Slashdot Mirror


User: djmurdoch

djmurdoch's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,077
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,077

  1. Re:The GPL is Viral, deflection not withstanding.. on Misconceptions About the GPL · · Score: 1

    Microsoft Office isn't really a 'library.'

    It's a COM server, isn't it?

    And I'd worry about you if your code was linking into it to run.

    Well, if I was trying to write a big bloated word processor...

  2. Re:So... on The Light Bulb That Can Change the World · · Score: 1

    They work in the winter? Maybe only the ones I have don't, but when the temperature is below freezing, they won't come on.

  3. Re:So... on The Light Bulb That Can Change the World · · Score: 1

    Why not?

    They cost 10 times as much as an incandescent bulb.

    They don't work in cold locations.

    They don't work in enclosed fixtures.

    They don't last as long as advertised. I've been running 4 of them for a year, with one failure so far. That's about what I'd have expected from a set of incandescents.

    They don't work with dimmers.

  4. Re: Rights are goods on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 1

    I can see your point, but "just dumb" is a little harsh.

    I can't think of a better adjective. A longer description would be "pedantic, but incorrect".

  5. Re:I don't care for these commercials on New "Get a Mac" TV ads · · Score: 1

    Yes, the Dell is coded that way: I forgot. But that's not the color coding on the headset, which is black/red (going into green/pink). The Mac (a Macbook) has no color coding.

  6. Re:I don't care for these commercials on New "Get a Mac" TV ads · · Score: 1

    The rest of the cables only fit into one socket, so the only way to misconnect them is either to forget to, or requires a hammer.

    Not quite. My headset has two colour coded but otherwise identical plugs for the headphones and the mic. Both my Mac and my Dell have tiny little embossed-and-in-dim-light-invisible icons indicating which is which. Since they're in opposite order on the two machines, it's always a pain to remember which plug goes in which socket.

  7. Re: Rights are goods on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 1

    certain unalienable Rights

    There are some rights that shouldn't be bought and sold, and that's what those guys were talking about. But contracts specify rights all the time. If you buy a ticket, you have a right to go in and see a movie. If you rent out a room in your house, your tenant has a right to use it in certain ways.

    Perhaps legal jargon has some adjective to distinguish between the two kinds of rights, but saying that rights obtained in exchange for payment aren't rights is just dumb.

  8. Re:Great idea on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 1, Informative

    "So essentially, either you pay the levy to the CPCC, or you pay the CPCC other money so that you don't pay them the levy."

    No, you also have the option of using media with no levy, e.g. DVDs, or the disk in your MP3 player.

    "they're getting your money, all because they preemptively convict you of stealing music"

    No, that's not why you pay. You pay in order to have the right to make private copies. If you do that, you're not stealing, you're making legal copies. If you use the discs for something else, you're being taxed for the benefit of someone else. If you make the copies on media that have no levies, you're getting the benefit without paying for it.

  9. Re:Great idea on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 1

    That sucks, but CD recorders for a computer are so cheap now that it likely wouldn't kill you to trash the Yamaha and do all your recording with a sound card on a computer. This will save you the extra cost of the levy on the audio discs, and the cost of recording crap, because you can edit that out before committing to media.

  10. Re:Great idea on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 1

    It is not always being charged,, but it is supposed to be. You can find more links about this case here.

  11. Re:Great idea on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 4, Informative

    Fair dealing is much more limited than fair use. For example, it wouldn't allow you to make a copy for time shifting, or media shifting. But you might be right that it's closer to being "Canada's equivalent of fair use" than private copying is. I just tend to think of "equivalent" as being a black and white relation.

    Wikipedia has a nice discussion of the differences between fair use and fair dealing.

    I could have said "Canada has no equivalent of Fair Use. Our Fair Dealing is quite different.", but the private copying levy has nothing to do with fair dealing.

  12. Re:Great idea on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 1

    Canada has no equivalent of Fair Use. Our Private Copying right is quite different.

    I'd say there's a good chance that the Private Copying right will go, because the multinationals don't like it any more. I think the Private Copying levy will go at the same time, because it is specifically put in place to reimburse copyright holders for the Private Copying right.

    Personally, I like Private Copying, and think the levy is a reasonable rate to pay for it. However, I don't think it's really sustainable in the long run, because it can't really keep up with technology.

  13. Re:Great idea on 30 Days of DRM · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a Canadian, I can tell you that there are no such levies on CDs or DVDs, because they are argued as being used for computer data.

    This is wrong. There are levies on blank CDs, because they are commonly used to record music, whether they are "CD-audio" or not.

    See the current rates here.

  14. Re:DRM yadda yadda... on Warner to Sell Music on DVD · · Score: 1

    You're assuming that downloading music is illegal, the way stealing cars is illegal. In fact, in some countries (e.g. Canada) downloading music is legal, because the copyright holders have been paid through a tariff on blank media.

    So maybe the metaphor should be: if the toll road costs too much, I'll just stay on the free one. It's not really free (I pay for it in my taxes), but it's less expensive than the toll road, and you shouldn't call me a thief for not paying the toll road operator.

  15. Re:If you value your country, you need to be on Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine · · Score: 1

    That stops election fraudsters from reprogramming the machines to ignore votes. Instead, they'd just change them to count for their own candidate. I don't see why anyone would be satisfied with that.

  16. Re:If you value your country, you need to be on Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine · · Score: 1

    To keep dead people from voting you either need a good identification system, or a way to mark people that lasts for a full day and can't be removed.

    If you want to keep the corpses out of the voting booths, the marks will have to last longer than a day.

  17. Re:If you value your country, you need to be on Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine · · Score: 1

    If you can look up your vote to verify it, then the thug who threatened to burn down your house unless you voted properly can ask you to prove your vote.

    You've lost the possibility of a secret vote.

  18. Re:Wrong. In fact, double wrong on Stem Cells - The Hope and the Hype · · Score: 1

    There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.

    The Bible isn't the only source of religious belief, even among Christians. Most of their beliefs come from other people (e.g. the Pope, or Pat Robertson, or their parents), not from the Bible.

    This is a battle between people who belief personhood begins at conception vs people who believe it begins at first brain wave, birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord, etc.

    The question of "personhood" could be a legal question, but in this context it's mainly a moral one, as you say. But since most religious people are supposed to derive their moral values from their religion, and since Bush certainly does that, it's quite correct to say that his decision is a religious decision.

  19. Re:A bit expensive for a Linux laptop? on Linux Laptop from R Cubed Reviewed · · Score: 2, Informative

    just shy of $1500 doesn't seem that high, it's only £812,

    You seem to think currency conversion is all that matters. Everything in the UK is priced higher than the same thing in the US. For example, the $1099 Macbook is £749 in the UK (incl VAT). Expect to pay over £1000 for this machine. (Without VAT the prices are closer, but the UK is still higher. In the US prices are always quoted without sales tax, because each state has its own tax rate.)

  20. Re:Not 800,000 years on Pharaoh's Gem Brighter Than a Thousand Suns · · Score: 1

    Well, that's assuming that someone saw the meteor strike, wasn't killed by it, and the legend was passed down through the generations. That's quite a lot to swallow with their being no evidence for any of it.

    Especially since the glass is 28.5 million years old.

  21. Re:impact crater anyone? on Pharaoh's Gem Brighter Than a Thousand Suns · · Score: 1

    Some of them are aware of the possible link.

    Regarding the possibility of the "memory of such an apocalyptic event": not too likely. According to the same article, the glass has been dated at roughly 28 million years old.

  22. Beyond Compare replacement? on Best Developer Tools for OS X · · Score: 1

    I've recently started using a Macbook, after years on Windows and *nix. The one tool I can't seem to find is a nice visual file compare utility, like Beyond Compare on Windows. I believe Emacs has something similar, but I'm allergic to it. Does Vim? Is there something standalone?

  23. Re:spaces bad, special chars bad on Linux/Mac/Windows File Name Friction · · Score: 1

    DOS only did it on a few extensions, Windows made it extendable. My point was that this was a good thing.

  24. Re:spaces bad, special chars bad on Linux/Mac/Windows File Name Friction · · Score: 1

    1. the requirement the ".3" portion be satisfied, i.e., if you didn't give a ".3" extension, it wasn't valid.

    As far as I know that was never true in DOS/Windows, though some applications may have done that.

    2. the semantic mapping of the extension to filetype, WTF?

    That bothered me at first, but it's a pretty nice convention to follow, so why not build it into the shell?

    3. the implied (don't remember if it was canonical) semantic that no ".3" extension meant the file was a directory

    That was only a convention.

    4. the case insensitive nature of file names

    I'm a native English speaker, so I don't mind this. English sometimes uses case to change the meaning of a word, but more often it's used to indicate something about the usage. I think Unix (and C, etc.) got this one wrong.


    And then everything swings completely the other direction where anything goes. This may curry favor with users, but wreaks havoc on billions of lines of code which all of a sudden choke on what had been simple parsing routines -- fixable, but at great expense. I still think this was a paradigm shift that somehow could have accommodated the user space/community but still allowed some sanity in the machine world.


    You're talking about spaces in filenames, etc? Those were always possible in Unix; why didn't you write your code to handle them properly? ;-)

    Options to show extension, defaults to hide extensions,

    No question, MS definitely got that one wrong. But they were probably motivated by your complaint number 2: they just didn't have anywhere to hide the type marker in the file or extended attributes, so they put it in the extension and then hid the extension. Bad decision.

  25. Re:Key line from TFA on Porn Dominates the Spam Battlefield · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You have the right to send any e-mail you want, including spam, and that's the way it should be.

    No, you don't have that right, and you shouldn't. It's my mailbox, and you can't use it without my permission.

    Go after the people who are paying the bills, and most of the "spam kings" will find themselves out of business in short order.

    In your world, where everyone has a right to put something in my mailbox, you'll just start getting mainstream ads instead of scams. I don't want to live in that world.