No phone is plugged into the through jack. The modem is an external USR Courier X2, flashed to v90. The problems are twofold. One is the phone at the other end, in the lab at work, is behind a switch that does not believe in any speed above 28.8k. The other is the crappy phone wiring in this house, that sometimes gives me 40k to my ISP, but usually hovers in the mid 30s.
Oh, plus all this is going through IP masquerading on a 486 box running RedHat 6.2b. No real problems, apart from Outlook, which needs to be shutdown and restarted before it will give me my mail. Do you think it knows I'm secretly using Linux?
First it checks your plugins. Note that this is slow enough (on a 28.8k modem) that it can put up a page saying what it is doing.
Then you get a page that presumably has some huge graphic on it. I didn't wait for it to load - I clicked on "enter html page". The alternative was flash.
Next another page, possibly also with a huge graphic. The only text on the page? A link, titled enter. I clicked it.
Now another of these slow "I'm checking you out" pages. This one is trying to find out what browser I'm using. How long can it take them to look in the http headers? I click on "netscape / ie 4.0 + 5" because I think that might be what I have.
Finally (the name of the file is frame_four.html) I get to the content. It is graphic intensive, and the main graphic is an animated gif, which rotates so fast you can't actually make out any details. But amidst the blurs I can make out... a foot-tall fish-shaped system unit, with separate monitor and separate speakers.
No wonder Apple are suing. I've half a mind to sue these bastards myself.
Faced with the choice between a PN ISP and a non-PN ISP, I know which most of use here would choose. However, it may not be easy to find out whether your ISP is in the Predictive Network or not, or the non-PN ISPs may be much more expensive.
The solution is noise. Code up a browser-bot (GPLed, of course) that randomly surfs the web while you're not (you don't want to interfere with your real browsing). Be careful you don't cross the arbitrary line of "excessive use"! Feed it some biases, or search terms from time to time, and watch as you get bombarded with spam from www.armadillofancier.com.
The difference is that AOLG is not directly involved. It's more like suing the city for allowing the person who shot you to walk on the street where you got shot.
Oh, and not that it's impossible to give up smoking, but when the tobacco companies alter their products to make it harder (while denying that this is what they're doing) I think a smoker has a case against them. Imagine if you bought a piece of software that gradually (without telling you, and the support people deny this is happening) encrypted all your data to make it harder to export into another program, and then started corrupting your data, so at the end using the program wasn't even useful any more, but you still had to use it every day because otherwise your whole system would crash.
NVidia, at least on some level, realize that they don't make money on the drivers. Otherwise they would charge you for every upgrade, every additional OS, and so on. However, they haven't made the cognitive leap that says that not only will bad drivers cut your sales (albeit not by much) but that good drivers will help your sales (by even less). But the good part is that if you publish your top level specs (without going into detail of how the card works), people will write good drivers for you for free.
You made the parallel with Intel. Intel gets it. You don't see Intel bragging about the latest opcodes in their new processor, but not telling you how to use it unless you sign an NDA. The more software that uses Intel-specific chip functionality, the less market share AMD gets.
Unfortunately, it's not as easy as that. When you bought your car, part of the cost was to pay for the time and materials of designing it in the first place. If GM spends $10M designing a new car, and expects to sell 100,000 of them, well, it's easy to hide $100 in the cost of a new car.
Likewise, when you buy a Britney (bless her silicone-ness) Spears CD, part of the cost goes to pay for time spent writing the song, studio time and so on. If Britney (or whoever writes her songs) spent 100 hours writing a song, wants to be paid $1,000 / hour, has 10 songs on a CD, and expects to sell 1,000,000 CDs, then they add one dollar to the cost of a CD to cover their time while writing it.
The obvious problem is, if people are copying the CD around in vast numbers (in whatever format), Britney is not getting her $1. It doesn't matter that she's losing that portion of the cost that represents materials and distribution, because she hasn't incurred any. It doesn't even matter that she's losing the portion of the sale price of the CD that represents the record company's profits. They're no longer involved in the transaction (remember - they billed Britney up front for studio time and promotion).
Should Britney get her dollar? What if she sells 2 million CDs? She has now made $2,000 / hour for her effort in writing it. At what point does this stop being an incentive to create and start becoming an incentive to retire? (emphasis added because this is a long rambling post and I finally got to an interesting point).
I think my point is that we are used to an environment in which the development costs, per unit, are much smaller than the unit production costs. No-one notices the $100 development fee on their $20,000 car. But when production costs go to zero, the development costs (Britney's dollar) become much more noticeable. Add to that the impracticality of collection, and the impossibility of enforcement, and you have a real problem. I really think the only solution is to change your business model.
I think a useful role model here is Alan Cox. Alan (I bet it's not every day that AC gets compared to Britney Spears) gives away his code. Not only that, but he is paid to give it away by a company that gives away lots of people's code. RedHat (in theory) make their money by selling supporting services, and conveniently pre-packaged...
Was it me, or did he imply that some of this stuff could be dumped on an area of a CPU, essentially giving you an on-die disk? Seek times measured in clock cycles? Yum.
...would be Belgium? It's not as hilly, so less strenuous for unfit geeks. Plus they have great beer. Lots of styles, most of them very alcoholic. German beer, while better than the piss that Americans apparently enjoy drinking, gets a little samey after a few liters.
Or better yet, England. Gentle, rolling hills, and the best beer in the world.
Disclaimer: I was born in England, but live in Minnesota. Don't anyone suggest a Linux Showshoeing Hike.
This one looks like it will be a lot better. As someone else pointed out, condensing 900+ pages into 90 minutes is pretty much impossible. 270 minutes is maybe doable.
Seems to me that if I had a mainframe, or could get hold of one, this is an awesome virtual hosting environment.
Give me money, and I give you root access to your own, incredibly reliable, Linux box. If you trash it, it can be restored from backups in seconds. Incremental cost of adding another virtual host: almost nil. Until, of course, we get to 41,000. By then I should have enough money to buy a new mainframe. And so on.
What's so bad about noise? You people at slashdot take signal too seriously
Moderation & meta-moderation are horrible. If the first-posters, Natalie-worshipers and hot-grits-pourers would go away they wouldn't be necessary. That's what's wrong with trying to get a first post.
These are two scenarios. If you assign the copyright you can't revoke it. They own it. You also can't change the licence on subsequent versions, because you're constrained by the GPL.
If you don't assign the copyright, but release under the GPL, that version remains under the GPL forever. However, you may change the licencing for future versions at your whim.
Proof, if proof were needed, that karma does not work. Here we have someone who, by dint of thoughtful posting and so on, has been moderated up enough times to get the +1 bonus, but who can't do anything better with it than to first post.
Plus, he can't spell "first post".
Plus, he wasn't even first.
Plus, if I were going to post something completely offtopic, I'd check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box to avoid moderators overly keen on the "overrated" option. Like this.
Re:You wanna talk about irony?
on
Protesting DMCA
·
· Score: 4
I don't want to get into veteran-bashing, because I do generally respect the sacrfices these people made. But because they risked their lives (in many cases, involuntarily) for our freedom that gives them the right to curtail it?
You have to be careful about assuming that veterans risked anything "for your freedom". Many US veterans risked their lives to suppress the freedoms of other people (Vietnam), or to keep oil prices low (Iraq). There are no Civil War veterans left alive, but were you able to ask I'm sure you'd get at least two different viewpoints on who was fighting for what.
The freedom part of the GPL is that everyone else gets the same rights as you. The source was made available to you, so you have to make it available to others (if you distribute binaries).
No, it's not totally free. IRL, you can do pretty much whatever you like inside your house, but once you get out on the street there are things you can't do (drive as fast as you like, on the wrong side of the road, etc.). These limitations are placed on you to protect the freedom (and life) of others. Likewise, the GPL puts restrictions on you to protect others' access to free software.
Total freedom, IMHO, disappeared the day the second sentient being was born on this planet. Freedom is as much about everyone's freedom as it is about yours.
Oh, and Franklin was talking about essential freedoms. He probably wouldn't include software, even if you could explain it to him.
The tailor is charging for the materials and for his time. If I want to make a copy of the suit, I will have to duplicate the materials, and invest some time.
If I want to duplicate an MP3, I have to invest diskspace (which I have already paid for), bandwidth (which I'm paying for anyway), and CPU time (ditto). The cost of production is negligible..
Slashdot Mirror
No phone is plugged into the through jack. The modem is an external USR Courier X2, flashed to v90. The problems are twofold. One is the phone at the other end, in the lab at work, is behind a switch that does not believe in any speed above 28.8k. The other is the crappy phone wiring in this house, that sometimes gives me 40k to my ISP, but usually hovers in the mid 30s.
Oh, plus all this is going through IP masquerading on a 486 box running RedHat 6.2b. No real problems, apart from Outlook, which needs to be shutdown and restarted before it will give me my mail. Do you think it knows I'm secretly using Linux?
Not if you reduce the number of 'P's by one...
FishPC, that is.
... a foot-tall fish-shaped system unit, with separate monitor and separate speakers.
First it checks your plugins. Note that this is slow enough (on a 28.8k modem) that it can put up a page saying what it is doing.
Then you get a page that presumably has some huge graphic on it. I didn't wait for it to load - I clicked on "enter html page". The alternative was flash.
Next another page, possibly also with a huge graphic. The only text on the page? A link, titled enter. I clicked it.
Now another of these slow "I'm checking you out" pages. This one is trying to find out what browser I'm using. How long can it take them to look in the http headers? I click on "netscape / ie 4.0 + 5" because I think that might be what I have.
Finally (the name of the file is frame_four.html) I get to the content. It is graphic intensive, and the main graphic is an animated gif, which rotates so fast you can't actually make out any details. But amidst the blurs I can make out
No wonder Apple are suing. I've half a mind to sue these bastards myself.
Faced with the choice between a PN ISP and a non-PN ISP, I know which most of use here would choose. However, it may not be easy to find out whether your ISP is in the Predictive Network or not, or the non-PN ISPs may be much more expensive.
The solution is noise. Code up a browser-bot (GPLed, of course) that randomly surfs the web while you're not (you don't want to interfere with your real browsing). Be careful you don't cross the arbitrary line of "excessive use"! Feed it some biases, or search terms from time to time, and watch as you get bombarded with spam from www.armadillofancier.com.
... then there wouldn't be any internet and we wouldn't have to put up with your trolling.
The difference is that AOLG is not directly involved. It's more like suing the city for allowing the person who shot you to walk on the street where you got shot.
Oh, and not that it's impossible to give up smoking, but when the tobacco companies alter their products to make it harder (while denying that this is what they're doing) I think a smoker has a case against them. Imagine if you bought a piece of software that gradually (without telling you, and the support people deny this is happening) encrypted all your data to make it harder to export into another program, and then started corrupting your data, so at the end using the program wasn't even useful any more, but you still had to use it every day because otherwise your whole system would crash.
NVidia, at least on some level, realize that they don't make money on the drivers. Otherwise they would charge you for every upgrade, every additional OS, and so on. However, they haven't made the cognitive leap that says that not only will bad drivers cut your sales (albeit not by much) but that good drivers will help your sales (by even less). But the good part is that if you publish your top level specs (without going into detail of how the card works), people will write good drivers for you for free.
You made the parallel with Intel. Intel gets it. You don't see Intel bragging about the latest opcodes in their new processor, but not telling you how to use it unless you sign an NDA. The more software that uses Intel-specific chip functionality, the less market share AMD gets.
Unfortunately, it's not as easy as that. When you bought your car, part of the cost was to pay for the time and materials of designing it in the first place. If GM spends $10M designing a new car, and expects to sell 100,000 of them, well, it's easy to hide $100 in the cost of a new car.
Likewise, when you buy a Britney (bless her silicone-ness) Spears CD, part of the cost goes to pay for time spent writing the song, studio time and so on. If Britney (or whoever writes her songs) spent 100 hours writing a song, wants to be paid $1,000 / hour, has 10 songs on a CD, and expects to sell 1,000,000 CDs, then they add one dollar to the cost of a CD to cover their time while writing it.
The obvious problem is, if people are copying the CD around in vast numbers (in whatever format), Britney is not getting her $1. It doesn't matter that she's losing that portion of the cost that represents materials and distribution, because she hasn't incurred any. It doesn't even matter that she's losing the portion of the sale price of the CD that represents the record company's profits. They're no longer involved in the transaction (remember - they billed Britney up front for studio time and promotion).
Should Britney get her dollar? What if she sells 2 million CDs? She has now made $2,000 / hour for her effort in writing it. At what point does this stop being an incentive to create and start becoming an incentive to retire? (emphasis added because this is a long rambling post and I finally got to an interesting point).
I think my point is that we are used to an environment in which the development costs, per unit, are much smaller than the unit production costs. No-one notices the $100 development fee on their $20,000 car. But when production costs go to zero, the development costs (Britney's dollar) become much more noticeable. Add to that the impracticality of collection, and the impossibility of enforcement, and you have a real problem. I really think the only solution is to change your business model.
I think a useful role model here is Alan Cox. Alan (I bet it's not every day that AC gets compared to Britney Spears) gives away his code. Not only that, but he is paid to give it away by a company that gives away lots of people's code. RedHat (in theory) make their money by selling supporting services, and conveniently pre-packaged...
Ah, this post is crap. I have no point.
Was it me, or did he imply that some of this stuff could be dumped on an area of a CPU, essentially giving you an on-die disk? Seek times measured in clock cycles? Yum.
Bugger.
See "SuSe" think Germany.
Plus last year's was in Germany.
Just my luck to have my post read by someone who read the article, too.
...would be Belgium? It's not as hilly, so less strenuous for unfit geeks. Plus they have great beer. Lots of styles, most of them very alcoholic. German beer, while better than the piss that Americans apparently enjoy drinking, gets a little samey after a few liters.
Or better yet, England. Gentle, rolling hills, and the best beer in the world.
Disclaimer: I was born in England, but live in Minnesota. Don't anyone suggest a Linux Showshoeing Hike.
How can there be irregularities in revenue reporting? Everyone knows that Linux companies don't have any revenue.
Maybe that was the irregularity - he was actually reporting some revenue?
Score -1: Not funny.
There is only one LotR movie, and it's crap.
This one looks like it will be a lot better. As someone else pointed out, condensing 900+ pages into 90 minutes is pretty much impossible. 270 minutes is maybe doable.
Seems to me that if I had a mainframe, or could get hold of one, this is an awesome virtual hosting environment.
Give me money, and I give you root access to your own, incredibly reliable, Linux box. If you trash it, it can be restored from backups in seconds. Incremental cost of adding another virtual host: almost nil. Until, of course, we get to 41,000. By then I should have enough money to buy a new mainframe. And so on.
What's so bad about noise? You people at slashdot take signal too seriously
Moderation & meta-moderation are horrible. If the first-posters, Natalie-worshipers and hot-grits-pourers would go away they wouldn't be necessary. That's what's wrong with trying to get a first post.
These are two scenarios. If you assign the copyright you can't revoke it. They own it. You also can't change the licence on subsequent versions, because you're constrained by the GPL.
If you don't assign the copyright, but release under the GPL, that version remains under the GPL forever. However, you may change the licencing for future versions at your whim.
Proof, if proof were needed, that karma does not work. Here we have someone who, by dint of thoughtful posting and so on, has been moderated up enough times to get the +1 bonus, but who can't do anything better with it than to first post.
Plus, he can't spell "first post".
Plus, he wasn't even first.
Plus, if I were going to post something completely offtopic, I'd check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box to avoid moderators overly keen on the "overrated" option. Like this.
I don't want to get into veteran-bashing, because I do generally respect the sacrfices these people made. But because they risked their lives (in many cases, involuntarily) for our freedom that gives them the right to curtail it?
You have to be careful about assuming that veterans risked anything "for your freedom". Many US veterans risked their lives to suppress the freedoms of other people (Vietnam), or to keep oil prices low (Iraq). There are no Civil War veterans left alive, but were you able to ask I'm sure you'd get at least two different viewpoints on who was fighting for what.
Well, that's the whole point of assigning copyright of your code to the FSF. You can be pretty certain they're not selling Emacs to anyone.
Oy! I just posted a comment disagreeing with this in a reasonable tone. How can it be flamebait?
I hope I get this one in meta-moderation.
Not that Rombuu's karma couldn't do with coming down a peg or two...
Or maybe they couldn't afford to prove they were right?
Presumption of innocence apparently doesn't apply in civil cases.
of a professor (Laurence Godfrey) suing the UK 's largest ISP (Demon) over something posted on USENET. In this case the ISP caved.
Read the story on Wired.
OK, OK, I'm going to feed the troll.
The freedom part of the GPL is that everyone else gets the same rights as you. The source was made available to you, so you have to make it available to others (if you distribute binaries).
No, it's not totally free. IRL, you can do pretty much whatever you like inside your house, but once you get out on the street there are things you can't do (drive as fast as you like, on the wrong side of the road, etc.). These limitations are placed on you to protect the freedom (and life) of others. Likewise, the GPL puts restrictions on you to protect others' access to free software.
Total freedom, IMHO, disappeared the day the second sentient being was born on this planet. Freedom is as much about everyone's freedom as it is about yours.
Oh, and Franklin was talking about essential freedoms. He probably wouldn't include software, even if you could explain it to him.
Although oddly enough, Barbie Benson's homepage advertises that it is registered with Cyber Patrol.
The tailor is charging for the materials and for his time. If I want to make a copy of the suit, I will have to duplicate the materials, and invest some time.
If I want to duplicate an MP3, I have to invest diskspace (which I have already paid for), bandwidth (which I'm paying for anyway), and CPU time (ditto). The cost of production is negligible..
And I'm the one with no grasp of economics!