...that these CDs will NOT be playable on the expensive (read: around $10,000) CD players that audiophiles and other people who are in need of near-perfect sound quality use. Kinda shooting themselves in the foot already, huh?
From Hemos' "article":
It's kinda like what Microsoft Passport attempts to do, but without the centralized privacy concerns.
One of the first things that he gets out of the way is the fact that you can't really expect privacy with any membership system on a computer network.
Quoting from the real article: On the other side, I don't think you can build a membership system in 2001 and make any guarantees of privacy. So once privacy is disclaimed, the problem is simply stated.
Now, that doesn't say anything about alleviating centralized privacy concerns, does it? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised that someone sneaks an obfuscated link to goatse.cx into a Slashdot front page article with the amount of reading that the "editors" bother to do before posting.
It's not like it's a big under-the-table deal. Especially with places like Go.com, where they are very overt about the whole practice and most of its users know that the top 3 query results for any given search query are sold to the highest bidders.
I really don't see what the big deal about it is, as long as people know what they are getting. After all, you can't expect places like Google to maintain their 8000 node cluster for free, can you? It's not like the real world works on the principles of Free Software.
It says here in the article that the bot runs Windows 98 on board! Better archive this article before the editors realize it and pull it from the site...
You are in violation of code 1643.1, section A
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IANAL
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· Score: 1
...which is pirating of character codes. You should immediately cease and desist these defamatory actions before someone files a lawsuit against Slashdot, Michael.
What? No, I can't send you a scan of my law degree right now. It's... in the shop.
Weren't you already doing this?
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MySQL & Nusphere
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from the slashdot-switches-to-flat-text-files dept.
Gee, from the kind of response time that I get when I load up Slashdot, my impression was that you have been doing this all along.
No one ever said that they were banning it. If you had even bothered to read the 5 to 6 lines of Slashdot summary, you would've seen that they are investigating the incidents.
Also, though you may be studying college-level chemistry, the average consumer is going to have no idea what most of those ingredients on the side of the can will do. Please don't assume that everyone out there knows at least as much as you do (which is all too frequent a problem on Slashdot, might I add.).
Yeah, those damn nanny states, always butting into our lives! Why can't they leave me and my company alone so that we don't have to spend money on fixing the gas tanks on our products so that it stops killing customers?
It is an outrage that the government would investigate a potentially defective product that could be lethal!
Yeah, except for the pesky fact that there is some pretty cheap equipment out there that, when attached to a phone line, can detect a data call. That is, if they have any kind of coherent phone network there.
Actually, I believe that if they were trying to gain funding, they would simply put up banners on their sites, proclaim that Linux sucks, and have several people submit the sites to Slashdot.
Perhaps English isn't your first language, but may I point out one thing?
Better if developers for all platforms just figure out that not releasing a product before it's finished will result in poor sales for current and future titles.
That's exactly what the problem is with AO. They know that releasing a finished product will result in poor sales because it is so late.
Honestly, every time I see a company get away with releasing a still-beta, unstable piece of shit and bill it as the stable, final release, and then charge you a nice chunk of change to boot, I feel more inclined to just chuck my windows machine and buy a console for gaming.
Just think about it: With a console, you CAN'T issure patches for a game. That means that you have to have it right the first time, and you can't get away with rushing a half-finished game out the door and thrust it upon unsuspecting buyers.
Also, I admire Somethingawful for not kissing major game publisher ass to gain favor with them. This is in contrast to most site which, like Lowtax said, will do almost anything to get "inside looks" at unreleased games. Journalistic integrity is not in their vocabularies (although it probably isn't in CmdrTaco's, either).
Jesus, Taco, you beat the open source drum all day and every day here at Slashdot, and yet you are planning on using a closed source program to power the site.
If you are going to go all proprietary software on us, why don't you just go all the way and get a real database from Oracle or Sybase, so the response time aren't so shitty.
There are also some excellent Python docs that can be found here.
Personally, I just find Python cleaner than Perl, as it has a better syntax, using whitespace to delimit rather than brackets. Also, it is a lot faster for my purposes. Anyway, now you can take the docs with you anywhere you go.
Seriously, though, who doesn't already buy a new computer on a yearly basis? It's kinda already in practice without these new "disposable" computers.
That's another thing that bothers me: the concept of throwing away your old hardware. I could not bring myself to throw away an old computer, that would be a complete waste. What we are coming to here, folks, is a society akin to that portrayed in "A Brave New World," where people are taught from birth to throw away items that are old or outdated in order to promote consumerism.
Personally, this whole thing saddens me, as I love hackable hardware. This is kinda like the whole fiasco with That DSL Company (tm) asking for their gateways back after abandoning them for months. I ended up having to shell out $500 to because I had made mine into a kewl little MP3 server.
Well, there remains the fact that both AT&T and Comcast use the @Home network to provide service. However, I have to say, and I'm sure most of my fellow @Home users would agree, that @Home tech support would make chimps with typewriters seem like absolute fucking geniuses.
Microsoft will be seeking to pursuade the U.S. Government to forbid distribution of federally funded software under the GPL
The article here almost implies that there is something wrong with the government distributing its own work under a license other than the GNU GPL. Honestly, what's wrong with using something like the BSD license?
First off, let's take the biggest and most obvious example of why GPLing gov't funded software would've been a bad idea: the BSD TCP/IP stack. If it wasn't for the fact that it had been under such a free and liberal license as the BSD license, we might never have seen the rise of such quality, albeit proprietary, operatings systems such as Sun's Solaris or Windows 2000. The nature of the GPL would have forced the companies to give away a lot of the rest of their intellectual property, thus making it impossible for them to use the "standard" implementation, and forcing them to create their own implementation and standard.
Also, what's wrong with companies profiting off of taxpayer-funded work? Last time I checked, large corporations pay taxes just like the rest of us do. I think it would be an affront to our freedom as American taxpayers and entrepreneurs if the governement released their software under such a restrictive license as the GPL.
In conclusion, one can't really argue with the fact that the GPL is a pretty viral license, because with examples like TCP/IP, where it is actually a part of the core operating system, rather than a seperate component. Forcing the openness of all the software would have been wrong and anti-American.
Well, there was quite a long time (up until today, in fact!) that I thought of the Slashdot population as a very open-minded community who preferred to let the world know what the best product was, not the one that best suited their politics. However, my faith has been shaken today.
While I would have to agree with the crowds of Debian users here that apt-get is indeed a superior tool to whatever Mandrake is using these days, I would have to disagree on the ultimate choice of best software package management system.
Now, Linux is a great operating system in general, and I love the apt-get part of Debian in particular, but why does it have to be on the command line? I hardly think that the average person, say, my grandfather, for example, would be able to deal with learning all the arcane aspects of a command line utility. To most, it is just too frustrating, poorly documented, and complicated. What we really need in a modern operating system is a package manager that the average Joe or my grandfather could use.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned Windows Update yet? Not only is it a fully graphical tool, but it automatically detects what software your computer needs, without sending that information to a third party, and then gives you an easy install wizard to update everything. Sure, some things may require a reboot, but there is a lot of Linux software that also requires a reboot to function properly. Personally, I think it is a far superior tool to apt-get, because it can also make recommendations on what kind of cool new screen saver you might want to check out, or update DirectX to improve your gaming framerates and such.
And, of course, it is very handy for patching all those security holes that invariably pop up in MS software, such as the notorious Outlook holes that have caused more than one system administrator a headache. Think about it, if an update tool is easy enough for the average user to utilize, then we won't have to worry about upgrading everyone's Linux machines when the latest BIND or Sendmail exploit hits Bugtraq. It would greatly improve the image of Open Source software when no one goes on a massive hacking spree and compromises a ton of machines for their DDoS wars.
Well, I don't know about some of you people (I heard somewhere that the average age of the Slashdot poster is around 15), but I remeber back in the day when we had to use terminals to use a computer at all. Yup, those were the days allright. Worrying about getting your processes killed for taking up too much CPU time, running up massive bills for computer time, etc.
I thought that we had gotten away from this by the early '90s when PCs became common and powerful enough that you could operate relatively comfortably without the support of some big iron. After all, wasn't the whole big-iron-to-desktop transition about self-empowerment? I thought so, because I didn't have to worry about pissing off some sysop when I compiled my newest Linux kernel on my 386 with 8 megs of RAM.
But now we have this crap about creating X terminals now. Don't we learn anything? We have all immensely enjoyed the personal freedom accorded to us by having enough local processing power to get the job done, no matter how many times the remote server crashes and burns. Besides, I have better ways to allocate my network's bandwidth than with a ton of X packets. Like, say, playing Quake III or browsing the web, or transfering files to my Windows 98 box from my NT server.
Plus, we are confronted with the fact that 486s probably won't have very nice video cards to begin with, so you can pretty much kiss a decent-looking display goodbye.
Slashdot Mirror
...that these CDs will NOT be playable on the expensive (read: around $10,000) CD players that audiophiles and other people who are in need of near-perfect sound quality use. Kinda shooting themselves in the foot already, huh?
It's kinda like what Microsoft Passport attempts to do, but without the centralized privacy concerns.
One of the first things that he gets out of the way is the fact that you can't really expect privacy with any membership system on a computer network.
Quoting from the real article:
On the other side, I don't think you can build a membership system in 2001 and make any guarantees of privacy. So once privacy is disclaimed, the problem is simply stated.
Now, that doesn't say anything about alleviating centralized privacy concerns, does it? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised that someone sneaks an obfuscated link to goatse.cx into a Slashdot front page article with the amount of reading that the "editors" bother to do before posting.
I really don't see what the big deal about it is, as long as people know what they are getting. After all, you can't expect places like Google to maintain their 8000 node cluster for free, can you? It's not like the real world works on the principles of Free Software.
/me watches as the sarcasm sails over everyone's head.
It says here in the article that the bot runs Windows 98 on board! Better archive this article before the editors realize it and pull it from the site...
Shouldn't they be using Solaris?
What? No, I can't send you a scan of my law degree right now. It's... in the shop.
Gee, from the kind of response time that I get when I load up Slashdot, my impression was that you have been doing this all along.
Also, though you may be studying college-level chemistry, the average consumer is going to have no idea what most of those ingredients on the side of the can will do. Please don't assume that everyone out there knows at least as much as you do (which is all too frequent a problem on Slashdot, might I add.).
Yeah, those damn nanny states, always butting into our lives! Why can't they leave me and my company alone so that we don't have to spend money on fixing the gas tanks on our products so that it stops killing customers?
It is an outrage that the government would investigate a potentially defective product that could be lethal!
Yeah, except for the pesky fact that there is some pretty cheap equipment out there that, when attached to a phone line, can detect a data call. That is, if they have any kind of coherent phone network there.
I mean honestly, is it the music you listen to while coding Perl or something?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's impossible, since any water would boil and evaporate in the vacuum that is present at the lunar surface.
Honestly, how many people here thing that this is a scam?
Watch the ad revenue come rolling in...
Better if developers for all platforms just figure out that not releasing a product before it's finished will result in poor sales for current and future titles.
That's exactly what the problem is with AO. They know that releasing a finished product will result in poor sales because it is so late.
Just think about it: With a console, you CAN'T issure patches for a game. That means that you have to have it right the first time, and you can't get away with rushing a half-finished game out the door and thrust it upon unsuspecting buyers.
Also, I admire Somethingawful for not kissing major game publisher ass to gain favor with them. This is in contrast to most site which, like Lowtax said, will do almost anything to get "inside looks" at unreleased games. Journalistic integrity is not in their vocabularies (although it probably isn't in CmdrTaco's, either).
If you are going to go all proprietary software on us, why don't you just go all the way and get a real database from Oracle or Sybase, so the response time aren't so shitty.
Personally, I just find Python cleaner than Perl, as it has a better syntax, using whitespace to delimit rather than brackets. Also, it is a lot faster for my purposes. Anyway, now you can take the docs with you anywhere you go.
That's another thing that bothers me: the concept of throwing away your old hardware. I could not bring myself to throw away an old computer, that would be a complete waste. What we are coming to here, folks, is a society akin to that portrayed in "A Brave New World," where people are taught from birth to throw away items that are old or outdated in order to promote consumerism.
Personally, this whole thing saddens me, as I love hackable hardware. This is kinda like the whole fiasco with That DSL Company (tm) asking for their gateways back after abandoning them for months. I ended up having to shell out $500 to because I had made mine into a kewl little MP3 server.
Well, there remains the fact that both AT&T and Comcast use the @Home network to provide service. However, I have to say, and I'm sure most of my fellow @Home users would agree, that @Home tech support would make chimps with typewriters seem like absolute fucking geniuses.
The article here almost implies that there is something wrong with the government distributing its own work under a license other than the GNU GPL. Honestly, what's wrong with using something like the BSD license?
First off, let's take the biggest and most obvious example of why GPLing gov't funded software would've been a bad idea: the BSD TCP/IP stack. If it wasn't for the fact that it had been under such a free and liberal license as the BSD license, we might never have seen the rise of such quality, albeit proprietary, operatings systems such as Sun's Solaris or Windows 2000. The nature of the GPL would have forced the companies to give away a lot of the rest of their intellectual property, thus making it impossible for them to use the "standard" implementation, and forcing them to create their own implementation and standard.
Also, what's wrong with companies profiting off of taxpayer-funded work? Last time I checked, large corporations pay taxes just like the rest of us do. I think it would be an affront to our freedom as American taxpayers and entrepreneurs if the governement released their software under such a restrictive license as the GPL.
In conclusion, one can't really argue with the fact that the GPL is a pretty viral license, because with examples like TCP/IP, where it is actually a part of the core operating system, rather than a seperate component. Forcing the openness of all the software would have been wrong and anti-American.
While I would have to agree with the crowds of Debian users here that apt-get is indeed a superior tool to whatever Mandrake is using these days, I would have to disagree on the ultimate choice of best software package management system.
Now, Linux is a great operating system in general, and I love the apt-get part of Debian in particular, but why does it have to be on the command line? I hardly think that the average person, say, my grandfather, for example, would be able to deal with learning all the arcane aspects of a command line utility. To most, it is just too frustrating, poorly documented, and complicated. What we really need in a modern operating system is a package manager that the average Joe or my grandfather could use.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned Windows Update yet? Not only is it a fully graphical tool, but it automatically detects what software your computer needs, without sending that information to a third party, and then gives you an easy install wizard to update everything. Sure, some things may require a reboot, but there is a lot of Linux software that also requires a reboot to function properly. Personally, I think it is a far superior tool to apt-get, because it can also make recommendations on what kind of cool new screen saver you might want to check out, or update DirectX to improve your gaming framerates and such.
And, of course, it is very handy for patching all those security holes that invariably pop up in MS software, such as the notorious Outlook holes that have caused more than one system administrator a headache. Think about it, if an update tool is easy enough for the average user to utilize, then we won't have to worry about upgrading everyone's Linux machines when the latest BIND or Sendmail exploit hits Bugtraq. It would greatly improve the image of Open Source software when no one goes on a massive hacking spree and compromises a ton of machines for their DDoS wars.
If it really matters so much to you, you COULD just pay for a subscription to a porn site.
I thought that we had gotten away from this by the early '90s when PCs became common and powerful enough that you could operate relatively comfortably without the support of some big iron. After all, wasn't the whole big-iron-to-desktop transition about self-empowerment? I thought so, because I didn't have to worry about pissing off some sysop when I compiled my newest Linux kernel on my 386 with 8 megs of RAM.
But now we have this crap about creating X terminals now. Don't we learn anything? We have all immensely enjoyed the personal freedom accorded to us by having enough local processing power to get the job done, no matter how many times the remote server crashes and burns. Besides, I have better ways to allocate my network's bandwidth than with a ton of X packets. Like, say, playing Quake III or browsing the web, or transfering files to my Windows 98 box from my NT server.
Plus, we are confronted with the fact that 486s probably won't have very nice video cards to begin with, so you can pretty much kiss a decent-looking display goodbye.