It seems as if these criminals went there. Of course lots of people download bootleg stuff, but for crying out loud, it's the same people who were copying the CD's to tape before. You cannot stop it, only go with the flow. But they will try and try until it becomes worldwide law and we're all forced to buy fuckshit like Britney Spears because only empty headed souless creeps like that can work with the industry on a permanent basis.
So in case you wankers from the big companies actually send your slaves to read this forum: I haven't bought a CD in about two years and will not do so in the future either. You can rot in hell you scum.
The script I used was:/System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer& exec/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacO S/Terminal
It seems it can only work as the root user. Perhaps windowServer is picky on who starts it? I used to be able to quit the windowServer and terminal with a script to drop back into the console, but I think one of Apple's upgrades has stopped this. This is a real hack with the only benefit being that one can save oneself the resources needed by the finder. If one needs almost the whole machine for a single piece of software, such as Photoshop, this can help a bit in terms of resources. Apart from that, it is mainly interesting to see that the WindowServer could theoretically have hooks for other finders or functions, I think.
I also don't really understand it. I normally use Mac OSX as an admin user, but not root. Perhaps it has something to do with the groups, although as someone else above pointed out, the files are readable by others, so perhaps the error does lie with Mozilla and not IE, in that Mozilla can edit local html files and tries to open the files in rw mode whereas IE doesn't.
An ln -s will not get me a link in the browser. I only noticed this because I had been doing it in IE wiithout really thinking about it until I tried it in Mozilla. And, no, I don't really understand why this happens.
I wasn't on my Mac last night when I posted, but you're right. The gist remains though. Is this because Mozilla can edit files where IE can't? Also try browsing the FS into area's where there are no permissions set for others. IE still works as far as I know.
Disregarding that sentence from India's IT Minister, the fact is that India IS a poor country and in poor country the thing people think about most, much in common with rich countries in recession, is jobs and money. India defintely has the resources to develop their own OS (Linux) and sell it to the masses(Simputer PDA). The thing is that most people in India who work in IT do it for $$$(or Rupees) and most of them percieve MS software development as being more lucrative than Linux. And so they develop software for MS since the market for commercial Linux software is only beginning to take off (give us a Navision competitor on Linux!). If and when large commercial projects are done on Linux, the picture will change rapidly in India. And RMS going over to India probably does Linux more harm than good, since he hasn't yet noticed that people have to eat.
Here in Europe, the picture is reversed. Germany, the country with the highest Linux use per capita in the world (netcraft et al) is mainly SuSE country, this mainly because SuSE is the first distro that people there hear about and because SuSE is German and has, surprise, better German documentation. (Not that I like SuSE though, my own experiences with them and their distro have been very bad). Mandrake also has a higher density in France than elsewhere, and has, surprise, good help in French. The localisation of these distros is what gives them their strength. Internationally though, RedHat has the best chances of success. Debian remains the friendliest non-commercial distro, once it's installed, with apt-get being the real choice item in the distro.
My prediction: Linux should devise a method of device support that lives outside the kernal and can be changed on the fly without rebooting.
First of all I am somehow shocked by the racism and total lack of cultural perspective often shown here. Words like "Habib" and "dothead" remind me of the Sihk who was killed at his gas station in the US after 9/11 last year. Firstly, most Indians (not all but most) are Hindu. Secondly, lumping millions if not billions of people into one basket is below the level of even some of the more sickening trolls on this forum. Thirdly (and please don't take this as anti-American, because it's not meant that way), It often seems that people here compare items like this from their own social and economic perspectives. For the target audience, most of whom have never seen a computer before, arguments about the processor speed etc and other commercial systems, such as Dell's PDA or a Palm are not exactly useful. No one in this device's target audience can afford commercial WinCE or Palm software. For a village in India or CAR (Central African Republic) that has to club together to buy a device like plus a hand generator or a small solar cell, $20 for some software to do text to speech In Their Language (since the ability to read english is strangely not universal) is a lot of money in an area where the per capita annual income is about $400.
While the gist of the idea is an axcellent one, I agree completely with the SA article in that mobile phones will probably fit these people's needs better. Wireless communication is already more widespread in Africa than landlines and most mobile phones based on the symbian platform offer localised languages and extremely easy to use interfaces as well as the ability to load Java applications which can do extra tasks needed by these people.
This reminds me of the realnames debacle with MS screwing the guy over although he was making a profit or possibly BECAUSE he was making a profit. MS make some very easy to use tools, most notably VS with VB and VC++ and ASP. However they are a bunch of thieving bastards and the way MS behaves one would that those scum in sales and marketing would gladly sell their mothers if it brought a buck or two into MS' tills.
It seems, given that the only two parts of MS to actually make a profit are the parts that have the world's computers in a vice grip, and the others that can't do the same lose atrocious amounts of money, that MS is actually shit scared that the last two bastions will fall also and they will start to bleed money and eventually die as a company. I think that MS can be trusted to fuck it up and try to squeeze more control out of customers even though that is the very reason the customers are leaving in the first place.
Under Mac OSX 10.1, Internet Explorer 5.1.2 runs as root or as some kind of su and has access to the entire system and basically doesn't care if you have directories ath you would rather protect. Mozilla respects FS protections. Under MacOSX the Java JDK documentation is hidden away in the the Frameworks/Java... directories where a non admin user has no access. To browse these I usually make a link in my browser to the index.html file and carry on from there. I discovered that IE lets you in everywhere it can go while Moz doesn't.
is the witty comment I was going to make, but instead I'll pose a question: At my place of work we have 15 2.4GHz PC's with 512MB RAM apiece. Almost 99% of the time the computer is simply going through an idle loop and not doing anything which brings me to the seti@home project. It accomplished what not many supercomputing projects have done at a tiny fraction of the cost, gathered support from all corners of the globe and put the CPU's of many computers to real work.
This tells me that people will enthusiastically take part in such mammoth projects if they see some sort of benefit ("Our team rulez", plain simple interest, cool screensaver etc) and they have the feeling that they are actually taking part. Would the response be as enthusiastic if there were a distributed project to calculate how to kill millions of people, although the nuclear club already has many times that capability? For one the government wouldn't allow it for security reasons and two, there are many people who don't actually believe that killing all the "mud people" and "terrorists"(i.e. the current governments foes) is for the good of mankind.
I do think that a distributed project to simulate global warming or weather modelling or better food distribution will gather much greater interest, especially if ego boosting a la seti@home is included.
Give the people some say in what you use their tax money for.
"I will say that I have found Comdex an excellent resource in seeing product demos and having access to key personnel for one-on-one q&a invaluable. And since the booth staff is usually engineers as well as sales people, you can even get some technical questions answered for products already purchased (that the phone support cannot seem to answer). "
Normally this is what you have tech support for, but I can appreciate your being tired of trying to get an answer from call-center operators on your tech püroblems.
but has Alienware considered the fact that all those copyprotected CD's won't play in the CD-drive? What about DVD's? Do they all work as well? does the XP-Media center edition give Bill the right to make a list of all your songs and movies? I don't think I want him to know that I have the full collection of the Morgan sex project and African sex safari.
Apple isn't really that saintly as some Mac Fans make it out to be; they'll also gladly get their legal dept. out if they feel they need to. The reason behind Apple's stance is one of economics. Apple is a major creator of digital content creation software and hardware (your Mac plus FCP and Logic Audio). Apple needs an image of freedom to create (the DRM issue as well as APSL) in order to make it stand out from the rest of the market.
However, I think this movielink thing is not destined for happy times. They only service that really makes money online is porno (I used to work in that branch, content editor and website creator) and the larger sites have the whole thing down pat already and have been international for years already. I cannot imagine normal users enjoying the tiny on screen movies and long waits for regular Hollywood content (where the porno goes on behind the scenes instead of on camera)
The OSX Window manager can be made to start without the finder by writing a shell script that , in one file, starts the window manger and then starts an application like the terminal. If you go into the console from the login window with ">console" and login as root, you can then start this shell script and will be blessed thereafter to be able to use MAC OSX without the rather slow finder.
Why do I write this? This simply illustrates that Apple has done quite a lot in order to hide the window manager, and a lot of other functionality, in the normal view and it is very possible that there are indeed hidden hooks in the window manager to get it to work over a network, such as the ability to create a seperate window from another machine, not just pushing bitmaps around. The technology is certainly there, with Remote Objects in Cocoa. I also don't think it has that much to do with Quartz, as quartz is simply the drawing system and the window manager is the system that actually manages all created windows. Quartz simply composits and draws them. The fact that 10.1 had the hack of enabling one to enable window buffer compression lends some support to this theory. In theory one would simply have to know whether the window manager could send and receive window objects across the network, or if window objects were confined to the local machine.
The rest of the world apart from Korea uses GSM. While many international telcos have huge debts because of the UMTS licence fiasco (the so called 3g services) there is a middle solution called GPRS which enables 48kbit/s and is now in common use in europe and MMS the multimedia equivalent of SMS, enabling people to send images, short videos and sounds to others instead of plain text is already being marketed like crazy and all new phones here in Europe now support this. SMS has been available for longer than I can remember here in Europe and MMS looks ready to improve on this with phones from Nokia and Ericsson already sporting digital cameras in them (and they are massively popular). Not only this but almost all phones in europe use the Symbian platform (apart from Orange's SPV-MS Smartphone- which looks ready to fail before it even begins). There are many providers that are already proving Java games and utilities that can be downloaded and installed on one's phone. The mobile phone has a completely different status in Europe, where there are many people such as myself who no longer (in fact for a couple of years now) have a fixed telephone because the mobile has become cheap and far more practical. You can take your phone anywhere you want in europe and it works with the same quality that you have at home, albeit paying higher rates in some cases due to roaming. Here in Switzerland, which is a very mountainous country the mobile coverage is around 95% of the country. Mobile phones, such as Nokia's communicator are doing things that PDA's were origionally sold for. The future of mobile phone technology in Europe is rosy, and the reason lies primarily behind the fact that there is ONE standard, agreed upon by all participants in Europe. The GSM/CDMA thing is becoming another PAL/NTSC thing where PAL took most of the world by storm due to it's better quality. I would go with GSM if possible in the states as that is where the the best services lie in the future.
If you're ever in Europe go into a telco or mobile shop and give the phones a spin or let a sales person demo the stuff to you. You might be pleasantly surprised. Having one standard for all participants also has the added benefit of forcing the telco's in Europe to treat their customers better because they cannot lock them in, and one can switch to another telco if one is not happy.
The reason X is mistaken for GTK is because most normal average computer users don't know the difference. One sees GTK based programmes and window managers such as the GIMP and GNOME and assumes that that IS Linux. Those that use SuSE see KDE and wonder why ALL programmes don't use that (including the GIMP, notwithstanding the fact that GTK comes from the GIMP). The point is that average users don't know or care why the GTK toolkit is so incedibly ugly (for them looks DO matter) or why X is not very flexible or easy to configure. They just give up and either use KDE or go back to Windows or use Mac OSX.
Linux needs one standard windowing protocol and system, either GNOME or KDE, not both. The continual clashing is hurting Linux and making it harder for developers. Time for a change.
Last week I posted a response to the article on the Council of Europe's anti-racism guidelines. Since that article generated many heated (and somewhat lacking in knowledge and insight) posts on the EU (being communist, Nazi, Socialist, ant-US, -insert common American perception of Europe here- ) although the Council of Europe has nothing to do with the EU, I think I should expand on that subject.
While the quality and hindsight of most of the anti-EU posts suggest both an almost complete lack of knowledge of what the EU or it's member states are, the posts sugesting protectionism might very well have a point. As we all know, when it comes down to business, the first priority of any government wishing to remain in power in the next elections is to ensure that jobs are held, the local industry does well and that, if possible, there is a net inflow of money into the state/area/country/region. This means that in practice the US President as well as the EU Commision will backstab one another and reneg on all treaties if needs be in order to ensure the wellfare of the own economies. The same applies to Russia, China, India and most other places, including Iraq when it comes to oil.
Why do you think so many non-US countries' governments are switching or considering to switch to Linux or other alternatives? So that, for the first time in a long time, there will actually be growth in the local software industry. Microsoft has an enormous lock on software in the developed world and there is a net outflow of money from those countries to the US, since MS is an American company. Nokia and partly also Ericsson, have the major part of the cell-phone market in Europe and are European companies. I very much doubt that anyone who has any say whatsoever in the EU wants another MS monpoly in another market. The Desktop PC market domination by MS is bad enough, given MS's behaviour.
I think the EU Commision will do anything legally within it's power in order to prevent MS gaining a monopoly there as well. MS has a lot of political influence in the US (see the recent trial outcome) and in developing countries where it can (and has done in Peru, South Africa and India) influence politicians with MS pocket change; MS loses more money on the XBox than it invested in South Africa, but the sum was enormous for South African standards. Your US President, GW Bush, did the same to the EU and others with his Steel import tarifs.
I too did time in a dotcom and now I'm a sysadmin in a small building company. I am a big Mac OSX fan, but although I would have loved to have bought a new PowerBook but although I managed to push one Linux server through for our CMS, but apart from that and our Novell file servers (thank God for NDS and NDPS. They prove that there are some really good alternatives to Windows server side) we are a complete Windows shop. I have a Dell Laptop with XP Pro and on the whole (apart from the ridiculously high native LCD resolution) I am very happy with it. Every single application runs on it. The Office stuff, the Novell admin stuff, the whole trip. This is why I use Windows.
But I miss Mac OSX a lot with it's cool mix of simple, well designed, good looking GUI and Unix core with a Terminal and shell a click away. My next laptop will agian be a Mac. I don't hate Windows, but Mac OSX is more fun and less pain.
I don't mean this to be a bash aginst America but as I read this I thought that this sort of thing could only happen in the litigation happy US. Don't you Americans get seriously and violently angry with the power afforded to lawyers in your country?
This is why learning C with plain old vi and gcc is a good idea: You learn the basics first and then you can advance to an IDE later. Actually there's a saying for this: "You have to crawl before you can walk"
Not Really, at least not in Europe. The photo of the israeli tank kiling a palestinian child is FACT, which this law makes clear that it is illiegal to deny. In other words you would be NEAR TO breaking the law if you claimed that the tank had not in fact killed the palestinian child, although it was clear in the photo that the tank indeed had kiled the child, and you would be clearly be doing something illegal if you put up the claim that the Tank had not killed the child along with a rant about how evil muslims/palestinians are etc.
Disregarding the fact that, a.) Most European countries have laws against incitement of racial, ethnic or religious hatred already, and, b.) the Council of Europe has nothing to do with the EU, I think there is another problem that lies somewhat deeper here: It seems that everytime some article appears here on slashdot about some difference or disagreement between the US and Europe, all the petty hatreds based on a lack of knowledge about the other place come to the fore. Just take a look at the numbers of postings about how evil or "unconstitutional" we Europeans are. One sees this sort of thing from the other side every time some article about the death sentence or the American military's possible action against Iraq.
I worked for the US Airforce many years ago in Berlin and a lot of Americans that I've met here in Europe have some strange idea's about Europe being socialist or some other strange thing (stereotypes like the French being especially anti-american because the French politicians actually have differing opinions to those of whatever American president is currently in power or the Germans still being Nazis). Likewise many Europeans don't know all that much about the US. A lot of Europeans think in terms of stereotypes just as Americans do.
I personally support this (although it already applies here in Switzerland) because I come originally from a country, South Africa, that had hatred as a state policy, and condoning it is like turning a blind eye. A large proportion of Europeans are of middle eastern or north african descent and I don't think anyone in Euope wants a repetition of the holocaust. Too many people died here.
I likewise point out that in the US you had enforced integration in schools (bussing) in the 70's and 80's, so you can see that this isn't some uniquely European idea.
Sadly, however, I think that as the years go by Europe and the US will drift further and further apart and perhaps become enemies someday.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems as if these criminals went there. Of course lots of people download bootleg stuff, but for crying out loud, it's the same people who were copying the CD's to tape before. You cannot stop it, only go with the flow. But they will try and try until it becomes worldwide law and we're all forced to buy fuckshit like Britney Spears because only empty headed souless creeps like that can work with the industry on a permanent basis.
So in case you wankers from the big companies actually send your slaves to read this forum: I haven't bought a CD in about two years and will not do so in the future either. You can rot in hell you scum.
The script I used was: /System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer& exec /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacO S/Terminal
It seems it can only work as the root user. Perhaps windowServer is picky on who starts it? I used to be able to quit the windowServer and terminal with a script to drop back into the console, but I think one of Apple's upgrades has stopped this. This is a real hack with the only benefit being that one can save oneself the resources needed by the finder. If one needs almost the whole machine for a single piece of software, such as Photoshop, this can help a bit in terms of resources. Apart from that, it is mainly interesting to see that the WindowServer could theoretically have hooks for other finders or functions, I think.
I also don't really understand it. I normally use Mac OSX as an admin user, but not root. Perhaps it has something to do with the groups, although as someone else above pointed out, the files are readable by others, so perhaps the error does lie with Mozilla and not IE, in that Mozilla can edit local html files and tries to open the files in rw mode whereas IE doesn't.
I wrote "or some kind of su". On Mac OSX the default user is an admin, even though root isn't enabled.
Thanks for nice comment btw.
An ln -s will not get me a link in the browser. I only noticed this because I had been doing it in IE wiithout really thinking about it until I tried it in Mozilla. And, no, I don't really understand why this happens.
I wasn't on my Mac last night when I posted, but you're right. The gist remains though. Is this because Mozilla can edit files where IE can't? Also try browsing the FS into area's where there are no permissions set for others. IE still works as far as I know.
Disregarding that sentence from India's IT Minister, the fact is that India IS a poor country and in poor country the thing people think about most, much in common with rich countries in recession, is jobs and money. India defintely has the resources to develop their own OS (Linux) and sell it to the masses(Simputer PDA). The thing is that most people in India who work in IT do it for $$$(or Rupees) and most of them percieve MS software development as being more lucrative than Linux. And so they develop software for MS since the market for commercial Linux software is only beginning to take off (give us a Navision competitor on Linux!). If and when large commercial projects are done on Linux, the picture will change rapidly in India. And RMS going over to India probably does Linux more harm than good, since he hasn't yet noticed that people have to eat.
Here in Europe, the picture is reversed. Germany, the country with the highest Linux use per capita in the world (netcraft et al) is mainly SuSE country, this mainly because SuSE is the first distro that people there hear about and because SuSE is German and has, surprise, better German documentation. (Not that I like SuSE though, my own experiences with them and their distro have been very bad). Mandrake also has a higher density in France than elsewhere, and has, surprise, good help in French. The localisation of these distros is what gives them their strength. Internationally though, RedHat has the best chances of success. Debian remains the friendliest non-commercial distro, once it's installed, with apt-get being the real choice item in the distro.
My prediction: Linux should devise a method of device support that lives outside the kernal and can be changed on the fly without rebooting.
First of all I am somehow shocked by the racism and total lack of cultural perspective often shown here. Words like "Habib" and "dothead" remind me of the Sihk who was killed at his gas station in the US after 9/11 last year. Firstly, most Indians (not all but most) are Hindu. Secondly, lumping millions if not billions of people into one basket is below the level of even some of the more sickening trolls on this forum. Thirdly (and please don't take this as anti-American, because it's not meant that way), It often seems that people here compare items like this from their own social and economic perspectives. For the target audience, most of whom have never seen a computer before, arguments about the processor speed etc and other commercial systems, such as Dell's PDA or a Palm are not exactly useful. No one in this device's target audience can afford commercial WinCE or Palm software. For a village in India or CAR (Central African Republic) that has to club together to buy a device like plus a hand generator or a small solar cell, $20 for some software to do text to speech In Their Language (since the ability to read english is strangely not universal) is a lot of money in an area where the per capita annual income is about $400.
While the gist of the idea is an axcellent one, I agree completely with the SA article in that mobile phones will probably fit these people's needs better. Wireless communication is already more widespread in Africa than landlines and most mobile phones based on the symbian platform offer localised languages and extremely easy to use interfaces as well as the ability to load Java applications which can do extra tasks needed by these people.
This reminds me of the realnames debacle with MS screwing the guy over although he was making a profit or possibly BECAUSE he was making a profit. MS make some very easy to use tools, most notably VS with VB and VC++ and ASP. However they are a bunch of thieving bastards and the way MS behaves one would that those scum in sales and marketing would gladly sell their mothers if it brought a buck or two into MS' tills.
It seems, given that the only two parts of MS to actually make a profit are the parts that have the world's computers in a vice grip, and the others that can't do the same lose atrocious amounts of money, that MS is actually shit scared that the last two bastions will fall also and they will start to bleed money and eventually die as a company. I think that MS can be trusted to fuck it up and try to squeeze more control out of customers even though that is the very reason the customers are leaving in the first place.
Under Mac OSX 10.1, Internet Explorer 5.1.2 runs as root or as some kind of su and has access to the entire system and basically doesn't care if you have directories ath you would rather protect. Mozilla respects FS protections. Under MacOSX the Java JDK documentation is hidden away in the the Frameworks/Java... directories where a non admin user has no access. To browse these I usually make a link in my browser to the index.html file and carry on from there. I discovered that IE lets you in everywhere it can go while Moz doesn't.
Differing perspectives on security, I suppose.
is the witty comment I was going to make, but instead I'll pose a question: At my place of work we have 15 2.4GHz PC's with 512MB RAM apiece. Almost 99% of the time the computer is simply going through an idle loop and not doing anything which brings me to the seti@home project. It accomplished what not many supercomputing projects have done at a tiny fraction of the cost, gathered support from all corners of the globe and put the CPU's of many computers to real work.
This tells me that people will enthusiastically take part in such mammoth projects if they see some sort of benefit ("Our team rulez", plain simple interest, cool screensaver etc) and they have the feeling that they are actually taking part. Would the response be as enthusiastic if there were a distributed project to calculate how to kill millions of people, although the nuclear club already has many times that capability? For one the government wouldn't allow it for security reasons and two, there are many people who don't actually believe that killing all the "mud people" and "terrorists"(i.e. the current governments foes) is for the good of mankind.
I do think that a distributed project to simulate global warming or weather modelling or better food distribution will gather much greater interest, especially if ego boosting a la seti@home is included.
Give the people some say in what you use their tax money for.
"I will say that I have found Comdex an excellent resource in seeing product demos and having access to key personnel for one-on-one q&a invaluable. And since the booth staff is usually engineers as well as sales people, you can even get some technical questions answered for products already purchased (that the phone support cannot seem to answer).
"
Normally this is what you have tech support for, but I can appreciate your being tired of trying to get an answer from call-center operators on your tech püroblems.
but has Alienware considered the fact that all those copyprotected CD's won't play in the CD-drive? What about DVD's? Do they all work as well? does the XP-Media center edition give Bill the right to make a list of all your songs and movies? I don't think I want him to know that I have the full collection of the Morgan sex project and African sex safari.
Apple isn't really that saintly as some Mac Fans make it out to be; they'll also gladly get their legal dept. out if they feel they need to. The reason behind Apple's stance is one of economics. Apple is a major creator of digital content creation software and hardware (your Mac plus FCP and Logic Audio). Apple needs an image of freedom to create (the DRM issue as well as APSL) in order to make it stand out from the rest of the market.
However, I think this movielink thing is not destined for happy times. They only service that really makes money online is porno (I used to work in that branch, content editor and website creator) and the larger sites have the whole thing down pat already and have been international for years already. I cannot imagine normal users enjoying the tiny on screen movies and long waits for regular Hollywood content (where the porno goes on behind the scenes instead of on camera)
The OSX Window manager can be made to start without the finder by writing a shell script that , in one file, starts the window manger and then starts an application like the terminal. If you go into the console from the login window with ">console" and login as root, you can then start this shell script and will be blessed thereafter to be able to use MAC OSX without the rather slow finder.
Why do I write this? This simply illustrates that Apple has done quite a lot in order to hide the window manager, and a lot of other functionality, in the normal view and it is very possible that there are indeed hidden hooks in the window manager to get it to work over a network, such as the ability to create a seperate window from another machine, not just pushing bitmaps around. The technology is certainly there, with Remote Objects in Cocoa. I also don't think it has that much to do with Quartz, as quartz is simply the drawing system and the window manager is the system that actually manages all created windows. Quartz simply composits and draws them. The fact that 10.1 had the hack of enabling one to enable window buffer compression lends some support to this theory. In theory one would simply have to know whether the window manager could send and receive window objects across the network, or if window objects were confined to the local machine.
The rest of the world apart from Korea uses GSM. While many international telcos have huge debts because of the UMTS licence fiasco (the so called 3g services) there is a middle solution called GPRS which enables 48kbit/s and is now in common use in europe and MMS the multimedia equivalent of SMS, enabling people to send images, short videos and sounds to others instead of plain text is already being marketed like crazy and all new phones here in Europe now support this. SMS has been available for longer than I can remember here in Europe and MMS looks ready to improve on this with phones from Nokia and Ericsson already sporting digital cameras in them (and they are massively popular). Not only this but almost all phones in europe use the Symbian platform (apart from Orange's SPV-MS Smartphone- which looks ready to fail before it even begins). There are many providers that are already proving Java games and utilities that can be downloaded and installed on one's phone. The mobile phone has a completely different status in Europe, where there are many people such as myself who no longer (in fact for a couple of years now) have a fixed telephone because the mobile has become cheap and far more practical. You can take your phone anywhere you want in europe and it works with the same quality that you have at home, albeit paying higher rates in some cases due to roaming. Here in Switzerland, which is a very mountainous country the mobile coverage is around 95% of the country. Mobile phones, such as Nokia's communicator are doing things that PDA's were origionally sold for. The future of mobile phone technology in Europe is rosy, and the reason lies primarily behind the fact that there is ONE standard, agreed upon by all participants in Europe. The GSM/CDMA thing is becoming another PAL/NTSC thing where PAL took most of the world by storm due to it's better quality. I would go with GSM if possible in the states as that is where the the best services lie in the future.
If you're ever in Europe go into a telco or mobile shop and give the phones a spin or let a sales person demo the stuff to you. You might be pleasantly surprised. Having one standard for all participants also has the added benefit of forcing the telco's in Europe to treat their customers better because they cannot lock them in, and one can switch to another telco if one is not happy.
The reason X is mistaken for GTK is because most normal average computer users don't know the difference. One sees GTK based programmes and window managers such as the GIMP and GNOME and assumes that that IS Linux. Those that use SuSE see KDE and wonder why ALL programmes don't use that (including the GIMP, notwithstanding the fact that GTK comes from the GIMP). The point is that average users don't know or care why the GTK toolkit is so incedibly ugly (for them looks DO matter) or why X is not very flexible or easy to configure. They just give up and either use KDE or go back to Windows or use Mac OSX.
Linux needs one standard windowing protocol and system, either GNOME or KDE, not both. The continual clashing is hurting Linux and making it harder for developers. Time for a change.
Last week I posted a response to the article on the Council of Europe's anti-racism guidelines. Since that article generated many heated (and somewhat lacking in knowledge and insight) posts on the EU (being communist, Nazi, Socialist, ant-US, -insert common American perception of Europe here- ) although the Council of Europe has nothing to do with the EU, I think I should expand on that subject.
While the quality and hindsight of most of the anti-EU posts suggest both an almost complete lack of knowledge of what the EU or it's member states are, the posts sugesting protectionism might very well have a point. As we all know, when it comes down to business, the first priority of any government wishing to remain in power in the next elections is to ensure that jobs are held, the local industry does well and that, if possible, there is a net inflow of money into the state/area/country/region. This means that in practice the US President as well as the EU Commision will backstab one another and reneg on all treaties if needs be in order to ensure the wellfare of the own economies. The same applies to Russia, China, India and most other places, including Iraq when it comes to oil.
Why do you think so many non-US countries' governments are switching or considering to switch to Linux or other alternatives? So that, for the first time in a long time, there will actually be growth in the local software industry. Microsoft has an enormous lock on software in the developed world and there is a net outflow of money from those countries to the US, since MS is an American company. Nokia and partly also Ericsson, have the major part of the cell-phone market in Europe and are European companies. I very much doubt that anyone who has any say whatsoever in the EU wants another MS monpoly in another market. The Desktop PC market domination by MS is bad enough, given MS's behaviour.
I think the EU Commision will do anything legally within it's power in order to prevent MS gaining a monopoly there as well. MS has a lot of political influence in the US (see the recent trial outcome) and in developing countries where it can (and has done in Peru, South Africa and India) influence politicians with MS pocket change; MS loses more money on the XBox than it invested in South Africa, but the sum was enormous for South African standards. Your US President, GW Bush, did the same to the EU and others with his Steel import tarifs.
This is the EU's answer.
I too did time in a dotcom and now I'm a sysadmin in a small building company. I am a big Mac OSX fan, but although I would have loved to have bought a new PowerBook but although I managed to push one Linux server through for our CMS, but apart from that and our Novell file servers (thank God for NDS and NDPS. They prove that there are some really good alternatives to Windows server side) we are a complete Windows shop. I have a Dell Laptop with XP Pro and on the whole (apart from the ridiculously high native LCD resolution) I am very happy with it. Every single application runs on it. The Office stuff, the Novell admin stuff, the whole trip. This is why I use Windows.
But I miss Mac OSX a lot with it's cool mix of simple, well designed, good looking GUI and Unix core with a Terminal and shell a click away. My next laptop will agian be a Mac. I don't hate Windows, but Mac OSX is more fun and less pain.
I don't mean this to be a bash aginst America but as I read this I thought that this sort of thing could only happen in the litigation happy US. Don't you Americans get seriously and violently angry with the power afforded to lawyers in your country?
This is why learning C with plain old vi and gcc is a good idea: You learn the basics first and then you can advance to an IDE later. Actually there's a saying for this: "You have to crawl before you can walk"
You mean that if the polar ice caps melt there will be a Europe or Japan to be happy about this?
Not Really, at least not in Europe. The photo of the israeli tank kiling a palestinian child is FACT, which this law makes clear that it is illiegal to deny. In other words you would be NEAR TO breaking the law if you claimed that the tank had not in fact killed the palestinian child, although it was clear in the photo that the tank indeed had kiled the child, and you would be clearly be doing something illegal if you put up the claim that the Tank had not killed the child along with a rant about how evil muslims/palestinians are etc.
Disregarding the fact that, a.) Most European countries have laws against incitement of racial, ethnic or religious hatred already, and, b.) the Council of Europe has nothing to do with the EU, I think there is another problem that lies somewhat deeper here: It seems that everytime some article appears here on slashdot about some difference or disagreement between the US and Europe, all the petty hatreds based on a lack of knowledge about the other place come to the fore. Just take a look at the numbers of postings about how evil or "unconstitutional" we Europeans are. One sees this sort of thing from the other side every time some article about the death sentence or the American military's possible action against Iraq.
I worked for the US Airforce many years ago in Berlin and a lot of Americans that I've met here in Europe have some strange idea's about Europe being socialist or some other strange thing (stereotypes like the French being especially anti-american because the French politicians actually have differing opinions to those of whatever American president is currently in power or the Germans still being Nazis). Likewise many Europeans don't know all that much about the US. A lot of Europeans think in terms of stereotypes just as Americans do.
I personally support this (although it already applies here in Switzerland) because I come originally from a country, South Africa, that had hatred as a state policy, and condoning it is like turning a blind eye. A large proportion of Europeans are of middle eastern or north african descent and I don't think anyone in Euope wants a repetition of the holocaust. Too many people died here.
I likewise point out that in the US you had enforced integration in schools (bussing) in the 70's and 80's, so you can see that this isn't some uniquely European idea.
Sadly, however, I think that as the years go by Europe and the US will drift further and further apart and perhaps become enemies someday.