Ever seen footage of how Hitler turned the 1936 Summer Games in Munich into a Nazi three-ring circus? How many of the athletes from foreign nations were forced to acknowledge the Fuhrer with Nazi salutes? Not exactly the Olympic movement's finest hour.
Perhaps you would be happy for the Stars and Stripes to be plastered all over this year's Winter Games, but would you be so happy if China was to push its political agenda just as vigorously when they host the Summer Games in 2008?
This is not flamebait. The person who moderated it as such should be ashamed.
How would you like it if your rights were stripped from you in this manner?
Disencfranchisement of thousands of votes through beaurocratic incompetency is incredible thing to see in a country that prides itself on being a beacon for democracy.
Isn't free speech one of the bedrocks of American society? Or is the First Amendment a figment of my imagination?
Short of devoting a large chunk of their life to public service, being able to vote is the only chance the average citizen has to voice his/her beliefs on how their society should be governed.
Voting and free speech don't just go hand in hand, voting is free speech.
Next time you step up to the ballot box, or even open your mouth to complain about being given a latte instead of a mocha, imagine how mad you'd feel if someone ripped that ballot paper out of your hand, or stuffed a gag in your mouth so you couldn't raise the issue.
Remember, democracy isn't just for you, it's for everyone out there too. Otherwise, it's not democracy.
Oh, and you forgot the obligatory exceptions, such as beige, counterfeit, deity, eight, either, foreign, forfeit, freight, heifer, height, heinous, heir, heist, leisure, neigh, neighbour, neither, reign, seismic, seize, sovereign, surfeit, their, veil, vein, weight, weir, weird, Neil, Sheila and their (no pun intended) derivatives.
And then are the ones that go the other way, like conscience, efficient, science, society, species, not to mention many plurals such as fallacies, fancies, etc.
These aren't complete lists - there are several other examples that I've neglected to mention but I'm damned if I can remember them all now.
Some interesting points and your example of the computer donation to a rebuilding police force clearly indicates what I was trying to say - there are major barriers other than the cost of a software license or two that prevent OSS being widely adopted in the developing world.*
Where people don't have the basics (PCs, electricity) what help is it discussing the details (software licensing)? It's like arguing whether a blind man's bedroom should be painted white or cream.
Yes, the saved software licensing costs at a governmental level can do some good but, let's be honest here, many developing world countries are run by less than egalitarian governments more interested in keeping themselves in power than they are in helping the common man.**
Few, if any lives, will be saved by transitioning from close source to open source but I'll take few over none - a point that I should have made in my original comment.
We agree that, in truly remote conditions, tech support is going to be a serious issue for both OSS and CSS. My original point wasn't that this was a disadvantage of OSS but rather that support always needs to be factored in.
Most people in the developed world are quite happily have their videos blinking 00:00, even though they have the step-by-step documentation that shows them how to set the time and date properly. I've yet to see any Linux distribution (or any version of Windows for that matter) supplied with documentation truly suited for complete novices. When forced to, some people will get stuck in and force themselves to learn but some won't, through fear of "breaking" something, etc. Good documentation is a must, but even the best documentation is no substitute for the occasional helping hand of a more experienced user.
Some serious food for thought for all of us.
(* Again, I'm not talking about South Africa here, I'm talking about the developing world - the poorest of the poor. South Africa doesn't fit into this category so feel free to mod me off-topic if you must, but this seems to be a nice discussion thread so why spoil things?)
(** A generalisation perhaps, but it's true in many cases. Unfortunately, democracy, free and fair elections and transparency of government aren't always the norm in the developing world, whereas dictatorships, opression and wide-scale corruption seem to be. It's a sad world we live in.)
Perhaps next time you use a quote from one of my posts you could do me the courtesy of not editing it first?
After all, what I wrote was this:
I guess you could always argue the point that you hadn't used the software (perhaps you had bought the software in error, had decided against using it after reading the EULA, etc) and thus were legally just reselling on what was sold to you in the first place.
Where from reading that, or the rest of my post, you saw me saying "lie about it and break the law" is a mystery to me. Must be nice to see things that aren't there.
What I was trying to illustrate was that there are many reasons why a piece of software might be lying on a shelf having never been used. Basically, at any point up to the owner's acceptance of any EULA, s/he is not the end user, and can arguably dispose of the software in a reasonable manner.
In effect s/he has just become another link in the supply chain. Just as the software was sold my the manufacturer to a distributor, then to a retail/mail order/online software vendor, and then to the current owner. Heck, this happens everyday - people buy software for friends all the time and the transfer of ownership is perfectly legal as long as the person who is handing over the software has not been bound by the terms of a EULA.
Of course, opening up the package, installing it, using it for a couple of months and then deciding to sell it on is illegal (rightly or wrongly, wrongly in my opinion).
But, opening up the package, flicking through the manuals, reading and rejecting the EULA and then deciding to sell it on is perfectly legal (and I'd like to see Microsoft or someone else even argue otherwise).
Now nowhere in the comment that I was replying to did the poster state whether on not they had accepted the EULA, used the software, etc. S/he simply states that they decided to go down another route. So, reselling the software s/he has maybe perfectly legal, in which case Microsoft and ebay might have jumped the gun in pulling the auction. But that's another story.
(Of course, IANAL, but this is all well-established under fair use, etc statutes.)
I guess you could always argue the point that you hadn't used the software (perhaps you had bought the software in error, had decided against using it after reading the EULA, etc) and thus were legally just reselling on what was sold to you in the first place.
But when ebay gets a call from Microsoft they aren't going to think twice about jumping on command. I would imagine that you could call them up and debate the semantics of the situation with an ebay representative but I'd bet the bottom line would be the same - no auction for you.
IANAL, but I'm willing to bet that, given the right ammunition, there are circumstances under which you could prevail. Though I doubt that, once you've shelled out for legal representation, you wouldn't have much to show for efforts, even if you managed to get full retail value for the package.
Personally, I'd take it up with ebay but stop short of calling in the suits. At worst, it'll get them squirming about it for a while and, at best, you might just catch a break.
(Before you right this off as a troll, please read on and think about how different your lifestyle is from that of the majority of the people in the world, who have no access to a telephone line, let alone the internet.)
OK, it's a no-brainer that open source software would be a good fit for governments that, in many cases, have problems feeding, clothing and housing their populations.*
But how, practically is this achievable on anything other than an administrative level? Running Linux and Star Office rather than Microsoft Windows and Office and employing sysadmins with the relative skills is all doable in the halls of power but how can open source be brought to the people?
In countries where many rural areas lack running water, let alone electricity, is it realistic to hope that the open source movement can help the common man?
OK, so a little off the government's licensing costs can't hurt but will it really make a meaningful difference? Not to Joe Average it won't.
If there was some way of getting cheap (second hand?) no-thrills PCs to local schools in a developing country then I think open source software could make a difference but, for all sorts of reasons, this just isn't practical.
For one thing, even open source software requires support (and so does the hardware it runs on). You might find all the support you need online but someone who lives miles from the nearest telephone is going to find it a little harder.
I'd love it for it to be possible, but it's not. The real world just doesn't work that way.
In my humble opinion, hoping for open source software to take off in the developing world before it happens in the developed world is a pipe dream.
(* No, I don't put South Africa in this category. Thanks to it's mineral riches, it's one of the few countries in Africa that can stand on its own two feet. It's a pity that the interest payments alone on crippling debt stops other african nations from being so self-sufficient, but that's another story.)
Surely it's not the number of vulnerabilities that either OS displays that's important but rather their severity?
I mean, an exploit that requires the malicious party to have physical access to a machine and then only gives him access to one specific folder on a system is hardly as big a deal as one that gives a script kiddie sitting in his bedroom complete remote control of your corporate servers, allowing him to copy, overwrite and delete files, folders and hard drives at the click of a button?
Let's try to compare apples and oranges here. Just because McDonalds has more restaurants than Michelin-stared ones it doesn't make the Big Mac a better meal.
Whatever qualification Prof. Steve Jones holds, he should probably take down his degree and wipe his arse with it, as it has turned out that is all it's good for.
Yet another example of someone on/. shouting down the efforts of someone they disagree with with an infantile remark.
For your information Professor Steve Jones is arguably the world's top geneticist. He's spent practically his entire career on the subject and is perhaps to genetics what Albert Einstein is to
relativity.
To say that his opinions are highly respected in the scientific community is an understatement - you'd have more luck finding a kid that hates candy than you would a serious scientist that was as dismissive of Prof. Jones's arguments as you appear to be.
Perhaps you have a professional interest in genetics yourself? A doctorate then? A degree perhaps? No, I didn't think so.
Yours seems to be a typical knee-jerk reaction. "Hey, I don't understand/like the idea of what this guy is saying so I'll bash/ridicule him." Very mature.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Prof. Jones, being a sensible scientist - the kind that looks at all avenues and approaches, accepting of all ideas and dismissive of none - looks at all the arguments before reaching his conclusions, whatever they may be.
Who knows, perhaps he looked at all the evidence - even the stuff you've put forward - before commiting his ideas to the scrutiny of the scientific community via a paper or a journal.
Perhaps he's right. Perhaps he's wrong. Scientists aren't always as arrogant as you seem to be - they don't claim to have all the answers but they damn well try to look for some.
It seems to me that Prof. Jones isn't defining some set-in-stone law here. He's only putting forward a theory.
Perhaps you'd be more confortable if scientist's didn't theorise? If Newton hadn't thought about gravity, Darwin about evolution or Einstein about the speed of light?
Science (and mankind in general) is progressed as much by taking an idea, working with it and finding out that it's wrong, coming up with a new idea that matches new emperical data, working with that, etc, as it is by someone pulling the right answers out of a hat first time.
Prof. Jones might be wrong. He might be right. Or, he might be somewhere in between. But if we take your approach to science we'll never find out.
1. Broadcasters and the majority of VCR/DVD player manufacturers hate TiVo and don't want Joe Average using it.
Broadcasters because people skip past the ads that bring in the bucks. Remember, from their point of view, programming is just filling to make sure you watch the ads they're broadcasting.
The VCR/DVD manufacturers hate it because TiVo doesn't just threaten sales of their players head to head, but also confuses the market - give Joe too many choices and he's more likely to take a wait-and-see approach, and will buy nothing rather than risk buying the wrong thing.
Without either the backing of major software providers (the broadcasters) or hardware manufacturers (the VCR/DVD crowd), TiVo is starved of publicity dollars, and that means...
2. Not many consumers know about TiVo.
I'd bet that our Joe Average is barely aware of TiVo's existence, let alone is aware of its features and benefits. And if Joe Average hasn't heard about it, he's not going to be buying it.
(Remember, Joe gets up in the morning, has breakfast, perhaps reads a paper, goes to work, comes home, has dinner and watches some TV before eventually going to bed. He doesn't read Slashdot, any IT or gadget-related magazines and he doesn't drool over the next big thing in quite the way we do.)
Besides, Joe Average doesn't shell out for hardware every day and he's just getting comfortable with his wide-screen TV and his other brand new appliance. Which merits a mention of its own...
3. DVDs are the hot item of the moment.
No technology has ever achieved such rapid market penetration as DVD. Or put another way, Joe Average and his brother either has a DVD player or is planning to get one.
And, having shelled out some serious money to buy his brand new box, Joe Average is darn well going to make good use of it.
And if he's buying the DVD back catalogue of his favourite TV show or he's creating a library of the latest blockbuster movies, he's got two fewer reasons to buy a TiVo box. Firstly, he's watching less TV (he's watching his DVDs instead) and, secondly, he doesn't need a box that will record every M.A.S.H. re-run, because he just bought a couple of series worth to play in his nice shiny new machine.
Of course, the broadcasters and studios (who in many cases are largely owned by the hardware manufacturers) love this guy. He might not be watching their ads or putting his bum on a movie seat but he's going one better - he's buying their product again but this time it's a product for which they recouped their initial investment some time ago.
Mind you, Joe doesn't mind. Now he's got his DVDs he can play them over and over again, and it won't cost him a penny. Which is more than can be said for TiVo, because...
4. TiVo is a subscription service. That means a monthly bill.
As far as Joe's concerned, he already pays enough for cable, satellite or whatever. Why does he need to spend even more on his monthly TV bill for a souped-up VCR?
In these economically uncertain times, Joe would rather have the money in the bank, thank you very much.
(Yes, I know some of you out there will have abandoned your subscriptions and will be using your TiVos without a monthly bill but if Joe gets a new box down at the store then he's committing himself for some time.)
There are, of course, many other reasons why Joe might have a TiVo but, frankly, these are reasons enough.
No one wants him to buy a TiVo, no one wants to tell him about TiVo, everyone wants to tell him about DVD and he doesn't feel comfortable about spending the money right now anyhow.
Pretty straightforward if you ask me.
Cluster priorities? Ease of set up or performance?
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Macintosh Clustering
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· Score: 1
I'm no genius but it doesn't take one to realise that the top priority for people setting up clusters isn't how easy they are to set up initially but how they behave once they are in use.
To most sysadmins, the performance and reliability of the cluster once it's up and running would be top of priority list.
Whether the cluster took 5 minutes or half a day to set up would be irrelevant compared to how quickly they could do the task in hand and how much ongoing maintenance was required. (I'm not saying that Macs aren't reliable, so don't flame me for that, just that, in the real world, people think about these things.)
Additionally, a fair proportion of real world clusters won't be built from scratch using brand new boxes. More than likely, several machines in the new network will have been appropriated from elsewhere. The likelyhood that these will be all Macs is low, whereas the chance that they'll be able to run Linux is much higher.
And even if you were building from scratch, cost would be a factor. Last time I checked, you could get far more bang for your buck buying PCs than Macs.
Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't build a Mac cluster only that, given the alternatives, I doubt the few pros outweigh the many cons.
Hitting Servers? A warning from Monty Python
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Kernel 2.5.3 Released
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· Score: 3, Funny
"Lets go hit those servers!"
Hitting a server is not a good idea. Hit them too hard and you will break something important and the server will cease to function properly.
The once lively server will be dead. It won't be resting, it'll be stone dead. It'll have passed on. It'll be no more. It will cease to be!
It'll have expired and gone to meet its maker. It'll be a stiff. Bereft of life, it'll rest in peace. If it wasn't for the fact that it had been mounted to a rack it'll be pushing up the daisies!
Its processing cycles will be history. It'll be off the twig. It will have kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!
Err, I don't exactly see where anyone said "the US is the best" or where I refuted it but, hey, if you want to see something that's not there then that's your prerogative. But, if you want clarity, I'll try to give it to you.
Saying "the US is the best" is not a racist. But saying that "everything we do is great, everything you do sucks, not that what you do matters anyhow, and stop claiming credit for anything half-decent you lying foreigner" is racist.
Perhaps you would be more comfortable if I used the word xenophobic but racist is just as accurate a description for what the Anonymous Coward had to say.
And before you get on your high horse, racism doesn't have to be about skin colour. Here are a couple of nice dictionary definitions for you:
racism (n)
1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
race (n)
1. A local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics.
2. A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution: the German race.
3. A genealogical line; a lineage.
4. Humans considered as a group.
5. Biology a. An interbreeding, usually geographically isolated population of organisms differing from other populations of the same species in the frequency of hereditary traits. A race that has been given formal taxonomic recognition is known as a subspecies.
b. A breed or strain, as of domestic animals.
6. A distinguishing or characteristic quality, such as the flavor of a wine.
Maybe, but the United States invented the whole damned thing, so what do we care?
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong.
The world wide web was the brainchild and invention of Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at the European Union-funded CERN particle research project. Yes, the Internet was born out of ARPAnet, a US military network but, as it exists today, it is arguably more international an endeavour than you'd ever like to admit.
This ignorant, "if it's not Uncle Sam, I don't give a damn", USA-centric view of the world is exactly what the original parent comment was arguing against. And, boy, did you prove him right with your revisionist rant.
Oh, next time you're playing your British game on your Japanese console perhaps you might consider that there are some foreign influences that aren't entirely evil.
I'm just glad that not every American is as ill-informed, naive and racist as you've obviously shown yourself to be.
Thanks to the latest duping hack (don't bother, the loophole's been closed), the Diablo II economy has taken a hit bigger than Elvis.
If you're really interested then check out DiabloII.net for more, but suffice to say that items that were gold dust are now as common as mud.
A quick look at the prices on Ebay (yes, I know that selling items in this way violates the D2 EULA but people do it and Blizzard's turned a blind eye to it) would show that D2 rares are way, way down in price.
The only real-world parallel I can draw is early 1930's Germany when people had to take wheelbarrows of notes to buy a loaf of bread as hyperinflation kicked in. Bank notes literally weren't worth the paper they were printed on.
If Hewlett Packard were to pull out of the PC (note, big if) it would be the end of some of the best desktop and server products in the industry.
From their consumer, soho, business and workstation PCs (such as the Brio, Vectra and Kayak ranges) all the way up to their server offerings, HP have consistently produced top-notch products.
Well designed, reliable machines with excellent utilities (is there a management suite out there that's better than TopTools?) backed up by a professional and knowledgeable support structure have made HP PCs a dream to work with - as both a end user and a system administrator.
Sure, the printing business may be the company's major cash cow but it's its systems that really impress me.
I've been fortunate to have reviewed PCs from dozens of manufacturers, and I can honestly say that if I bought a PC (I tend to build my own) there would only be two companies I'd buy from. HP is one of them.
But let's be realistic here. HP has a massive installed user base, including many blue chip corporates. It's not going to abandon making PCs and those customers (many of whom will have support contracts that guarantee the availability of their preferred desktop and servers for years to come) any more than it's going to abandon its print business.
From the sounds of it, this is classic boardroom spin ("if X doesn't happen then we'll be forced to do Y") aimed squarely at getting Fiorina the votes she desperately needs to push through the HP/Compaq merger on which she seems to have mortgaged her career.
Quite frankly, if this comment was a serious statement of HP's intent then it would have been made to a more respected media outlet, such as the Wall Street Journal or a Ziff Davis title, or via a major press conference, rather than the less-than-heavyweight USA Today.
That's the least of your worries. Live anywhere near a gas storage facility? Toxic dump? Or even a gas filling station? How about within several states of a nuclear power facility?
The slightest thing going wrong with the containment at any of these places and you can kiss your ass goodbye.
Now we all know that these things don't blow up every day but - broadly speaking, scientists in a lab type environment take far more sensible precautions over the storage, use and containment of potentially hazardous materials than people in the real world.
That's because the scientist's priority will invariably be safe, repeatable research carried out in baby steps whereas the real world corporations will always weigh risk against profit.
And, personally speaking, I don't think that a bean counter focused on the fiscal bottom line is the best person to trust when it comes to safety.
I can't believe yours is the only post I've read so far mentioning Tad Williams.
Critics have called Williams the closest thing there is to a modern-day JRR Tolkien but, IMHO, his work blows Tolkien away.
Sure, he's not as well known, but read his classic fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (made up of The Dragonbone Chair, The Stone of Farewell and To Green Angel Tower*), and compare it to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Now I'm not saying that LOTR isn't a good read - it's a great one - but MST has so much more action, emotion and depth that you immediately remember that LOTR was written for kids.
If more people knew about Williams, he'd be lauded as a genius - and rightly so.
(* MST's book three was also published in paperback in two parts as it was so big. These two books are called Storm and Siege.)
Re:Be wary of Athlon for games
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The New Athlons
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· Score: 1
Seems to me like your beef isn't with AMD, it's with the manufacturer of your motherboard, whom you have forgotten to mention.
Blaming AMD for your motherboard maker's AGP woes is a bit like blaming Goodyear because the fuel injection system on your Ford doesn't work properly. Unless the manufacturer of the chipset concerned was AMD (which I doubt), you're pointing the blaming the wrong party.
Ask a bunch of hardcore gamers what they think of AMD and their processors - I bet they have good things to say. Even the most die-hard Intel fan would have to admit that the competition from AMD has driven chip prices down to more realistic levels.
...never be a good samaritan, because no one will appreciate your efforts.
Imagine this conversation in your street:
Guy 1: "Hey neighbour, you've left your front door wide open and I think the local hoods are eyeing over your TV and VCR system."
Guy 2: "What? You say you saw my front door open? How did that happen? I couldn't have left it open, not me. You opened it, right? I'm calling the cops buddy."
The scene: A surgeon, having being hastly called to the operaing theatre finds before him a hulking great mass.
The surgeon prepares himself for action; he is about to open the patient's guts. Cowled, hooded and cloaked, he looks a strange sight. Slowly but surely though, he activates his lightsaber and makes a long incision along the length of abdomen.
The stench of the the air released by the innards once exposed to the air is nauseating. The surgeon staggers visiblyh, unprepared for such a olefactory assault.
Surgeon: And I thought they smelled bad on the outside.
(Apologies to George Lucas, Harrison Ford and Star Wars fans everywhere. No tauntons were harmed in the narration of this story.)
Slashdot Mirror
Simply zap your purchases with your handheld EMP generator.
Uh, you do have a handheld EMP generator don't you?
(A Stargate Zat gun will do in a pinch.)
Ever seen footage of how Hitler turned the 1936 Summer Games in Munich into a Nazi three-ring circus? How many of the athletes from foreign nations were forced to acknowledge the Fuhrer with Nazi salutes? Not exactly the Olympic movement's finest hour.
Perhaps you would be happy for the Stars and Stripes to be plastered all over this year's Winter Games, but would you be so happy if China was to push its political agenda just as vigorously when they host the Summer Games in 2008?
No, I didn't think so.
I'm willing to bet it's Aqua.
This is not flamebait. The person who moderated it as such should be ashamed.
How would you like it if your rights were stripped from you in this manner?
Disencfranchisement of thousands of votes through beaurocratic incompetency is incredible thing to see in a country that prides itself on being a beacon for democracy.
Isn't free speech one of the bedrocks of American society? Or is the First Amendment a figment of my imagination?
Short of devoting a large chunk of their life to public service, being able to vote is the only chance the average citizen has to voice his/her beliefs on how their society should be governed.
Voting and free speech don't just go hand in hand, voting is free speech.
Next time you step up to the ballot box, or even open your mouth to complain about being given a latte instead of a mocha, imagine how mad you'd feel if someone ripped that ballot paper out of your hand, or stuffed a gag in your mouth so you couldn't raise the issue.
Remember, democracy isn't just for you, it's for everyone out there too. Otherwise, it's not democracy.
Oh, and you forgot the obligatory exceptions, such as beige, counterfeit, deity, eight, either, foreign, forfeit, freight, heifer, height, heinous, heir, heist, leisure, neigh, neighbour, neither, reign, seismic, seize, sovereign, surfeit, their, veil, vein, weight, weir, weird, Neil, Sheila and their (no pun intended) derivatives.
And then are the ones that go the other way, like conscience, efficient, science, society, species, not to mention many plurals such as fallacies, fancies, etc.
These aren't complete lists - there are several other examples that I've neglected to mention but I'm damned if I can remember them all now.
Some interesting points and your example of the computer donation to a rebuilding police force clearly indicates what I was trying to say - there are major barriers other than the cost of a software license or two that prevent OSS being widely adopted in the developing world.*
Where people don't have the basics (PCs, electricity) what help is it discussing the details (software licensing)? It's like arguing whether a blind man's bedroom should be painted white or cream.
Yes, the saved software licensing costs at a governmental level can do some good but, let's be honest here, many developing world countries are run by less than egalitarian governments more interested in keeping themselves in power than they are in helping the common man.**
Few, if any lives, will be saved by transitioning from close source to open source but I'll take few over none - a point that I should have made in my original comment.
We agree that, in truly remote conditions, tech support is going to be a serious issue for both OSS and CSS. My original point wasn't that this was a disadvantage of OSS but rather that support always needs to be factored in.
Most people in the developed world are quite happily have their videos blinking 00:00, even though they have the step-by-step documentation that shows them how to set the time and date properly. I've yet to see any Linux distribution (or any version of Windows for that matter) supplied with documentation truly suited for complete novices. When forced to, some people will get stuck in and force themselves to learn but some won't, through fear of "breaking" something, etc. Good documentation is a must, but even the best documentation is no substitute for the occasional helping hand of a more experienced user.
Some serious food for thought for all of us.
(* Again, I'm not talking about South Africa here, I'm talking about the developing world - the poorest of the poor. South Africa doesn't fit into this category so feel free to mod me off-topic if you must, but this seems to be a nice discussion thread so why spoil things?)
(** A generalisation perhaps, but it's true in many cases. Unfortunately, democracy, free and fair elections and transparency of government aren't always the norm in the developing world, whereas dictatorships, opression and wide-scale corruption seem to be. It's a sad world we live in.)
Perhaps next time you use a quote from one of my posts you could do me the courtesy of not editing it first?
After all, what I wrote was this:
I guess you could always argue the point that you hadn't used the software (perhaps you had bought the software in error, had decided against using it after reading the EULA, etc) and thus were legally just reselling on what was sold to you in the first place.
Where from reading that, or the rest of my post, you saw me saying "lie about it and break the law" is a mystery to me. Must be nice to see things that aren't there.
What I was trying to illustrate was that there are many reasons why a piece of software might be lying on a shelf having never been used. Basically, at any point up to the owner's acceptance of any EULA, s/he is not the end user, and can arguably dispose of the software in a reasonable manner.
In effect s/he has just become another link in the supply chain. Just as the software was sold my the manufacturer to a distributor, then to a retail/mail order/online software vendor, and then to the current owner. Heck, this happens everyday - people buy software for friends all the time and the transfer of ownership is perfectly legal as long as the person who is handing over the software has not been bound by the terms of a EULA.
Of course, opening up the package, installing it, using it for a couple of months and then deciding to sell it on is illegal (rightly or wrongly, wrongly in my opinion).
But, opening up the package, flicking through the manuals, reading and rejecting the EULA and then deciding to sell it on is perfectly legal (and I'd like to see Microsoft or someone else even argue otherwise).
Now nowhere in the comment that I was replying to did the poster state whether on not they had accepted the EULA, used the software, etc. S/he simply states that they decided to go down another route. So, reselling the software s/he has maybe perfectly legal, in which case Microsoft and ebay might have jumped the gun in pulling the auction. But that's another story.
(Of course, IANAL, but this is all well-established under fair use, etc statutes.)
I guess you could always argue the point that you hadn't used the software (perhaps you had bought the software in error, had decided against using it after reading the EULA, etc) and thus were legally just reselling on what was sold to you in the first place.
But when ebay gets a call from Microsoft they aren't going to think twice about jumping on command. I would imagine that you could call them up and debate the semantics of the situation with an ebay representative but I'd bet the bottom line would be the same - no auction for you.
IANAL, but I'm willing to bet that, given the right ammunition, there are circumstances under which you could prevail. Though I doubt that, once you've shelled out for legal representation, you wouldn't have much to show for efforts, even if you managed to get full retail value for the package.
Personally, I'd take it up with ebay but stop short of calling in the suits. At worst, it'll get them squirming about it for a while and, at best, you might just catch a break.
(Before you right this off as a troll, please read on and think about how different your lifestyle is from that of the majority of the people in the world, who have no access to a telephone line, let alone the internet.)
OK, it's a no-brainer that open source software would be a good fit for governments that, in many cases, have problems feeding, clothing and housing their populations.*
But how, practically is this achievable on anything other than an administrative level? Running Linux and Star Office rather than Microsoft Windows and Office and employing sysadmins with the relative skills is all doable in the halls of power but how can open source be brought to the people?
In countries where many rural areas lack running water, let alone electricity, is it realistic to hope that the open source movement can help the common man?
OK, so a little off the government's licensing costs can't hurt but will it really make a meaningful difference? Not to Joe Average it won't.
If there was some way of getting cheap (second hand?) no-thrills PCs to local schools in a developing country then I think open source software could make a difference but, for all sorts of reasons, this just isn't practical.
For one thing, even open source software requires support (and so does the hardware it runs on). You might find all the support you need online but someone who lives miles from the nearest telephone is going to find it a little harder.
I'd love it for it to be possible, but it's not. The real world just doesn't work that way.
In my humble opinion, hoping for open source software to take off in the developing world before it happens in the developed world is a pipe dream.
(* No, I don't put South Africa in this category. Thanks to it's mineral riches, it's one of the few countries in Africa that can stand on its own two feet. It's a pity that the interest payments alone on crippling debt stops other african nations from being so self-sufficient, but that's another story.)
I mean no disrespect, but honestly, how hard is it to rhyme elements when half of them end in "ium" anyway?
I, um, have no idea...
Surely it's not the number of vulnerabilities that either OS displays that's important but rather their severity?
I mean, an exploit that requires the malicious party to have physical access to a machine and then only gives him access to one specific folder on a system is hardly as big a deal as one that gives a script kiddie sitting in his bedroom complete remote control of your corporate servers, allowing him to copy, overwrite and delete files, folders and hard drives at the click of a button?
Let's try to compare apples and oranges here. Just because McDonalds has more restaurants than Michelin-stared ones it doesn't make the Big Mac a better meal.
Whatever qualification Prof. Steve Jones holds, he should probably take down his degree and wipe his arse with it, as it has turned out that is all it's good for.
/. shouting down the efforts of someone they disagree with with an infantile remark.
Yet another example of someone on
For your information Professor Steve Jones is arguably the world's top geneticist. He's spent practically his entire career on the subject and is perhaps to genetics what Albert Einstein is to
relativity.
To say that his opinions are highly respected in the scientific community is an understatement - you'd have more luck finding a kid that hates candy than you would a serious scientist that was as dismissive of Prof. Jones's arguments as you appear to be.
Perhaps you have a professional interest in genetics yourself? A doctorate then? A degree perhaps? No, I didn't think so.
Yours seems to be a typical knee-jerk reaction. "Hey, I don't understand/like the idea of what this guy is saying so I'll bash/ridicule him." Very mature.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Prof. Jones, being a sensible scientist - the kind that looks at all avenues and approaches, accepting of all ideas and dismissive of none - looks at all the arguments before reaching his conclusions, whatever they may be.
Who knows, perhaps he looked at all the evidence - even the stuff you've put forward - before commiting his ideas to the scrutiny of the scientific community via a paper or a journal.
Perhaps he's right. Perhaps he's wrong. Scientists aren't always as arrogant as you seem to be - they don't claim to have all the answers but they damn well try to look for some.
It seems to me that Prof. Jones isn't defining some set-in-stone law here. He's only putting forward a theory.
Perhaps you'd be more confortable if scientist's didn't theorise? If Newton hadn't thought about gravity, Darwin about evolution or Einstein about the speed of light?
Science (and mankind in general) is progressed as much by taking an idea, working with it and finding out that it's wrong, coming up with a new idea that matches new emperical data, working with that, etc, as it is by someone pulling the right answers out of a hat first time.
Prof. Jones might be wrong. He might be right. Or, he might be somewhere in between. But if we take your approach to science we'll never find out.
Wow! Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!
/. - flogging dead horses is par for the course.)
(Yes, I know it runs WinCE, but lighten up and laugh - it's good for you.)
(And, yes, I do agree that this joke has warn out its welcome but this is
1. Broadcasters and the majority of VCR/DVD player manufacturers hate TiVo and don't want Joe Average using it.
Broadcasters because people skip past the ads that bring in the bucks. Remember, from their point of view, programming is just filling to make sure you watch the ads they're broadcasting.
The VCR/DVD manufacturers hate it because TiVo doesn't just threaten sales of their players head to head, but also confuses the market - give Joe too many choices and he's more likely to take a wait-and-see approach, and will buy nothing rather than risk buying the wrong thing.
Without either the backing of major software providers (the broadcasters) or hardware manufacturers (the VCR/DVD crowd), TiVo is starved of publicity dollars, and that means...
2. Not many consumers know about TiVo.
I'd bet that our Joe Average is barely aware of TiVo's existence, let alone is aware of its features and benefits. And if Joe Average hasn't heard about it, he's not going to be buying it.
(Remember, Joe gets up in the morning, has breakfast, perhaps reads a paper, goes to work, comes home, has dinner and watches some TV before eventually going to bed. He doesn't read Slashdot, any IT or gadget-related magazines and he doesn't drool over the next big thing in quite the way we do.)
Besides, Joe Average doesn't shell out for hardware every day and he's just getting comfortable with his wide-screen TV and his other brand new appliance. Which merits a mention of its own...
3. DVDs are the hot item of the moment.
No technology has ever achieved such rapid market penetration as DVD. Or put another way, Joe Average and his brother either has a DVD player or is planning to get one.
And, having shelled out some serious money to buy his brand new box, Joe Average is darn well going to make good use of it.
And if he's buying the DVD back catalogue of his favourite TV show or he's creating a library of the latest blockbuster movies, he's got two fewer reasons to buy a TiVo box. Firstly, he's watching less TV (he's watching his DVDs instead) and, secondly, he doesn't need a box that will record every M.A.S.H. re-run, because he just bought a couple of series worth to play in his nice shiny new machine.
Of course, the broadcasters and studios (who in many cases are largely owned by the hardware manufacturers) love this guy. He might not be watching their ads or putting his bum on a movie seat but he's going one better - he's buying their product again but this time it's a product for which they recouped their initial investment some time ago.
Mind you, Joe doesn't mind. Now he's got his DVDs he can play them over and over again, and it won't cost him a penny. Which is more than can be said for TiVo, because...
4. TiVo is a subscription service. That means a monthly bill.
As far as Joe's concerned, he already pays enough for cable, satellite or whatever. Why does he need to spend even more on his monthly TV bill for a souped-up VCR?
In these economically uncertain times, Joe would rather have the money in the bank, thank you very much.
(Yes, I know some of you out there will have abandoned your subscriptions and will be using your TiVos without a monthly bill but if Joe gets a new box down at the store then he's committing himself for some time.)
There are, of course, many other reasons why Joe might have a TiVo but, frankly, these are reasons enough.
No one wants him to buy a TiVo, no one wants to tell him about TiVo, everyone wants to tell him about DVD and he doesn't feel comfortable about spending the money right now anyhow.
Pretty straightforward if you ask me.
I'm no genius but it doesn't take one to realise that the top priority for people setting up clusters isn't how easy they are to set up initially but how they behave once they are in use.
To most sysadmins, the performance and reliability of the cluster once it's up and running would be top of priority list.
Whether the cluster took 5 minutes or half a day to set up would be irrelevant compared to how quickly they could do the task in hand and how much ongoing maintenance was required. (I'm not saying that Macs aren't reliable, so don't flame me for that, just that, in the real world, people think about these things.)
Additionally, a fair proportion of real world clusters won't be built from scratch using brand new boxes. More than likely, several machines in the new network will have been appropriated from elsewhere. The likelyhood that these will be all Macs is low, whereas the chance that they'll be able to run Linux is much higher.
And even if you were building from scratch, cost would be a factor. Last time I checked, you could get far more bang for your buck buying PCs than Macs.
Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't build a Mac cluster only that, given the alternatives, I doubt the few pros outweigh the many cons.
"Lets go hit those servers!"
Hitting a server is not a good idea. Hit them too hard and you will break something important and the server will cease to function properly.
The once lively server will be dead. It won't be resting, it'll be stone dead. It'll have passed on. It'll be no more. It will cease to be!
It'll have expired and gone to meet its maker. It'll be a stiff. Bereft of life, it'll rest in peace. If it wasn't for the fact that it had been mounted to a rack it'll be pushing up the daisies!
Its processing cycles will be history. It'll be off the twig. It will have kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!
IT WILL BE AN EX-SERVER!
Oh yeah, the sysadmin will be pissed at you too.
Err, I don't exactly see where anyone said "the US is the best" or where I refuted it but, hey, if you want to see something that's not there then that's your prerogative. But, if you want clarity, I'll try to give it to you.
Saying "the US is the best" is not a racist. But saying that "everything we do is great, everything you do sucks, not that what you do matters anyhow, and stop claiming credit for anything half-decent you lying foreigner" is racist.
Perhaps you would be more comfortable if I used the word xenophobic but racist is just as accurate a description for what the Anonymous Coward had to say.
And before you get on your high horse, racism doesn't have to be about skin colour. Here are a couple of nice dictionary definitions for you:
racism (n)
1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
race (n)
1. A local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics.
2. A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution: the German race.
3. A genealogical line; a lineage.
4. Humans considered as a group.
5. Biology
a. An interbreeding, usually geographically isolated population of organisms differing from other populations of the same species in the frequency of hereditary traits. A race that has been given formal taxonomic recognition is known as a subspecies.
b. A breed or strain, as of domestic animals.
6. A distinguishing or characteristic quality, such as the flavor of a wine.
Hope that clears things up for you.
Maybe, but the United States invented the whole damned thing, so what do we care?
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong.
The world wide web was the brainchild and invention of Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at the European Union-funded CERN particle research project. Yes, the Internet was born out of ARPAnet, a US military network but, as it exists today, it is arguably more international an endeavour than you'd ever like to admit.
This ignorant, "if it's not Uncle Sam, I don't give a damn", USA-centric view of the world is exactly what the original parent comment was arguing against. And, boy, did you prove him right with your revisionist rant.
Oh, next time you're playing your British game on your Japanese console perhaps you might consider that there are some foreign influences that aren't entirely evil.
I'm just glad that not every American is as ill-informed, naive and racist as you've obviously shown yourself to be.
Thanks to the latest duping hack (don't bother, the loophole's been closed), the Diablo II economy has taken a hit bigger than Elvis.
If you're really interested then check out DiabloII.net for more, but suffice to say that items that were gold dust are now as common as mud.
A quick look at the prices on Ebay (yes, I know that selling items in this way violates the D2 EULA but people do it and Blizzard's turned a blind eye to it) would show that D2 rares are way, way down in price.
The only real-world parallel I can draw is early 1930's Germany when people had to take wheelbarrows of notes to buy a loaf of bread as hyperinflation kicked in. Bank notes literally weren't worth the paper they were printed on.
D2 (sadly) looks like it's going the same way.
If Hewlett Packard were to pull out of the PC (note, big if) it would be the end of some of the best desktop and server products in the industry.
From their consumer, soho, business and workstation PCs (such as the Brio, Vectra and Kayak ranges) all the way up to their server offerings, HP have consistently produced top-notch products.
Well designed, reliable machines with excellent utilities (is there a management suite out there that's better than TopTools?) backed up by a professional and knowledgeable support structure have made HP PCs a dream to work with - as both a end user and a system administrator.
Sure, the printing business may be the company's major cash cow but it's its systems that really impress me.
I've been fortunate to have reviewed PCs from dozens of manufacturers, and I can honestly say that if I bought a PC (I tend to build my own) there would only be two companies I'd buy from. HP is one of them.
But let's be realistic here. HP has a massive installed user base, including many blue chip corporates. It's not going to abandon making PCs and those customers (many of whom will have support contracts that guarantee the availability of their preferred desktop and servers for years to come) any more than it's going to abandon its print business.
From the sounds of it, this is classic boardroom spin ("if X doesn't happen then we'll be forced to do Y") aimed squarely at getting Fiorina the votes she desperately needs to push through the HP/Compaq merger on which she seems to have mortgaged her career.
Quite frankly, if this comment was a serious statement of HP's intent then it would have been made to a more respected media outlet, such as the Wall Street Journal or a Ziff Davis title, or via a major press conference, rather than the less-than-heavyweight USA Today.
That's the least of your worries. Live anywhere near a gas storage facility? Toxic dump? Or even a gas filling station? How about within several states of a nuclear power facility?
The slightest thing going wrong with the containment at any of these places and you can kiss your ass goodbye.
Now we all know that these things don't blow up every day but - broadly speaking, scientists in a lab type environment take far more sensible precautions over the storage, use and containment of potentially hazardous materials than people in the real world.
That's because the scientist's priority will invariably be safe, repeatable research carried out in baby steps whereas the real world corporations will always weigh risk against profit.
And, personally speaking, I don't think that a bean counter focused on the fiscal bottom line is the best person to trust when it comes to safety.
I can't believe yours is the only post I've read so far mentioning Tad Williams.
Critics have called Williams the closest thing there is to a modern-day JRR Tolkien but, IMHO, his work blows Tolkien away.
Sure, he's not as well known, but read his classic fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (made up of The Dragonbone Chair, The Stone of Farewell and To Green Angel Tower*), and compare it to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Now I'm not saying that LOTR isn't a good read - it's a great one - but MST has so much more action, emotion and depth that you immediately remember that LOTR was written for kids.
If more people knew about Williams, he'd be lauded as a genius - and rightly so.
(* MST's book three was also published in paperback in two parts as it was so big. These two books are called Storm and Siege.)
Seems to me like your beef isn't with AMD, it's with the manufacturer of your motherboard, whom you have forgotten to mention.
Blaming AMD for your motherboard maker's AGP woes is a bit like blaming Goodyear because the fuel injection system on your Ford doesn't work properly. Unless the manufacturer of the chipset concerned was AMD (which I doubt), you're pointing the blaming the wrong party.
Ask a bunch of hardcore gamers what they think of AMD and their processors - I bet they have good things to say. Even the most die-hard Intel fan would have to admit that the competition from AMD has driven chip prices down to more realistic levels.
...never be a good samaritan, because no one will appreciate your efforts.
Imagine this conversation in your street:
Guy 1: "Hey neighbour, you've left your front door wide open and I think the local hoods are eyeing over your TV and VCR system."
Guy 2: "What? You say you saw my front door open? How did that happen? I couldn't have left it open, not me. You opened it, right? I'm calling the cops buddy."
Only in America.
The scene: A surgeon, having being hastly called to the operaing theatre finds before him a hulking great mass.
The surgeon prepares himself for action; he is about to open the patient's guts. Cowled, hooded and cloaked, he looks a strange sight. Slowly but surely though, he activates his lightsaber and makes a long incision along the length of abdomen.
The stench of the the air released by the innards once exposed to the air is nauseating. The surgeon staggers visiblyh, unprepared for such a olefactory assault.
Surgeon: And I thought they smelled bad on the outside.
(Apologies to George Lucas, Harrison Ford and Star Wars fans everywhere. No tauntons were harmed in the narration of this story.)