re: the generated furor, is a low-budget advertising campaign. .
Sort of like starting "New Coca Cola", getting the furor as publicity, and pretending to revert back to the old fornula with "Classic Coca Cola" and looking like they're the good guys for listening to their buying publick: meanwhile, they secretly substituted corn syrup for the cane sugar originally used as the sweetener. A little sleight of hand here, a little misdirection there, and the guillible ol' public thinks "hey, this big ol' corporations looking out for US!". .
On the other hand, if there'd been no outcry, hey, new onerous terms accepted, and cash flow increased. Cha-cha-ching!
re: A property tax is the proper way to fund the maintenance of the facility. .
A fee for use can also be proper, such as a
toll to pay for bridge passage that helps to pay for maintenance. The
Coronado Bridge in San Diego used to be paid for that way. You can also push a social or ecologic/"green" agenda by waiving the toll if the car has multiple passengers and requiring the toll if the car has only a single passenger. But they've gotten rid of the tolls on that bridge completely since 2003.
re: I'm guessing that what China really wants is the ability to put back doors and kill switches into communications platforms used there. Microsoft... .
That seems like the most likely answer. China would definitely want central control and a centrally throwable kill switch. But China would also have to worry that some TLA from the USA might convince MS to introduce a few extra features into the mix. China would be better off building its own mash-up OS, preferably one from open source so that they could look at all of the code when they compile the final package. .
So ironic for an iron-fisted government to have to cradle the soft-warm-fuzzy underbelly of open-sourcery in order to get what it needs. Otherwise, they have to worry about Stuxnet like trojans or other hidden gateways and messengers.
a question about units... is that a "metric fuckton" or an "imperial fuckton" of data to which you are referring? ;>) Of course, along with having HIPAA compliance goes two types of caveats: you can accidentally and unmeaningly waive your right to privacy by signing up with a non-covered entity such as Google health, (that link is to the privacy concerns portion). Even though Google health is kaput, others are following in the wake of privacy obliteration. The other caveat is the sharing of data with "partners", who are loosely defined.
I guess I'm rolling for some more negative troll points, though my comments (and yours above, the two of you) are actually apropos and on point. .
Hey, did you notice how every comment downrating this article has been modded to (-1) immediately? There's only one comment at (+2) and one comment at (+1). It's almost as if the down-moderations are being done by someone with editor-level powers or maybe even a higher-higher upper-up muckity-muck. Rob-limo-u-sine-O, is this your doing at feeling insulted and called out for being caught shilling? Look at the distribution of comment scores at 13h45 PST 2013-03-05:
score . . . . . number of comments
-1 . . . . . . . . . 16 comments
0 . . . . . . . . . . 3 comments
1 . . . . . . . . . . 2 comments
2 . . . . . . . . . . 1 comment (haha, no one likes this article)
.
Have you ever seen such an amazing negative skewing of comment scores? Moi, je n'ai jamais pas vu quelque chose comme ci aqui (dang, where'd that come from?) . I agree with rocketrabbit that it would be tons more honorable if they put a bold label of slashvertisement across the top of this page. And seriously, consider interviewing an engineer or techie, or founder of the company at least, rather than the uber-muckity-muck VP of marketing.
Hey, did you notice how every comment downrating this article has been modded to (-1) immediately? There's only one comment at (+2) and one comment at (+1). It's almost as if the down-moderations are being done by someone with editor-level powers or maybe even a higher-higher upper-up muckity-muck. Rob-limo-u-sine-O, is this your doing at feeling insulted and called out for being caught shilling? Look at the distribution of comment scores at 13h45 PST 2013-03-05:
score . . . . . number of comments
-1 . . . . . . . . . 16 comments
0 . . . . . . . . . . 3 comments
1 . . . . . . . . . . 2 comments
2 . . . . . . . . . . 1 comment (haha, no one likes this article)
.
Have you ever seen such an amazing negative skewing of comment scores? Moi, je n'ai jamais pas vu quelque chose comme ci aqui (dang, where'd that come from?)
Yeah, it's definitely advertising when the person being interviewed is in charge of marketing and sales. Hey RobLimo, wake up and bring us back the real slashdot! Wouldn't it make more sense, Robin, to interview an engineer or designer at a company so that the article would be more slash-dotty and techy? Can't you even put up a pretense that you're not doing advertisements disguised as articles? I'd say "for shame, slashdot", but I don't think that this Dice Holdings SlashDot has any shame or is capable of any shame. Hell, I feel ashamed for posting in this crap advertisement, even if it is to complain about it.
Read the MSDN blog for how screwed up this really was. Here's the car analogy:
We have a "Secret Store" that tells "the team that owns the tires" that the tires are just about worn out and that they will be useless on a certain specific date. The "team that owns the tires" buys new tires and tells the "Secret Store" that new tires have been bought. But the team does not install the new tires, but places the task of installing the tires in an "unprioritized queue"!!!! Somehow, more important tasks like replacing the windshield washer fluid and replacing that pine-tree air freshener hanging off the mirror get prioritized on the queue and performed. Lo and hehold, the tires get too old, expire, and are taken off of the car. No one bothers putting new tires on the car. The car is nonfunctional. MS FTW, yet again!
It's incredible how they keep shuffling blame around, or hot-potato-ing it:
In this case, the Secret Store service notified the Windows Azure Storage service team that the SSL certificates mentioned above would expire on the given dates. On January 7th, 2013 the storage team updated the three certificates in the Secret Store and included them in a future release of the service. However, the team failed to flag the storage service release as a release that included certificate updates. Subsequently, the release of the storage service containing the time critical certificate updates was delayed behind updates flagged as higher priority, and was not deployed in time to meet the certificate expiration deadline. Additionally, because the certificate had already been updated in the Secret Store, no additional alerts were presented to the team, which was a gap in our alerting system. [source link] [bold emphasis mine]
Yeah, all of the window phones silliness is so worth laughing at. I remember the crazy ad that came out for the windows phone last year that had QuestLove in the commercial. I believe that/. had a story about MS cancelling that phone the SAME DAY that the commercial had just aired. . And what the fVCk is it with the stomping and jumping and slapping around of hardware in the ms tablet ads? Is that all that the MS tablets are good for? Throwing them around and clunking them onto tables and benches? What's with the ugly mean-faced girl-scouty attired girls in that first MS tablet surface ad? I think MS just saw the Apple ipod and iPhone ads that had a single song playing in the background with cool activities and decided to copy the style without any substance. Hey, that kind of explains most of the things that they do!
Thank you. I had not heard of RequestPolicy or of ImgLikeOpera before. I will download them and try them next. My parents tell me that when they had dial-up internet access, they would ssh into their university accounts and use Lynx to browse the internet in text mode. That must also be faster. I can read/. and most newspaper sites fine without images.
Nice! I like the fact that it was a linux user who paid the renewal fee and got passport.com back up again, allowing further logins into hotmail. Linky to credit card receipt of individual user :
The lapse, which was first reported on the Internet news service Slashdot.org, was apparently caused when Microsoft's registration for the Passport.com domain name expired sometime Dec. 24, Chaney said. The Passport.com site verifies user identification and passwords for access to Hotmail and about 25 other services, according to Chaney.
Chaney said he paid the bill Dec. 25 at about 2 p.m. EST and was given invoice #11395965 documenting the transaction. An electronic copy of the receipt can be viewed at his Web site at "www.doublewide.net."
Interesting. How did you set up the UI for it? Something like a regular gear-shifter? Have you actually made this, or is this just a conceptual thing? Very cool either way.:>)
Wouldn't it make more sense to use a system with a larger width lens to gather and capture more photons to increase the ability to get imagery in low-light conditions? Funnel more photons captured with a larger lens onto the same focal plane: more photons come onto the same pixel areas, leading to higher signal levels for the same stop and exposure time, right?
Very good points! An automatic transmission cannot read your mind. Having manual control of gear shifting lets you control what you want to do with the power-transmission system, particularly since you can see the road ahead of you and can plan for what you are about to do. You won't manually up-shift as you ease up on the accelerator when you know you'll need to stay in the same gear about 5 seconds later. .
I guess the point is that the automatic transmission tries to figure out what you meant to be doing, whereas with the manual, you use your own brain and control the system for what is going to happen.
Re: There are modern automatic transmissions that are basically just automated clutch-equipped gearboxes rather than the standard torque-converter-automatic that saps power like crazy. :>) Zoinks! I just learned something new. I'm more an electronics and software person, not a mechanical engineering gear-head person. I had never even thought about the power-loss through automatic transmissions until a few months ago, and I had never heard of the automated manual transmissions until reading your post. Something cool to look into when I'm thinking of buying a car someday.
Agreed. Blocking javascript and blacklisting the advertising sites makes quite a few pages load faster, except for the recalcitrant many pages which seem to hang on waiting for javascript payloads from google googlesyndication gravatar doubleclick facebook twitter facebooks-content-delivery-network and every like-it-plus-it-tag-it-tweet-it-inhale-it button available on the interwebs. God-damn-gez-und-fucking-heit!!! Too many things that block what you want. .
The other way to speed browse is to disable image loading entirely. Why can't there be a way to just selectively load images as needed instead of having to block all images entirely.???? But this is probably only useful to me as I like to read text-heavy sites like/. and newspapers, not flittering off to instagram or flickr or snapchatting. (i've got a blind cousin and a poor vision (extremely poooor vision) aunt, so I also try to see how well pages do for those who are blind and need to use text readers). .
The side-effect and side-benefit of blocking these bandwidth hogs is not that the sites load faster but that I use less bandwidth. If I could only do that lower bandwidth usage on my telephonic and tabletic devices so that I don't use up 40-75% (crapstistics, pulled out of the air) of my bandwidth on these useless tracking and analytics scripts then I could actually browse more content for the same cost. .
Don't tell me that I'm leeching off of you, you advertisers you! I pay for my bandwidth out of my own money!
While Linux may not be about revenue stream, Canonical is about monetizing what it can out of the gnu/linux/foss enviro-world, just like redhat also monetizes what it can out of the gnu/linux/foss world structure. Redhat just tends to donate back into the eco-structure much more than canonical does, and canonical tends to behave more like a bully thinking that canonical can lead by loud exhortations: "hey everybody, have a release schedule that meets our needs, not yours." Remember that Canonical is NOT about Linux. .
Herding cats by proclaiming yourself to be "THE leader" and shouting loudest does not work: example look how debian bent to Canonical/ubuntu's will on release schedules. It did not.
Copyright assignment, the idiocy of, in my opinion .
re: the one criticism they strangely seem to ignore is that Unity is licensed so that Canonical is assigned the copyright for any potential contributions. Just like you, Canonical enjoys being given things for free. .
Amen, brothers and sisters! That's the exact same sort of thing that happened with the community building up the compact disc database (cddb, look at its history on-line)
The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information thinking the service would also remain free.
The same sort of thing happened with CUPS, with apple buying outright ownership of the CUPS software package and hiring the developer fulltime with CUPS having all contributions assigning copyright to the key developer (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History ):
Michael Sweet, who owned Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997. The first public betas appeared in 1999.[3] The original design of CUPS used the LPD protocol, but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for several Linux distributions, including Red Hat Linux.[citation needed] In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[4] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[5]
Not so strangely, the same sort of copyright assignment sort of thing is NOT done or required for the linux kernel, but seeing as we trust our benevolent dictator to not kowtow or sell out to external interests, somehow this is definitely okay. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Copyright.2C_trademark.2C_and_naming
Torvalds states that the Linux kernel will not move from version 2 of the GPL to version 3. He specifically dislikes some provisions in the new license which prohibit the use of the software in digital rights management,[109][110] and it would also be impractical to obtain permission from all the copyright holders, who number in the thousands [emphasis by moi.[111]
Notice how the presence of multiple contributors who do not assign copyright over to a single benevolent dictator allows for the GPL to function the way it is intended to function (at least by the RMS [not root mean square] definition): free software that remains free as in freedom.
Interesting. It's also in color laserprinters according to the EFF site. It appears to be about counterfeiting money and tracking down those who try to print counterfeit bills at home, though it can also be used as an effective tracker system.
re Pretty sure the last one was a bug that was something to do with the cert expiring on a leap-day though. [emphasis mine] .
$gt begin{sarcasm} Well, if it was a leap-day event, well that's totally excuseable because there's no predictable way to know that a particular year might be a leap-year with a leap-day in it, and even if there were, my goodness, you'd need some sort of computational device to carry out the algorithm (that Al Gore, he invents everything!) that would let you figure it out, and who could afford a computational device??? end{sarcasm} ;>p
Come on, you can't let Microsoft off the hook for screwing up things like that. It's supposed to be a software company. Y2k was known about well before it occured; leap-year days are well known about and recur on an amazingly well-understood and defined schedule. This is not a much deeper problem. It's just another basic problem that shows that there are not any good processes going on behind the scenes at Microsoft. And Apple screwed up their alarm clock functionality that kept messing up on iOS at the beginning of the New Year, too. That was also just as inexcuseable.
Blocking search engines should lead all the way to blocking google and bing. Blocking organized indices should lead all the way to blocking yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle, remember???) and such. Blocking links to content should lead all the way to blocking The New York Times and every newspaper site and every web site in the entire WWW (as someone pointed out that the entire point of the world-wide-web and Hypertext Markup Language is to provide linkages between pages on the internet's WWW. .
This is the same crap that was being fed to people when there was the argument about the existence of "illegal links" or trying to tell people "hey don't link to our website without our permission!!!" It's like telling people you shouldn't tell anyone what a particular physical world geolocation address is IRL, or to not pass along a phone number (I can almost see the point in that one, though, for privacy reasons, eh?)
Hey, the East Germans tracked every privately owned typewriter so that they could know who might write or might have written subversive or anti-state material. Considering the twisted theorizing and behaviors the USA govt is currently performing, your comms drm concept may fly yet.
re DO you think that certain English dialects impart an aura of class or import to the speaker?
Yes, I do think that there are people who tend to ascribe more credibility or authority to people who speak in certain ways (dialect, use of slang, use of profanity). I am not one of those persons, but there are people around me at school who hang on the words of those with particular accents or discount others with the wrong types of speech mannerisms. For a musical take on this, see the musical performance "My Fair Lady". It shows at the least that people have believed this sort of thing for close to a century.
re:$329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16KB storage .
Hey, "editors" of slashdot, you might want to edit the reference to "16 KB of storage" to the correct value. You know that 640K ought to be enough for anybody, but 16KB, well that just seems wrong! C'mon, people and so-called "editors", get to actually reading the blurb before posting it to the front page. And what's with all the idio-advertising-spam shit on the firehose. I stopped going in the last three weeks because 90-98% of the firehose entries are "come visit kerala india" (I even had a tourism-bot spam one of my posts with a spam reply, yikes) or "come buy clothes from this tailor" or other spam.
Slashdot Mirror
re: the generated furor, is a low-budget advertising campaign.
.
Sort of like starting "New Coca Cola", getting the furor as publicity, and pretending to revert back to the old fornula with "Classic Coca Cola" and looking like they're the good guys for listening to their buying publick: meanwhile, they secretly substituted corn syrup for the cane sugar originally used as the sweetener. A little sleight of hand here, a little misdirection there, and the guillible ol' public thinks "hey, this big ol' corporations looking out for US!".
.
On the other hand, if there'd been no outcry, hey, new onerous terms accepted, and cash flow increased. Cha-cha-ching!
re: A property tax is the proper way to fund the maintenance of the facility.
.
A fee for use can also be proper, such as a toll to pay for bridge passage that helps to pay for maintenance. The Coronado Bridge in San Diego used to be paid for that way. You can also push a social or ecologic/"green" agenda by waiving the toll if the car has multiple passengers and requiring the toll if the car has only a single passenger. But they've gotten rid of the tolls on that bridge completely since 2003.
re: I'm guessing that what China really wants is the ability to put back doors and kill switches into communications platforms used there. Microsoft...
.
That seems like the most likely answer. China would definitely want central control and a centrally throwable kill switch. But China would also have to worry that some TLA from the USA might convince MS to introduce a few extra features into the mix. China would be better off building its own mash-up OS, preferably one from open source so that they could look at all of the code when they compile the final package.
.
So ironic for an iron-fisted government to have to cradle the soft-warm-fuzzy underbelly of open-sourcery in order to get what it needs. Otherwise, they have to worry about Stuxnet like trojans or other hidden gateways and messengers.
a question about units... is that a "metric fuckton" or an "imperial fuckton" of data to which you are referring?
;>)
Of course, along with having HIPAA compliance goes two types of caveats: you can accidentally and unmeaningly waive your right to privacy by signing up with a non-covered entity such as Google health, (that link is to the privacy concerns portion). Even though Google health is kaput, others are following in the wake of privacy obliteration. The other caveat is the sharing of data with "partners", who are loosely defined.
I guess I'm rolling for some more negative troll points, though my comments (and yours above, the two of you) are actually apropos and on point.
.
Hey, did you notice how every comment downrating this article has been modded to (-1) immediately? There's only one comment at (+2) and one comment at (+1). It's almost as if the down-moderations are being done by someone with editor-level powers or maybe even a higher-higher upper-up muckity-muck. Rob-limo-u-sine-O, is this your doing at feeling insulted and called out for being caught shilling? Look at the distribution of comment scores at 13h45 PST 2013-03-05:
score . . . . . number of comments
-1 . . . . . . . . . 16 comments
0 . . . . . . . . . . 3 comments
1 . . . . . . . . . . 2 comments
2 . . . . . . . . . . 1 comment (haha, no one likes this article)
.
Have you ever seen such an amazing negative skewing of comment scores? Moi, je n'ai jamais pas vu quelque chose comme ci aqui (dang, where'd that come from?)
.
I agree with rocketrabbit that it would be tons more honorable if they put a bold label of slashvertisement across the top of this page. And seriously, consider interviewing an engineer or techie, or founder of the company at least, rather than the uber-muckity-muck VP of marketing.
Hey, did you notice how every comment downrating this article has been modded to (-1) immediately? There's only one comment at (+2) and one comment at (+1). It's almost as if the down-moderations are being done by someone with editor-level powers or maybe even a higher-higher upper-up muckity-muck. Rob-limo-u-sine-O, is this your doing at feeling insulted and called out for being caught shilling? Look at the distribution of comment scores at 13h45 PST 2013-03-05:
score . . . . . number of comments
-1 . . . . . . . . . 16 comments
0 . . . . . . . . . . 3 comments
1 . . . . . . . . . . 2 comments
2 . . . . . . . . . . 1 comment (haha, no one likes this article)
.
Have you ever seen such an amazing negative skewing of comment scores? Moi, je n'ai jamais pas vu quelque chose comme ci aqui (dang, where'd that come from?)
It's incredible that you're so dense that you don't know about car analogies or soviet russia jokes! What, are you a neutron star?
Yeah, it's definitely advertising when the person being interviewed is in charge of marketing and sales. Hey RobLimo, wake up and bring us back the real slashdot! Wouldn't it make more sense, Robin, to interview an engineer or designer at a company so that the article would be more slash-dotty and techy? Can't you even put up a pretense that you're not doing advertisements disguised as articles? I'd say "for shame, slashdot", but I don't think that this Dice Holdings SlashDot has any shame or is capable of any shame. Hell, I feel ashamed for posting in this crap advertisement, even if it is to complain about it.
It's incredible how they keep shuffling blame around, or hot-potato-ing it:
In this case, the Secret Store service notified the Windows Azure Storage service team that the SSL certificates mentioned above would expire on the given dates. On January 7th, 2013 the storage team updated the three certificates in the Secret Store and included them in a future release of the service. However, the team failed to flag the storage service release as a release that included certificate updates. Subsequently, the release of the storage service containing the time critical certificate updates was delayed behind updates flagged as higher priority, and was not deployed in time to meet the certificate expiration deadline. Additionally, because the certificate had already been updated in the Secret Store, no additional alerts were presented to the team, which was a gap in our alerting system. [source link] [bold emphasis mine]Laughable, if it were not so stupid.
Yeah, all of the window phones silliness is so worth laughing at. I remember the crazy ad that came out for the windows phone last year that had QuestLove in the commercial. I believe that /. had a story about MS cancelling that phone the SAME DAY that the commercial had just aired.
.
And what the fVCk is it with the stomping and jumping and slapping around of hardware in the ms tablet ads? Is that all that the MS tablets are good for? Throwing them around and clunking them onto tables and benches? What's with the ugly mean-faced girl-scouty attired girls in that first MS tablet surface ad? I think MS just saw the Apple ipod and iPhone ads that had a single song playing in the background with cool activities and decided to copy the style without any substance. Hey, that kind of explains most of the things that they do!
Thank you. I had not heard of RequestPolicy or of ImgLikeOpera before. I will download them and try them next. My parents tell me that when they had dial-up internet access, they would ssh into their university accounts and use Lynx to browse the internet in text mode. That must also be faster. I can read /. and most newspaper sites fine without images.
Nice! I like the fact that it was a linux user who paid the renewal fee and got passport.com back up again, allowing further logins into hotmail. Linky to credit card receipt of individual user : The lapse, which was first reported on the Internet news service Slashdot.org, was apparently caused when Microsoft's registration for the Passport.com domain name expired sometime Dec. 24, Chaney said. The Passport.com site verifies user identification and passwords for access to Hotmail and about 25 other services, according to Chaney. Chaney said he paid the bill Dec. 25 at about 2 p.m. EST and was given invoice #11395965 documenting the transaction. An electronic copy of the receipt can be viewed at his Web site at "www.doublewide.net."
Interesting. How did you set up the UI for it? Something like a regular gear-shifter? Have you actually made this, or is this just a conceptual thing? Very cool either way. :>)
Wouldn't it make more sense to use a system with a larger width lens to gather and capture more photons to increase the ability to get imagery in low-light conditions? Funnel more photons captured with a larger lens onto the same focal plane: more photons come onto the same pixel areas, leading to higher signal levels for the same stop and exposure time, right?
Very good points! An automatic transmission cannot read your mind. Having manual control of gear shifting lets you control what you want to do with the power-transmission system, particularly since you can see the road ahead of you and can plan for what you are about to do. You won't manually up-shift as you ease up on the accelerator when you know you'll need to stay in the same gear about 5 seconds later.
.
I guess the point is that the automatic transmission tries to figure out what you meant to be doing, whereas with the manual, you use your own brain and control the system for what is going to happen.
Re: There are modern automatic transmissions that are basically just automated clutch-equipped gearboxes rather than the standard torque-converter-automatic that saps power like crazy.
:>)
Zoinks! I just learned something new. I'm more an electronics and software person, not a mechanical engineering gear-head person. I had never even thought about the power-loss through automatic transmissions until a few months ago, and I had never heard of the automated manual transmissions until reading your post. Something cool to look into when I'm thinking of buying a car someday.
Agreed. Blocking javascript and blacklisting the advertising sites makes quite a few pages load faster, except for the recalcitrant many pages which seem to hang on waiting for javascript payloads from google googlesyndication gravatar doubleclick facebook twitter facebooks-content-delivery-network and every like-it-plus-it-tag-it-tweet-it-inhale-it button available on the interwebs. God-damn-gez-und-fucking-heit!!! Too many things that block what you want. /. and newspapers, not flittering off to instagram or flickr or snapchatting. (i've got a blind cousin and a poor vision (extremely poooor vision) aunt, so I also try to see how well pages do for those who are blind and need to use text readers).
.
The other way to speed browse is to disable image loading entirely. Why can't there be a way to just selectively load images as needed instead of having to block all images entirely.???? But this is probably only useful to me as I like to read text-heavy sites like
.
The side-effect and side-benefit of blocking these bandwidth hogs is not that the sites load faster but that I use less bandwidth. If I could only do that lower bandwidth usage on my telephonic and tabletic devices so that I don't use up 40-75% (crapstistics, pulled out of the air) of my bandwidth on these useless tracking and analytics scripts then I could actually browse more content for the same cost.
.
Don't tell me that I'm leeching off of you, you advertisers you! I pay for my bandwidth out of my own money!
While Linux may not be about revenue stream, Canonical is about monetizing what it can out of the gnu/linux/foss enviro-world, just like redhat also monetizes what it can out of the gnu/linux/foss world structure. Redhat just tends to donate back into the eco-structure much more than canonical does, and canonical tends to behave more like a bully thinking that canonical can lead by loud exhortations: "hey everybody, have a release schedule that meets our needs, not yours." Remember that Canonical is NOT about Linux.
.
Herding cats by proclaiming yourself to be "THE leader" and shouting loudest does not work: example look how debian bent to Canonical/ubuntu's will on release schedules. It did not.
.
re: the one criticism they strangely seem to ignore is that Unity is licensed so that Canonical is assigned the copyright for any potential contributions. Just like you, Canonical enjoys being given things for free.
.
Amen, brothers and sisters! That's the exact same sort of thing that happened with the community building up the compact disc database (cddb, look at its history on-line) The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information thinking the service would also remain free.
The same sort of thing happened with CUPS, with apple buying outright ownership of the CUPS software package and hiring the developer fulltime with CUPS having all contributions assigning copyright to the key developer (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History ):
Michael Sweet, who owned Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997. The first public betas appeared in 1999.[3] The original design of CUPS used the LPD protocol, but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for several Linux distributions, including Red Hat Linux.[citation needed] In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[4] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[5]Not so strangely, the same sort of copyright assignment sort of thing is NOT done or required for the linux kernel, but seeing as we trust our benevolent dictator to not kowtow or sell out to external interests, somehow this is definitely okay. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Copyright.2C_trademark.2C_and_naming
Torvalds states that the Linux kernel will not move from version 2 of the GPL to version 3. He specifically dislikes some provisions in the new license which prohibit the use of the software in digital rights management,[109][110] and it would also be impractical to obtain permission from all the copyright holders, who number in the thousands [emphasis by moiNotice how the presence of multiple contributors who do not assign copyright over to a single benevolent dictator allows for the GPL to function the way it is intended to function (at least by the RMS [not root mean square] definition): free software that remains free as in freedom.
Interesting. It's also in color laserprinters according to the EFF site. It appears to be about counterfeiting money and tracking down those who try to print counterfeit bills at home, though it can also be used as an effective tracker system.
re Pretty sure the last one was a bug that was something to do with the cert expiring on a leap-day though. [emphasis mine]
.
$gt begin{sarcasm} Well, if it was a leap-day event, well that's totally excuseable because there's no predictable way to know that a particular year might be a leap-year with a leap-day in it, and even if there were, my goodness, you'd need some sort of computational device to carry out the algorithm (that Al Gore, he invents everything!) that would let you figure it out, and who could afford a computational device??? end{sarcasm}
;>p
Come on, you can't let Microsoft off the hook for screwing up things like that. It's supposed to be a software company. Y2k was known about well before it occured; leap-year days are well known about and recur on an amazingly well-understood and defined schedule. This is not a much deeper problem. It's just another basic problem that shows that there are not any good processes going on behind the scenes at Microsoft. And Apple screwed up their alarm clock functionality that kept messing up on iOS at the beginning of the New Year, too. That was also just as inexcuseable.
Blocking search engines should lead all the way to blocking google and bing. Blocking organized indices should lead all the way to blocking yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle, remember???) and such. Blocking links to content should lead all the way to blocking The New York Times and every newspaper site and every web site in the entire WWW (as someone pointed out that the entire point of the world-wide-web and Hypertext Markup Language is to provide linkages between pages on the internet's WWW.
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This is the same crap that was being fed to people when there was the argument about the existence of "illegal links" or trying to tell people "hey don't link to our website without our permission!!!" It's like telling people you shouldn't tell anyone what a particular physical world geolocation address is IRL, or to not pass along a phone number (I can almost see the point in that one, though, for privacy reasons, eh?)
Hey, the East Germans tracked every privately owned typewriter so that they could know who might write or might have written subversive or anti-state material. Considering the twisted theorizing and behaviors the USA govt is currently performing, your comms drm concept may fly yet.
re DO you think that certain English dialects impart an aura of class or import to the speaker? Yes, I do think that there are people who tend to ascribe more credibility or authority to people who speak in certain ways (dialect, use of slang, use of profanity). I am not one of those persons, but there are people around me at school who hang on the words of those with particular accents or discount others with the wrong types of speech mannerisms. For a musical take on this, see the musical performance "My Fair Lady". It shows at the least that people have believed this sort of thing for close to a century.
re:$329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16KB storage
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Hey, "editors" of slashdot, you might want to edit the reference to "16 KB of storage" to the correct value. You know that 640K ought to be enough for anybody, but 16KB, well that just seems wrong! C'mon, people and so-called "editors", get to actually reading the blurb before posting it to the front page. And what's with all the idio-advertising-spam shit on the firehose. I stopped going in the last three weeks because 90-98% of the firehose entries are "come visit kerala india" (I even had a tourism-bot spam one of my posts with a spam reply, yikes) or "come buy clothes from this tailor" or other spam.