I am starting to think that we linux lovers may be taking it up the butt the same way that vegetarians get reamed for "Organic" produce.. See a market , exploit that market and I think we may being exploited here.
I hope this wasn't an epiphany to you.
Linux zealousy and vegetarianism/veganism are both just forms of snobbery for overly wealthy people to throw money at in hopes of appearing socially schismatic. Yawn.
Ever seen a poor vegan? Nope. Ever seen a poor person that had to have everything certified 'Microsoft free' by some snotty hardware company? Nope.
Real people eat the food they can afford and like the taste of, and real people buy a computer and use Windows or install their own blend of Linux. Practically every new PC runs Linux, including laptops. Regular people just buy a laptop and install Linux. Only snobs and zealots care about their computer being certified as "Windows free."
Note to author of article: get over yourself, dismount your high horse, and get on with life.
Does anyone ever check the dates on articles? Or the content?
Uhh...the Slashdot article on the sale of DALnet was a joke, but the DDoS attack on DALnet is very real. Actually, several IRC networks have been getting DDoSed in recent months.
Dammit, editors, RTFLA (linked article)! I quote from the site:
On Tuesday, 7 January 2003, Mr. Mike Murray, one of the founders of EUROSETI, visited the offices of UFO Magazine to conduct a WORLD EXCLUSIVE filmed interview. With his kind permission, that interview - which features a healthy selection of these images - can now be viewed on our website.
Those wishing to attend the lectures at Britain's National Space Centre in Leicester should book their seat a.s.a.p. with EUROSETI. Tickets are £20.00 each and available NOW!
Even if there had been linked information (there wasn't) why should this type of very skeptical pseudo-science make the front page? What's next, a link to the cold fusion magazines? Perpetual motion devices?
This article exemplifies the growing problem of apathy amongst the editorial staff of Slashdot. I'm disappointed, too, because I like this place.
The American government can spend upwards of $200 BILLION dollars to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, install a government to do its bidding, and pillage the country for its natural resources. But we can't spend that same $200 BILLION to open up space.
This is a false dichotomy often used against a government's involvement in war. Unfortunately government spending is not an either-or proposition - if we decided not to go to war with Iraq, it doesn't automatically mean that we have $200 billion to spend on education or the space race.
The U.S. government, for instance, allocates a certain amount of yearly resources to defense spending, regardless of the current political climate. During war or wannabe-war years, that spending increases, and is often deficit spending to address a perceived need. The government usually isn't willing to deficit spend on education or technology, unless absolutely necessary.
Furthermore, you neglected to mention that the United States citizens themselves, not our elected officials, usually vote down spending for social issues (regardless of party affiliation, I might add). So even if it were an either-or dichotomy, we'd still have ourselves to blame.
Aside from the 'brilliant' Libertarian idea to have the government build a megalithic mass of wires everywhere, there's an up-and-coming technology: wireless.
Compared to anything wired, which requires some kind of physical infrastructure and maintainence (meaning beaucoup $$) wireless is comparably cheap and more easily maintainable. Therefore, I think the more sensible option is 802.11x, or some neat derivative thereof (as 802.11x isn't necessarily a great system by itself).
Wireless brings with it its own set of problems, but ultimately, getting 11, 22, or 54Mbps out of thin air is a much more attractive option than sending the government's New Deal construction company out to dig up the street you live on and lay conduits.
Until wireless attains ubiquity, there's unfortunately still going to need to be infrastructure to support it (big fibre pipes for the APs to go into, for instance) but even so, it's less infrastructure than a "cable everywhere" proposal.
And no, Dan, and I don't want the government giving us wireless either...that's what the free enterprise market is for (isn't that what Libertarians supposedly trump up anyways?).
To clarify AMD's processor naming scheme for those who haven't been keeping up with the Joneses, the Athlon 64 is AMD's 64-bit desktop and mobile CPU, while the Opteron is AMD's 64-bit server and workstation CPU. Both utilize the x86-64 architecture, which is essentially an extension of the existing x86 instruction set for 64 bits.
A few key differences between the two are that the Opteron will be multiprocessor-enabled and have three HyperTransport pipes (each providing a theoretical 6.4GB/s of throughput) versus one in the Athlon 64. The Opteron will also have more on-die L2 cache (1MB and 2MB are being talked about right now), and will draw quite a bit more power (90W+ vs. ~65W for the Athlon 64).
Our department of "Homeland Security" is creating the situation where all users of the net must be tracable [...] Annonymous communication over the net allows disent to grow without the heavy hand of big brother picking out the "ringleaders."
I agree with you up to the point where you brought in the tried and tired Big Brother rhetoric of the unhealthily paranoid.
"Homeland Security" does want to create a situation where everything is traceable, and they wouldn't be able to do it, if it wasn't for the fact that they could bully ISPs and telcos into compliance. The Internet protocols in place don't allow for normal traffic to be very traceable if you don't want it to. At the very worst, you find out what ISP somebody got access through, but the ISP refuses to say anything.
Now "Homeland Security" wants to bully all open WiFi ports into closing because of the hypothetical premise that a 'terrorist' could use the open APs to anonymously conduct terrorist business online. And that's true - but guess what, it's just as easy to splice a few wires in the right locations to get the same access, only wired. Or they could splice and then put on an AP and homebrew their comm links.
This is doing nothing except regulating a new useful technology before it even gets off the ground. I'm pissed - I want WiFi to become ubiquitous, but not with the hand of "Homeland Security" on its shoulder. What bullocks!
Note to feds: hands off my technology. If you want to touch it, you'd better be prepared to show me a search warrant.
Unfortunately, they don't even need a search warrant anymore, under these new bills. *sigh*
I think we're being a bit critical of this attempt, considering it is the movie studio's first well-organized expedition into the realm of content-over-the-Internet.
The problems that have been mentioned are encoding quality, audio quality, picture size, proprietary up the wazoo, and limited viewing time. But for their first attempt at this, we really shouldn't have expected anything more, so I actually give this first shaky effort two thumbs up for the try. A few things that we can reasonably layout for future attempts:
Limited viewing time: This isn't really bad at all. Maybe the 24-hour window is (why not 48 or 72 hours?) but remember that you only get a few days at Blockbuster/Hollywood Video too. This is a standard rental model. They're not going to let you keep the movie indefinetely for $3, folks.
Proprietary format: Whether or not you disagree with proprietary formats and copyright in practice is one thing, but pragmatically speaking, I don't ever expect the studios to release movies in an unencrypted format, especially not with the cheap price of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs now. This is here to stay. That's not to say, however, that a Linux and Mac player couldn't be built, or that the player source code (minus the decryption codecs) couldn't be made open...
Quality: The Slashdot crowd has access to lots and lots and lots of bandwidth, unlike most of the rest of the world. As such, the ~200K streaming rate they're talking about is all most people can sustain right now.
In summary, I think this is a great first-try for the movie studios. There's much room to improve, but we ought to at least congratulate them on starting to embrace the Internet as a viable means for content distribution, and not simply a ship full of pirates.
It's important to note that this has been debated on and off in the Phoenix community for quite some time. Many of the users and theme developers are quite opposed to Phoenix changing its name, but the developers insist that it's a necessary evil. A proposal for the name change on the MozillaZine board spanned into a 20-page discussion.
Whatever they finally decide upon, it's going to take quite a while to win the approval of the users.
I'm an avid user of Phoenix, which of course blocks pop-ups, and this is great news to me! Websites that use this will now immediately inform me, "We don't want you to give us (or our advertisers) your money." This is a big time-saving feature from having to wade through a webpage for a while to determine whether or not it's crap. Now I know from the outset. Thanks, webmasters!
Now we have VRSA. Vancomycin Resistant Staphyloccocus Aureus.
Okay, this freaks me out; Patients have to be given Vancomycin via a catheter, because if they give it to you through a regular IV line, it can destroy the veins in your arms because it's so powerful. As I understand it, it's kind of like pumping Clorox into your veins to kill the staph.
If there's a strain of staph that's immune to Vancomycin now, well...eek, that's absolutely terrifying.
These new phones from Nokia are always great - if you live in a country that Nokia releases them to. The new cell phone technology here in the US (where a majority of/.ers are from, remember) is severely lacking. Only just recently did AT&T switch over to a GSM system (well, it's coterminal with their existing TDMA network). We've still got a battle between CDMA, TDMA, GSM, and iDen networks here. And because of that (and for other reasons, doubtlessly) Nokia never releases these really cool phones here. Boo.
If a post ever deserved to be modded up, this one does. Well said. Even though I suspect you're Karma whoring, your point is very valid. Real dogs are loving animals that are wonderful. Yes, they're more work than a plastic dog, and I'm sure for some people an Aibo is the only dog they CAN have, but for so many others, a real dog is the best choice. Thanks for pointing it out.
This is not a troll, but an observation: When it's IBM spray-painting Linux graffiti messages, it's free speech, but when it's Microsoft painting butterflies, it's vandalism?
This is not a troll, but an observation: When it's IBM spray-painting Linux graffiti messages, it's free speech, but when it's Microsoft painting butterflies, it's vandalism?
Ah, wait, I just noticed which editor posted it. Now it all makes sense.
The cool thing about this product is that it's being marketed by a big company, namely Sharp, and not some no-name startup that promises to "revolutionize the world" but never gets its product to market. There's a much higher chance of actual success when a big company like Sharp is involved. From the site, they've also done the following:
In 1973, Sharp was the first to successfully mass produce LCDs for use in electronic calculators. Since then, we have actively promoted innovation in display technologies, going from simple numeric displays to dot-matrix graphic displays, moving from monochrome to color displays, and on to full-motion video displays.
My school has been doing this for about a year now. It was necessary to eliminate the bandwidth hogs who clogged things up with their P2P apps. As a non-P2P user, I got really tired of having my web requests drag so freshmen could download the latest Britney Spears videos.
This is pretty standard across the board - traffic shapers are a good way to keep P2P traffic to a minimum without frivolously trying to cut it out.
In related news, the routing technology for these things is pretty cool, though certainly not new. A story about DIY traffic shapers would be a better front page story than this, Michael.
[snip] from the american-goal:-100%-of-danish-electricity-from-oil dept.
How about having one from the sick-of-michaels-libertarian-diatribes-on-the-fron t-page dept.?
This comment will get modded to hell, so I'll make it worth my while (and hey, I've got the karma, so plug your ears and go for it, faith Slashdot sheep).
Michael posts both under his name and under the pseudonym of jellicle. His posts are easily identified by the thoughtless hysteria that denotes most fundamentalist propaganda and rhetoric.
I've made several calls for Andover/VA to fire Michael. A good appeal would be to Roblimo. But one thing is clear: Micahel Sims needs to go. This article's head is just another example of why.
The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.
You can only sell it at a diamond purchasing center or a pawn shop where you will receive a tiny fraction of its original "value."
...or because it takes a professionally-certified gemologist to discern the actual quality of a gem. Of course diamonds have no value on eBay - people don't want to buy them without certificates of authenticity, an AGA-backed jeweler to verify them, etc.
Of course, if this were true it would mean that apparantely all insurance companies have been duped as well.
The valid points of the objections are that the diamond trade has been used to propagate slavery, fuel wars, etc. Many jewelers can now tell you the exact origin of your diamond, from mine to showroom.
Ben Franklin, truly enough, didn't see the merit in patents, but this doesn't mean that we need to follow his logic. He was one of the founding fathers of America, but his beliefs are not canonical for the foundation of American Constitutional republic government.
Michael and other Libertarians can claim that because Franklin said it, it must somehow be true of the way this government "ought to work," but unfortunately there are no provisions in The Constitution or general law that make patents illegal. Therefore, people who claim this are necessarily taking a revisionist read of history (and a poor one at that).
One can ignore the facts all one wants, but patents are as real to America as apple pie and baseball.
Slashdot Mirror
I am starting to think that we linux lovers may be taking it up the butt the same way that vegetarians get reamed for "Organic" produce.. See a market , exploit that market and I think we may being exploited here.
I hope this wasn't an epiphany to you.
Linux zealousy and vegetarianism/veganism are both just forms of snobbery for overly wealthy people to throw money at in hopes of appearing socially schismatic. Yawn.
Ever seen a poor vegan? Nope. Ever seen a poor person that had to have everything certified 'Microsoft free' by some snotty hardware company? Nope.
Real people eat the food they can afford and like the taste of, and real people buy a computer and use Windows or install their own blend of Linux. Practically every new PC runs Linux, including laptops. Regular people just buy a laptop and install Linux. Only snobs and zealots care about their computer being certified as "Windows free."
Note to author of article: get over yourself, dismount your high horse, and get on with life.
Eventually somebody's going to make reference to this little diddy, the oh-so-famous "all your base are belong to us" video game.
Does anyone ever check the dates on articles? Or the content?
Uhh...the Slashdot article on the sale of DALnet was a joke, but the DDoS attack on DALnet is very real. Actually, several IRC networks have been getting DDoSed in recent months.
This article exemplifies the growing problem of apathy amongst the editorial staff of Slashdot. I'm disappointed, too, because I like this place.
On my own story? How often does that happen...
Yep, I'm burning karma with this.
The American government can spend upwards of $200 BILLION dollars to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, install a government to do its bidding, and pillage the country for its natural resources. But we can't spend that same $200 BILLION to open up space.
This is a false dichotomy often used against a government's involvement in war. Unfortunately government spending is not an either-or proposition - if we decided not to go to war with Iraq, it doesn't automatically mean that we have $200 billion to spend on education or the space race.
The U.S. government, for instance, allocates a certain amount of yearly resources to defense spending, regardless of the current political climate. During war or wannabe-war years, that spending increases, and is often deficit spending to address a perceived need. The government usually isn't willing to deficit spend on education or technology, unless absolutely necessary.
Furthermore, you neglected to mention that the United States citizens themselves, not our elected officials, usually vote down spending for social issues (regardless of party affiliation, I might add). So even if it were an either-or dichotomy, we'd still have ourselves to blame.
Now on to phase two.. Ideas. Got any? I sure dont
Aside from the 'brilliant' Libertarian idea to have the government build a megalithic mass of wires everywhere, there's an up-and-coming technology: wireless.
Compared to anything wired, which requires some kind of physical infrastructure and maintainence (meaning beaucoup $$) wireless is comparably cheap and more easily maintainable. Therefore, I think the more sensible option is 802.11x, or some neat derivative thereof (as 802.11x isn't necessarily a great system by itself).
Wireless brings with it its own set of problems, but ultimately, getting 11, 22, or 54Mbps out of thin air is a much more attractive option than sending the government's New Deal construction company out to dig up the street you live on and lay conduits.
Until wireless attains ubiquity, there's unfortunately still going to need to be infrastructure to support it (big fibre pipes for the APs to go into, for instance) but even so, it's less infrastructure than a "cable everywhere" proposal.
And no, Dan, and I don't want the government giving us wireless either...that's what the free enterprise market is for (isn't that what Libertarians supposedly trump up anyways?).
To clarify AMD's processor naming scheme for those who haven't been keeping up with the Joneses, the Athlon 64 is AMD's 64-bit desktop and mobile CPU, while the Opteron is AMD's 64-bit server and workstation CPU. Both utilize the x86-64 architecture, which is essentially an extension of the existing x86 instruction set for 64 bits.
A few key differences between the two are that the Opteron will be multiprocessor-enabled and have three HyperTransport pipes (each providing a theoretical 6.4GB/s of throughput) versus one in the Athlon 64. The Opteron will also have more on-die L2 cache (1MB and 2MB are being talked about right now), and will draw quite a bit more power (90W+ vs. ~65W for the Athlon 64).
Our department of "Homeland Security" is creating the situation where all users of the net must be tracable [...]
Annonymous communication over the net allows disent to grow without the heavy hand of big brother picking out the "ringleaders."
I agree with you up to the point where you brought in the tried and tired Big Brother rhetoric of the unhealthily paranoid.
"Homeland Security" does want to create a situation where everything is traceable, and they wouldn't be able to do it, if it wasn't for the fact that they could bully ISPs and telcos into compliance. The Internet protocols in place don't allow for normal traffic to be very traceable if you don't want it to. At the very worst, you find out what ISP somebody got access through, but the ISP refuses to say anything.
Now "Homeland Security" wants to bully all open WiFi ports into closing because of the hypothetical premise that a 'terrorist' could use the open APs to anonymously conduct terrorist business online. And that's true - but guess what, it's just as easy to splice a few wires in the right locations to get the same access, only wired. Or they could splice and then put on an AP and homebrew their comm links.
This is doing nothing except regulating a new useful technology before it even gets off the ground. I'm pissed - I want WiFi to become ubiquitous, but not with the hand of "Homeland Security" on its shoulder. What bullocks!
Note to feds: hands off my technology. If you want to touch it, you'd better be prepared to show me a search warrant.
Unfortunately, they don't even need a search warrant anymore, under these new bills. *sigh*
The problems that have been mentioned are encoding quality, audio quality, picture size, proprietary up the wazoo, and limited viewing time. But for their first attempt at this, we really shouldn't have expected anything more, so I actually give this first shaky effort two thumbs up for the try. A few things that we can reasonably layout for future attempts:
- Limited viewing time: This isn't really bad at all. Maybe the 24-hour window is (why not 48 or 72 hours?) but remember that you only get a few days at Blockbuster/Hollywood Video too. This is a standard rental model. They're not going to let you keep the movie indefinetely for $3, folks.
- Proprietary format: Whether or not you disagree with proprietary formats and copyright in practice is one thing, but pragmatically speaking, I don't ever expect the studios to release movies in an unencrypted format, especially not with the cheap price of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs now. This is here to stay. That's not to say, however, that a Linux and Mac player couldn't be built, or that the player source code (minus the decryption codecs) couldn't be made open...
- Quality: The Slashdot crowd has access to lots and lots and lots of bandwidth, unlike most of the rest of the world. As such, the ~200K streaming rate they're talking about is all most people can sustain right now.
In summary, I think this is a great first-try for the movie studios. There's much room to improve, but we ought to at least congratulate them on starting to embrace the Internet as a viable means for content distribution, and not simply a ship full of pirates.It's important to note that this has been debated on and off in the Phoenix community for quite some time. Many of the users and theme developers are quite opposed to Phoenix changing its name, but the developers insist that it's a necessary evil. A proposal for the name change on the MozillaZine board spanned into a 20-page discussion.
Whatever they finally decide upon, it's going to take quite a while to win the approval of the users.
I'm an avid user of Phoenix, which of course blocks pop-ups, and this is great news to me! Websites that use this will now immediately inform me, "We don't want you to give us (or our advertisers) your money." This is a big time-saving feature from having to wade through a webpage for a while to determine whether or not it's crap. Now I know from the outset. Thanks, webmasters!
Now we have VRSA. Vancomycin Resistant Staphyloccocus Aureus.
Okay, this freaks me out; Patients have to be given Vancomycin via a catheter, because if they give it to you through a regular IV line, it can destroy the veins in your arms because it's so powerful. As I understand it, it's kind of like pumping Clorox into your veins to kill the staph.
If there's a strain of staph that's immune to Vancomycin now, well...eek, that's absolutely terrifying.
These new phones from Nokia are always great - if you live in a country that Nokia releases them to. The new cell phone technology here in the US (where a majority of /.ers are from, remember) is severely lacking. Only just recently did AT&T switch over to a GSM system (well, it's coterminal with their existing TDMA network). We've still got a battle between CDMA, TDMA, GSM, and iDen networks here. And because of that (and for other reasons, doubtlessly) Nokia never releases these really cool phones here. Boo.
If a post ever deserved to be modded up, this one does. Well said. Even though I suspect you're Karma whoring, your point is very valid. Real dogs are loving animals that are wonderful. Yes, they're more work than a plastic dog, and I'm sure for some people an Aibo is the only dog they CAN have, but for so many others, a real dog is the best choice. Thanks for pointing it out.
This is not a troll, but an observation: When it's IBM spray-painting Linux graffiti messages, it's free speech, but when it's Microsoft painting butterflies, it's vandalism?
This is not a troll, but an observation: When it's IBM spray-painting Linux graffiti messages, it's free speech, but when it's Microsoft painting butterflies, it's vandalism?
Ah, wait, I just noticed which editor posted it. Now it all makes sense.
i am so foist post great, wally! woot
Cool stuff.
My school has been doing this for about a year now. It was necessary to eliminate the bandwidth hogs who clogged things up with their P2P apps. As a non-P2P user, I got really tired of having my web requests drag so freshmen could download the latest Britney Spears videos.
This is pretty standard across the board - traffic shapers are a good way to keep P2P traffic to a minimum without frivolously trying to cut it out.
In related news, the routing technology for these things is pretty cool, though certainly not new. A story about DIY traffic shapers would be a better front page story than this, Michael.
[snip]l dept.
n t-page dept.?
from the american-goal:-100%-of-danish-electricity-from-oi
How about having one from the sick-of-michaels-libertarian-diatribes-on-the-fro
This comment will get modded to hell, so I'll make it worth my while (and hey, I've got the karma, so plug your ears and go for it, faith Slashdot sheep).
Michael is a pollutant in the Slashdot community. In addition to his other crimes and personal problems, Michael routinely mischaracterizes arguments, uses completely flawed logic, and routinely attacks and slanders those who disagree with him.
Michael posts both under his name and under the pseudonym of jellicle. His posts are easily identified by the thoughtless hysteria that denotes most fundamentalist propaganda and rhetoric.
I've made several calls for Andover/VA to fire Michael. A good appeal would be to Roblimo. But one thing is clear: Micahel Sims needs to go. This article's head is just another example of why.
w00t
From the article:
...or because it takes a professionally-certified gemologist to discern the actual quality of a gem. Of course diamonds have no value on eBay - people don't want to buy them without certificates of authenticity, an AGA-backed jeweler to verify them, etc.
The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.
63 years old? That wouldn't explain the Crown Jewels of England or the historicity of diamonds' value dating back hundreds of years.
You can only sell it at a diamond purchasing center or a pawn shop where you will receive a tiny fraction of its original "value."
Of course, if this were true it would mean that apparantely all insurance companies have been duped as well.
The valid points of the objections are that the diamond trade has been used to propagate slavery, fuel wars, etc. Many jewelers can now tell you the exact origin of your diamond, from mine to showroom.
Ben Franklin, truly enough, didn't see the merit in patents, but this doesn't mean that we need to follow his logic. He was one of the founding fathers of America, but his beliefs are not canonical for the foundation of American Constitutional republic government.
Michael and other Libertarians can claim that because Franklin said it, it must somehow be true of the way this government "ought to work," but unfortunately there are no provisions in The Constitution or general law that make patents illegal. Therefore, people who claim this are necessarily taking a revisionist read of history (and a poor one at that).
One can ignore the facts all one wants, but patents are as real to America as apple pie and baseball.
Thanks for that. You forgot to mention that both newspapers have a well-documented history of sensationalizing and editorializing their news content.
At least in the U.S., opinion pieces are [usually] clearly marked as such.