It's slower than MS Office running on wine on linux. It starts up more slowly, it responds more slowly, it uses more memory. Is that clear enough for you?
I can't find an explanation of how Neilsen/Netrating is getting these figures. If it's the same way as they get TV figures, then it'll be based on a tiny sample of households, fitted with voluntary tracking systems. Note that they specify "US households", not worldwide figures, so how else would they get them?
Pop quiz: if you're planning to do some serious leeching, are you more or less likely to sign up to Neilsen tracking?
For bonus points, if you're the sort of Suzie Homemaker that's on the Neilsen system because you're genuinely unaware that those Barry Mannilow mp3s you've been sucking down are hooky, and you're suddenly made aware that the RIAA Is Watching You, are you likely to spit up a hairball and suddenly stop sharing?
Looks to me like this is a survey selected to produce this result.
I thought I used KDE on the desktop. If you swap the linux kernel our from under that in favour of a BSD, Solaris, or heck, a Windows kernel, how would I even tell?
Make the [MP|RI]AA sell non-discriminatory licenses for content that's already out there, rather than allowing them to throttle the channels of distribution. That's in the spirit of copyright law, because the intent of copyright law is to put content into the public domain... pause, think... and the mechanism for doing it is to reward rights owners. So by having Joe Public distribute the content, then reward the rights owner, everybody wins, right?
Well, sure, but there's a tiny problem. It's that nobody remembers that. The publishers have a vested interest in not remembering it. In fact, they've paid huge sums of money to Congress to forget it. The DMCA, and DMCA case law explicitely refutes it. The "exclusive rights" have become paramount, trumping the intent to make the content available.
So, you make the [MP|RI]AA license content. Fine. Does that mean they have to make it available without DRM? Nope. Does it mean that you get the right to break the DRM to use it? Well, technically, if you can do it yourself without obtaining or making available a tool to do it, so, de facto, no. DMCA case law has already made this clear. Congress said that it's not legal to obtain tools even for use on content that you licensed, and the courts have (astonishingly) upheld that.
So what good does licensing do, when you can only get crippleware content, and devices that will play crippleware content, and when you can't legally obtain tools that let you uncripple it?
I applaud the EFF's intent, but defeating rampant DRM is a pre-requisite to any shake up in licensing, not an afterthought.
> "Most of the auctions are for credits (20k credits on Bria server, etc). Some are for buildings, or accounts."
What this highlights is that the in-game markets aren't working. If SOE provide better in-game fora for these transfers, they can nip this in the bud right now.
Of course, it's far more exciting to debate how stoooopid people are for paying $$$ for blasters. You can get back to doing that now.
>Also, if you are using Linux, remember that, when it is low on memory, it simply kills applications that are consuming lots of memory.
Suuuure it does, that's why it's so popular on servers. I suspect that you're talking about linux doing pre-emptive reads on open file descriptors (so your free RAM appears to dribble away), then freeing them when a userland application performs a memory intensive operation. It does this because free is a very cheap operation under linux, and is in contrast to the way (e.g.) the BSD or NT(2K/XP) kernels work. But, heh, it doesn't just kill applications. Symbian does that, PalmOS might, but not linux.
Meh. I work on a browser/file viewer that supports Flash, Javascript, MS Word, Excel, PDF, RTF, most flavours of HTML, with landscape/portrait mode, vector fonts, reflow, real time document panning and zooming, which has a ~1.6MB footproint, and getting smaller every day.
The basic problem with "fat" browsers that I can see is that they're developed on and for PCs where it's easy to make excuses for allocating a few hundred K here, a MB or two there. Try fitting the same browser on embedded devices, and you quickly find that, hey, you really didn't need that memory or all that startup code after all. Opera is our only real competitor on these devices, and even they suffer from bloat because they started on PC and then cut down.
Er, thinking about it, the BBC article was probably actually about Sweden, as I believe the letters mentioned Sven Goran Ericsson. They probably talked about Finland having the same principle in law, which is where I made the association here.
Why don't you take your mealy mouthed disclaimers, roll them up, and use them to cluster fuck yourselves up your dissembling asses, you spineless cogs in the beaurocorporate machine?
Lawyers. These fucks are lawyers. I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire. Worthless parasites, each and every one of them.
That's why they don't just tell google to not cache. They want the links to appear, but not to the stories themselves.
How about we discuss that issue, rather than some other, theoretical issue? I know it's an alien concept, but let's give it a try.
Here, I'll start it off. It looks like a decent idea. Google still gets the links, the NYT still gets the traffic, everyone gets to find the articles they want. What's not to like?
We could considering spending defence budget on defence, not on empire building. How do aircraft carriers help to defend anything, except in the sense that a good defence consists of pre-emptively bombing anyone who pisses you off back to the stone age, then sending in Haliburton to build oil pipelines?
Circa 2003, I mean, where they can still come up with funny premises, but the implementation just sort of meanders around in an aimless fashion and tails off in a non conclusive, dribbling, eh, yeah, mmmm.
I remember hearing a BBC article on the difference betwee the Finnish and British governments. You (yes, you, Joe Public, even Joe Foreigner) can just walk in off the street to the residence of the Finnish Prime Minister, and ask to see any government related document. And they don't peer at you in a suspicious manner and tell you they'll get back to you in two years after checking your security clearance, they smile and fetch it straight away, and get you coffee while you're waiting. For example, they fetched some of the personal correspondance between Tony Blair and the Finnish Prime Minister, the actual original letters, and just handed them over, no questions, no bullshit.
Contrast with asking for copies of the same correspondance in the UK. The UK Freedom of Information act gives you every right to see them, but when the BBC asked for them, they were given the run around, passed from department to department in Whitehall, each one of which expressed amazement that anyone would ask for this. They were eventually fobbed off by being told that such correspondance was classified, too secret to be seen. They said that they'd already seen it, and that it talked mostly about football. This produced outright disbelief, and vague threats about carrying out "further investigation" on the reporter.
I think that sums up the spectrum in Europe. In some places, there is a genuine openness and willingness to trust Joe Public. In others, the citizen is treated with suspicion and disdain.
My hope is that we move towards the Finnish position. My fear is that we'll all end up more like Britain.
You know, one of the many reasons that the rest of the world views USians with such a piquant mix of fear and loathing is your breathtakinly egotistical assumption that anyone who doesn't say otherwise must belong to your hooting, braying pack of thugs.
Translation: war is really neat and clean, as long as you're on the side with the biggest guns!
Pop quiz: every time the USA ups the ante by squirting out another carrier battle group, or beats the tar out of an uppity dictator, does that make it A) less, or B) more likely that every tinpot dictator across the globe will trade his first born son in return for some enriched uranium and a suitcase to put it in?
We live in an age of war and hatred, and that sucks donkey whang. How about we try to do something about that other than working on our ability to make our enemies fear us more than they hate us?
Sure, we haven't tackled illiteracy, child poverty, acid rain, inequality of opportunity, inner city ghettoes, organized crime, global warming, space exploration, the garbage crisis, smog, cancer, AIDS, rainforest clearing, renewable energy or affordable social security, but looky here! Our zillion dollar aircraft carriers now come with a screensaver!
I accept that the observations have probably been analysed fairly well, and will now be analysed further, and that they are the only data we have. However, I'd like to see us duplicate those observations rather than accepting them at face value simply because we don't at the moment have the means to duplicate them.
I'm picturing a bunch of explorers on a ship, hotly debating the nature of the hidden coastline that's being described by the man with a telescope in the crow's nest. Heck, they're probably not just debating the significance of a smudge on his telescope lens, and he's probably not imagining it, or making it up for a lark, or just telling them what they want to hear. But how would they know?
Hubble is immensely valuable, but its primary use is - or should be - to produce a list of observations to be verified, not to draw definite conclusions from. What's the big hurry to take a guess? The universe isn't going anywhere.
All for-profit companies will ultimately become dumb and/or evil. Were we under the impression that it was otherwise? With cross licensing and horse trading over patents and IP, any rot that sets in will quickly spread to pollute everyone in what is, after all, a small and incestuous industry.
And you Red Hat users can wipe that self satisfied smirk off of your faces, because you're next. Yeah, "defensive" patents. Good job Red Hat will never run out of money or get bought out by someone less scrupulous, eh? That'll never happen, because, uh... the Magic Linux Pixies will rally round and stop it.
Look, for those not getting it, here's how it works. If you have code that you wrote with your own hands on your own time without copying anyone else, then that belongs to you. If you have code that you obtained rights to through a mutually agreed contract with a tangible transfer of benefit in the other direction, then you're probably all right in the short term - assuming that the rights belonged to whoever you obtained them from.
Under any other circumstances - open source licenses, commercial EULAs without an explicit mutual contract, code obtained from a third party, code "based on" someone else's - you're only borrowing it until the original owner wants it back, and comes knocking with his lawyers to get it. Go ahead and use it for hobby projects, but if you try and build a business on it, be aware that you're on borrowed time.
Look at it this way; if you were to buy a pure linux distributor tomorrow, what would their assets be? What do they own? Their office hardware. Their installer, maybe. The contents of their knowledge base. Their logo. Goodwill. That's it. Most Linux vendors have the same assets as Napster, i.e. a name and maybe a smattering of easily replicatable technology. They do nothing that Sun or IBM can't do bigger and better if they see the benefit to doing it.
You'd better believe that I know what I'm talking about. I work for a tech company that's set up to be sold, either as a going concern, or to one of our rivals in order to kill us (hey, the money is the same colour either way). We perform regular audits on our code base and tools to ensure that nothing - nothing - written outside the company or not unambiguously licensed through contract has got in there. As we're reminded over and over, the company is the code base. That, plus our reputation, is our sum worth, and the reputation is only a way to bring bidders to the table. The code base is the chest of gold.
Sun gets this. Microsoft gets this. IBM pretty much gets it, and is arguing out the details with SCO, who definitely get it. Upwardly mobile outfits like Red Hat get it, which is why they are desparately trying to obtain some IP leverage of their own. Little penny ante outfits (by which I mean every other linux distributor) can either get it, or get swatted when one of the big boys gets tired of them buzzing around their head.
I know that's not what linux hackers want to hear, but it's the brutal truth. Don't get too attached to any particular pure-linux distro, because their days are numbered. There might only be room for one or two linux distributors, and that might be Sun and IBM, not Mandrake and SuSE.
Slashdot Mirror
It's slower than MS Office running on wine on linux. It starts up more slowly, it responds more slowly, it uses more memory. Is that clear enough for you?
I can't find an explanation of how Neilsen/Netrating is getting these figures. If it's the same way as they get TV figures, then it'll be based on a tiny sample of households, fitted with voluntary tracking systems. Note that they specify "US households", not worldwide figures, so how else would they get them?
Pop quiz: if you're planning to do some serious leeching, are you more or less likely to sign up to Neilsen tracking?
For bonus points, if you're the sort of Suzie Homemaker that's on the Neilsen system because you're genuinely unaware that those Barry Mannilow mp3s you've been sucking down are hooky, and you're suddenly made aware that the RIAA Is Watching You, are you likely to spit up a hairball and suddenly stop sharing?
Looks to me like this is a survey selected to produce this result.
I thought I used KDE on the desktop. If you swap the linux kernel our from under that in favour of a BSD, Solaris, or heck, a Windows kernel, how would I even tell?
Make the [MP|RI]AA sell non-discriminatory licenses for content that's already out there, rather than allowing them to throttle the channels of distribution. That's in the spirit of copyright law, because the intent of copyright law is to put content into the public domain... pause, think... and the mechanism for doing it is to reward rights owners. So by having Joe Public distribute the content, then reward the rights owner, everybody wins, right?
Well, sure, but there's a tiny problem. It's that nobody remembers that. The publishers have a vested interest in not remembering it. In fact, they've paid huge sums of money to Congress to forget it. The DMCA, and DMCA case law explicitely refutes it. The "exclusive rights" have become paramount, trumping the intent to make the content available.
So, you make the [MP|RI]AA license content. Fine. Does that mean they have to make it available without DRM? Nope. Does it mean that you get the right to break the DRM to use it? Well, technically, if you can do it yourself without obtaining or making available a tool to do it, so, de facto, no. DMCA case law has already made this clear. Congress said that it's not legal to obtain tools even for use on content that you licensed, and the courts have (astonishingly) upheld that.
So what good does licensing do, when you can only get crippleware content, and devices that will play crippleware content, and when you can't legally obtain tools that let you uncripple it?
I applaud the EFF's intent, but defeating rampant DRM is a pre-requisite to any shake up in licensing, not an afterthought.
> "Most of the auctions are for credits (20k credits on Bria server, etc). Some are for buildings, or accounts."
What this highlights is that the in-game markets aren't working. If SOE provide better in-game fora for these transfers, they can nip this in the bud right now.
Of course, it's far more exciting to debate how stoooopid people are for paying $$$ for blasters. You can get back to doing that now.
>Also, if you are using Linux, remember that, when it is low on memory, it simply kills applications that are consuming lots of memory.
Suuuure it does, that's why it's so popular on servers. I suspect that you're talking about linux doing pre-emptive reads on open file descriptors (so your free RAM appears to dribble away), then freeing them when a userland application performs a memory intensive operation. It does this because free is a very cheap operation under linux, and is in contrast to the way (e.g.) the BSD or NT(2K/XP) kernels work. But, heh, it doesn't just kill applications. Symbian does that, PalmOS might, but not linux.
Meh. I work on a browser/file viewer that supports Flash, Javascript, MS Word, Excel, PDF, RTF, most flavours of HTML, with landscape/portrait mode, vector fonts, reflow, real time document panning and zooming, which has a ~1.6MB footproint, and getting smaller every day.
The basic problem with "fat" browsers that I can see is that they're developed on and for PCs where it's easy to make excuses for allocating a few hundred K here, a MB or two there. Try fitting the same browser on embedded devices, and you quickly find that, hey, you really didn't need that memory or all that startup code after all. Opera is our only real competitor on these devices, and even they suffer from bloat because they started on PC and then cut down.
Er, thinking about it, the BBC article was probably actually about Sweden, as I believe the letters mentioned Sven Goran Ericsson. They probably talked about Finland having the same principle in law, which is where I made the association here.
Many thanks!
Why don't you take your mealy mouthed disclaimers, roll them up, and use them to cluster fuck yourselves up your dissembling asses, you spineless cogs in the beaurocorporate machine?
Lawyers. These fucks are lawyers. I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire. Worthless parasites, each and every one of them.
Is there some problem with readers, with editors, hell, with story submitters, actually reading the damn article before making snide speculations?
"Wwe're going to [fix] it so when you click on a link it will take you to a registration page," said Christine Mohan, a spokeswoman at New York Times Digital, the publisher of NYTimes.com.
That's why they don't just tell google to not cache. They want the links to appear, but not to the stories themselves.
How about we discuss that issue, rather than some other, theoretical issue? I know it's an alien concept, but let's give it a try.
Here, I'll start it off. It looks like a decent idea. Google still gets the links, the NYT still gets the traffic, everyone gets to find the articles they want. What's not to like?
We could considering spending defence budget on defence, not on empire building. How do aircraft carriers help to defend anything, except in the sense that a good defence consists of pre-emptively bombing anyone who pisses you off back to the stone age, then sending in Haliburton to build oil pipelines?
Quite right, we should never appease dictators. So, Bush has had Afghanistan and Iraq. How much more breathing space does he need?
Read the grandparent post, chump. This was a refutation of something I hadn't said.
Circa 2003, I mean, where they can still come up with funny premises, but the implementation just sort of meanders around in an aimless fashion and tails off in a non conclusive, dribbling, eh, yeah, mmmm.
I remember hearing a BBC article on the difference betwee the Finnish and British governments. You (yes, you, Joe Public, even Joe Foreigner) can just walk in off the street to the residence of the Finnish Prime Minister, and ask to see any government related document. And they don't peer at you in a suspicious manner and tell you they'll get back to you in two years after checking your security clearance, they smile and fetch it straight away, and get you coffee while you're waiting. For example, they fetched some of the personal correspondance between Tony Blair and the Finnish Prime Minister, the actual original letters, and just handed them over, no questions, no bullshit.
Contrast with asking for copies of the same correspondance in the UK. The UK Freedom of Information act gives you every right to see them, but when the BBC asked for them, they were given the run around, passed from department to department in Whitehall, each one of which expressed amazement that anyone would ask for this. They were eventually fobbed off by being told that such correspondance was classified, too secret to be seen. They said that they'd already seen it, and that it talked mostly about football. This produced outright disbelief, and vague threats about carrying out "further investigation" on the reporter.
I think that sums up the spectrum in Europe. In some places, there is a genuine openness and willingness to trust Joe Public. In others, the citizen is treated with suspicion and disdain.
My hope is that we move towards the Finnish position. My fear is that we'll all end up more like Britain.
Sorry, I meant "wiiiiiine".
Hehehe, rated troll. That's so cute. Really. You guys are just adorable.
You know, one of the many reasons that the rest of the world views USians with such a piquant mix of fear and loathing is your breathtakinly egotistical assumption that anyone who doesn't say otherwise must belong to your hooting, braying pack of thugs.
Aw, you're so cute. Really, you are. Bless.
Translation: war is really neat and clean, as long as you're on the side with the biggest guns!
Pop quiz: every time the USA ups the ante by squirting out another carrier battle group, or beats the tar out of an uppity dictator, does that make it A) less, or B) more likely that every tinpot dictator across the globe will trade his first born son in return for some enriched uranium and a suitcase to put it in?
We live in an age of war and hatred, and that sucks donkey whang. How about we try to do something about that other than working on our ability to make our enemies fear us more than they hate us?
Sure, we haven't tackled illiteracy, child poverty, acid rain, inequality of opportunity, inner city ghettoes, organized crime, global warming, space exploration, the garbage crisis, smog, cancer, AIDS, rainforest clearing, renewable energy or affordable social security, but looky here! Our zillion dollar aircraft carriers now come with a screensaver!
Microsoft to blame for kiddie porn, idiocy. Film at 11.
I accept that the observations have probably been analysed fairly well, and will now be analysed further, and that they are the only data we have. However, I'd like to see us duplicate those observations rather than accepting them at face value simply because we don't at the moment have the means to duplicate them.
I'm picturing a bunch of explorers on a ship, hotly debating the nature of the hidden coastline that's being described by the man with a telescope in the crow's nest. Heck, they're probably not just debating the significance of a smudge on his telescope lens, and he's probably not imagining it, or making it up for a lark, or just telling them what they want to hear. But how would they know?
Hubble is immensely valuable, but its primary use is - or should be - to produce a list of observations to be verified, not to draw definite conclusions from. What's the big hurry to take a guess? The universe isn't going anywhere.
All for-profit companies will ultimately become dumb and/or evil. Were we under the impression that it was otherwise? With cross licensing and horse trading over patents and IP, any rot that sets in will quickly spread to pollute everyone in what is, after all, a small and incestuous industry.
And you Red Hat users can wipe that self satisfied smirk off of your faces, because you're next. Yeah, "defensive" patents. Good job Red Hat will never run out of money or get bought out by someone less scrupulous, eh? That'll never happen, because, uh... the Magic Linux Pixies will rally round and stop it.
Look, for those not getting it, here's how it works. If you have code that you wrote with your own hands on your own time without copying anyone else, then that belongs to you. If you have code that you obtained rights to through a mutually agreed contract with a tangible transfer of benefit in the other direction, then you're probably all right in the short term - assuming that the rights belonged to whoever you obtained them from.
Under any other circumstances - open source licenses, commercial EULAs without an explicit mutual contract, code obtained from a third party, code "based on" someone else's - you're only borrowing it until the original owner wants it back, and comes knocking with his lawyers to get it. Go ahead and use it for hobby projects, but if you try and build a business on it, be aware that you're on borrowed time.
Look at it this way; if you were to buy a pure linux distributor tomorrow, what would their assets be? What do they own? Their office hardware. Their installer, maybe. The contents of their knowledge base. Their logo. Goodwill. That's it. Most Linux vendors have the same assets as Napster, i.e. a name and maybe a smattering of easily replicatable technology. They do nothing that Sun or IBM can't do bigger and better if they see the benefit to doing it.
You'd better believe that I know what I'm talking about. I work for a tech company that's set up to be sold, either as a going concern, or to one of our rivals in order to kill us (hey, the money is the same colour either way). We perform regular audits on our code base and tools to ensure that nothing - nothing - written outside the company or not unambiguously licensed through contract has got in there. As we're reminded over and over, the company is the code base. That, plus our reputation, is our sum worth, and the reputation is only a way to bring bidders to the table. The code base is the chest of gold.
Sun gets this. Microsoft gets this. IBM pretty much gets it, and is arguing out the details with SCO, who definitely get it. Upwardly mobile outfits like Red Hat get it, which is why they are desparately trying to obtain some IP leverage of their own. Little penny ante outfits (by which I mean every other linux distributor) can either get it, or get swatted when one of the big boys gets tired of them buzzing around their head.
I know that's not what linux hackers want to hear, but it's the brutal truth. Don't get too attached to any particular pure-linux distro, because their days are numbered. There might only be room for one or two linux distributors, and that might be Sun and IBM, not Mandrake and SuSE.
It's a four step process.