While I agree with the general idea you're stating here, and I think you were trying to be humourous, I realy wouldn't suggest active monitoring/supervising/proxying what your kids do online.
For one thing, they're smarter than you when it comes to technology. Always have been, always will be. They can bypass damn near any spying method you can come up with, short of 24-7 watching over their shoulders. Even if they can't, they'll clue in pretty quick that they're being watched, and as much as you may think it's a good thing, to most people constant supervision makes them feel like a criminal before the fact.
Besides, there's a hell of a lot worse things that could happen to a young girl than a glimpse of Playgirl - and if you make the child feel the need to hide things from you all the time, chances are some of them will happen to her.
BTW, McDonalds serves their coffee at 180 degrees F because PEOPLE LIKE IT THAT HOT. Duh.
I don't think you've ever taken the temperature of your coffee when you drink it (I have, and sampled many others, ah, the joys of chem lab:).
212 Farenheit is the boiling point of water. Like, vaporisation. 180 is close enough that I guarantee you you'll have some serious pain if you ingest much of it.
McDonald's was found negligent for having their coffee too hot because (and follow this closely here) virtually every other restaurant/donut/coffee shop in the country keeps it far cooler. That's an important part of negligence - what's the usual thing to do. If everyone kept their coffee at 180 degrees, this lawsuit wouldn't have gone anywhere.
Oh yeah, if people want their coffee that hot, why doesn't McDonald's have a 99% market share on counter coffee sales? And why don't they have big screaming ads "OUR COFFEE IS THE HOTTEST IN THE BIZ" to attract all of the people looking for it?
Surprise surprise, people come knocking when they hear you funded a company which YOU KNEW(AND HAD BEEN ADVISED BY A LAWYER TO THE SAME EFFECT), WAS ENGAGING IN ILLEGAL ACTIVITY.
Wow, a hell of a lot of people better sell their Microsoft stock, and fast. Because from what little I can gather these days, they've been repeatedly convicted of BREAKING THE LAW.
Under any version of Windows up to and including 2000, re-associating html files with any browser I so choose has been exactly as easy/hard as any other file type. In fact, I don't even go that far anymore - Opera does it for me when it installs. Come to think of it, it must have easily registered itself as 'default browser' somewhere, because in the 2 years I've been using it, not once has IE popped up when I click on a link in any other application, open an html file, anything.
Is this something new in XP? I know completely removing IE isn't terribly viable, as parts of it are embedded into the OS code itself, but I've long since removed any links to IE, and wouldn't even know it was on my system save for a couple of megs of wasted disk space.
We will outlaw speeding! that'll surely get people to drive safely and stuff.
And amazingly, this works for the most part. Visit Germany sometime, take a spin on the Autobahn. No speed limit, and people cruise along at speeds well beyond human reaction times.
Return home, and suddenly everyone is going a lot slower.
Of course, if your argument was 'some people will disobey laws, so there's no point in having any', then just ignore me.
from my experience, one should not go around tweaking a system until he understands it well enough to create it entirely on his own
Guess I should stop programming and tinkering with hardware, as I'm way behind being able to take a bunch of sand and turn it into a CPU.
Playing with components of something to make it do more is a process human beings have done since humans started using tools, and I don't think anyone *yet* quite understands enough to create anything entirely on their own.
Interestingly enough, until this year I never found the need to use spam filtering. The couple every week or 2 wasn't a big deal.
However, I at one point was getting several dozen a day of the usual chain letter/joke/picture Fwd:Fwd:Fwd (ad naseum). Putting a filter to delete anything with more than one Fwd: in it cut my junkmail down to virtually nothing. I used to complain that users were worse than spammers - some 'friends' were in the habit of sending me a dozen of these 'gems' at a time.
Of course, in the past 12 months this has all changed. I'm now the lucky recipient of at least a dozen spam a day, and it's getting worse every week. 40% my ass, more like 80% in my case.
Hmm. People locking themselves away from human contact for hours at a time, day after day after day. Yeah, that really dispells the geek stereotype of videogamers.
Any other game, please! Average Joes play their Playstations these days, Sims sold more copies than I think there are pocket protectors on the planet, but...
Thousands, hundreds of thousands are spent on replication and distribution and marketing just so regular people (including the non net-savvy) can hear about new music.
Huh. In the good old days (and golly gee, today even!), people found out about new music through things like the radio, MTV, and (when you get a little older) what's playing in the clubs.
All 3 venues require payment to the copyright holder in order to play the music.
No thanks, I'd prefer not to be paying $14.99 per CD just so some marketdroid can install a 20' high cardboard sign telling me that the new Britney Spears album really IS the hottest album in the US.
Be happy you don't have a system like Canada, which pupports a Senate, that doesn't actually do anything. We like yourselves have 2 major groups of lawmakers - but our Senate just passes any law that comes its way.
The problem? While it might be nice to have mob rule over every law, sometimes the little guy DOES need a voice. 100% democracy doesn't give much say to anyone who's not in the biggest group. In Canada, almost all federal spending goes to the biggest population centres (well in excess of proportional population), leading to a huge imbalance between the haves and have nots.
Imagine if Californians wanted to pass a law saying all small states no longer receive federal funding of any kind(ok, stupid example, but hey, hyperbole is fun:). Under the US system, this law wouldn't go anywhere. The senate prevents tyranny of the majority. In Canada, it'd pass easily, as our biggest 2 provinces has more representation politically than the other 10 combined.
Nostalgia is writing the output from your abacus in the sand at your feet using a stick you carved yourself during the 20 mile trip uphill to school into the wind through 5 feet of snow (sans shoes).
My low end Sony amp that I got in 1993 (about $200, if that) still works as well as day 1. A friend bought some B&O stuff (I think the amp alone was over $1000) a few years back, and once the warranty ended, most of it died pretty damn quick.
A lot of times it's just luck of the draw, and avoiding overpriced stuff sold on name alone.
Just today I noticed that Future Shop (think Best Buy for canucks) has a big sign when you walk in: "Canadian copyright levies". Basically, it outlines the whole blank media levy issue in a couple of sentences, and has the line 'Future shop does not support levies', etc etc.
I think it's really cool that a major retailer has taken up the fight against this bullshit, even if they're just doing it to keep their prices down. Beyond that one sign, I don't see the common person ever even knowing about the issue. Sometimes, corporations *are* in our favour:)
I've been a faithful Windows user for almost a decade now. Mostly because it's getting expensive to buy software every time I want to do something new, and mass piracy is turning my stomach, I've been looking into this whole 'free software' thing. Also, my current co-op work term required me to learn Linux and Solaris.
Ok, so at work we have about a dozen test machines. At home, I have a couple of spare machines. Broad range of hardware, from cutting edge XP1800's and 128mb video cards, to barely usable p100's with 64mb ram and 1mb video. ISA, PCI, AGP, sound, network, scsi you name it, it's here.
So freeweed decides to try installing linux. Ooo, I've heard good things about this Red Hat. Download the isos, burn, start the install. Wow, looks as good as, if not better than, the current batch of Windows installers. Very slick and intuitive (as long as you understand drive partitioning, something required even in the Microsoft world). A short while later and I'm in Gnome thinking "huh. except for a really odd filesystem, it's like Windows with nicer graphics". So, I carry on. Mandrake. Debian. Slackware (ok, that was a bit of a bitch and I needed to ask for help:). Once they're installed, I poke around a bit, look for the GUI configuration tools in the 'start' menu, and bang, I can change almost anything I want. Hmm. Just like Windows, where every new version means you have to hunt and peck (mouse wise) for where they've moved everything, and for all the new features you're unfamiliar with.
So, I'm pretty used to installing linux at this point, and with all these different configurations, the worst I had to deal with was looking up how to get an old ISA network card to work. Huh. Just like Windows. Now, it's time to try using some of this software. Holy shit! There's an office suite installed, free! Mp3 player, ftp client, multiple browsers, packet sniffers, IRC clients, you name it. I have almost everything I need, without the 18 reboots and hunting down cd after cd after cd trying to install everything I use. Ok, let's see how hard it is to get something not on this system. Hmm.. download a package, double click it in nautilus, it's installed! No easy desktop shortcut or start menu entry, so let's try just typing its name on the command line (just as I've done for years in Windows). No pathing errors, this is pretty damn cool!
Summary: I've been a Windows kid since the early 90s. Installing linux was at least as easy as Windows (it even told me that 'root' was the linux word for 'administrator'). I can do everything I want, for FREE. So far it's been pretty easy, and I'm hooked.
This writer who's coming from Windows 95 obviously hasn't tried installing 2000 or XP, they're at least as involved as a Red Hat install. (Oh, and for the record, anyone with an older machine that finds Gnome/KDE a tad slow, try windowmaker. Nope, it doesn't look like Windows, but boy, is it fast!).
Well, someone's come up with a novel way to hide their links. Slashdot currently tries to post the REAL domain as [domain.com] after the URL, but apparently this got past it.
Now it's time for bitching. SOMETHING has changed very recently in the past few days on Slashdot, and now that damn [domain.com] is what I see in my status bar in Opera (6.05). I no longer see the actual, full URL like I do with normal href's.
If the GP32 can emulate a SNES at a reasonable speed, why on earth do you assume "2 frames per second" for a GBA emu ? The GBA is a very low-spec machine (similar to a SNES) - you don't need any more than "this sort of hardware" in order to emulate it !
The SNES is a 16-bit machine, the GBA 32. The SNES has but a fraction of the ram that a GBA does. Just because a lot of SNES games have been ported over, does not mean the GBA is just a portable SNES.
There's a reason you can quite nicely play SNES emulators using a 4 or 5 year old PC, but it takes over a 1 ghz machine to play any GBA emulator that's out there.
Try actually using the software, and do a little research on the hardware involved, before you go spouting off based on some news release.
Around 1985 or so, when I was just starting high school, I had the privledge of working with a Unisys Icon computer. Really neat machines, ran on some QNX variant from what I've been able to dig up.
Anyway, one interesting piece of software on this machine was a vector graphics editor. Monochrome, but still, compared to the Commodore 64 and Geopaint, the detail level I could do here was amazing. However, the best feature of the software was that it would take a series of vector images, and 'animate' them - by taking the vertices that were closest together between frames, and moving them (and attached lines) towards the position of the next frame.
Sound familiar? Yup, a very crude form of morphing. When the hype began around T2, all I could think about was 'wow, those Icons sure have improved':)
The word 'morph' predates all of this by a fair bit though - it stems from morphology, or shape. Change something's shape == morph it. Clever eh? That's the original Greek root, iirc. I saw this being used in comics at least as far back as the early 80s, hence why I used the term when I was working on primitive morphing software.
We have to stop perpetuating this myth
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No one like the product activation in Windows XP or Office XP, but at the same time product activation makes piracy less workable and forces users to face the high price tag Microsoft has placed on these products.
Ok, so it's mostly Microsoft who spreads this one, but even some Slashdot users fall for it.
You think product activation stopped XP piracy one iota? Think again. Cracked copies were floating around before it even hit retail shelves. Service pack 1, you say? Once again, within days of that debacle, a workaround even my parents can handle was available.
People get their warezed XP the same way they got their warezed 2000, ME, 98, etc. Kazaa and its ilk are making it even easier.
Know who product activation hurts? Not pirates, that's for sure. It hurts those of us who do anything more than install XP once, on one system, ever. Want to mirror your desktop's contents onto your laptop? Sorry. Have to re-install Windows? Sorry. Bought a new computer? Sorry. If you're lucky, you're only forced to upload some data to Microsoft. No internet? Hope you don't mind sitting on hold for a while. Past what Microsoft considers an acceptable amount of re-installs? Oh well, hope you have another $300.
The University I attend gets free copies of Windows and Visual Studio for its CS students. I can get as many license keys as I want without paying. But, I still have to deal with Microsoft's insane activation scheme if I want to use XP. Instead, I just use 2000. One CD, and *I* get to choose how I use it.
Know what most students are doing, to get around the hassle of activating XP so many times? That's right, downloading the cracked version. Guess what they're going to do once they're out of school and want the latest version of Windows?
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with the general idea you're stating here, and I think you were trying to be humourous, I realy wouldn't suggest active monitoring/supervising/proxying what your kids do online.
For one thing, they're smarter than you when it comes to technology. Always have been, always will be. They can bypass damn near any spying method you can come up with, short of 24-7 watching over their shoulders. Even if they can't, they'll clue in pretty quick that they're being watched, and as much as you may think it's a good thing, to most people constant supervision makes them feel like a criminal before the fact.
Besides, there's a hell of a lot worse things that could happen to a young girl than a glimpse of Playgirl - and if you make the child feel the need to hide things from you all the time, chances are some of them will happen to her.
I don't know about you, but I was earning my own money (and spending it) years before I hit 18.
:)
If I wanted to get anal, I could list allowances/gifts/etc, that goes back to at least first grade
BTW, McDonalds serves their coffee at 180 degrees F because PEOPLE LIKE IT THAT HOT. Duh.
:).
I don't think you've ever taken the temperature of your coffee when you drink it (I have, and sampled many others, ah, the joys of chem lab
212 Farenheit is the boiling point of water. Like, vaporisation. 180 is close enough that I guarantee you you'll have some serious pain if you ingest much of it.
McDonald's was found negligent for having their coffee too hot because (and follow this closely here) virtually every other restaurant/donut/coffee shop in the country keeps it far cooler. That's an important part of negligence - what's the usual thing to do. If everyone kept their coffee at 180 degrees, this lawsuit wouldn't have gone anywhere.
Oh yeah, if people want their coffee that hot, why doesn't McDonald's have a 99% market share on counter coffee sales? And why don't they have big screaming ads "OUR COFFEE IS THE HOTTEST IN THE BIZ" to attract all of the people looking for it?
Surprise surprise, people come knocking when they hear you funded a company which YOU KNEW(AND HAD BEEN ADVISED BY A LAWYER TO THE SAME EFFECT), WAS ENGAGING IN ILLEGAL ACTIVITY.
Wow, a hell of a lot of people better sell their Microsoft stock, and fast. Because from what little I can gather these days, they've been repeatedly convicted of BREAKING THE LAW.
I think he'll still prefer catching younger types...
Wtf?
Under any version of Windows up to and including 2000, re-associating html files with any browser I so choose has been exactly as easy/hard as any other file type. In fact, I don't even go that far anymore - Opera does it for me when it installs. Come to think of it, it must have easily registered itself as 'default browser' somewhere, because in the 2 years I've been using it, not once has IE popped up when I click on a link in any other application, open an html file, anything.
Is this something new in XP? I know completely removing IE isn't terribly viable, as parts of it are embedded into the OS code itself, but I've long since removed any links to IE, and wouldn't even know it was on my system save for a couple of megs of wasted disk space.
Christ, if a multigigabyte website is 'little', I'd hate to see what happend when a site that these guys consider 'big' gets slashdotted.
I wonder, in Soviet Russia, do the gates commit suicide at you?
:)
(for anyone not getting the joke, please just mod me down
We will outlaw speeding! that'll surely get people to drive safely and stuff.
And amazingly, this works for the most part. Visit Germany sometime, take a spin on the Autobahn. No speed limit, and people cruise along at speeds well beyond human reaction times.
Return home, and suddenly everyone is going a lot slower.
Of course, if your argument was 'some people will disobey laws, so there's no point in having any', then just ignore me.
Higher corporate taxes mean higher prices for goods and services.
:)
And higher personal taxes mean higher wages, which means higher prices for goods and services. In the long term, anyway.
Ahh, wealth redistribution, what a wonderful concept
from my experience, one should not go around tweaking a system until he understands it well enough to create it entirely on his own
Guess I should stop programming and tinkering with hardware, as I'm way behind being able to take a bunch of sand and turn it into a CPU.
Playing with components of something to make it do more is a process human beings have done since humans started using tools, and I don't think anyone *yet* quite understands enough to create anything entirely on their own.
Sure, as soon as geeks universally drop the use of 'cracker' and only use 'hacker' :)
Co-opting someone else's term for your own use cuts both ways.
Interestingly enough, until this year I never found the need to use spam filtering. The couple every week or 2 wasn't a big deal.
However, I at one point was getting several dozen a day of the usual chain letter/joke/picture Fwd:Fwd:Fwd (ad naseum). Putting a filter to delete anything with more than one Fwd: in it cut my junkmail down to virtually nothing. I used to complain that users were worse than spammers - some 'friends' were in the habit of sending me a dozen of these 'gems' at a time.
Of course, in the past 12 months this has all changed. I'm now the lucky recipient of at least a dozen spam a day, and it's getting worse every week. 40% my ass, more like 80% in my case.
Isn't a DBMS part of the latest Mozilla build?
:)
(laugh, it's a joke
Hmm. People locking themselves away from human contact for hours at a time, day after day after day. Yeah, that really dispells the geek stereotype of videogamers.
Any other game, please! Average Joes play their Playstations these days, Sims sold more copies than I think there are pocket protectors on the planet, but...
Everquest? Is this guy nuts?
Thousands, hundreds of thousands are spent on replication and distribution and marketing just so regular people (including the non net-savvy) can hear about new music.
Huh. In the good old days (and golly gee, today even!), people found out about new music through things like the radio, MTV, and (when you get a little older) what's playing in the clubs.
All 3 venues require payment to the copyright holder in order to play the music.
No thanks, I'd prefer not to be paying $14.99 per CD just so some marketdroid can install a 20' high cardboard sign telling me that the new Britney Spears album really IS the hottest album in the US.
Be happy you don't have a system like Canada, which pupports a Senate, that doesn't actually do anything. We like yourselves have 2 major groups of lawmakers - but our Senate just passes any law that comes its way.
:). Under the US system, this law wouldn't go anywhere. The senate prevents tyranny of the majority. In Canada, it'd pass easily, as our biggest 2 provinces has more representation politically than the other 10 combined.
The problem? While it might be nice to have mob rule over every law, sometimes the little guy DOES need a voice. 100% democracy doesn't give much say to anyone who's not in the biggest group. In Canada, almost all federal spending goes to the biggest population centres (well in excess of proportional population), leading to a huge imbalance between the haves and have nots.
Imagine if Californians wanted to pass a law saying all small states no longer receive federal funding of any kind(ok, stupid example, but hey, hyperbole is fun
Pfft.
Nostalgia is writing the output from your abacus in the sand at your feet using a stick you carved yourself during the 20 mile trip uphill to school into the wind through 5 feet of snow (sans shoes).
*Sometimes* you get what you pay for.
My low end Sony amp that I got in 1993 (about $200, if that) still works as well as day 1. A friend bought some B&O stuff (I think the amp alone was over $1000) a few years back, and once the warranty ended, most of it died pretty damn quick.
A lot of times it's just luck of the draw, and avoiding overpriced stuff sold on name alone.
Just today I noticed that Future Shop (think Best Buy for canucks) has a big sign when you walk in: "Canadian copyright levies". Basically, it outlines the whole blank media levy issue in a couple of sentences, and has the line 'Future shop does not support levies', etc etc.
:)
I think it's really cool that a major retailer has taken up the fight against this bullshit, even if they're just doing it to keep their prices down. Beyond that one sign, I don't see the common person ever even knowing about the issue. Sometimes, corporations *are* in our favour
I've been a faithful Windows user for almost a decade now. Mostly because it's getting expensive to buy software every time I want to do something new, and mass piracy is turning my stomach, I've been looking into this whole 'free software' thing. Also, my current co-op work term required me to learn Linux and Solaris.
:). Once they're installed, I poke around a bit, look for the GUI configuration tools in the 'start' menu, and bang, I can change almost anything I want. Hmm. Just like Windows, where every new version means you have to hunt and peck (mouse wise) for where they've moved everything, and for all the new features you're unfamiliar with.
Ok, so at work we have about a dozen test machines. At home, I have a couple of spare machines. Broad range of hardware, from cutting edge XP1800's and 128mb video cards, to barely usable p100's with 64mb ram and 1mb video. ISA, PCI, AGP, sound, network, scsi you name it, it's here.
So freeweed decides to try installing linux. Ooo, I've heard good things about this Red Hat. Download the isos, burn, start the install. Wow, looks as good as, if not better than, the current batch of Windows installers. Very slick and intuitive (as long as you understand drive partitioning, something required even in the Microsoft world). A short while later and I'm in Gnome thinking "huh. except for a really odd filesystem, it's like Windows with nicer graphics". So, I carry on. Mandrake. Debian. Slackware (ok, that was a bit of a bitch and I needed to ask for help
So, I'm pretty used to installing linux at this point, and with all these different configurations, the worst I had to deal with was looking up how to get an old ISA network card to work. Huh. Just like Windows. Now, it's time to try using some of this software. Holy shit! There's an office suite installed, free! Mp3 player, ftp client, multiple browsers, packet sniffers, IRC clients, you name it. I have almost everything I need, without the 18 reboots and hunting down cd after cd after cd trying to install everything I use. Ok, let's see how hard it is to get something not on this system. Hmm.. download a package, double click it in nautilus, it's installed! No easy desktop shortcut or start menu entry, so let's try just typing its name on the command line (just as I've done for years in Windows). No pathing errors, this is pretty damn cool!
Summary: I've been a Windows kid since the early 90s. Installing linux was at least as easy as Windows (it even told me that 'root' was the linux word for 'administrator'). I can do everything I want, for FREE. So far it's been pretty easy, and I'm hooked.
This writer who's coming from Windows 95 obviously hasn't tried installing 2000 or XP, they're at least as involved as a Red Hat install. (Oh, and for the record, anyone with an older machine that finds Gnome/KDE a tad slow, try windowmaker. Nope, it doesn't look like Windows, but boy, is it fast!).
Well, someone's come up with a novel way to hide their links. Slashdot currently tries to post the REAL domain as [domain.com] after the URL, but apparently this got past it.
Now it's time for bitching. SOMETHING has changed very recently in the past few days on Slashdot, and now that damn [domain.com] is what I see in my status bar in Opera (6.05). I no longer see the actual, full URL like I do with normal href's.
Could someone please fix this?
If the GP32 can emulate a SNES at a reasonable speed, why on earth do you assume "2 frames per second" for a GBA emu ? The GBA is a very low-spec machine (similar to a SNES) - you don't need any more than "this sort of hardware" in order to emulate it !
The SNES is a 16-bit machine, the GBA 32. The SNES has but a fraction of the ram that a GBA does. Just because a lot of SNES games have been ported over, does not mean the GBA is just a portable SNES.
There's a reason you can quite nicely play SNES emulators using a 4 or 5 year old PC, but it takes over a 1 ghz machine to play any GBA emulator that's out there.
Try actually using the software, and do a little research on the hardware involved, before you go spouting off based on some news release.
Around 1985 or so, when I was just starting high school, I had the privledge of working with a Unisys Icon computer. Really neat machines, ran on some QNX variant from what I've been able to dig up.
:)
Anyway, one interesting piece of software on this machine was a vector graphics editor. Monochrome, but still, compared to the Commodore 64 and Geopaint, the detail level I could do here was amazing. However, the best feature of the software was that it would take a series of vector images, and 'animate' them - by taking the vertices that were closest together between frames, and moving them (and attached lines) towards the position of the next frame.
Sound familiar? Yup, a very crude form of morphing. When the hype began around T2, all I could think about was 'wow, those Icons sure have improved'
The word 'morph' predates all of this by a fair bit though - it stems from morphology, or shape. Change something's shape == morph it. Clever eh? That's the original Greek root, iirc. I saw this being used in comics at least as far back as the early 80s, hence why I used the term when I was working on primitive morphing software.
No one like the product activation in Windows XP or Office XP, but at the same time product activation makes piracy less workable and forces users to face the high price tag Microsoft has placed on these products.
Ok, so it's mostly Microsoft who spreads this one, but even some Slashdot users fall for it.
You think product activation stopped XP piracy one iota? Think again. Cracked copies were floating around before it even hit retail shelves. Service pack 1, you say? Once again, within days of that debacle, a workaround even my parents can handle was available.
People get their warezed XP the same way they got their warezed 2000, ME, 98, etc. Kazaa and its ilk are making it even easier.
Know who product activation hurts? Not pirates, that's for sure. It hurts those of us who do anything more than install XP once, on one system, ever. Want to mirror your desktop's contents onto your laptop? Sorry. Have to re-install Windows? Sorry. Bought a new computer? Sorry. If you're lucky, you're only forced to upload some data to Microsoft. No internet? Hope you don't mind sitting on hold for a while. Past what Microsoft considers an acceptable amount of re-installs? Oh well, hope you have another $300.
The University I attend gets free copies of Windows and Visual Studio for its CS students. I can get as many license keys as I want without paying. But, I still have to deal with Microsoft's insane activation scheme if I want to use XP. Instead, I just use 2000. One CD, and *I* get to choose how I use it.
Know what most students are doing, to get around the hassle of activating XP so many times? That's right, downloading the cracked version. Guess what they're going to do once they're out of school and want the latest version of Windows?