" Who should decide what ships in a so-called Linux kernel, a vendor, or Linus and his team?"
That's is THE dumbiest thing I have EVER read. If vendors are not free to ship whatever version of a kernel they want then what the fuck is the point of the GPL and OSS?
Quality control? You do know who works for Red Hat don't you? You do know that they employ key kernel hackers like Alan Cox who actually make up that team that you think should be telling Red Hat what they can and can't do.
I've heard decent things about it and it will be supported for like 5 years, so worth a look. It will be going on my main server at home but I just haven't got around to it yet.
"Mechanics charge upwards of $50 just to take a look at your car to see what's wrong, and this has been standard industry practice for a long period of time."
No they don't. Any Mechanic I've even seen will look at a car for Free and try to tell you what's wrong. If its something which requires hours of diagnosing then yes they will usually charge a fee but its by no means automatic. I've been taking cars to dealers and private mechanics for estimates and second estimateas for years and I've only been charged a few times.
If tech support worked that way they would at least listen to your problem for Free and notify you if a quick fix is available. I'm not against charging for tech support if a problem involved lots of trouble shooting and hand holding on the Software makers part, but they should be making a determination if that's really necessary before they start charging you money or taking your credit card number. Asking for the card up front is just a scare tatic to try to get consumers to not call in. Personally I don't care for the pratice.
Actually the number of Windows users dwarfs the numbers of Linux users here these days. Sure Widows gets beatup on more because of the constant worms etc but have a look at the average "is linux ready for the desktop" thread. You get post after post of people critical of Linux on the desktop. At best some people will agree that linux is fine in some very specific situations. As I've said many times there is a reason why Slashdot won't show recent web browser statistics. My guess is it over 80% IE and not just because people are at work.
For the record I also use XP on my laptop. Until everything works perfectly out of the box, ACPI and all, I'm not installing any nix on it.
I believe your wrong about the Pioneer dvd drive. At first they said it was just firmware but later it was found out that there was indeed hardware swapped.
This is where I downloaded from last night and it seemed to check out fine.
Re:ffmpeg is better...
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"I'm astonished at all the Xvid fanboyism around here. Sure it produces better quality than Divx, but at the same time, it's damn slow."
Why are you astonished? Its a really nice video codec that's open source and happens to perform very well compared to the competition. How is acknowledging this "fanboyism"? Its certainly not "damn slow", especially compared to the dog that is divx. Its also been tested and found to perform well both speed-wise and quality-wise by some of the most knowledgable people around.
All I know is googling for BloodBR doesn't show very nice results. I guess its possible that it was a joke but(and don't flame me if I'm wrong) it looks like they got rooted.
2007, no wait 2009 er what was that again? Sorry but your question just doesn't make much sense or even seem very fair for that matter. This you would know within 2 minutes of Googling the subject. Nobody knows the answer to that question. You might have well have asked What is the Timeline for World Peace?
To give you some sort of answer even though I don't really know if you deserve it is this. The only way there will be 100% compatability is when Microsoft completely Open Sources their OS's. Until then you have to use something like VMware which works but can be slow depending on the app and Wine which works for only some specific apps but is improving all the time.
I honestly don't really think I want to play games where you can't tell the characters from the ones in real life. I'm currently playing through Call of Duty again and if all of the soldiers I killed looked exactly like real people dying I don't think I could actually do it. There is something to be said for being able to experience things more realistically, but I just don't think it would be fun anymore. The reason why games don't lead to violence in real life imho is because its easy to clearly differentiate between life and a video game. Well what happens in 5 years when you literally cannot tell the difference between the two? As a gamer for over 20 years now I've always enjoyed seeing the graphics get better and better but I wonder if it will someday go too far and make games less enjoyable?
"Is Microsoft still going to be considered the "evil" company who "forces" things on people whether they want it or not?"
Leaving out the judgements of good or evil the only way one could argue that Microsoft doesn't force things on people is to ignore the entire company's history. It has been proven time and time again and finally through the court system that Microsoft has imposed its will on OEMs and consumers for years now. Every single time we have gotten even the slightest glimpse into Micrsoft's way of thinking its always been about Destroying the competition by leveraging its Monopoly and locking in consumers to elminate choice. Fine if you want to attempt this when your a startup but not appropriate behavior when you have a defacto monopoly and you use dirty tactics to prevent anyone from entering your market. If you want to argue contrary to that your going to need to wait for Microsoft to change its entire business model. That or find some really really dumb people who don't know how to read.
Minimize this any way you want if that makes you feel better but this is still a real accomplishment. AMD doesn't have to annihilate Intel for this to be considered a worthy achievement.
"I read a while ago that 0-day exploits on Windows are mostly unheard of, while most viruses seem to come out a few weeks AFTER Microsoft has issued a patch, because the virus-writers wait for a patch to disassemble it and learn how to exploit the weakness, which is easier to do that figuring out how to exploit the vulnerability."
Actually your probably not doing it intentionally but your just repeating Microsoft marketing-speak. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/26/155520 8
There is little evidence that hackers are actuallly reverse engineers patches. In fact as people pointed out in that thread if that theory was true then MS could just stop releasing patches and Windows would become invulnerable.
Most exploits are based on proof of concept code that floats around the net way before MS gets around to fixing patches. In fact there are more than a few sites out there that have lists of MS security flaws which have yet to be patched. I think your right that patches may increase the visibility of MS flaws to some of the dumbiest script kiddies and common people but the damage was already done way before then. MS is just trying to plug a hole that was already known. So no, patches are Not the reason why worms happen.
Finally as proof of at least one virus or 0-day exploit that took advantage before MS issued a patch, look at the Melissa virus. See that thread for other examples.
When MS's security cheif said "We have never had vulnerabilities exploited before the patch was known", he lied.
Is that what you think I was doing? I'm simply pointing out what should be common sense. I also don't use P2P so don't worry, I won't be trying to download anything from you. Those that do and share files are in fact idiots though. Don't know what that means for you.
As far as you being so brave and smart and thinking you'll never get caught, good for you. I'm glad your so confident in your warezing skills. Personally I could give a crap about the RIAA or the fact that people download whatever they want. That doesn't bother me in the least. People being harassed and targeted does. Hense the advice about not sharing.
Yea I know that, but I was really just speaking in a general sense. My main point is if you need to download stuff stick to methods in which you don't share anything. That means no BT but it also means relatively little risk, if indeed that is someone's goal.
Well basically its the same thing we have known all along. This isn't about "downlading" as the blog and topic states. Its about sharing or uploading files via P2P and Bittorrent. If you don't want to get caught be a leecher. Now you may have some misguided notion that its "only right" that you should be giving if your taking, but that's the suckers play. Don't fall for it. All of those people who will give you flack and try to blame you for the eventual downfall of P2P for not sharing are not going to be there to pay your $10,000 fine when you busted.
Better that Apple and DRM fail completely and we are stuck with Store bought CD's then we move to a market where all music has DRM built in and you have no freedom. Sorry but beyond letting you avoid buying entire albums Apple isn't doing anyone any favors with the Itunes store and they certainly aren't contributing to World Peace.
"I don't know what endgame they're working towards,"
Oh, but I know what Apple's endgame is. Gaining complete control over your music collection and deciding what you are and are not allowed to do. Witness the restrictions which are already increasing. 10 burns to 7? What next? Did you really think that Apple's "loophole" of allowing you to go DRM->CD->non-drm was going to last forever? The endgame for Apple and the rest of the online music industry to completely take away any rights you might once have had with regard to doing what you want with your music. Eventually there will come a time when people forget that you didn't had to have a license for every God dam machine you wanted to play music on.
If the current "Apple" model wins eventually we will all lose. You need to get over your whole benevolent dictator fantasy if you think that was ever going to be the long term model for online music sales. Better we force their hand now then slowly get caught up in their DRM like a lobster in a pot heating up on a stove. If you don't get out now you never will.
People tell me Word is fine once you get used to the way it forces your cursor around. They say you just have to let Word be in control and let IT decide on how the formatting should be. That or you need to learn the mystic ways in which to counteract Word when it decides to move your cursor THERE instead of where you wanted it. Mostly it involves a lot of hitting the backspace key and then tapping the spacebar in a futile attempt to line things up.
For simple text documents in which you might only have to tab in once every few paragraphs Word works fine. For anything else its a real test of one's patience.
"I know it sucks for the little guy who wants to give music to all of their friends, "
Newsflash buddy. With all old versions of Itunes you could already burn to cd and then either rip it or just give copies of the cd to friends. So how does this stop anything?
Enjoy your DRM'd low quality music. I hope for your sake Apple doesn't decide to revoke all of your music or eliminate burning all together.
I'll take buying $14 Cd's anyday over buying low quality music that I don't even own. Sure I think CD's should be cheaper but they are a hell of a lot better deal than this online DRM'd crap which you people seem to so eagerly embrace. The day all music is only available online in restricted form is the day I stop listening to music.
Yes I AM serious. I'm well aware of what is involved in setting up Mplayer and where the codecs go. And Yes I was using the plugin the day it came out. Did you think I was new to this whole Linux thing or something?
"With this, I can do all Quicktime trailers, Windows Media streams, you name it. Heck, you get the RealPlayer codecs and you can do that too."
Good for you. So can I. But if you weren't so busy defending this hacked solution you'd realize that A)the whole codec thing is questionably legal and B) it does NOT work 100%. Yea sure most trailers work fine at apple.com, but there is a ton of content out there that does NOT display correctly.
So spare me the lecture on what you can do with Mplayer and realize that like I stated it is NOT a 100% drop in solution.
That's a hack though and there are lots of problems with the implementation. Don't get me wrong since I do that as well but mplayer with legally questionable hacked codecs isn't a 100% drop-in replacement for WMP or Realplayer.
"unleashing the unstable Fedora betas which one day will become a product which you must pay for."
Yawn. Geez can't you come up with anything better than that? Who fucking cares what happens to the code that's in Fedora? So what if Red Hat picks the best of Fedora and includes it in RHEL. How is that possibly wrong in any way? Your right, how DARE Red Hat use code from a product they've created in another one of their products. I use Fedora, I haven't bought RHEL. Gee your right. They really got me there. Oh wait, no they didn't. You have no point so stop the Trolling.
Fedora stands on its own as a solid distro. Its not some half-assed distro that Red Hat doesn't spend a lot of time and money testing. Don't like the fact that its got a shorter period of support? TFB. Stick with your Gentoo.
They got left behind with the transition to 32bit programs. WP 6.1 was slow to launch and the Office 95 was easy to pirate. It was actually interesting to watch. One person in an office would get Office 95 and then suddenly that same version would end up on every machine. Then companies starting getting on the Net. Suddenly Word.doc files were being emailed around and now needed to be read by companies not using Word. The need to read.doc files because narrow-minded business parters refused to use anything else really sealed WP's fate. Then...well you know the rest of the story. As much as I like to hype OpenOffice.org, no way Microsoft is going to let history repeat itself in the business world. They'll give Office away for Free before they let cede the Fortune 1000 market to someone else.
Also contrary to this guys take it was NEVER about quality. If it was Word Perfect would have won out.
btw I'd still rather use WP 6.1 over any version of Word even today. Word is infuriating to work with as it constantly has to do things "its way". I just recently was updating my resume which hasn't been touched in years and the act of just adding a simple bullet point in line with the others made me want to smash my head into my monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
" Who should decide what ships in a so-called Linux kernel, a vendor, or Linus and his team?"
That's is THE dumbiest thing I have EVER read. If vendors are not free to ship whatever version of a kernel they want then what the fuck is the point of the GPL and OSS?
Quality control? You do know who works for Red Hat don't you? You do know that they employ key kernel hackers like Alan Cox who actually make up that team that you think should be telling Red Hat what they can and can't do.
I swear, the things I see modded up these days.
I've heard decent things about it and it will be supported for like 5 years, so worth a look. It will be going on my main server at home but I just haven't got around to it yet.
"Mechanics charge upwards of $50 just to take a look at your car to see what's wrong, and this has been standard industry practice for a long period of time."
No they don't. Any Mechanic I've even seen will look at a car for Free and try to tell you what's wrong. If its something which requires hours of diagnosing then yes they will usually charge a fee but its by no means automatic. I've been taking cars to dealers and private mechanics for estimates and second estimateas for years and I've only been charged a few times.
If tech support worked that way they would at least listen to your problem for Free and notify you if a quick fix is available. I'm not against charging for tech support if a problem involved lots of trouble shooting and hand holding on the Software makers part, but they should be making a determination if that's really necessary before they start charging you money or taking your credit card number. Asking for the card up front is just a scare tatic to try to get consumers to not call in. Personally I don't care for the pratice.
Ask The Buffalo Bills. Four Super Bowls in a row and Four losses.
Actually the number of Windows users dwarfs the numbers of Linux users here these days. Sure Widows gets beatup on more because of the constant worms etc but have a look at the average "is linux ready for the desktop" thread. You get post after post of people critical of Linux on the desktop. At best some people will agree that linux is fine in some very specific situations. As I've said many times there is a reason why Slashdot won't show recent web browser statistics. My guess is it over 80% IE and not just because people are at work.
For the record I also use XP on my laptop. Until everything works perfectly out of the box, ACPI and all, I'm not installing any nix on it.
I believe your wrong about the Pioneer dvd drive. At first they said it was just firmware but later it was found out that there was indeed hardware swapped.
http://kuix.de/fedora/
This is where I downloaded from last night and it seemed to check out fine.
"I'm astonished at all the Xvid fanboyism around here. Sure it produces better quality than Divx, but at the same time, it's damn slow."
Why are you astonished? Its a really nice video codec that's open source and happens to perform very well compared to the competition. How is acknowledging this "fanboyism"? Its certainly not "damn slow", especially compared to the dog that is divx. Its also been tested and found to perform well both speed-wise and quality-wise by some of the most knowledgable people around.
All I know is googling for BloodBR doesn't show very nice results. I guess its possible that it was a joke but(and don't flame me if I'm wrong) it looks like they got rooted.
2007, no wait 2009 er what was that again? Sorry but your question just doesn't make much sense or even seem very fair for that matter. This you would know within 2 minutes of Googling the subject. Nobody knows the answer to that question. You might have well have asked What is the Timeline for World Peace?
To give you some sort of answer even though I don't really know if you deserve it is this. The only way there will be 100% compatability is when Microsoft completely Open Sources their OS's. Until then you have to use something like VMware which works but can be slow depending on the app and Wine which works for only some specific apps but is improving all the time.
I honestly don't really think I want to play games where you can't tell the characters from the ones in real life. I'm currently playing through Call of Duty again and if all of the soldiers I killed looked exactly like real people dying I don't think I could actually do it. There is something to be said for being able to experience things more realistically, but I just don't think it would be fun anymore. The reason why games don't lead to violence in real life imho is because its easy to clearly differentiate between life and a video game. Well what happens in 5 years when you literally cannot tell the difference between the two?
As a gamer for over 20 years now I've always enjoyed seeing the graphics get better and better but I wonder if it will someday go too far and make games less enjoyable?
"Is Microsoft still going to be considered the "evil" company who "forces" things on people whether they want it or not?"
Leaving out the judgements of good or evil the only way one could argue that Microsoft doesn't force things on people is to ignore the entire company's history. It has been proven time and time again and finally through the court system that Microsoft has imposed its will on OEMs and consumers for years now. Every single time we have gotten even the slightest glimpse into Micrsoft's way of thinking its always been about Destroying the competition by leveraging its Monopoly and locking in consumers to elminate choice. Fine if you want to attempt this when your a startup but not appropriate behavior when you have a defacto monopoly and you use dirty tactics to prevent anyone from entering your market. If you want to argue contrary to that your going to need to wait for Microsoft to change its entire business model. That or find some really really dumb people who don't know how to read.
Minimize this any way you want if that makes you feel better but this is still a real accomplishment. AMD doesn't have to annihilate Intel for this to be considered a worthy achievement.
"I read a while ago that 0-day exploits on Windows are mostly unheard of, while most viruses seem to come out a few weeks AFTER Microsoft has issued a patch, because the virus-writers wait for a patch to disassemble it and learn how to exploit the weakness, which is easier to do that figuring out how to exploit the vulnerability."
0 8
Actually your probably not doing it intentionally but your just repeating Microsoft marketing-speak. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/26/15552
There is little evidence that hackers are actuallly reverse engineers patches. In fact as people pointed out in that thread if that theory was true then MS could just stop releasing patches and Windows would become invulnerable.
Most exploits are based on proof of concept code that floats around the net way before MS gets around to fixing patches. In fact there are more than a few sites out there that have lists of MS security flaws which have yet to be patched. I think your right that patches may increase the visibility of MS flaws to some of the dumbiest script kiddies and common people but the damage was already done way before then. MS is just trying to plug a hole that was already known. So no, patches are Not the reason why worms happen.
Finally as proof of at least one virus or 0-day exploit that took advantage before MS issued a patch, look at the Melissa virus. See that thread for other examples.
When MS's security cheif said "We have never had vulnerabilities exploited before the patch was known", he lied.
"Don't act like a scared child."
Is that what you think I was doing? I'm simply pointing out what should be common sense. I also don't use P2P so don't worry, I won't be trying to download anything from you. Those that do and share files are in fact idiots though. Don't know what that means for you.
As far as you being so brave and smart and thinking you'll never get caught, good for you. I'm glad your so confident in your warezing skills. Personally I could give a crap about the RIAA or the fact that people download whatever they want. That doesn't bother me in the least. People being harassed and targeted does. Hense the advice about not sharing.
"You sound like a FUD-slinger."
You sound like a arrogant ass. Have a nice day.
Yea I know that, but I was really just speaking in a general sense. My main point is if you need to download stuff stick to methods in which you don't share anything. That means no BT but it also means relatively little risk, if indeed that is someone's goal.
Well basically its the same thing we have known all along. This isn't about "downlading" as the blog and topic states. Its about sharing or uploading files via P2P and Bittorrent. If you don't want to get caught be a leecher. Now you may have some misguided notion that its "only right" that you should be giving if your taking, but that's the suckers play. Don't fall for it. All of those people who will give you flack and try to blame you for the eventual downfall of P2P for not sharing are not going to be there to pay your $10,000 fine when you busted.
Better that Apple and DRM fail completely and we are stuck with Store bought CD's then we move to a market where all music has DRM built in and you have no freedom. Sorry but beyond letting you avoid buying entire albums Apple isn't doing anyone any favors with the Itunes store and they certainly aren't contributing to World Peace.
"I don't know what endgame they're working towards,"
Oh, but I know what Apple's endgame is. Gaining complete control over your music collection and deciding what you are and are not allowed to do. Witness the restrictions which are already increasing. 10 burns to 7? What next? Did you really think that Apple's "loophole" of allowing you to go DRM->CD->non-drm was going to last forever? The endgame for Apple and the rest of the online music industry to completely take away any rights you might once have had with regard to doing what you want with your music. Eventually there will come a time when people forget that you didn't had to have a license for every God dam machine you wanted to play music on.
If the current "Apple" model wins eventually we will all lose. You need to get over your whole benevolent dictator fantasy if you think that was ever going to be the long term model for online music sales. Better we force their hand now then slowly get caught up in their DRM like a lobster in a pot heating up on a stove. If you don't get out now you never will.
People tell me Word is fine once you get used to the way it forces your cursor around. They say you just have to let Word be in control and let IT decide on how the formatting should be. That or you need to learn the mystic ways in which to counteract Word when it decides to move your cursor THERE instead of where you wanted it. Mostly it involves a lot of hitting the backspace key and then tapping the spacebar in a futile attempt to line things up.
For simple text documents in which you might only have to tab in once every few paragraphs Word works fine. For anything else its a real test of one's patience.
"I know it sucks for the little guy who wants to give music to all of their friends, "
Newsflash buddy. With all old versions of Itunes you could already burn to cd and then either rip it or just give copies of the cd to friends. So how does this stop anything?
Enjoy your DRM'd low quality music. I hope for your sake Apple doesn't decide to revoke all of your music or eliminate burning all together.
I'll take buying $14 Cd's anyday over buying low quality music that I don't even own. Sure I think CD's should be cheaper but they are a hell of a lot better deal than this online DRM'd crap which you people seem to so eagerly embrace. The day all music is only available online in restricted form is the day I stop listening to music.
Yes I AM serious. I'm well aware of what is involved in setting up Mplayer and where the codecs go. And Yes I was using the plugin the day it came out. Did you think I was new to this whole Linux thing or something?
"With this, I can do all Quicktime trailers, Windows Media streams, you name it. Heck, you get the RealPlayer codecs and you can do that too."
Good for you. So can I. But if you weren't so busy defending this hacked solution you'd realize that A)the whole codec thing is questionably legal and B) it does NOT work 100%. Yea sure most trailers work fine at apple.com, but there is a ton of content out there that does NOT display correctly.
So spare me the lecture on what you can do with Mplayer and realize that like I stated it is NOT a 100% drop in solution.
That's a hack though and there are lots of problems with the implementation. Don't get me wrong since I do that as well but mplayer with legally questionable hacked codecs isn't a 100% drop-in replacement for WMP or Realplayer.
Who the hell modded this underrated?
"unleashing the unstable Fedora betas which one day will become a product which you must pay for."
Yawn. Geez can't you come up with anything better than that? Who fucking cares what happens to the code that's in Fedora? So what if Red Hat picks the best of Fedora and includes it in RHEL. How is that possibly wrong in any way? Your right, how DARE Red Hat use code from a product they've created in another one of their products. I use Fedora, I haven't bought RHEL. Gee your right. They really got me there. Oh wait, no they didn't. You have no point so stop the Trolling.
Fedora stands on its own as a solid distro. Its not some half-assed distro that Red Hat doesn't spend a lot of time and money testing. Don't like the fact that its got a shorter period of support? TFB. Stick with your Gentoo.
They got left behind with the transition to 32bit programs. WP 6.1 was slow to launch and the Office 95 was easy to pirate. It was actually interesting to watch. One person in an office would get Office 95 and then suddenly that same version would end up on every machine. Then companies starting getting on the Net. Suddenly Word .doc files were being emailed around and now needed to be read by companies not using Word. The need to read .doc files because narrow-minded business parters refused to use anything else really sealed WP's fate. Then...well you know the rest of the story. As much as I like to hype OpenOffice.org, no way Microsoft is going to let history repeat itself in the business world. They'll give Office away for Free before they let cede the Fortune 1000 market to someone else.
Also contrary to this guys take it was NEVER about quality. If it was Word Perfect would have won out.
btw I'd still rather use WP 6.1 over any version of Word even today. Word is infuriating to work with as it constantly has to do things "its way". I just recently was updating my resume which hasn't been touched in years and the act of just adding a simple bullet point in line with the others made me want to smash my head into my monitor.