Mozilla was intended to be a replacement to a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. What's emerged is a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. Tell me again why anyone bothered?
Ah, but Mozilla is "buggy, bloated and over-featured" on a *much* bigger scale than Communicator was -- just as all the things it does right are more impressive than Communicator.
I think the problem with Mozilla is that they implemented an 'ideal' architecture in terms of extensibility and cross-platform-ness, and made the decision that certain other things (conformity with the host interface, sparing use of resources, etc.) weren't important.
Hey, I can't argue -- I'm posting this from Mozilla 0.8, but then I *do* have a fast machine:/
If a song is bought from the website I would hope the contract is a little more fair.
Sure, you can hope [wicked grin] and I admit there may be more chance... but then again some artists may be able to make their own deals with Napster, admittedly only the very powerful (e.g. Prince, Madonna) or the very... umm... unpowerful (insert local garage band here).
Either way, the artists are gonna get screwed... so, nothing's changed then.
2. The consumer's knowledge that if the songs are bought directly from a band's website, actual money has gone to the artist, and not neccessarily just the labels as it will be under the Napster payment system.
Isn't it a standard clause in record company contracts these days to sign over use of the artist's name in any web address -- definitely the.com version anyway? Then they can just fake it as a "straight from the band" site with copy written by marketing drones...
Vaguely related fact: The capital of South Australia (Adelaide) is known as the 'city of churches' as it has more per capita than any of the other Australian states / territories. (Fortunately in my case I'm from Sydney).
Apparently Adelaide also has more brothels per capita as well. (No, I haven't indulged:)
Sure there is a vocal crowd who oppose such things as keeping refugees in concentration camps, but these are (smelly hippies || professional protestors || 'do-gooders')
Remember that this in contravention of UN human rights treaties that we (Australia) have signed, and puts us in about the same position as Burma or Pakistan when it comes to making statements on human rights abuses in other countries. (East Timor, for example).
i.e. not a very credible one - "do as I say, not as I do"
Wasn't Australia the island where the british sent all their criminals and other "anti-social" people to get rid of them ?
However, the colony of South Australia was founded by free settlers as a business venture. Unlike almost all of the other states (i.e. former colonies), which *were* made up from criminals and those sent to guard them, at least initially.
1) No one who was "just following orders" was tried at Nuremberg. Only those "in charge" were tried.
I'll have to check a list to see that, but almost everyone except Goebbels tried that defence AFAICR...
2) Corporations are not "taking orders".
But if they are acting without the moral compulsions that an ordinary person does, obeying the letter but not the spirit of the law, that is usually their defence when thousands of people are poisoned by the company's actions -- "we were maximizing shareholder value". Sounds a lot like "just following orders" to me.
Furthermore, Tatu Ylonen seems to be a fair and decent sort of person. He didn't try to enforce his trademark until he started getting tons of annoying email and support calls from people who didn't realize they were using OpenSSH.
Why take out the trademark if you won't enforce it? Use it or lose it...
I was replying to the specific sentence I quoted, which was my I marked my post off-topic (I don't consider that Tatu has this attitude, but the attitude that poster displayed frightened me).
As regards the SSH kerfuffle, hopefully the IETF will rename the standard and then OpenSSH can change their name to match that...
War means killing people, Business means paying people and making money to pay with.
Murder is not acceptable. Corporate attitudes are partly caused by the ground rules of business.
You should look at the economic reasoning behind most wars. Obviously it was "acceptable" to kill a couple of hundered thousand Iraqis in order to keep oil prices down.
...for having such a sucky SMTP server, and for short-changing me on bandwidth (my 608/128 ADSL is running at 108/109 right now).
It's time to hold the ISPs accountable!
One of my client's ISPs takes months to respond to a simple request, usually one that is required because they have stuffed up the NT machines they don't even know how to admin properly. You can be sure they'll be held accountable in a few months time, when that contract comes up for "renewal"...
For a start the nazis were individual people who could each make their own decisions, whereas a corporate entity is obliged to act in the best interests of its shareholders.
So "I was just following orders", while not accepted as a valid defence at the Nuremberg Trials, is somehow acceptable for members of modern corporations?
The end does not, and never will, justify the means.
(please don't mod too harshly, moderators, I won't do it again...:)
Sorry for the offtopicness, but does anyone remember Thomas M. Disch's Amnesia? That was probably one of the best written (and definitely the longest) text games I've played.
That was a great game... I never got past the brownstone building once owned by John Lennon (I think that's what it was) though. Must dig that up from somewhere and play it again sometime. Last time I played that game was on my Commodore 64. I feel old.
In my analysis, I'd say he's trying to make money off his jealousy towards SciFi authors.
I think the money is irrelevant; but in SF lit crit, even more so than in criticism of general literature, the opinions advanced often seem to be personal attacks on the beliefs and values of the author's opponents/targets, and decency and propriety are the first things out the window when this process starts. (Look at Aldiss' Billion/Trillion Year Spree for an example.) The object of the author is to disseminate their view of history at the expense of variant accounts (and make a bit of money on the side, I'm sure:).
The great shame of this is that it is often the better authors who indulge in this sort of behaviour; Disch is an original and interesting writer, although he didn't really write all that much within the genre itself.
(Also, Poe wasn't an SF author, although his work does presage the style of 20th Century fantasy literature. The first 'modern' SF writer of any note was H.G. Wells...)
Re:A generation of sociopaths?
on
'Snatch'
·
· Score: 1
Wile E. Coyote getting flattened was one thing. Brains and gore all over the screen is another. I find it a little disturbing that kids think this is great, knee-slapping, hilarious stuff.
This is just the clown-falling-over, getting slapped-in-the-face style of comedy taken to its logical extreme. For all the depth these characters are presented with, they may as well be cartoon characters getting safes dropped on their heads, or being blown up by faulty ACME dynamite, or the like.
Fight Club is tied with Natural Born Killers as my all time favorite movie.
Natural Born Killers was an insult to the intelligence. Take a decent script by Tarantino, remove any irony, and film... Stone's message seemed to be "Violence in the mass media is a bad thing, so... ummm... here's lots of it, just to prove my point". Also, we got to see Juliette Lewis do her f*cking weird dancing thing *again*. (as seen in the Cape Fear remake and every movie she's done since). I've got nothing against violence in film, as long as it plays a part in the plot, but if I want to see mindless killing I'll take it with a hint of humour and dramatic excess, a la early Arnie films:)
This is the film that made me swear never to see another Oliver Stone film again. I'm not alone in this; I saw the film with 5 friends, and we all felt the same way. Basically it felt like we were being preached to by someone who felt that it was OK for him to break the very rule that he was preaching, because "it's such an important message". In other words, a pro-censorship film from someone who obviously can't affect his viewers on the issue any other way.
This does explain a lot, though, about why a certain listserver a guy up in Dallas administers had to migrate its whole list to eGroups because Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were almost always IP blocking, or rejecting messages over a certain recipient per hour quota, or any number of other forms of useless bullshit.
Of course, eGroups is now Yahoo! eGroups, so the fun can begin again once they decide the advertising isn't making them enough money:)
I'm serious, that was almost but not quite the catchphrase of an advertisement that was inflicted upon me on an International flight into Sydney. I couldn't believe my eyes, it's funny enough when Melbourne claims to have IT clues. The video was nice though, lots of fancy transitions and pictures zooming into others etc.
Not to knock Adelaide, some interesting stuff does come out of here from time to time, but I'd hardly describe it as a world HQ of 'IT innovation'. Stand aside Silicon Valley! *snort*
Melbourne's main advantage is its status as the traditional home of television content development... translates to "multimedia content" in this new media corporate climate.
Oh, I often find too many transitions in videos rather disorienting... like seeing 10 fonts in one 3-page document:)
Thanks to competition, I'm now on a relatively unlimited download cable connection (though O@H, of course).
Thanks to the lack of competition, I, living in Adelaide, am unable to get any cable access. I have a socket in my wall that Foxtel (Murdoch's Fox and the half-privatized Telstra) will only sell me cable TV programming through, purely because Optus stopped their cable rollout (and thus data access) after doing the eastern coast.
In the past few weeks ADSL has become available... now which body part should I sell to afford it? Or should I wait several years until Telstra give other telecom companies local loop access, so I can use another provider?
Competition? Not sure what it's really like, here...
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla was intended to be a replacement to a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. What's emerged is a buggy, bloated and over-featured browser. Tell me again why anyone bothered?
:/
Ah, but Mozilla is "buggy, bloated and over-featured" on a *much* bigger scale than Communicator was -- just as all the things it does right are more impressive than Communicator.
I think the problem with Mozilla is that they implemented an 'ideal' architecture in terms of extensibility and cross-platform-ness, and made the decision that certain other things (conformity with the host interface, sparing use of resources, etc.) weren't important.
Hey, I can't argue -- I'm posting this from Mozilla 0.8, but then I *do* have a fast machine
If a song is bought from the website I would hope the contract is a little more fair.
Sure, you can hope [wicked grin] and I admit there may be more chance... but then again some artists may be able to make their own deals with Napster, admittedly only the very powerful (e.g. Prince, Madonna) or the very... umm... unpowerful (insert local garage band here).
Either way, the artists are gonna get screwed... so, nothing's changed then.
2. The consumer's knowledge that if the songs are bought directly from a band's website, actual money has gone to the artist, and not neccessarily just the labels as it will be under the Napster payment system.
.com version anyway? Then they can just fake it as a "straight from the band" site with copy written by marketing drones...
Isn't it a standard clause in record company contracts these days to sign over use of the artist's name in any web address -- definitely the
Vaguely related fact: The capital of South Australia (Adelaide) is known as the 'city of churches' as it has more per capita than any of the other Australian states / territories. (Fortunately in my case I'm from Sydney).
:)
Apparently Adelaide also has more brothels per capita as well. (No, I haven't indulged
Sure there is a vocal crowd who oppose such things as keeping refugees in concentration camps, but these are (smelly hippies || professional protestors || 'do-gooders')
Remember that this in contravention of UN human rights treaties that we (Australia) have signed, and puts us in about the same position as Burma or Pakistan when it comes to making statements on human rights abuses in other countries. (East Timor, for example).
i.e. not a very credible one - "do as I say, not as I do"
Wasn't Australia the island where the british sent all their criminals and other "anti-social" people to get rid of them ?
However, the colony of South Australia was founded by free settlers as a business venture. Unlike almost all of the other states (i.e. former colonies), which *were* made up from criminals and those sent to guard them, at least initially.
Messes up your "theory", doesn't it.
1) No one who was "just following orders" was tried at Nuremberg. Only those "in charge" were tried.
I'll have to check a list to see that, but almost everyone except Goebbels tried that defence AFAICR...
2) Corporations are not "taking orders".
But if they are acting without the moral compulsions that an ordinary person does, obeying the letter but not the spirit of the law, that is usually their defence when thousands of people are poisoned by the company's actions -- "we were maximizing shareholder value". Sounds a lot like "just following orders" to me.
Furthermore, Tatu Ylonen seems to be a fair and decent sort of person. He didn't try to enforce his trademark until he started getting tons of annoying email and support calls from people who didn't realize they were using OpenSSH.
Why take out the trademark if you won't enforce it? Use it or lose it...
I was replying to the specific sentence I quoted, which was my I marked my post off-topic (I don't consider that Tatu has this attitude, but the attitude that poster displayed frightened me).
As regards the SSH kerfuffle, hopefully the IETF will rename the standard and then OpenSSH can change their name to match that...
War means killing people, Business means paying people and making money to pay with.
Murder is not acceptable. Corporate attitudes are partly caused by the ground rules of business.
You should look at the economic reasoning behind most wars. Obviously it was "acceptable" to kill a couple of hundered thousand Iraqis in order to keep oil prices down.
...for having such a sucky SMTP server, and for short-changing me on bandwidth (my 608/128 ADSL is running at 108/109 right now).
It's time to hold the ISPs accountable!
One of my client's ISPs takes months to respond to a simple request, usually one that is required because they have stuffed up the NT machines they don't even know how to admin properly. You can be sure they'll be held accountable in a few months time, when that contract comes up for "renewal"...
If they called it 'OpenCocaCola' and it was rather popular and it was 2 years before Coke sued them... coke would probably lose it's trademark.
Money talks... I'm sure Coca-Cola can afford to buy a few judges.
For a start the nazis were individual people who could each make their own decisions, whereas a corporate entity is obliged to act in the best interests of its shareholders.
So "I was just following orders", while not accepted as a valid defence at the Nuremberg Trials, is somehow acceptable for members of modern corporations?
The end does not, and never will, justify the means.
(please don't mod too harshly, moderators, I won't do it again...:)
Sorry for the offtopicness, but does anyone remember Thomas M. Disch's Amnesia? That was probably one of the best written (and definitely the longest) text games I've played.
That was a great game... I never got past the brownstone building once owned by John Lennon (I think that's what it was) though. Must dig that up from somewhere and play it again sometime. Last time I played that game was on my Commodore 64. I feel old.
In my analysis, I'd say he's trying to make money off his jealousy towards SciFi authors.
:).
I think the money is irrelevant; but in SF lit crit, even more so than in criticism of general literature, the opinions advanced often seem to be personal attacks on the beliefs and values of the author's opponents/targets, and decency and propriety are the first things out the window when this process starts. (Look at Aldiss' Billion/Trillion Year Spree for an example.) The object of the author is to disseminate their view of history at the expense of variant accounts (and make a bit of money on the side, I'm sure
The great shame of this is that it is often the better authors who indulge in this sort of behaviour; Disch is an original and interesting writer, although he didn't really write all that much within the genre itself.
(Also, Poe wasn't an SF author, although his work does presage the style of 20th Century fantasy literature. The first 'modern' SF writer of any note was H.G. Wells...)
Sorry about the tone... I was getting a bit irritated there, and the weather here has been high 30-degrees C for a couple of weeks :/
:)
I've tried the game, BTW... it made me queasy, especially the rapid zooming in & out phases
Yes, but you can't copy their workers for free ;-)
:)
Cloning is getting cheaper, though... (j/k
Wile E. Coyote getting flattened was one thing. Brains and gore all over the screen is another. I find it a little disturbing that kids think this is great, knee-slapping, hilarious stuff.
This is just the clown-falling-over, getting slapped-in-the-face style of comedy taken to its logical extreme. For all the depth these characters are presented with, they may as well be cartoon characters getting safes dropped on their heads, or being blown up by faulty ACME dynamite, or the like.
Fight Club is tied with Natural Born Killers as my all time favorite movie.
:)
Natural Born Killers was an insult to the intelligence. Take a decent script by Tarantino, remove any irony, and film... Stone's message seemed to be "Violence in the mass media is a bad thing, so... ummm... here's lots of it, just to prove my point". Also, we got to see Juliette Lewis do her f*cking weird dancing thing *again*. (as seen in the Cape Fear remake and every movie she's done since). I've got nothing against violence in film, as long as it plays a part in the plot, but if I want to see mindless killing I'll take it with a hint of humour and dramatic excess, a la early Arnie films
This is the film that made me swear never to see another Oliver Stone film again. I'm not alone in this; I saw the film with 5 friends, and we all felt the same way. Basically it felt like we were being preached to by someone who felt that it was OK for him to break the very rule that he was preaching, because "it's such an important message". In other words, a pro-censorship film from someone who obviously can't affect his viewers on the issue any other way.
If you like Tetris®, you might like a Tetris clone I wrote that simulates the effect of hallucinogens(no, Tetripz is that other one) called TOD.
This is getting a bit like Kibo on Usenet... no-one can mention Tetris on Slashdot without you advertising your *#!@^%$ game.
Think that's bad...
:)
I live in Perth!
Maybe some South African telcos can move eastward. Might be quicker and cheaper in the long run than moving all those Telstra vans out of Sydney
This does explain a lot, though, about why a certain listserver a guy up in Dallas administers had to migrate its whole list to eGroups because Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were almost always IP blocking, or rejecting messages over a certain recipient per hour quota, or any number of other forms of useless bullshit.
:)
Of course, eGroups is now Yahoo! eGroups, so the fun can begin again once they decide the advertising isn't making them enough money
I'm serious, that was almost but not quite the catchphrase of an advertisement that was inflicted upon me on an International flight into Sydney. I couldn't believe my eyes, it's funny enough when Melbourne claims to have IT clues. The video was nice though, lots of fancy transitions and pictures zooming into others etc.
:)
Not to knock Adelaide, some interesting stuff does come out of here from time to time, but I'd hardly describe it as a world HQ of 'IT innovation'. Stand aside Silicon Valley! *snort*
Melbourne's main advantage is its status as the traditional home of television content development... translates to "multimedia content" in this new media corporate climate.
Oh, I often find too many transitions in videos rather disorienting... like seeing 10 fonts in one 3-page document
And you might want to get a new television. The ABC - state run television - seem to get most programming from the UK.
And it's SBS - state owned, some commercials - that shows 98% of the good programs on Australian TV. Mainly documentaries & cult/arthouse films.
"Adelaide is the free world's headquarters for IT innovation"
:)
Laughable -- and I live in Adelaide
Does that slogan imply that the world behind the Iron Curtain has a similar HQ for IT innovation? Soviet-era Leningrad, perchance?
Real football has a round ball.
:)
It's 'The World Game'(tm).
Thanks to competition, I'm now on a relatively unlimited download cable connection (though O@H, of course).
Thanks to the lack of competition, I, living in Adelaide, am unable to get any cable access. I have a socket in my wall that Foxtel (Murdoch's Fox and the half-privatized Telstra) will only sell me cable TV programming through, purely because Optus stopped their cable rollout (and thus data access) after doing the eastern coast.
In the past few weeks ADSL has become available... now which body part should I sell to afford it? Or should I wait several years until Telstra give other telecom companies local loop access, so I can use another provider?
Competition? Not sure what it's really like, here...