible way a surprising turn of events for beta software with about a half a year left for bug fixing, polish, and catch-ups from driver developers? I really have to defend MS a bit when clueless people like him are given enough attention to appear on Slashdot.
But, at what point of copying large blocks of someone else's copyrighted material do you cross the line from fair use to copyright infringement?
Yes, that's what may be open for debate, however, of all blogs I've visited, I can hardly say anything I've seen has raised doubts about this. Again, as the author names his section by, it's about these block quotes, and how often do these cover more than a paragraph or so? A majority of a document? Hardly. That would make for a quite hard to read blog too; people don't want to dig through heaps and heaps of content. There's already a device invented for these situations, and they're frequently used by bloggers -- hyperlinks.
Thanks, that's a pretty nice website, and being updated too!
The AntiVir suggestion goes well with what I've heard too.
Generally I think many suggest AVG because it's what they've tried, and it works. It somehow seem to be the most used free AV, but I'm not convinced that's founded in detection rates, resource usage, etc. It could be the ZoneAlarm case -- the by far most popular one, but from my experiences, e.g Kerio has interfered with other system/network-close tools far less. I can't count how many times I've heard people complain about Kerio, but this is steering off-topic.:-)
I don't mean this to be a flame, but since detection rates are generally more important than software license in these cases due to the risk one would take with a subpar AV, I wonder if there's any statistics on detection rates that include clamAV?
Again, I'm not looking to discredit the tool, because I love OSS as well. Actually, one could say it would be a way to in the future credit it.:-)
The UK government has said it will bring in the new powers to address a rise in the use of encryption by criminals and terrorists.
So is it then OK to demand the UK government to stop encrypting "sensitive" information? I mean, they could be sneaking child porn in there. Surely, the UK government has something to hide, because that's basically the only reason to want privacy.
What's next? Forbidding using curtains to stop public insight into rooms. For God's sake, one could be raping a kid in there!
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.torrentspy.com/torrent/745696/Family_Gu y_Season_4
:-p
This link was brought to you by the Useless Piracy Battle Coalition.
As Slyck said, the TPB folks said the police wasn't 100% sure the confiscated computers had any illegal material on them.
.torrent hashes, they could've done this months earlier?
I wonder if this is an attempt/hope that they'll have carried actual infringing material on the server to set a crime in stone. I mean, if all they needed was some stupid
The premature departure of ThePirateBay.org marks a significant turning point in the BitTorrent community.
Well, it's a web site taken down in a battle against a movement in modern society. Yes, it was a popular web site, but are we really calling the Suprnova take down the same in retrospect? All good that did was spawning many others.
Damn, there are a lot of guys involved in this joke then!! :-D
Well orchestrated, Pirate Bay!
Hehe..
Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi While the DVD re-edits of these are slightly better than the theatrical re-edits from a couple years before, they are still deeply flawed. Han still "dodges" a laser. The Jabba scene is still redunandant, still repeats dialog from the Greedo scene, and still has that stupid slapstick moment of Han stepping on Jabba's tail. Empire's re-edit fares slightly better, but syncing the Emperor with the one from Jedi and the prequels was, I feel, a bad choice, necessitated only by a need to keep things consistant with the prequels. The new ending sequence in Jedi was a mess... The Death Star effect was changed for the worse, and the tribal festivities of the corny "Yub Nub" song was replaced with something considerably less inspiring.
:-S
The force of Nostalgy is strong in this one.
Seriously, when one start calling polish for movie consistency bad, and actually using the proper actor for the Emperor, I personally think one is going too far.
But, again, Nostalgy is the only truly powerful Force in the Star Wars universe.
Reading through the comments on this forum so far, looks like Rob got it right. About 1/3 like it a lot, about 1/3 think it's good but they're reflexively resistant, and about 1/3 sounding like country music singers and how they "long for the old one". :-)
:-)
Agreed, that's indeed a very good rating from a bunch of mostly pessimist comic book-guy style geeks.
From the message, I can't say he was looking for overly "mentally stimulating" things to do (although these are of course useful as well, besides this topic). If you have to pick between TV, reading and playing a MMORPG to make friends and socialize, I'd recommend MMORPG's. The problem with the other two is the isolation, and many MMORPG players don't even play the game too much, but rather just hang out with friends in the games and talk about daily events.
It's not just that they're feature packed and I don't want to pay for stuff I won't use, but it's that these features I don't use cause such complexity in the software that the phone can hang during the most trivial tasks. A phone should never ever lock up, and they can take away any feature besides actual phoning to remedy that IMHO.
Just TEN PEOPLE died?
Sorry guys, not that significant. How many people die every year due to any sort of drug related addiction?
A hell of a lot more.
It's of course not just about the deaths; these are just the tip of the iceberg of problems that can come along with it.
Vietnam (90%), Zimbabwe (90%), Indonesia (87%), China (86%), and Pakistan (86%). The countries with the lowest piracy rates were the United States (21%), New Zealand (23%), Austria (26%), and Finland (26%).
:-p
I'll wonder if they can see the common denominator among the piracy levels and these countries.
Looks to me like high piracy goes for less rich countries.
Wow, could BSA's issues have mostly to do with too expensive software, rather than a general evilness among people?
Naah, it can't be that simple, can it?
You are also going to take a lot of flak for this not being open source software. Remember, you are releasing to Linux and if you want to keep your Google is not an evil company image with Linux users you are going to have to eventually open up the source and probably GPL it if you actually expect people to use it.
Funny, I see most Linux users thinking quite highly of nVidia for consistently delivering reasonably good Linux drivers. Seriously, software doesn't have to be open source, it's as simple as that. And if you think it must be, I have to wonder how many alternative open source image managers there are for Linux for you to pick from? This software is good for choice, especially for the Linux users who don't mind closed source applications.
A 17-year-old student who posted on his blog site that he was being bullied and threatened by the Plainfield School District will face an expulsion hearing this week, a local attorney said.
;-)
Hehe, his point is hence proven.
I hope there's some intervention for this though. If schools can expel students that don't share their opinions, where's society going then? They have their duty to teach their students; no more, no less. But in corporate America, I suppose the PR machinery for schools are more important anyway...
Having just gotten back from China I can tell you that ANYTHING you want on DVD is available for a BUCK.
Yes, that goes for DVD recordables too.
Seriously, what makes China that different? Piracy is rampant pretty much everywhere. It's just that pirated material is sold there. Good for those who're lazy enough, but I can't say it's hard to let a computer stay on over the night and spend a few minutes burning your own high quality pre-release DVD.
In Guangzhou lot of people have 50+ inch plasma Hi-Def TVs.
Yes, so? People have that in Sweden (where you come from?) too...? My sister has one for example. Hardly shocking. Well, it is if you believe all of China still are some kind of poor population, but that's not really the case anymore.
I'm sure they will pirate Blu-Ray when it comes out.
Yes, and I'm sure that will also be distributed to homes via BT sites too.
As you're a Swede, you already know we have very cheap 100 Mbps connections over here, with The Pirate Bay going strong, so only the sky is the limit as for pirated material here if that's what you wish to do. No need to travel and impress yourself by going to China?
Yeah. Since I defended MS in a post above, I still want to say that Vista hasn't been overly impressive to me. This is most likely because the goof ups during development that forced MS to largely restart their project sometime in 2004 with the Windows Server 2003 codebase instead of the XP one. So while Vista has been in development at least since 2002, it actually doesn't have that many uninterrupted development years behind it. And I think it shows -- as cut features, delays, and still an unimpressive final product. It's not that it looks horrible to me, but it's just playing catch up with where an OS like OS X has been for years. In terms of UI, desktop search, media management, "gadgets", and much more. This, along with its attempt to enforce a Un*x style security with User Access Control and only in part succeeding, makes it feel like an OS of maybe around 3 years back in evolution.
IE 7 and WMP 11 are also listed as features, but these will be released for Windows XP as well, and should clearly not be a purchase incentive for Vista alone, for anyone. Funny enough, these are among the most visible changes to the end-user.
The Sidebar isn't something I'd like to consume desktop real estate, and desktop searchers are available for free for a much larger range of Windows operating systems, with far more features than Windows Desktop Search seem to include. Again, you can get it today for XP, and they work great.
There are many more examples (Antispyware when people have already got used to the free Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, etc), and I think that's risks you run into when trying to add value by bundling stuff.
Vista do have OS-level improvements though (Wikipedia article listing of new features), but I feel most of the news are in more bundles and upgraded apps. So personally, being a user who actually know how to download and secure my OS, I think I'll have most need of Vista when those DirectX 10-only games start to arrive.
Yes, I agree. When the tester has his own hardware failing, and he even brings it up in the article (why should I care for you failing to even use your equipment!?), it doesn't lend much credibility to the reviewer.
:-p
I picture a clueless journalist thinking "oh, and upgrade should work!", crashing his system, formatting the whole thing, and finding out "oh, I forgot to check drivers are available before trying all this!", becoming pissed off, and writing an angry article.
Vista might be the beginning of the end for Microsoft in the OS realm.
What makes you think this? Your quotes even agrees on things that you believe have been missing for way too long, and you agree that organization is nice, and elsewhere there's a lot of OK's which I take as neutral remarks not telling it's horrible features.
If Microsoft will fail in the OS realm with their OEM deals, that would need a completely devastating turn of events that would have to pretty much shock the world at the problems with it, with MS not being able to release patches for whatever problems there were in months. That would spell trouble. Until Microsoft released a new service pack or OS fixing the stuff. Then people would just look at that failure like they do with Windows Me, like they also managed to sell despite being far less stable than its predecessor.
I think this article is spot on the issues coming from an as imprecise term as "beta". On Google services, Beta often doesn't end up meaning anything more than "new" to end users because they're usually very solid, and can also remain in beta for years without anything even happening to them. In computer software, the same can sometimes apply, but others use "beta" with the older definition at least when developing large applications, like Microsoft. A "beta" that means "don't run this in anything like production systems".
He has these things to say when excluding his whining:
- I was given a pre-beta 2 release but will call it "Beta 2" in this article.
- I can't install this "Beta 2" on my Lenovo ThinkPad X60 laptop.
- I know beta software can be quirky.
- I couldn't run an automated upgrade from XP.
- I could run a clean install, but not all drivers are available yet, like that to my wireless card.
- A clean install will not let you keep old drivers.
- Install on Computer #2 failed because my clock battery was too old.
- Install on Computer #3 failed because my hard drive crashed early on.
- With Microsoft support help, I now have Vista running to some extent on my laptop.
Now, is this in any possible way a surprising turn of events for beta software with about a half a year left for bug fixing, polish, and catch-ups from driver developers? I really have to defend MS a bit when clueless people like him are given enough attention to appear on Slashdot.
But, at what point of copying large blocks of someone else's copyrighted material do you cross the line from fair use to copyright infringement?
Yes, that's what may be open for debate, however, of all blogs I've visited, I can hardly say anything I've seen has raised doubts about this. Again, as the author names his section by, it's about these block quotes, and how often do these cover more than a paragraph or so? A majority of a document? Hardly. That would make for a quite hard to read blog too; people don't want to dig through heaps and heaps of content. There's already a device invented for these situations, and they're frequently used by bloggers -- hyperlinks.
Thanks, that's a pretty nice website, and being updated too!
:-)
The AntiVir suggestion goes well with what I've heard too.
Generally I think many suggest AVG because it's what they've tried, and it works. It somehow seem to be the most used free AV, but I'm not convinced that's founded in detection rates, resource usage, etc. It could be the ZoneAlarm case -- the by far most popular one, but from my experiences, e.g Kerio has interfered with other system/network-close tools far less. I can't count how many times I've heard people complain about Kerio, but this is steering off-topic.
I don't mean this to be a flame, but since detection rates are generally more important than software license in these cases due to the risk one would take with a subpar AV, I wonder if there's any statistics on detection rates that include clamAV?
:-)
Again, I'm not looking to discredit the tool, because I love OSS as well. Actually, one could say it would be a way to in the future credit it.
Hey, he was just trying to stick with in-words of the early nineties!
Jeez, cut him some slack, it's hard to stay up to date...!
I purchased some new pop music and it went silent too. :-(
Then I touched my ears, and they were both bleeding...
Sue Creates an Apple? :-/
The UK government has said it will bring in the new powers to address a rise in the use of encryption by criminals and terrorists.
So is it then OK to demand the UK government to stop encrypting "sensitive" information? I mean, they could be sneaking child porn in there. Surely, the UK government has something to hide, because that's basically the only reason to want privacy.
What's next? Forbidding using curtains to stop public insight into rooms. For God's sake, one could be raping a kid in there!
Reminds me a bit of those books listing "cool" web site links when the dotcom bubble yet had to burst.