I'm not advocating communism -- I'm saying that when consumer preferences deviate from the current offerings, those who fail to adapt to consumer desires will fail to take advantage of potential revenue.
You mocked Dreamweaver after he admitted to laughing at the pity-mercials, and came up with a sob story about roofers losing money because cheaper alternatives (ie, free labor) became available. You advocated pity for the poor saps in the movie industry who stand to lose their jobs if reducing Ben Affleck's income to, say, that of the average orthopaedic surgeon fails to provide the additional money required to continue to keep said saps in bacon and beer.
Wasting the time of millions of moviegoers with sob stories in which the MPAA tries to convince us that we're not just going to the theater in order to actually watch the movie but out of some duty to provide income to some random set workers is laughable. To suggest that I should go to the movies to ensure that the guy holding a microphone continues to have a job simply out of pity is against the idea that consumers should make choices simply because they feel that the product is worth the price.
I'd be annoyed if ATMs gave me a speech about how if more people withdrew in the bank branch more tellers would be required to service those customers and thus more jobs would be created. I'd be annoyed if my PS2 played a short video upon startup explaining that if I don't buy the next revision of the Playstation platform I'll be putting the incomes of thousands of workers at risk. I'd be annoyed if I had to listen to the sob story of a roofer when buying a sandwich, and I'm sure as hell annoyed that despite the fact that I've made the economic choice in a free market economy to pay to watch the movie I have to listen to some guy explaining to me that demand for products can help to create jobs.
I'm aware that they create jobs, but I am obligated to spend my money on goods and services when (and only when) I decide that they are worth the money I'm shelling out on them. That is how a free market economy works -- consumers make decisions based on maximising their perceived benefit from the purchase of goods and services.
You make a cryptic statement regarding communism, but I've only suggested that consumers are paying because they feel that the experience is worth the money, and that if they can make an economic choice that provides them with a better utility-to-price ratio, they will opt to make that decision instead. Further, I feel that any other expectation is laughable, and that pity-mercials are a waste of time designed to guilt consumers into doing something other than making a simple economic decision as a consumer.
And yes, I do mean guilt, because despite the fact that I do not distribute or watch movies online I do consider other forms of entertainment. The pity-mercials suggest that one should choose a product based on maximising the number of people who were employed to produce a product. This is absolutely meant to make consumers feel guilty over not considering such things when making economic choices, whether for or against watching movies in theaters.
I prefer to view movies in theaters, rather than spend time looking for low-quality copies online.
While Valenti says that the few don't matter, he continues to issue a collective "shame on you" to moviegoing audiences despite the fact that very few of the audience members are the ones recording and redistributing movies illegally.
Those present in the theaters already made the decision that "movies are worth it." The very few in the audience to whom a scolding might apply are far outnumbered by those who just want to watch the damned movies. By Valenti's own thinking, it is bad to annoy the "millions and millions" of innocent moviegoers with the shame-on-you clips simply because a few have snuck in cameras.
Your assertion that the risk of job loss should prevent industries from moving on seems a little short-sighted. The economy seems to have gotten over the loss of jobs suffered by milkmen everywhere as pasturization extended milk's shelf life, and the employment listings are shockingly devoid of requests for experienced stable workers since that pesky automobile caught on.
Yes, the loss of those stable jobs may have had quite an impact upon the country (hell, look at how depressed the economy was in the early 1900's!), but despite the migration from horse-drawn to gasoline-powered travel, the country seems to have finally come out ahead.
Employers don't hire out of pity -- they hire because a person provides them with enough value to make them worth having on the payroll. The minute that an employer decides that your position does not profit the company at least as much as they pay you to fill it, it will be eliminated. Look at Baystar and SCO -- Baystar is questioning the value McBride brings to SCO, and they're looking to trim some fat from their budget.
Screw the movie industry -- they produce movies, hoping to make up their costs on distribution revenue. At the moment, their method of distribution is superior to alternatives (such as searching for crappy MPEGs on P2P or whatever people do). However, the increasing availability of broadband will continue to close the gap between the enjoyment gained from going to the theater, and the pleasure of watching new releases from your own home.
It's a matter of consumer choice -- Americans want the freedom to consume what they want, when they want, how they want. If the movie industry cannot move quickly enough to provide what the consumer wants to have, then they should fail, because that is how free market economies reportedly work.
Of course, given Valenti's lobbying powers, that may not be the way the cookie actually crumbles.
I saw a presentation at CMU given by a researcher working on creating genetically engineered bacteria to help clean up polluted ground water. She was receptive to questions of the "What about superbacteria?" type, but seemed genuinely amused as she related stories of getting the engineered bacteria to survive even in carefully controlled lab conditions.
As far as the "modified genes spreading" theory, genetic flaws are not contagious -- how many people can claim to have gotten Lou Gehrig's disease as a result of bacteria spreading around bad genes?
Sure enough, Active X is an ugly thing. Designed to crush OpenGL and then mixed up with all sorts of stupid stuff like their window manager. A hardware interface should be independent of its window manager, duh.
No, DirectX was designed to crush OpenGL. ActiveX was designed to crush Java.
Despite the common "X", they aren't directly related technologies
Microsoft has taken good code from BSD and elswhere and crapped it up.
Is there a browser distributed under a BSD-ish license that MS borrowed from when developing IE?
They reportedly used BSD's IP stack, but I don't see how that's related to the IE/ActiveX security model.
Opening specifications isn't about support costs, it's about fear. Deciding to stop distributing the same exact documentation which they used to provide quite happily wasn't a move to cut support costs.
Manufacturers are afraid that when their "trade secrets" get out, competing suppliers will destroy them. However, there have been manufacturers marketing MIPS cores for years, yet many still opt for the original in their designs. Intel seems to be doing fairly well despite having documented their instruction sets for decades.
It's about shipping a product which is well-manufactured enough that competition isn't so worrisome. Matrox uses quality RAMDACs, so their cards have beautiful output. Even if someone were to sell a cheap knock-off clone, Matrox still owns the trademarks, and nobody can steal their reputation for producing cards with quality output.
It's about fear of competition, and refusing to disclose anything beyond the bare minimum is nothing but an attempt to stifle it.
Linux may kick some ass in the embedded market, but PC hardware makers are still disappointingly reluctant to release information needed to ensure that their hardware works to its fullest extent under everyone's favorite OSS kernel.
Matrox used to release specifications so that those willing to roll their own drivers could take advantage of their hardware. This is sadly no longer true.
It's awesome to see that Linux holds its own in the embedded market. Embedded manufacturers realize that their hardware is a means to an end, and by allowing developers the freedom to make their own decisions regarding OS they only widen their potential customer base. I only wish that PC hardware manufacturers felt the same way.
Your card should work fine, unless DRI only works on AGP cards.
Sadly, DRI only works on AGP cards.
The annoying part is that it probably wouldn't be a huge effort to support 3D on PCI cards, but the drivers don't support it and the specs aren't available. That's what bothers me -- the hard part (writing the driver proper) has been done, but because the specs aren't available those of us with PCI G450s are left in the cold.
What is great about open source is that it can be extended by the end-user. Without OSS drivers and available specifications, though, my Matrox card is nothing but an expensive 2D card.
I didn't even want multi-monitor (at the moment, at least) as I don't have a spare monitor to hook up. I bought a card from Matrox based on my previous knowledge of them which no longer holds true.
Thanks greatly for the offer of assistance, though! I really appreciate your kind response.
I'm not complaining about it not having been marked up. I _am_ stating that saying that ASCII text is more useful than ASCII text + markup (ie, XML) doesn't make sense to me.
it's oft complained about by the lazy or uninformed. I personally LOVE the plain ascii text versions. I am able to convert them EASILY to my eBook's format and extend the life of that device that they decided to discontinue and all the books for it.
And XML isn't easy to parse or convert to other formats?
As I see it, it's easier to cut out metadata with a program or script than to add it by hand. With XML, one can easily produce ASCII, or marked-up HTML with nice formatting. I have better things to do with my time than perform tasks which could be easily automated.
With ASCII, you have to mark up the text manually. I must be "lazy or uninformed", so please explain -- how is being forced to mark up text manually better than starting with XML?
I found out only yesterday that Matrox no longer provides developers with specifications for their cards. A few short years ago, Matrox provided developers with the technical documentation needed to write drivers to take advantage of things such as 3d acceleration, and their cards were well-supported by the community.
Not realizing that Matrox has stopped providing the OSS community with the information needed to write drivers, I dropped $104 on a PCI G450. What worked well on my old (community-supported!) AGP G200 is impossible on my PCI G450.
Now that under Windows, it'd all be fine, but Matrox doesn't want to devote as many resources to full-featured Linux support, and they no longer support the community with documentation, so I am now the proud owner of a $104 2D card.
With sound and network cards specs are often available. However, when it comes to a half-decent 3D card, I don't know of any manufacturers that are willing to provide specifications so that the community can allow their own priorities to drive development.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem -- vendors don't want to devote resources towards Linux because they don't see a large gaming community. Game developers are reluctant to produce quality Linux ports due to flaky hardware support. The best way out of the loop would be for hardware manufacturers to provide specifications and let the community take care of the lack of quality drivers.
The sad part is that none of the manufacturers see that being known for rock-solid OSS Linux drivers would provide a sales boost, which would supply more money for them to devote towards R&D. I'd love to see a lesser 3D accelerator vendor (ie, not NVidia or ATI) warm up to the idea of releasing specifications. There has to be money in developing well-supported, reasonably-priced cards for those more interested in quality and stability than bleeding-edge first-person-shooter framerates. I thought that Matrox filled that niche, but they no longer seem to care about being well-supported.
The NE2000 chipset is a staple when it comes to cheap, decently-supported ethernet cards. Where is the NE2000 of video cards?
Sorry for the rambling, I'm exhausted.
Re:freenet vs fascist corporations
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...which is true, but still doesn't solve fact that preserving content isn't one of Freenet's design goals. Popular content spreads around, but content which isn't used eventually goes away.
Freenet's design duplicates highly used data, which should reduce the average amount of traffic required to actually retrieve it. However, it is not (and likely will never be) intended to store content permanently, which means that no matter how well Freenet works at its intended goals, there will still be content which will cease to exist because nobody has requested it while every node in existence has the Paris Hilton video cached in its local store.
Freenet is a great project which in theory should do incredibly well for its intended goals. It may also work reasonably well for allowing you to access some artistic content. However, as long as the U.S. Government lets the RIAA and friends keep the keys to the storage shed that used to be called "public domain", using Freenet to distribute copyrighted content will be treating the symptom, not the disease.
Many companies produce mission statements which are meant to help to direct the companies actions towards a given goal. If a plan is suggested, it can be evaluated in terms of how well it helps the company to achieve its stated goals.
One would hope that the U.S. government's mission statement were truly the motivation to affect change which drives public officers. However, politicians are generally working towards their own best interests. Talking about how copyright is overextended is a sure-fire way to be ignored (or ridiculed) by popular media, which is decidedly against the goals of most politicians.
The government won't "come to its senses", because officials need the media to get elected.
That's attacking the problem at the wrong level. Hiding the fact that we're trading what should be public domain is a waste of energy.
Segregation wasn't outlawed in the U.S. by silent contempt -- it was changed by U.S. citizens publicly showing their discontent with the current system. Better P2P systems won't solve the problem, they'll just make the symptoms less painful.
In Soviet Russia...
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This seems like the perfect time to mention the fact that under original copyright law, the television shows you remembered watching as a child would fall under the public domain at some point in your lifetime.
Music, television shows, movies -- all these are stolen from the public by excessive copyright terms. Copyright was supposed to encourage "content developers" to share the fruits of their labors so that the public could benefit from (and eventually take ownership of) their works.
Lately I keep thinking of a short bit of an Arthur C. Clark's "2061: Odyssey Three" in which Haywood Floyd remembers a bit of an old tune and considers asking his computer to help him to find the actual song. It strikes me as quite sad that because we seem to have forgotten the benefits of copyright expiration, it's likely that whatever old tunes I try to remember in 2061 will probably still be controlled as tightly as possible by the recording industry.
I feel like the media industries beat me up and stole my lunch money.
PS, IANAL, which for any discussion like this, we could all save time by just sticking that in our sigs.;-)
Or "we" could even stop assuming that everyone thinks that we're lawyers in the first place.
Honestly, when I've seen lawyers post, it's been accompanied by something like "I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice." When a lawyer posts, they generally make it clear that they are a lawyer, but aren't giving legal advice, just a somewhat educated $0.02 worth.
Stories discussing caffeine don't seem to spawn hundreds of posts with "I am not an organic chemist", and the recent story about the amount of waste byproducts resulted from manufacturing a computer resulted in not even one "I am not a garbage man, but..." post.
Hell, you want to state in your signature that you're not a lawyer? If you're that concerned, why don't you just entirely stop telling us what you aren't and post a link to your professional resume in your signature?
Hmmm... maybe I shouldn't take things at face value, either. Perhaps IANAL is really meant as "I ANAL". Are you sure you aren't a GNAA troll?
Oh, and in case you were going to assume otherwise, I am not a humorist. Heh.
AutoZone violated SCO's UNIX copyrights by running versions of the Linux operating system
Using a program isn't a violation of copyright. Copying without permission of the copyright holder is generally a violation of copyright (with a few exceptions, such as educational use), but under the U.S. interpretation of copyright simply using a program cannot be a copyright violation.
Postfix uses SASL, the same mechanism used for Sendmail for SMTP authentication. Neither work out-of-the-box, and neither have a simple "auth-against-PAM" option -- it's a bit more work than it really needs to be.
Yes, it's possible, but it's not standard, which was my point. FTP, ssh, logins -- these generally work with PAM with a minimum of hassle. SMTP authentication requires much more work. So does, say, letting Joe User access the 2400dpi scanner you just bought for your department.
And the point which I made that you seem to have missed is that users will invariably end up having a legitimate need to do something which you didn't expect. This is precisely the point of full-featured management interfaces with standardized plugin interfaces: it allows programs to present configuration options to the people who need to configure things (such as letting a new employee send mail from outside the intranet, or allowing him to print to the laserjet down the hall).
When you say you can script it all, either you're going to be writing full-fledged management interfaces to everything end-users should have the ability to configure, or you'll have confused and frustrated end-users.
That's true to some extent, but even the fact that Microsoft allows things like user authentication to "just work" for network logins and sending mail are major benefits to anyone managing users. Have you configured Sendmail to "just authenticate" users via SMTP authentication without having to resort to pain-in-the-ass mechanisms?
Ideally, it would just authenticate against PAM (or whatever the local system uses for auth) out-of-the-box, but so far it doesn't seem possible. I've gotten SMTP auth working, but only with plaintext passwords. Sure, I could SSL the whole thing, but that's not the point, because SMTP allows for encrypted passwords, and Sendmail can't seem to use them to authenticate against/etc/passwd or NIS, let alone do it automatically for any new user or allow some PHB to do it via a pointy-clicky interface. It should "just work", but it doesn't.
Also keep in mind that the people adding users needn't be the administrators themselves -- a department head should be able to add users to their domain without having to run to admins. When the admins are no longer the ones performing such tasks, they're further removed from the fact that it's more of a pain in the ass and thus less likely to be annoyed enough for automation.
Suddenly, when pointy-haired middle management can't add users or easily permit Joe Temp to send mail from outside the corporate intranet with a few simple mouse clicks, there are problems not covered by your "script it" solution.
Keep in mind that there's a large difference between fixing Outlook Express for Grandma and the field of CS.
It's going to sound a little harsh, but if you want to futz with computers, go work for Best Buy or CompUSA in the repair department, or start your own PC repair shop. If you're looking for a more analytical field and enjoy both coding and higher-level math, CS is more your bag.
Don't mistake this for elitism -- someone who enjoys construction isn't necessarily an engineer, and someone who enjoys using computers and software isn't necessarily going to enjoy trying to design computers and software.
Also keep in mind that computer use is something that professionals depend upon more and more, so even if you choose a field which doesn't seem to relate to "computers", you'll probably end up staring at one for years to come anyways.
As the head of a department which uses a large farm of Linux machines, I find myself concerned with the legal issues surrounding the use of Linux in a commercial environment.
I have two questions regarding the purchase of SCO IP licenses.
First, I have read in several trade publications that purchasing SCO licenses will protect me against legal action by SCO. What legal action could SCO bring against me as an end-user of Linux?
Second, will SCO indemnify me against the possibility that it is determined in a court of law that SCO IP was not misappropriated? My technical staff is of the opinion that there is no reason to purchase such licenses, but the promise of a refund if a court of law determines that SCO's claims are invalid would certainly help to justify the expense.
Here's to hoping for a response. I'll post anything I hear back;)
I just sent an email to the author of the article:
In your article, "The SCO legal train: Know your options", you suggest that legal indemnification is something that end-users should be concerned with.
However, what you didn't explain is exactly what SCO could sue end-users for doing. As SCO continued to distribute the Linux kernel under the GPL even after filing suit against IBM, they really cannot argue that end-users are infringing upon their copyrights. After all, the GPL provides explicit permission to redistribute under certain conditions.
If end-users didn't actually break the law, SCO has no case against them. "They should have paid us" isn't a strong core argument for the prosecution unless law was actually broken.
What exactly do you believe that SCO can sue end-users for doing?
One site that I've found useful as an introduction is Mulder's Stylesheets Tutorial. It's presented quite well, and covers enough to give you a good idea of what can be done easily with CSS.
I'd go on more about it, but if you're looking for a good tutorial, you'll probably try every link you see in this story's comments. If you're not looking for a tutorial, there's no point in me wasting my time describing it.
...which is another example of just why people shouldn't place themselves in a position such that others are passing them on the right side.
It seems that generally people don't adhere to safe driving practices, and it saddens me that the same people who insist on moving more slowly than surrounding traffic refuse to at least have the consideration to move to the right.
From what I understand, passing on the slower side in Germany is illegal. To me, this makes much more sense than trying to enforce a flat speed limit -- since most drivers exceed the speed limit to some (varying) degree, the best thing to do would be to consider the safety of yourself and others and not force people to pass you on the left and the right. If people are passing you on the right, you're likely travelling in the wrong lane.
Of course, this is nothing more than pedantic bitching on my part when I pretend that the laws are actually designed with the safety of the average citizen in mind. Speed limits generate "fee-based" income which supplants the tax monies collected by the governments. It's easier (and more practical) for a police officer to sit along a roadside and occasionally pick off a speeder than for them to actually travel with traffic, observe traffic patterns, and issue citations to those motorists that think that they are well within their rights to obstruct traffic and cause unsafe conditions simply because a blanket speed limit has been applied to all lanes.
In the meantime people are passing them on both sides and (preventable!) situations such as the one you described happen because people value their own moral superiority over the lives of others. It seems quite arrogant to inconvenience others by forcing them to take a potentially unsafe path around you.
Interestingly enough, on Maryland's wide highways the rightmost lane is generally the least occupied. I've observed fair traffic in all lanes with quarter-mile gaps between cars in the right lane.
Okay, sore spot, I'm annoyed by those who value their convenience over the safety of others. I'll be quiet now. Be careful and considerate, everyone, and have a great Saturday!
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I'm not advocating communism -- I'm saying that when consumer preferences deviate from the current offerings, those who fail to adapt to consumer desires will fail to take advantage of potential revenue.
You mocked Dreamweaver after he admitted to laughing at the pity-mercials, and came up with a sob story about roofers losing money because cheaper alternatives (ie, free labor) became available. You advocated pity for the poor saps in the movie industry who stand to lose their jobs if reducing Ben Affleck's income to, say, that of the average orthopaedic surgeon fails to provide the additional money required to continue to keep said saps in bacon and beer.
Wasting the time of millions of moviegoers with sob stories in which the MPAA tries to convince us that we're not just going to the theater in order to actually watch the movie but out of some duty to provide income to some random set workers is laughable. To suggest that I should go to the movies to ensure that the guy holding a microphone continues to have a job simply out of pity is against the idea that consumers should make choices simply because they feel that the product is worth the price.
I'd be annoyed if ATMs gave me a speech about how if more people withdrew in the bank branch more tellers would be required to service those customers and thus more jobs would be created. I'd be annoyed if my PS2 played a short video upon startup explaining that if I don't buy the next revision of the Playstation platform I'll be putting the incomes of thousands of workers at risk. I'd be annoyed if I had to listen to the sob story of a roofer when buying a sandwich, and I'm sure as hell annoyed that despite the fact that I've made the economic choice in a free market economy to pay to watch the movie I have to listen to some guy explaining to me that demand for products can help to create jobs.
I'm aware that they create jobs, but I am obligated to spend my money on goods and services when (and only when) I decide that they are worth the money I'm shelling out on them. That is how a free market economy works -- consumers make decisions based on maximising their perceived benefit from the purchase of goods and services.
You make a cryptic statement regarding communism, but I've only suggested that consumers are paying because they feel that the experience is worth the money, and that if they can make an economic choice that provides them with a better utility-to-price ratio, they will opt to make that decision instead. Further, I feel that any other expectation is laughable, and that pity-mercials are a waste of time designed to guilt consumers into doing something other than making a simple economic decision as a consumer.
And yes, I do mean guilt, because despite the fact that I do not distribute or watch movies online I do consider other forms of entertainment. The pity-mercials suggest that one should choose a product based on maximising the number of people who were employed to produce a product. This is absolutely meant to make consumers feel guilty over not considering such things when making economic choices, whether for or against watching movies in theaters.
I prefer to view movies in theaters, rather than spend time looking for low-quality copies online.
While Valenti says that the few don't matter, he continues to issue a collective "shame on you" to moviegoing audiences despite the fact that very few of the audience members are the ones recording and redistributing movies illegally.
Those present in the theaters already made the decision that "movies are worth it." The very few in the audience to whom a scolding might apply are far outnumbered by those who just want to watch the damned movies. By Valenti's own thinking, it is bad to annoy the "millions and millions" of innocent moviegoers with the shame-on-you clips simply because a few have snuck in cameras.
Your assertion that the risk of job loss should prevent industries from moving on seems a little short-sighted. The economy seems to have gotten over the loss of jobs suffered by milkmen everywhere as pasturization extended milk's shelf life, and the employment listings are shockingly devoid of requests for experienced stable workers since that pesky automobile caught on.
Yes, the loss of those stable jobs may have had quite an impact upon the country (hell, look at how depressed the economy was in the early 1900's!), but despite the migration from horse-drawn to gasoline-powered travel, the country seems to have finally come out ahead.
Employers don't hire out of pity -- they hire because a person provides them with enough value to make them worth having on the payroll. The minute that an employer decides that your position does not profit the company at least as much as they pay you to fill it, it will be eliminated. Look at Baystar and SCO -- Baystar is questioning the value McBride brings to SCO, and they're looking to trim some fat from their budget.
Screw the movie industry -- they produce movies, hoping to make up their costs on distribution revenue. At the moment, their method of distribution is superior to alternatives (such as searching for crappy MPEGs on P2P or whatever people do). However, the increasing availability of broadband will continue to close the gap between the enjoyment gained from going to the theater, and the pleasure of watching new releases from your own home.
It's a matter of consumer choice -- Americans want the freedom to consume what they want, when they want, how they want. If the movie industry cannot move quickly enough to provide what the consumer wants to have, then they should fail, because that is how free market economies reportedly work.
Of course, given Valenti's lobbying powers, that may not be the way the cookie actually crumbles.
I saw a presentation at CMU given by a researcher working on creating genetically engineered bacteria to help clean up polluted ground water. She was receptive to questions of the "What about superbacteria?" type, but seemed genuinely amused as she related stories of getting the engineered bacteria to survive even in carefully controlled lab conditions.
As far as the "modified genes spreading" theory, genetic flaws are not contagious -- how many people can claim to have gotten Lou Gehrig's disease as a result of bacteria spreading around bad genes?
Despite the common "X", they aren't directly related technologies
Is there a browser distributed under a BSD-ish license that MS borrowed from when developing IE?
They reportedly used BSD's IP stack, but I don't see how that's related to the IE/ActiveX security model.
Just how does add revenue work?
Opening specifications isn't about support costs, it's about fear. Deciding to stop distributing the same exact documentation which they used to provide quite happily wasn't a move to cut support costs.
Manufacturers are afraid that when their "trade secrets" get out, competing suppliers will destroy them. However, there have been manufacturers marketing MIPS cores for years, yet many still opt for the original in their designs. Intel seems to be doing fairly well despite having documented their instruction sets for decades.
It's about shipping a product which is well-manufactured enough that competition isn't so worrisome. Matrox uses quality RAMDACs, so their cards have beautiful output. Even if someone were to sell a cheap knock-off clone, Matrox still owns the trademarks, and nobody can steal their reputation for producing cards with quality output.
It's about fear of competition, and refusing to disclose anything beyond the bare minimum is nothing but an attempt to stifle it.
Linux may kick some ass in the embedded market, but PC hardware makers are still disappointingly reluctant to release information needed to ensure that their hardware works to its fullest extent under everyone's favorite OSS kernel.
Matrox used to release specifications so that those willing to roll their own drivers could take advantage of their hardware. This is sadly no longer true.
It's awesome to see that Linux holds its own in the embedded market. Embedded manufacturers realize that their hardware is a means to an end, and by allowing developers the freedom to make their own decisions regarding OS they only widen their potential customer base. I only wish that PC hardware manufacturers felt the same way.
Fiddle-dee-dee! That will require a tetanus shot.
(Homer, after stepping on a nail)
The annoying part is that it probably wouldn't be a huge effort to support 3D on PCI cards, but the drivers don't support it and the specs aren't available. That's what bothers me -- the hard part (writing the driver proper) has been done, but because the specs aren't available those of us with PCI G450s are left in the cold.
What is great about open source is that it can be extended by the end-user. Without OSS drivers and available specifications, though, my Matrox card is nothing but an expensive 2D card.
I didn't even want multi-monitor (at the moment, at least) as I don't have a spare monitor to hook up. I bought a card from Matrox based on my previous knowledge of them which no longer holds true.
Thanks greatly for the offer of assistance, though! I really appreciate your kind response.
I'm not complaining about it not having been marked up. I _am_ stating that saying that ASCII text is more useful than ASCII text + markup (ie, XML) doesn't make sense to me.
As I see it, it's easier to cut out metadata with a program or script than to add it by hand. With XML, one can easily produce ASCII, or marked-up HTML with nice formatting. I have better things to do with my time than perform tasks which could be easily automated.
With ASCII, you have to mark up the text manually. I must be "lazy or uninformed", so please explain -- how is being forced to mark up text manually better than starting with XML?
Two words: stable drivers.
I found out only yesterday that Matrox no longer provides developers with specifications for their cards. A few short years ago, Matrox provided developers with the technical documentation needed to write drivers to take advantage of things such as 3d acceleration, and their cards were well-supported by the community.
Not realizing that Matrox has stopped providing the OSS community with the information needed to write drivers, I dropped $104 on a PCI G450. What worked well on my old (community-supported!) AGP G200 is impossible on my PCI G450.
Now that under Windows, it'd all be fine, but Matrox doesn't want to devote as many resources to full-featured Linux support, and they no longer support the community with documentation, so I am now the proud owner of a $104 2D card.
With sound and network cards specs are often available. However, when it comes to a half-decent 3D card, I don't know of any manufacturers that are willing to provide specifications so that the community can allow their own priorities to drive development.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem -- vendors don't want to devote resources towards Linux because they don't see a large gaming community. Game developers are reluctant to produce quality Linux ports due to flaky hardware support. The best way out of the loop would be for hardware manufacturers to provide specifications and let the community take care of the lack of quality drivers.
The sad part is that none of the manufacturers see that being known for rock-solid OSS Linux drivers would provide a sales boost, which would supply more money for them to devote towards R&D. I'd love to see a lesser 3D accelerator vendor (ie, not NVidia or ATI) warm up to the idea of releasing specifications. There has to be money in developing well-supported, reasonably-priced cards for those more interested in quality and stability than bleeding-edge first-person-shooter framerates. I thought that Matrox filled that niche, but they no longer seem to care about being well-supported.
The NE2000 chipset is a staple when it comes to cheap, decently-supported ethernet cards. Where is the NE2000 of video cards?
Sorry for the rambling, I'm exhausted.
...which is true, but still doesn't solve fact that preserving content isn't one of Freenet's design goals. Popular content spreads around, but content which isn't used eventually goes away.
Freenet's design duplicates highly used data, which should reduce the average amount of traffic required to actually retrieve it. However, it is not (and likely will never be) intended to store content permanently, which means that no matter how well Freenet works at its intended goals, there will still be content which will cease to exist because nobody has requested it while every node in existence has the Paris Hilton video cached in its local store.
Freenet is a great project which in theory should do incredibly well for its intended goals. It may also work reasonably well for allowing you to access some artistic content. However, as long as the U.S. Government lets the RIAA and friends keep the keys to the storage shed that used to be called "public domain", using Freenet to distribute copyrighted content will be treating the symptom, not the disease.
I doubt it.
Many companies produce mission statements which are meant to help to direct the companies actions towards a given goal. If a plan is suggested, it can be evaluated in terms of how well it helps the company to achieve its stated goals.
One would hope that the U.S. government's mission statement were truly the motivation to affect change which drives public officers. However, politicians are generally working towards their own best interests. Talking about how copyright is overextended is a sure-fire way to be ignored (or ridiculed) by popular media, which is decidedly against the goals of most politicians.
The government won't "come to its senses", because officials need the media to get elected.
That's attacking the problem at the wrong level. Hiding the fact that we're trading what should be public domain is a waste of energy.
Segregation wasn't outlawed in the U.S. by silent contempt -- it was changed by U.S. citizens publicly showing their discontent with the current system. Better P2P systems won't solve the problem, they'll just make the symptoms less painful.
This seems like the perfect time to mention the fact that under original copyright law, the television shows you remembered watching as a child would fall under the public domain at some point in your lifetime.
Music, television shows, movies -- all these are stolen from the public by excessive copyright terms. Copyright was supposed to encourage "content developers" to share the fruits of their labors so that the public could benefit from (and eventually take ownership of) their works.
Lately I keep thinking of a short bit of an Arthur C. Clark's "2061: Odyssey Three" in which Haywood Floyd remembers a bit of an old tune and considers asking his computer to help him to find the actual song. It strikes me as quite sad that because we seem to have forgotten the benefits of copyright expiration, it's likely that whatever old tunes I try to remember in 2061 will probably still be controlled as tightly as possible by the recording industry.
I feel like the media industries beat me up and stole my lunch money.
Honestly, when I've seen lawyers post, it's been accompanied by something like "I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice." When a lawyer posts, they generally make it clear that they are a lawyer, but aren't giving legal advice, just a somewhat educated $0.02 worth.
Stories discussing caffeine don't seem to spawn hundreds of posts with "I am not an organic chemist", and the recent story about the amount of waste byproducts resulted from manufacturing a computer resulted in not even one "I am not a garbage man, but..." post.
Hell, you want to state in your signature that you're not a lawyer? If you're that concerned, why don't you just entirely stop telling us what you aren't and post a link to your professional resume in your signature?
Hmmm... maybe I shouldn't take things at face value, either. Perhaps IANAL is really meant as "I ANAL". Are you sure you aren't a GNAA troll?
Oh, and in case you were going to assume otherwise, I am not a humorist. Heh.
Postfix uses SASL, the same mechanism used for Sendmail for SMTP authentication. Neither work out-of-the-box, and neither have a simple "auth-against-PAM" option -- it's a bit more work than it really needs to be.
Yes, it's possible, but it's not standard, which was my point. FTP, ssh, logins -- these generally work with PAM with a minimum of hassle. SMTP authentication requires much more work. So does, say, letting Joe User access the 2400dpi scanner you just bought for your department.
And the point which I made that you seem to have missed is that users will invariably end up having a legitimate need to do something which you didn't expect. This is precisely the point of full-featured management interfaces with standardized plugin interfaces: it allows programs to present configuration options to the people who need to configure things (such as letting a new employee send mail from outside the intranet, or allowing him to print to the laserjet down the hall).
When you say you can script it all, either you're going to be writing full-fledged management interfaces to everything end-users should have the ability to configure, or you'll have confused and frustrated end-users.
That's true to some extent, but even the fact that Microsoft allows things like user authentication to "just work" for network logins and sending mail are major benefits to anyone managing users. Have you configured Sendmail to "just authenticate" users via SMTP authentication without having to resort to pain-in-the-ass mechanisms?
/etc/passwd or NIS, let alone do it automatically for any new user or allow some PHB to do it via a pointy-clicky interface. It should "just work", but it doesn't.
Ideally, it would just authenticate against PAM (or whatever the local system uses for auth) out-of-the-box, but so far it doesn't seem possible. I've gotten SMTP auth working, but only with plaintext passwords. Sure, I could SSL the whole thing, but that's not the point, because SMTP allows for encrypted passwords, and Sendmail can't seem to use them to authenticate against
Also keep in mind that the people adding users needn't be the administrators themselves -- a department head should be able to add users to their domain without having to run to admins. When the admins are no longer the ones performing such tasks, they're further removed from the fact that it's more of a pain in the ass and thus less likely to be annoyed enough for automation.
Suddenly, when pointy-haired middle management can't add users or easily permit Joe Temp to send mail from outside the corporate intranet with a few simple mouse clicks, there are problems not covered by your "script it" solution.
Keep in mind that there's a large difference between fixing Outlook Express for Grandma and the field of CS.
It's going to sound a little harsh, but if you want to futz with computers, go work for Best Buy or CompUSA in the repair department, or start your own PC repair shop. If you're looking for a more analytical field and enjoy both coding and higher-level math, CS is more your bag.
Don't mistake this for elitism -- someone who enjoys construction isn't necessarily an engineer, and someone who enjoys using computers and software isn't necessarily going to enjoy trying to design computers and software.
Also keep in mind that computer use is something that professionals depend upon more and more, so even if you choose a field which doesn't seem to relate to "computers", you'll probably end up staring at one for years to come anyways.
Good luck!
Here's to hoping for a response. I'll post anything I hear back
I'll post any response I get
One site that I've found useful as an introduction is Mulder's Stylesheets Tutorial. It's presented quite well, and covers enough to give you a good idea of what can be done easily with CSS.
I'd go on more about it, but if you're looking for a good tutorial, you'll probably try every link you see in this story's comments. If you're not looking for a tutorial, there's no point in me wasting my time describing it.
That and it's time to poop. Bye!
...which is another example of just why people shouldn't place themselves in a position such that others are passing them on the right side.
It seems that generally people don't adhere to safe driving practices, and it saddens me that the same people who insist on moving more slowly than surrounding traffic refuse to at least have the consideration to move to the right.
From what I understand, passing on the slower side in Germany is illegal. To me, this makes much more sense than trying to enforce a flat speed limit -- since most drivers exceed the speed limit to some (varying) degree, the best thing to do would be to consider the safety of yourself and others and not force people to pass you on the left and the right. If people are passing you on the right, you're likely travelling in the wrong lane.
Of course, this is nothing more than pedantic bitching on my part when I pretend that the laws are actually designed with the safety of the average citizen in mind. Speed limits generate "fee-based" income which supplants the tax monies collected by the governments. It's easier (and more practical) for a police officer to sit along a roadside and occasionally pick off a speeder than for them to actually travel with traffic, observe traffic patterns, and issue citations to those motorists that think that they are well within their rights to obstruct traffic and cause unsafe conditions simply because a blanket speed limit has been applied to all lanes.
In the meantime people are passing them on both sides and (preventable!) situations such as the one you described happen because people value their own moral superiority over the lives of others. It seems quite arrogant to inconvenience others by forcing them to take a potentially unsafe path around you.
Interestingly enough, on Maryland's wide highways the rightmost lane is generally the least occupied. I've observed fair traffic in all lanes with quarter-mile gaps between cars in the right lane.
Okay, sore spot, I'm annoyed by those who value their convenience over the safety of others. I'll be quiet now. Be careful and considerate, everyone, and have a great Saturday!