Gateway had a policy until a year ago that the warranty would be void if you even installed software after you purchased the computer. For instance, if you installed a retail version of PhotoShop, your warranty would be void. However, this is not illegal.
The GIMP is *not* fine. The interface is convoluted and, being a GIMP novice, I find it difficult to perform the simplest tasks in GIMP. Photoshop, on the other hand, has been usability engineered in such a way that the simple tasks are extremely easy to perform, even to a novice like me.
This is the strangest thing to say. Having used both GIMP and Photoshop, the menus look the same to me. May be there are different features, but I haven't heard anyone say that photoshop has a good user interface.
but if you are doing work that needs to go into a print publication
As I said in my original post, the general trend is towards electronic publishing. Soon people will have very little time to go through dead tree brochures. Till about a couple of years ago, I used to get glossy publications from vendors. Now I get CD-ROMs and spiels about how many features are present in the company website. It won't be long now...
All nusicians that lose revenue to Kazza are rich. Look at the sharing lists of people who they go after. Do you see any little indi artists there?
And that hurts the indie artists--if the pricing was done right, some of the people downloading the top40 stuff would buy the indie albums. The problem is similar to that faced by smaller software publishers--who will purchase a $50 imaging program when you can download Photoshop for free?
Name me three innovative linux features in the OS, I'll name you a hundred innovative features in Apple's OSes. Nearly everything cool in Linux was done somewhere else first.
Since you didn't name even a couple of features in Apple's OS, I will make this unsubstantiated statement: for every 3 innovative features in OSX, I will name 300 innovative features in Linux.
Hmm, somehow methinks there are going to be a lot more G5 clusters popping up running OS X than the cray numbers. I guess we'll see.
Yeah, generalizing from a sample size of one is always a great idea. I am not holding my breath though.
It is usually possible to tell there's something wrong with a post when someone starts ranting and raving about GIMP. Yep, it's free, and no, it's no patch on Photoshop. In fact, GraphicConverter is in many ways better than GIMP.
And why is Photoshop better again? Is it because you shelled out $$$ for it? Unless you need CMYK support (and you don't need that for electronic publishing), GIMP is just fine. And people use ImageMagick for converting files in UNIX.
Hmm, I feel like a game of Diablo. Oh, what's that? You can only run it in emulation?
Yeah, talk about the two games that have been released on OS X. Face it, with almost all the games going with DirectX, Mac as a gaming platform is dead. And you have Quake in GNU/Linux too.
They're probably really neat, you'd probably download them and stick them in your utilities folder and they'd never get seen again.
I don't have to download them--they are already installed and ready to use. And when was the last time you could trust an.exe in closed systems (most likely spy/adware)?
Yeah, and with every point release adds more features than Linux gets in a full digit release.
I suppose you are talking about the kernel. Can you list the new features in the Mac kernel?
Linux certainly has it's place in areas where organisations can develop a full system, but where you want to go out and buy something and have it all work, intuitively, and stable-y, and without spyware, and without MS groping your HD, you go buy a mac. Simple.
Apple software (eg. iTunes) does send info back to the company. And no, that is even before you sign up for their service.
Oh really? They follow all of the licenses, they have helped improve many programs and libraries (gcc and KHTML come immediately to mind) and they have given us quite a bit (say, all of Darwin) that they didn't have to.
No, they don't follow licenses: FSF had to threated to sue them before Jobs released the changes to gcc. As for giving back to the community, the FreeBSD people were pretty happy to have Apple support till one by one all Apple-paid developers withdrew from FreeBSD.
Do I care whether it is as open as Linux?
Openness of a platform is not a matter of religion. It is human nature to yearn for freedom. I suppose you would be happy to be a well fed prisoner.
You will be left with an obsolete brick in just a few years.
Unless the software is rented to you and the company goes belly-up, you can still use the one that came with the hardware, right? You wouldn't be able to run the latest OS on the old hardware anyway, so what's the point?
What about a command that sets the video card to a really bad scan rate and/or resolution, damaging the CRT? There was an early "hardware" virus that supposedly did this.
That was quite likely an urban legend. Anyway, it hasn't been possible with monitors made in the last 10 years.
You will be left with an obsolete brick in just a few years.
Unless the software is rented to you and the company goes belly-up, you can still use the one that came with the hardware, right? You wouldn't be able to run the latest OS on the old hardware anyway, so what's the point?
Anybody know a cheap source of ~6-10" 800x600 LCD screens?
Try EarthLCD. They have a lot of LCDs for about $100. What would be really cool would be a machine with a character display device (which can be had for about $10). This would make a good text editing machine.
My opinion: It won't kill you to register, and I'd rather read the article and learn something interesting than rail against them as a matter of principle and isolate myself.
Registration is another hurdle which browsers other than IE have a problem with (they use IE specific cookie detection code). I have reported this to many websites but no action was taken.
That was great for the days when spell checking was a process that took a long time. But now it can be done almost instantly for any reasonable length document (I have a 35kword document I'm working on with OO.org with a few non-dictionary words in it, and a spell check occurs as quickly as I can move my eyes from clicking the 'skip' button back to the box that displays the word that isn't in the dictionary). The idea of checking the spelling 'while you're away' is an idea that had its time ten years ago, it just isn't possible now. The check will be done before you can get out of your seat.
And you suffer because you let typesetting interfere with the creative process. Have a look here to see how you can create a good document. I used Word for a while and hated all the little things it did while you were typing the document--like reformatting the paragraph continuously, and changing spelling when it thought you had made a mistake.
I can see how a foreign government might have reasonably decided that US software wasn't the best option. However, that doesn't mean that there was any big secret there, except for the sake of political scandal.
I can see why the German government is funding gnupg. However, one shouldn't blame people who buy software to expect "fitness for merchantibility" (although that is explicitly excluded in the EULA, go figure).
anyone who willfully and knowingly uses smileys or other "emoticons" should have their mail client replace it with a some boilerplate text that reads "WARNING: IDIOT AT THE KEYBOARD"
They are necessary due to the nature of email. Emails are used for casual conversations without the feedback that is no essential to such communication. Think of all the flame wars that have been avoided by judicious use of emoticons.
That's incorrect. It was documented, publicized in tech rags, and even sold as a feature for international customers. It became an issue maybe because IBM oversold the product, but probably mainly for political reasons.
Why is escrow a feature? Did they promise TLA protection for companies who went bought the software?:-) Or something along the lines of "it's not a bug, it's a feature"?
Note that Netscape and Microsoft also gave the NSA part of their SSL keys as well. So this situation was not unique to Lotus and was mandated by US government regulation for "export" products.
I doubt Netscape was involved. The Netscape international version was only 40 bit anyway, so what would they escrow? People could probably break it using pencil and paper. Microsoft claimed that the strength of their cipher was determined by the server they connected to, so no reduction in key strength was required.
According to IBM/Lotus, there was no key escrow for the North American version.
The big issue was that IBM/Lotus didn't tell their non-US clients about the escrow until they were found out.
Could you elaborate? Notes isn't perfect, but it's more secure than many other products of it's class. Of course, it was built in a different era, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was built with keysizes in mind that are no longer "good."
Notes encryption had a key length of 64 bits, but 24 of those bits were escrowed with US government agencies. As you know, 40 bit keys are trivially easy to break. It was a big issue about 8 years ago. However, I doubt it was discussed in the mainstream press. As for your comment about security, there is no way to know since no one has audited the full source.
Good cryptographic controls are built into the product, so it's easy for individual users to put these kinds of policies in force for their own messages.
Do those policies include giving away 24 of the 64 bits in the key? Makes me feel really secure.
I sincerely hope than some more mainstream languages (besides Fortran) add support for this style of processing.
Are there any commercial packages using FORTRAN today? I think even Mathworks is moving away from it. Hardly a mainstream programming language.
Otherwise the vector processing capabilities will continue be effectively limited to handcoded assembly
Vector processors weren't general purpose enough to be useful until recently (SSE2). For instance, Apple had single precision floating points which served very little purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Gateway had a policy until a year ago that the warranty would be void if you even installed software after you purchased the computer. For instance, if you installed a retail version of PhotoShop, your warranty would be void. However, this is not illegal.
Not if it downhill :-)
This is the strangest thing to say. Having used both GIMP and Photoshop, the menus look the same to me. May be there are different features, but I haven't heard anyone say that photoshop has a good user interface.
As I said in my original post, the general trend is towards electronic publishing. Soon people will have very little time to go through dead tree brochures. Till about a couple of years ago, I used to get glossy publications from vendors. Now I get CD-ROMs and spiels about how many features are present in the company website. It won't be long now ...
And that hurts the indie artists--if the pricing was done right, some of the people downloading the top40 stuff would buy the indie albums. The problem is similar to that faced by smaller software publishers--who will purchase a $50 imaging program when you can download Photoshop for free?
I am even more surprised to hear about a 486 with a CPU fan. I thought CPU fans were a recent abomination.
Since you didn't name even a couple of features in Apple's OS, I will make this unsubstantiated statement: for every 3 innovative features in OSX, I will name 300 innovative features in Linux.
Yeah, generalizing from a sample size of one is always a great idea. I am not holding my breath though.
And why is Photoshop better again? Is it because you shelled out $$$ for it? Unless you need CMYK support (and you don't need that for electronic publishing), GIMP is just fine. And people use ImageMagick for converting files in UNIX.
Yeah, talk about the two games that have been released on OS X. Face it, with almost all the games going with DirectX, Mac as a gaming platform is dead. And you have Quake in GNU/Linux too.
I don't have to download them--they are already installed and ready to use. And when was the last time you could trust an .exe in closed systems (most likely spy/adware)?
I suppose you are talking about the kernel. Can you list the new features in the Mac kernel?
Apple software (eg. iTunes) does send info back to the company. And no, that is even before you sign up for their service.
No, they don't follow licenses: FSF had to threated to sue them before Jobs released the changes to gcc. As for giving back to the community, the FreeBSD people were pretty happy to have Apple support till one by one all Apple-paid developers withdrew from FreeBSD.
Openness of a platform is not a matter of religion. It is human nature to yearn for freedom. I suppose you would be happy to be a well fed prisoner.
Sounds like something from the Jargon file (the one with Robin Hood). What is the name of the program again? :-)
I haven't had any problem with the Linux version. An earlier version used to take up 100% CPU though (some kind of busy loop).
Unless the software is rented to you and the company goes belly-up, you can still use the one that came with the hardware, right? You wouldn't be able to run the latest OS on the old hardware anyway, so what's the point?
That was quite likely an urban legend. Anyway, it hasn't been possible with monitors made in the last 10 years.
Unless the software is rented to you and the company goes belly-up, you can still use the one that came with the hardware, right? You wouldn't be able to run the latest OS on the old hardware anyway, so what's the point?
Try EarthLCD. They have a lot of LCDs for about $100. What would be really cool would be a machine with a character display device (which can be had for about $10). This would make a good text editing machine.
Registration is another hurdle which browsers other than IE have a problem with (they use IE specific cookie detection code). I have reported this to many websites but no action was taken.
Physics proof? If you are going to use Physics, give the proper expansion QED = Quantum Electrodynamics.
And you suffer because you let typesetting interfere with the creative process. Have a look here to see how you can create a good document. I used Word for a while and hated all the little things it did while you were typing the document--like reformatting the paragraph continuously, and changing spelling when it thought you had made a mistake.
I can see why the German government is funding gnupg. However, one shouldn't blame people who buy software to expect "fitness for merchantibility" (although that is explicitly excluded in the EULA, go figure).
They are necessary due to the nature of email. Emails are used for casual conversations without the feedback that is no essential to such communication. Think of all the flame wars that have been avoided by judicious use of emoticons.
Why is escrow a feature? Did they promise TLA protection for companies who went bought the software? :-) Or something along the lines of "it's not a bug, it's a feature"?
I doubt Netscape was involved. The Netscape international version was only 40 bit anyway, so what would they escrow? People could probably break it using pencil and paper. Microsoft claimed that the strength of their cipher was determined by the server they connected to, so no reduction in key strength was required.
The big issue was that IBM/Lotus didn't tell their non-US clients about the escrow until they were found out.
Notes encryption had a key length of 64 bits, but 24 of those bits were escrowed with US government agencies. As you know, 40 bit keys are trivially easy to break. It was a big issue about 8 years ago. However, I doubt it was discussed in the mainstream press. As for your comment about security, there is no way to know since no one has audited the full source.
Do those policies include giving away 24 of the 64 bits in the key? Makes me feel really secure.
Are there any commercial packages using FORTRAN today? I think even Mathworks is moving away from it. Hardly a mainstream programming language.
Vector processors weren't general purpose enough to be useful until recently (SSE2). For instance, Apple had single precision floating points which served very little purpose.
I don't think there is any code sharing. However, it is mentioned in the Maxima webpage.