Its not just a contract outlining use and preventing piracy. It also outlines the companies legal repsponsibility reguarding replacment of media, loss of data (or money?) due to bugs and their responsibility reguarding technical support among other things.
I honestly don't think you could make commercial software for instance if companies were responsible for things like loss of data/money because of bugs. And how else do you communicate this responsibility? Debian does it every time you log in by default. Auto manufacturers put this information in the book that comes with the car, but reading this I'll bet most people didn't know that.
I work in technical support and I've been on the recieving end of a "loss of money" bug. Customer was livid and they wanted blood, but we wouldn't make software if the risks were that high. If you've ever done customer support (like technical support) you'll see why license agreements exist very quickly.
Ever review a license agreement called the GPL? It gives you no warrenty specifically. It largely deals with contributions and copying. Can you imagine Linux if the license agreement it comes with wasn't enforcable or didn't exist?
Books are somewhat different - like apples and orange really. There's no automation bugs that are going to stop charging taxes on invoices, or corrupt long documents, and books rarely deliver anything against what the product manual claims they do. And also if you order a book and its damaged they'll replace it (just like software). Its also illegal to make copies of books and sell them.
Also - on the Photoshop note. It is fully possible to transfer the license of a copy you sold on Ebay to another user.
That is to say that license agreements don't over-reach, but I think they are a necessary part of the software industry. I don't think they are that impractical either. Adobe's EULA for instance actually outlines all the really important stuff right at the opening and highlights important stuff in bold text. Its not that hard to read and if its of concern to you - you should take the time and at least glance over it. And long before any lawsuits arrived Adobe has put sticker the opening that say something along the lines of "note - this product subject to the license agreement found at such and such a website"
I can't speak for AmigaDOS 4, but I still use my Amiga 4000 and Toaster 4000 card as a production video switcher - it does a very good job of this.
I know everyone is saying eww - analogue video. But you know what? Not a day goes by when I don't see a commercial on TV (this is in the Portland Oregon metro area) that was made with the toaster (it has plenty of "signature" effects that you don't see anywhere else)).
And for geek factor > My A4000 has the somewhat famous Phase 5 PPC board in it - and its kinda fun to play with Linux PPC on it as well. Hopefully I'll be able to get mac on linux running on it. It also has ethernet, and while you can browse the net with it - its not a fun experience.
I disagree. My brother in law bought a Dell just before Christmas on special and for around 500$ it came with a cheap monitor, a dvd+r recorder (probably getting rid of these), an AIO printer and the computer came with a 2.4 GHz proc with 256 megs of ram.
It didn't have firewire, but we found a via based one down at a computer shop for 20$ and it works just fine.
Re:From the "interesting read" link...
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Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This was always a big point of contention for me. On the dell you could get any (because all network cards work with windows) 25$ 802.11G card that has a small antenna sticking out of the back of the pci slot (you wouldn't notice it if its sitting with its back to the wall). Wheras with apple - even if you had a pci slot you're stuck buying the one or two cards that work with OSX for quite a bit more.
This reminded me of an ipod (2nd gen model) a room-mate sold me. He was a mac fanatic, and he always believed in taking the machine to the dealer to have anything done to it - as an example he had an I-Lamp and wanted to upgrade the ram and took it to the shop where they charged him like 150$ to do this (256 megs as I recall). I don't have a mac, but I liked the ipod:).
Anyhow the battery died - and I found an aftermarket battery (just fyi - it seems to go for about a week or two with normal on and off use). Anyhow installation required pulling the thing apart - which as you'll notice has no screws. I found that if you file off an old credit card you can use it like a shim and along the top and the sides and the whole thing will pop apart (its all held together with leaf springs along the sides and bottom). I was working on this on the kitchen table, and he came in shocked that I had dared to take apart the holy grail of apple technology.
Overall it was pretty easy for me - and honestly if you look at it you wouldn't know it had an aftermarket battery in it - or had even been opened. I don't think people should shy away from installing their own mac-mini upgrades even though it means prying open the case.
Just out of curiousity is it an ATI video card? I went through 5 9500's (under warrenty) until I got my Nvidia 6800GT which's I've had ever since. Its never drawn one pixel wrong.
I can't explain the HDD's though - I've got 6 ide drives on a raid and I've only had one of them fail in the last two years.
I should mention that the Atari 400 and 800 was actually designed by a team that included Jay Miner the same engineer that was on the team that designed the original Amiga.
The FCC didn't assign 802.11b/g or cordless phones to 2.4GHz, it's an unlicensed band that anyone can do whatever they want in within certain limits on power and such.
Its not an unlicensed band - amateur radio operators have primary access, part 15 devices (which include phones, wifi etc) have secondary access on the 2.4 ghz band.
Knock yourself out its on the right hand side of the fourth row from the top.
Just pretend talking to your friend while on hold, discussing the option to switch to another competitor "if this call doesn't solve my problems", that might get you something.
As someone who has worked in several call centers I can honestly tell you that the QA departments who monitor calls could really care less. I used to get threatened all the time with that statement while on the phone - just made me want to hang up quicker. The reason why is my co-workers and I were paid 9$/hr (and I'm not kidding in the slightest) to support these complex applications for a company we didn't work for.
I don't remember them being bad guys; it was before my time, and probably most others.
Ever hear the phrase nobody ever got fired for buying IBM? The government broke them up because they wouldn't open up their hardware and software to 3rd party developers at all. The phrase came from the fact that you were better off going with IBM's expensive hardware and peripherals than risk being unsupported when you needed help and were caught using 3rd party stuff.
On personaly computers though. I don't think they were necessarily evil per se - definately not in the modern sense (but then again open source software wasn't nearly as big then). They mainly suffered from a top heavy management struture which understood one thing - mainframes were their core business and they made decisions based on that logic. As an example time and time again they crippled the PC so it wouldn't compete with big iron. IBM used to exert their power by creating standards, and they were slow to react when the clone based PC companies moved quicker than they did.
When I first got into PC's what IBM said and did was gospel. A lot of the standards they established are still with us today - things like PS/2 keyboards/mice, and VGA graphics as two examples you'll find in most every pc made today (vga graphics are even in today's Macintosh's). PC's that used their own standards died off very quickly. The last article I saw before IBM drifted into obscurity (as far as hardware goes at least) is when they started to push 2.88 megabyte floppies as a new standard - the fact it was news in Infoworld speaks volumes. There are lots of PS/2's out there with 2.88 meg floppies, but hardly anyone uses them today for anything.
I think things changed when Compaq released a 386/AT based PC before IBM did. Things only got worse when IBM tried to regain control over the PC by releasing the PS/2 - which (unlike the AT) wasn't based on open standards. The PS/2 was technically superior but it had several things wrong with it. A) expensive and crippled MCA peripherals (crippled on purpose as to not compete with their mainframe business) and B) They were incredibly expensive pc's compared to their main rival Compaq (and the other clones). To me thats about as evil as it got.
Really though they pale compared to Microsoft's monopoly on the market. IBM's control over the personal computer world is a footnote compared to Microsoft's today.
I support windows where I work. The application is a database front end for glass shops. I'd say the single biggest threat to doing business on windows in general is from spyware. Getting socket errors when opening database applications because there's a spyware app corrupting the network connection is not a fun thing to fix.
I think microsoft is releasing this because people are idiots when it comes to computers. They always run as admin, never apply security updates and always browse websites they shouldn't using unpatched versions of IE. This might actually help reduce support call volume for MS and its OEM's.
Last I saw in a graph of issues people call with Microsoft spyware dominated the chart.
Sure is. One reason the Japanese companies are so big into amateur radio is because of the number of hams in Japan. Check it out.
Japan is one of the few places in the world where (in like Akihabara) you can walk into a seemingly normal electronic shop and buy amateur radio equipment sitting next to stereos and computers.
I guess we can return to preaching to the choir on how this is a terrible tragedy. Or we can get our ham licenses and help out. I did the latter and now I'm an extra class licensee. Amateur radio isn't just about emergency communications - it can be fun as well to meet people all over the world.
I don't see why we shouldn't point the BPL problem out. Here's a situation where nothing else worked except amateur radio and even then it wasn't nearly enough (ie more people need to take up the hobby world wide). I feel its our duty to point out that this wouldn't happen if BPL was deployed - it is after all the single most important band threat we've ever seen ever. I think the reason we do this is because there seem to be a lot of people on slashdot who support BPL for some reason and may not understand that their blind support for this terrible technology could have cost more human lives than it did. Communications saves lives because it helps direct much needed resources.
I mostly operate mobile. After I got my extra class license my very first HF contact I ever made was to an operator in Japan on 10 meters who was hearing me just fine. This was while driving down the road on I-5. Now I may not be able to get out to india sure, but that operator in Japan could have relayed me the message I'm positive.
Were in the 10 year low sure, and the muf has decreased, but I regularly talk to operators in Australia and Japan on 15 and 20. I'm not using any external amplifier (just 100 watts pep) and I'm not even using a gain antenna.
Sat phones are common? How many people do you know who have one and regularly use them? How about someone living on the edge of life in a 2nd or 3rd world country? Often times in places like this radio is the only way to communicate.
BPL is so senseless. It destroys a natural phenomenon that is not only precious to amateur radio operators, but also to commercial operators in the airline business (a lot of them live around 60m) and the mobile maritime radio networks who both use it on a daily basis.
Now, as I type this, I am typing from an XP machine. It is not nearly as stable as I would like - nothing like the non-gui server I have next to me running RH 6.2 (Never bothered to upgrade it, it is still running just fine thanks.) I work on Linux all day, and I now do all my work with Putty to connect to the servers I work on. I am considering going back to Linux on the desktop for browsing, email and chat as I have been having stablity issues with XP and my DVD burner. However, I like my games, and I like playing them well. Furthermore, I like having the highest FPS and quality settings avaliable.
Windows XP must have some linux advocacy code built in or something and crash more often. Then again - how come I'd had no problems? I can literally count the number of bluescreens I've had on my home computer, laptop and my work computer on one hand.
There's some truth to that. Down at the apple store every game availble for the mac is on one shelf - and there all titles that have come and gone on the PC.
The fact that tulip computers was promoting it on their site, and the fact that the back of the device says commodore name used under license by (company name I don't know) I think she's safe.
You're forgetting that the original divx and css came out long before napster started the p2p revolution.
You're fooling yourself if you think the mpaa/riaa is going go to go easy on consumers because they think were being honest. Never forget - these are the same guys who wanted to take away movie rentals and video tape recorders.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
650$ really isn't all that much when you consider how much its worth when you can use it for your business.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
One thing photoshop has over gimp is the ability to work in the cmyk colour model - and switch back and forth seemlessly. While this isn't show stopping, if you're trying to make pdf-x compatible images ready for print its really helpful (and most rip's these days only support postscript and pdf). Or even if you're working with some layout app its helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not just a contract outlining use and preventing piracy. It also outlines the companies legal repsponsibility reguarding replacment of media, loss of data (or money?) due to bugs and their responsibility reguarding technical support among other things.
I honestly don't think you could make commercial software for instance if companies were responsible for things like loss of data/money because of bugs. And how else do you communicate this responsibility? Debian does it every time you log in by default. Auto manufacturers put this information in the book that comes with the car, but reading this I'll bet most people didn't know that.
I work in technical support and I've been on the recieving end of a "loss of money" bug. Customer was livid and they wanted blood, but we wouldn't make software if the risks were that high. If you've ever done customer support (like technical support) you'll see why license agreements exist very quickly.
Ever review a license agreement called the GPL? It gives you no warrenty specifically. It largely deals with contributions and copying. Can you imagine Linux if the license agreement it comes with wasn't enforcable or didn't exist?
Books are somewhat different - like apples and orange really. There's no automation bugs that are going to stop charging taxes on invoices, or corrupt long documents, and books rarely deliver anything against what the product manual claims they do. And also if you order a book and its damaged they'll replace it (just like software). Its also illegal to make copies of books and sell them.
Also - on the Photoshop note. It is fully possible to transfer the license of a copy you sold on Ebay to another user.
That is to say that license agreements don't over-reach, but I think they are a necessary part of the software industry. I don't think they are that impractical either. Adobe's EULA for instance actually outlines all the really important stuff right at the opening and highlights important stuff in bold text. Its not that hard to read and if its of concern to you - you should take the time and at least glance over it. And long before any lawsuits arrived Adobe has put sticker the opening that say something along the lines of "note - this product subject to the license agreement found at such and such a website"
I can't speak for AmigaDOS 4, but I still use my Amiga 4000 and Toaster 4000 card as a production video switcher - it does a very good job of this.
I know everyone is saying eww - analogue video. But you know what? Not a day goes by when I don't see a commercial on TV (this is in the Portland Oregon metro area) that was made with the toaster (it has plenty of "signature" effects that you don't see anywhere else)).
And for geek factor > My A4000 has the somewhat famous Phase 5 PPC board in it - and its kinda fun to play with Linux PPC on it as well. Hopefully I'll be able to get mac on linux running on it. It also has ethernet, and while you can browse the net with it - its not a fun experience.
I disagree. My brother in law bought a Dell just before Christmas on special and for around 500$ it came with a cheap monitor, a dvd+r recorder (probably getting rid of these), an AIO printer and the computer came with a 2.4 GHz proc with 256 megs of ram.
It didn't have firewire, but we found a via based one down at a computer shop for 20$ and it works just fine.
This was always a big point of contention for me. On the dell you could get any (because all network cards work with windows) 25$ 802.11G card that has a small antenna sticking out of the back of the pci slot (you wouldn't notice it if its sitting with its back to the wall). Wheras with apple - even if you had a pci slot you're stuck buying the one or two cards that work with OSX for quite a bit more.
This reminded me of an ipod (2nd gen model) a room-mate sold me. He was a mac fanatic, and he always believed in taking the machine to the dealer to have anything done to it - as an example he had an I-Lamp and wanted to upgrade the ram and took it to the shop where they charged him like 150$ to do this (256 megs as I recall). I don't have a mac, but I liked the ipod :).
Anyhow the battery died - and I found an aftermarket battery (just fyi - it seems to go for about a week or two with normal on and off use). Anyhow installation required pulling the thing apart - which as you'll notice has no screws. I found that if you file off an old credit card you can use it like a shim and along the top and the sides and the whole thing will pop apart (its all held together with leaf springs along the sides and bottom). I was working on this on the kitchen table, and he came in shocked that I had dared to take apart the holy grail of apple technology.
Overall it was pretty easy for me - and honestly if you look at it you wouldn't know it had an aftermarket battery in it - or had even been opened. I don't think people should shy away from installing their own mac-mini upgrades even though it means prying open the case.
Never mind the obsurdity in creating an entire distribution to play video games.
Just out of curiousity is it an ATI video card? I went through 5 9500's (under warrenty) until I got my Nvidia 6800GT which's I've had ever since. Its never drawn one pixel wrong.
I can't explain the HDD's though - I've got 6 ide drives on a raid and I've only had one of them fail in the last two years.
I should mention that the Atari 400 and 800 was actually designed by a team that included Jay Miner the same engineer that was on the team that designed the original Amiga.
Keyboard & Mouse )Use the USB keyboard and mouse you already are using as you post on Slashdot with your crappola PC): $0
Unlike your totally leet (and expensive) mac which can't get the parentheses the right way around?
The FCC didn't assign 802.11b/g or cordless phones to 2.4GHz, it's an unlicensed band that anyone can do whatever they want in within certain limits on power and such.
Its not an unlicensed band - amateur radio operators have primary access, part 15 devices (which include phones, wifi etc) have secondary access on the 2.4 ghz band.
Knock yourself out its on the right hand side of the fourth row from the top.
Just pretend talking to your friend while on hold, discussing the option to switch to another competitor "if this call doesn't solve my problems", that might get you something.
As someone who has worked in several call centers I can honestly tell you that the QA departments who monitor calls could really care less. I used to get threatened all the time with that statement while on the phone - just made me want to hang up quicker. The reason why is my co-workers and I were paid 9$/hr (and I'm not kidding in the slightest) to support these complex applications for a company we didn't work for.
I don't remember them being bad guys; it was before my time, and probably most others.
Ever hear the phrase nobody ever got fired for buying IBM? The government broke them up because they wouldn't open up their hardware and software to 3rd party developers at all. The phrase came from the fact that you were better off going with IBM's expensive hardware and peripherals than risk being unsupported when you needed help and were caught using 3rd party stuff.
On personaly computers though. I don't think they were necessarily evil per se - definately not in the modern sense (but then again open source software wasn't nearly as big then). They mainly suffered from a top heavy management struture which understood one thing - mainframes were their core business and they made decisions based on that logic. As an example time and time again they crippled the PC so it wouldn't compete with big iron. IBM used to exert their power by creating standards, and they were slow to react when the clone based PC companies moved quicker than they did.
When I first got into PC's what IBM said and did was gospel. A lot of the standards they established are still with us today - things like PS/2 keyboards/mice, and VGA graphics as two examples you'll find in most every pc made today (vga graphics are even in today's Macintosh's). PC's that used their own standards died off very quickly. The last article I saw before IBM drifted into obscurity (as far as hardware goes at least) is when they started to push 2.88 megabyte floppies as a new standard - the fact it was news in Infoworld speaks volumes. There are lots of PS/2's out there with 2.88 meg floppies, but hardly anyone uses them today for anything.
I think things changed when Compaq released a 386/AT based PC before IBM did. Things only got worse when IBM tried to regain control over the PC by releasing the PS/2 - which (unlike the AT) wasn't based on open standards. The PS/2 was technically superior but it had several things wrong with it. A) expensive and crippled MCA peripherals (crippled on purpose as to not compete with their mainframe business) and B) They were incredibly expensive pc's compared to their main rival Compaq (and the other clones). To me thats about as evil as it got.
Really though they pale compared to Microsoft's monopoly on the market. IBM's control over the personal computer world is a footnote compared to Microsoft's today.
I support windows where I work. The application is a database front end for glass shops. I'd say the single biggest threat to doing business on windows in general is from spyware. Getting socket errors when opening database applications because there's a spyware app corrupting the network connection is not a fun thing to fix.
I think microsoft is releasing this because people are idiots when it comes to computers. They always run as admin, never apply security updates and always browse websites they shouldn't using unpatched versions of IE. This might actually help reduce support call volume for MS and its OEM's.
Last I saw in a graph of issues people call with Microsoft spyware dominated the chart.
Whoops - I screwed up the link... One more time :).
m
http://www.qsl.net/yo5ofh/others/how_many_hams.ht
Sure is. One reason the Japanese companies are so big into amateur radio is because of the number of hams in Japan. Check it out.
Japan is one of the few places in the world where (in like Akihabara) you can walk into a seemingly normal electronic shop and buy amateur radio equipment sitting next to stereos and computers.
There's a lot of truth to this - once debian is installed you'll never need to reinstall.
I guess we can return to preaching to the choir on how this is a terrible tragedy. Or we can get our ham licenses and help out. I did the latter and now I'm an extra class licensee. Amateur radio isn't just about emergency communications - it can be fun as well to meet people all over the world.
I don't see why we shouldn't point the BPL problem out. Here's a situation where nothing else worked except amateur radio and even then it wasn't nearly enough (ie more people need to take up the hobby world wide). I feel its our duty to point out that this wouldn't happen if BPL was deployed - it is after all the single most important band threat we've ever seen ever. I think the reason we do this is because there seem to be a lot of people on slashdot who support BPL for some reason and may not understand that their blind support for this terrible technology could have cost more human lives than it did. Communications saves lives because it helps direct much needed resources.
Does that make sense?
I mostly operate mobile. After I got my extra class license my very first HF contact I ever made was to an operator in Japan on 10 meters who was hearing me just fine. This was while driving down the road on I-5. Now I may not be able to get out to india sure, but that operator in Japan could have relayed me the message I'm positive.
Were in the 10 year low sure, and the muf has decreased, but I regularly talk to operators in Australia and Japan on 15 and 20. I'm not using any external amplifier (just 100 watts pep) and I'm not even using a gain antenna.
Sat phones are common? How many people do you know who have one and regularly use them? How about someone living on the edge of life in a 2nd or 3rd world country? Often times in places like this radio is the only way to communicate.
BPL is so senseless. It destroys a natural phenomenon that is not only precious to amateur radio operators, but also to commercial operators in the airline business (a lot of them live around 60m) and the mobile maritime radio networks who both use it on a daily basis.
Now, as I type this, I am typing from an XP machine. It is not nearly as stable as I would like - nothing like the non-gui server I have next to me running RH 6.2 (Never bothered to upgrade it, it is still running just fine thanks.) I work on Linux all day, and I now do all my work with Putty to connect to the servers I work on. I am considering going back to Linux on the desktop for browsing, email and chat as I have been having stablity issues with XP and my DVD burner. However, I like my games, and I like playing them well. Furthermore, I like having the highest FPS and quality settings avaliable.
Windows XP must have some linux advocacy code built in or something and crash more often. Then again - how come I'd had no problems? I can literally count the number of bluescreens I've had on my home computer, laptop and my work computer on one hand.
There's some truth to that. Down at the apple store every game availble for the mac is on one shelf - and there all titles that have come and gone on the PC.
FLC is actually an autodesk format you insensitive clod. Oddly enough Amiga's can't play FLC files out of the box.
On the Amiga its native format was ANIM, and CDXL (cdxl was a method of doing full motion movies with the cdtv and cd32).
The fact that tulip computers was promoting it on their site, and the fact that the back of the device says commodore name used under license by (company name I don't know) I think she's safe.
You're forgetting that the original divx and css came out long before napster started the p2p revolution.
You're fooling yourself if you think the mpaa/riaa is going go to go easy on consumers because they think were being honest. Never forget - these are the same guys who wanted to take away movie rentals and video tape recorders.
650$ really isn't all that much when you consider how much its worth when you can use it for your business.
One thing photoshop has over gimp is the ability to work in the cmyk colour model - and switch back and forth seemlessly. While this isn't show stopping, if you're trying to make pdf-x compatible images ready for print its really helpful (and most rip's these days only support postscript and pdf). Or even if you're working with some layout app its helpful.