this is about the fact that due to RIAA's litigation-happy activities, she was essentially terrorized and intimidated. She was very. very afraid. Who is to blame for that fear and intimidation? The RIAA.
Thankfully, we have already declared a war on terrorism. The military will invade the RIAA soon.
"oh no this 3rd party application which adds dubious and useless enhancements to my system is causing my computer to not work upon upgrading to a completely new version!"
I've had these dubious and useless enhancements added to my Macs for years. 0 problems to date. These enhancements are tied very closely to the OS rev, and I would not expect them to work past an OS change.
Pshaw, I want my car to drive me home when I'm too drunk to drive myself!
Think of all of the social changes that self driving cars would bring.
No more police checkpoints. Kids with as much freedom as drunks, old people, and "normal" adults. No speeding tickets. Car chases in the movies will have to be set in the past, and eventually will look like westerns do today. Registration, insurance, and all that is the responsibility of the _driver_ today. Terrorists will no longer have to hijack trucks and stuff.
Come to think of it, I would guess by then, going to work would require taking off your shoes, going though a metal detector, and all that prior to take off.
A better answer would be to stop giving everyone personal computers if they're not supposed to be, well, personalizing them.
Not to be too fucking obvious, here.
How about using deductive reasoning instead of putting the finger in the dike?
I mean, its already illegal to share illegal stuff illegally. Why focus on p2p? This kind of information could be spread via email, snail mail, http, ftp, newsgroups, pencil and paper, smoke signals, telephone, telegraph, stenography, steganography, etc, etc, etc.
I can't wait until these technology ignorant people that are in power retire and die off. I guess it will be another 10-20 years of this crap, but then again, as the Who says "meet the new boss same as the old boss". So odds are, some other ignorant but powerful crap will continue.
You're fighting a battle which was stupid even before it was lost, 10 years ago. To the general population, when Joey Pimpleface finds some code on the internet that lets him sniff out some doofus's password, that is hacking.
All of these statements are inflammable. Definitely not flammable.
If translucency were so great in the real world, we would be printing on onion skin and writing on glass things.
Translucency has its place. Fishnet stockings and the like come to mind.
As far as on a computer, the best place I've found it to be is with terminal windows. Its nice to be able to have one terminal window over another one that is doing something and be able to passively watch the window below the current one.
Personally, I think that feature is excellent, and I hate being without it.
Translucency also enables things like rounded corners and drop shadows, which I think are also nice.
I don't see translucency going away any time soon. In fact, it was a big deal with GIFs on the web to add 1 bit translucency, and many people want better alpha channel support for PNGs on the web.
The thing is that translucency/alpha channel stuff is here, so why not use it?
You can also add human readable comments with things like who changed something, when, and why.
These things add no value to the computer program, but to us stupid humans, we actually value these things.
AFAIK, there is no way for 99.999% of the human race to tell much about HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\foo\bar\MGROPW with type of REG_SZ and a value of 0c0a000a2c means without some other information. The only part I made up in this example is foo and bar, everything else is stolen from a screen capture I found here.
Personally, I think that the trend towards XML based configuration files is not much better, because they seem to me as just another form of the example above.
It's the antivirus/computer companies fault, since they switched to giving people with new computers only 30-60 days of protection when they would give you a full year or even software that never expired... People think they still get full service when they buy a computer that they did 2-3 years ago.
OK. My computer did not come with any antivirus trial or program. At work, I use a computer and admin over 1,000 other computers, and none of them have installed or came with an antivirus thing.
Back in 1994, I did get some kind of Monkey virus or something when I ran Windows and DOS because a roommate used a floppy in the computer lab at school. I have not ran or used an antivirus thing on any of my computers since then.
So, my question is. Am I in the half that has antivirus protection or the half that thinks they do?
The best way to learn something is to try to teach it.
No, the best way to learn something is to do something, but that is based on my definition of learning.
I define learning as a relatively permanant change in behavior. I don't count "knowing better" as learning.
I do believe that the best way to validate that you have learned something is to teach it. That goes a new level called mastery, understanding, or simply "getting it".
Ah, ten years of Slashdot cliches. Here's to ten more, you crazy nerds.:)
Although my UID is not single digits or anything. I was a slahdotter before slashdot. If you know what chip-n-dips is, then you are an older geek like me.
Bonus points if you know what omphaloskepsis means.
Besides that, medicine and law are recession proof. Hell, they are nuclear-war proof.
I'll ignore medicine, but with respect to the topic of debate regarding grad school and non-us students, I would bet that approximately 0% of the law school graduate students are foreign. In fact, I would bet that approximately 0% are non-judeo/christian white people.
Now, with respect to US vs non-us people in general, the trend seems to be that Americans are pretty comfortable in the conservative middle-class kind of lifestyle. Things like run of the mill business management, banking, etc. But in my lifetime, I have seen the technical side of things and the lower class/labor side of things being dominated by foreign people.
Where I live, and nearby, we import seasonal workers, primarily from the former Soviet Union for tourist jobs. This is new. These jobs used to be done by American college/highschool kids and by other local people. I have no idea what that demographic is doing now. What do college and hs kids do for summer and part-time work during school? I work at a university, and I hardly see them working off campus.
Also, the migration of workers from South America and Mexico for low paying jobs is something that is exploding as well. Many of them are "illegal", and the government pretty much looks the other way. I can say that in my area, the number of non-native English speaking people has grown exponentially over the past 10-15 years.
I could buy a 10 GB drive for most of my OS and software, and just keep my media on a traditional hard drive. You don't need a super fast drive for your MP3s and Videos, but it would be nice to increase boot times as well as application start up times.
As an cluster guy, I would like to have these things as cheap, reliable, and removable. Size does not matter too much here.
As a server guy, I would like to have the same, but also with larger capacities.
Imagine a life w/o ever having a RAID array throw a disk. Imagine a life w/o having a RAID array.
Interesting concept, except that with the way it moves, it can't really walk in a straight line.
When I looked at the video, I thought, "WOW! Thats pretty cool how the body flips like that".
Then, it came to me, that it sucks that the body flips like that. What kind of payload could you have on the thing when every step it took it was flipped upside down?
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a value added here.
FWIW, it gave me a warm fuzzy to hear one of my slashdot "fans" mentioned by name on NPR for their efforts in fighting the RIAA.
I admire the effort of all those who actually attempt to work within the system to promote change for the betterment of everyone . These are the principles that the US and its constitution were founded on, and although we seem to be in the minority for desiring those principles, I have hope that others will follow.
Thank you for putting your law degree to good use.
I think she is like computer illeterate and whatnot, and the RIAA admitted that "oops, we meant to go after this person, or bad, sorry" and she has accumilated like 10s of thousands of debt to fight this.
Other countries have a better system where if the initiator of a lawsuit was completely wrong, then they have to pay or something like that. I think that is a better system. Because otherwise its advantagous for a lawyer just to blindly sue whenever they feel like it, and they get paid win or lose.
The article says that some say that day is already here. I agree.
Try to do -anything- on the web without having to deal with Firefox, Apache, PHP, etc, etc... Good freaking luck. Even Safari uses open source components, so there goes all compatibility with Mac as well.
I could quote more, but I would bet that almost 100% of the sane people on the planet would agree with both the parent post and the linked article.
I'm just confused as to the point of the article. This article seems as relevant as saying air in the Earth's atmosphere contains 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, 0.9 percent argon, 0.03 percent carbon dioxide, with trace gasses and this is impossible to avoid.
Is there something I missed? Is open source a problem or something? I don't understand the point here.
Whenever one process technology reaches its physical limits, we get a new one, because the new process makes money.
I kinda agree and kinda disagree.
Moore's "Law" is clearly stated in terms of physics. It says that the number of transisters will double, not the speed will double over time.
However, as Kurzweil and other's have observed, the speed of _computation_ has doubled over time before Moore's law and there is no reason or hint that this will stop once Moore's law is obsolete.
ICs have been good for a while, but then so were abacus' at one time.
CPUs are simply different than they were a few years ago. Things like the Niagra chip from Sun and the multi-core stuff from AMD and Intel is pretty different design (SMP on a chip -- yes, that is an oversimplification).
10-15 years is about in the middle of 2020, which seems to be a common point of a number of interesting stuff. Physics computations are predicted to be pretty interesting by then. Computers are predicted to be interesting by then. Who knows what else.
Its not hardware that I think is the problem or challenge, its the pains of software that seems to be more challenging. I mean its 2007 and we have what for software? OSes and compilers and whatnot have pretty much stagnated since the early 70s. Sure, we have 4g languages that are easier for us stupid people to program with, but from a performance and efficiency POV they are backwards, not forwards. JIT stuff in.NET and Java are a little interesting, but programming computers is still a PITA.
First, Linux is Linus' hobby that is kinda also a job. I've read somewhere where he said that he is more proud of Linux being on a digital picture frame that he bought his wife than having it on the top500 list.
Second, AFAIK, the kernel is fine for both desktop and server stuff. There are compile options to optimize for each, and patches, etc. Linux on the desktop is difficult because of a lacking standard and good software installation system and GUI environment and various other things. The kernel is fine for the desktop. There simply is not software on top of said kernel to make it desktop friendly.
He loaded what was billed as a fully featured OS. These days, what part of what a fully featured OS is assumed to provide is default support for a wide range of multimedia.
Everyone with any sense knows that Linux isn't a great choice compared to Windows or OS X for those that don't want to learn a new UI
OK, I'm going to be a little hard on Linux/*NIX here, but I'm not trolling. I love linux, I'm typing this from a Linux box, so here we go.
All *NIX GUI is pretty bad (with the exception of OS X). From my opinion, there is no real difference between Gnome and KDE, and both are pretty much a combo of 80s and 90s UNIX X window managers with a strong Microsoft Windows influence. My favorite GUI environment from the late 90s was WindowMaker, which was a ripoff of NextStep.
Linux is cool from the perspective of its openness and it being based on *NIX philosopies and style. But Even Linus will tell you that Linux is nothing new, and I believe that it would take something like a startup and a bunch of cash and forethought to make a good GUI for Linux or any other *NIX (again besides OS X).
I've used FVWM, TWM, OL(V)WM, WindowMaker, Afterstep (which is how I found/.), CDE, KDE, and Gnome, and I guess a few other Windowing environments for *NIX, and sure they are usable, but none of them are great.
It drives me up a wall that copy and paste is so inconsistant. I have to think, is it control-v, right click and use menu, middle click, shift-insert, and its common for me to get it wrong. Oh, to do page up/down, should I use page up or down keys, or shift and page up/down, or will page up and down even work? What about drag and drop? Will it work? Will it work between apps? What about a consistant Widget look and feel?
These are common GUI things from the mid 80s, but as a rank ordering from best to worst, you have OS X, Windows, and others. Windows is not that great either. The look and feel has become about as segmented as *NIX. And OS X is not perfect, but it seems clear that they have spent more time and effort with attention to these design features than anybody else.
I thought Google only needed a browser to run on, and you can get a browser on any of the various OS I've tried.
Me too. Sure, Google being primarily a server and service provider needs clients (in the client/server sense), and I've loved google's ability to keep their interfaces clean and standards compliant, and ones that "just work".
I don't use Windows as an OS. I mostly use Linux and OS X, and how well things like google maps works on these platforms with various web browsers. No plugins necessary. Just standard HTML and javascript.
Slashdot Mirror
this is about the fact that due to RIAA's litigation-happy activities, she was essentially terrorized and intimidated. She was very. very afraid. Who is to blame for that fear and intimidation? The RIAA.
Thankfully, we have already declared a war on terrorism. The military will invade the RIAA soon.
"oh no this 3rd party application which adds dubious and useless enhancements to my system is causing my computer to not work upon upgrading to a completely new version!"
I've had these dubious and useless enhancements added to my Macs for years. 0 problems to date. These enhancements are tied very closely to the OS rev, and I would not expect them to work past an OS change.
Pshaw, I want my car to drive me home when I'm too drunk to drive myself!
Think of all of the social changes that self driving cars would bring.
No more police checkpoints. Kids with as much freedom as drunks, old people, and "normal" adults. No speeding tickets. Car chases in the movies will have to be set in the past, and eventually will look like westerns do today. Registration, insurance, and all that is the responsibility of the _driver_ today. Terrorists will no longer have to hijack trucks and stuff.
Come to think of it, I would guess by then, going to work would require taking off your shoes, going though a metal detector, and all that prior to take off.
Wouldn't it just make a lot more sense to say it could hold X hours of music, instead?
How many hours of music are in the library of congress?
A better answer would be to stop giving everyone personal computers if they're not supposed to be, well, personalizing them.
Not to be too fucking obvious, here.
How about using deductive reasoning instead of putting the finger in the dike?
I mean, its already illegal to share illegal stuff illegally. Why focus on p2p? This kind of information could be spread via email, snail mail, http, ftp, newsgroups, pencil and paper, smoke signals, telephone, telegraph, stenography, steganography, etc, etc, etc.
I can't wait until these technology ignorant people that are in power retire and die off. I guess it will be another 10-20 years of this crap, but then again, as the Who says "meet the new boss same as the old boss". So odds are, some other ignorant but powerful crap will continue.
SHUT UP.
You're fighting a battle which was stupid even before it was lost, 10 years ago. To the general population, when Joey Pimpleface finds some code on the internet that lets him sniff out some doofus's password, that is hacking.
All of these statements are inflammable. Definitely not flammable.
If translucency were so great in the real world, we would be printing on onion skin and writing on glass things.
Translucency has its place. Fishnet stockings and the like come to mind.
As far as on a computer, the best place I've found it to be is with terminal windows. Its nice to be able to have one terminal window over another one that is doing something and be able to passively watch the window below the current one.
Personally, I think that feature is excellent, and I hate being without it.
Translucency also enables things like rounded corners and drop shadows, which I think are also nice.
I don't see translucency going away any time soon. In fact, it was a big deal with GIFs on the web to add 1 bit translucency, and many people want better alpha channel support for PNGs on the web.
The thing is that translucency/alpha channel stuff is here, so why not use it?
You can also add human readable comments with things like who changed something, when, and why.
These things add no value to the computer program, but to us stupid humans, we actually value these things.
AFAIK, there is no way for 99.999% of the human race to tell much about HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\foo\bar\MGROPW with type of REG_SZ and a value of 0c0a000a2c means without some other information. The only part I made up in this example is foo and bar, everything else is stolen from a screen capture I found here.
Personally, I think that the trend towards XML based configuration files is not much better, because they seem to me as just another form of the example above.
It's the antivirus/computer companies fault, since they switched to giving people with new computers only 30-60 days of protection when they would give you a full year or even software that never expired... People think they still get full service when they buy a computer that they did 2-3 years ago.
OK. My computer did not come with any antivirus trial or program. At work, I use a computer and admin over 1,000 other computers, and none of them have installed or came with an antivirus thing.
Back in 1994, I did get some kind of Monkey virus or something when I ran Windows and DOS because a roommate used a floppy in the computer lab at school. I have not ran or used an antivirus thing on any of my computers since then.
So, my question is. Am I in the half that has antivirus protection or the half that thinks they do?
Macs are really going to stink if Apple changes their default operating system to ZFS. ZFS is a file system.
Right, and emacs is a text editor.
At this point, why not just shut it down and give up?
I would agree that tags should just go away.
They are web2.0ish I guess, but they simply don't apply to slashdot. I'm not saying tags or slashdot are bad, I'm just saying that they don't mix.
The best way to learn something is to try to teach it.
No, the best way to learn something is to do something, but that is based on my definition of learning.
I define learning as a relatively permanant change in behavior. I don't count "knowing better" as learning.
I do believe that the best way to validate that you have learned something is to teach it. That goes a new level called mastery, understanding, or simply "getting it".
Ah, ten years of Slashdot cliches. Here's to ten more, you crazy nerds. :)
Although my UID is not single digits or anything. I was a slahdotter before slashdot. If you know what chip-n-dips is, then you are an older geek like me.
Bonus points if you know what omphaloskepsis means.
10 years? Where has the time gone?
Besides that, medicine and law are recession proof. Hell, they are nuclear-war proof.
I'll ignore medicine, but with respect to the topic of debate regarding grad school and non-us students, I would bet that approximately 0% of the law school graduate students are foreign. In fact, I would bet that approximately 0% are non-judeo/christian white people.
Now, with respect to US vs non-us people in general, the trend seems to be that Americans are pretty comfortable in the conservative middle-class kind of lifestyle. Things like run of the mill business management, banking, etc. But in my lifetime, I have seen the technical side of things and the lower class/labor side of things being dominated by foreign people.
Where I live, and nearby, we import seasonal workers, primarily from the former Soviet Union for tourist jobs. This is new. These jobs used to be done by American college/highschool kids and by other local people. I have no idea what that demographic is doing now. What do college and hs kids do for summer and part-time work during school? I work at a university, and I hardly see them working off campus.
Also, the migration of workers from South America and Mexico for low paying jobs is something that is exploding as well. Many of them are "illegal", and the government pretty much looks the other way. I can say that in my area, the number of non-native English speaking people has grown exponentially over the past 10-15 years.
Interesting.
I could buy a 10 GB drive for most of my OS and software, and just keep my media on a traditional hard drive. You don't need a super fast drive for your MP3s and Videos, but it would be nice to increase boot times as well as application start up times.
As an cluster guy, I would like to have these things as cheap, reliable, and removable. Size does not matter too much here.
As a server guy, I would like to have the same, but also with larger capacities.
Imagine a life w/o ever having a RAID array throw a disk. Imagine a life w/o having a RAID array.
Now, if only we could get rid of tapes...
You do realize Lenovo is selling the Thinkpads now because... *drumroll* they were the company that made them all along?
.sig makes sense today.
And isn't almost everything mass produced coming from China or nearby anyway?
I guess my
Interesting concept, except that with the way it moves, it can't really walk in a straight line.
When I looked at the video, I thought, "WOW! Thats pretty cool how the body flips like that".
Then, it came to me, that it sucks that the body flips like that. What kind of payload could you have on the thing when every step it took it was flipped upside down?
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a value added here.
Thanks, Bryan. I think you're my kind of people.
FWIW, it gave me a warm fuzzy to hear one of my slashdot "fans" mentioned by name on NPR for their efforts in fighting the RIAA.
I admire the effort of all those who actually attempt to work within the system to promote change for the betterment of everyone . These are the principles that the US and its constitution were founded on, and although we seem to be in the minority for desiring those principles, I have hope that others will follow.
Thank you for putting your law degree to good use.
It's an unfortunate situation where you still have to pay out when you are completely in the right.
So true. I heard the other day where someone on welfare and her 6 year old kid accumilated something like $20k in lawyer costs from an RIAA suit. Some info here. http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/6873.cfm here http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005294.php
I think she is like computer illeterate and whatnot, and the RIAA admitted that "oops, we meant to go after this person, or bad, sorry" and she has accumilated like 10s of thousands of debt to fight this.
Other countries have a better system where if the initiator of a lawsuit was completely wrong, then they have to pay or something like that. I think that is a better system. Because otherwise its advantagous for a lawyer just to blindly sue whenever they feel like it, and they get paid win or lose.
The article says that some say that day is already here. I agree.
Try to do -anything- on the web without having to deal with Firefox, Apache, PHP, etc, etc... Good freaking luck. Even Safari uses open source components, so there goes all compatibility with Mac as well.
I could quote more, but I would bet that almost 100% of the sane people on the planet would agree with both the parent post and the linked article.
I'm just confused as to the point of the article. This article seems as relevant as saying air in the Earth's atmosphere contains 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, 0.9 percent argon, 0.03 percent carbon dioxide, with trace gasses and this is impossible to avoid.
Is there something I missed? Is open source a problem or something? I don't understand the point here.
Whenever one process technology reaches its physical limits, we get a new one, because the new process makes money.
.NET and Java are a little interesting, but programming computers is still a PITA.
I kinda agree and kinda disagree.
Moore's "Law" is clearly stated in terms of physics. It says that the number of transisters will double, not the speed will double over time.
However, as Kurzweil and other's have observed, the speed of _computation_ has doubled over time before Moore's law and there is no reason or hint that this will stop once Moore's law is obsolete.
Take a peek at http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 specifically http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart03.jpg
ICs have been good for a while, but then so were abacus' at one time.
CPUs are simply different than they were a few years ago. Things like the Niagra chip from Sun and the multi-core stuff from AMD and Intel is pretty different design (SMP on a chip -- yes, that is an oversimplification).
10-15 years is about in the middle of 2020, which seems to be a common point of a number of interesting stuff. Physics computations are predicted to be pretty interesting by then. Computers are predicted to be interesting by then. Who knows what else.
Its not hardware that I think is the problem or challenge, its the pains of software that seems to be more challenging. I mean its 2007 and we have what for software? OSes and compilers and whatnot have pretty much stagnated since the early 70s. Sure, we have 4g languages that are easier for us stupid people to program with, but from a performance and efficiency POV they are backwards, not forwards. JIT stuff in
I guess we will have to wait and see.
First, Linux is Linus' hobby that is kinda also a job. I've read somewhere where he said that he is more proud of Linux being on a digital picture frame that he bought his wife than having it on the top500 list.
Second, AFAIK, the kernel is fine for both desktop and server stuff. There are compile options to optimize for each, and patches, etc. Linux on the desktop is difficult because of a lacking standard and good software installation system and GUI environment and various other things. The kernel is fine for the desktop. There simply is not software on top of said kernel to make it desktop friendly.
He loaded what was billed as a fully featured OS. These days, what part of what a fully featured OS is assumed to provide is default support for a wide range of multimedia.
Funny, Microsoft gets sued for provided a "fully featured OS" -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6998272.stm
Everyone with any sense knows that Linux isn't a great choice compared to Windows or OS X for those that don't want to learn a new UI
/.), CDE, KDE, and Gnome, and I guess a few other Windowing environments for *NIX, and sure they are usable, but none of them are great.
OK, I'm going to be a little hard on Linux/*NIX here, but I'm not trolling. I love linux, I'm typing this from a Linux box, so here we go.
All *NIX GUI is pretty bad (with the exception of OS X). From my opinion, there is no real difference between Gnome and KDE, and both are pretty much a combo of 80s and 90s UNIX X window managers with a strong Microsoft Windows influence. My favorite GUI environment from the late 90s was WindowMaker, which was a ripoff of NextStep.
Linux is cool from the perspective of its openness and it being based on *NIX philosopies and style. But Even Linus will tell you that Linux is nothing new, and I believe that it would take something like a startup and a bunch of cash and forethought to make a good GUI for Linux or any other *NIX (again besides OS X).
I've used FVWM, TWM, OL(V)WM, WindowMaker, Afterstep (which is how I found
It drives me up a wall that copy and paste is so inconsistant. I have to think, is it control-v, right click and use menu, middle click, shift-insert, and its common for me to get it wrong. Oh, to do page up/down, should I use page up or down keys, or shift and page up/down, or will page up and down even work? What about drag and drop? Will it work? Will it work between apps? What about a consistant Widget look and feel?
These are common GUI things from the mid 80s, but as a rank ordering from best to worst, you have OS X, Windows, and others. Windows is not that great either. The look and feel has become about as segmented as *NIX. And OS X is not perfect, but it seems clear that they have spent more time and effort with attention to these design features than anybody else.
I thought Google only needed a browser to run on, and you can get a browser on any of the various OS I've tried.
Me too. Sure, Google being primarily a server and service provider needs clients (in the client/server sense), and I've loved google's ability to keep their interfaces clean and standards compliant, and ones that "just work".
I don't use Windows as an OS. I mostly use Linux and OS X, and how well things like google maps works on these platforms with various web browsers. No plugins necessary. Just standard HTML and javascript.