I personally don't want anyone messing with my coffee's flavour. I like it black.
If others don't like the taste, why are they drinking it?? It can't be for the caffine content, since then they could drink tea or Coke, or hell, even take caffine pills.
The Gentoo install guide is great. The only problem I had with it was the lack of instructions on how to use fdisk (the first time I did it I had to play a bit), but other than that it was great.
"The record companies are like cartels, like countries, for God's sake," singer/songwriter Tom Waits says. "It's a nightmare to be trapped in one. I'm on a good label (Epitaph) now that's not part of the plantation system.
You can buy mp3s of every Epitaph release (even the out of print ones I believe) from Emusic, then do what ever you want with them, like make your own mixed cds.
...but the farthest I got with WineX was getting Warcraft 3 to install. After that, nothing.
Now, I wasn't using their membership-based binary release though, but still, why should I go through the hell of manually editing config files and removing the cinematics from my game when I could just reboot?
...is not truly OO. If it was there would be no primitive data types. Sure, there's Integer, etc, classes, but having primitive data types in the first place excludes it from being purely OO.
I do manually install updates. I think the EULA comment refered to the fact that even if you had that option disabled, Microsoft was still giving themselves the right to force software updates/removal.
Please be sure to read the EULA before installing the patch.
So I have to choose between a dangerously insecure system, or one which Microsoft has some control over. Hrm....lets see...I don't patch and risk losing everthing to a malicious hacker, or I do patch and maybe, at some point on the future Microsoft MIGHT push a update onto my machine.
Well in my experience their support was good. My original harddrive started making an extremely annoying high piched whine. The drive seemed to be working fine but the sound was killing me. Called them up, and had a brand new drive in less than a week. And that was close to 3 years after I bought the system (a couple months away from the warranty expiring I think.)
Maybe their server support is worse, I don't know as I've never used it...
One of my first PCs was a Dell, and I still have it running as a linux router. Whenever someone that doesn't know much about computers asks me about buying one, I tell them to check out Dell, mostly because of the excellent support, and pretty decent quality hardware.
To have them available in a store is even better, since the hefty shipping costs to Canada can be a bit of a deterent.
You mean Asia Carrera is going to be there? Sweet!
Server seems to be getting slashdotted
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Here's the text in case the server goes down. Took a while to load at my end...
-- Open with caution
I SUPPOSE IT was inevitable. With sneakwrap terms showing up in everything from charity Web sites to pornographic spam, it was just a matter of time. Books with shrinkwrap license agreements have arrived.
The first report of this phenomena to The Gripe Line came a few months ago when a reader who is a physician received an unsolicited tome in the mail entitled Geriatric Pharmaceutical Care Guidelines, 2002 Edition, from Omnicare. "This book arrived wrapped in plastic with a shrinkwrap license on the front," the doctor wrote. "It plainly says that by breaking the seal you agree to the terms of the license and if you don't agree you should return the book unopened. Is this what software licensing has led us to? This license says the book remains the property of Omnicare. Will they come up with a way to remotely disable the book if someone else reads it?"
The doctor obligingly faxed me a copy of the license, and I saw that it was indeed a sneakwrap agreement worthy of Microsoft or VeriSign. "In the event that you do not agree with any terms of this agreement you should promptly return the material unopened to your local Omnicare pharmacy," it read in bold letters near the top.
The license was nontransferable and would "terminate immediately if the Licensee or his or her employer ceased to be an Omnicare customer." And although the Omnicare "Guidelines are intended only to provide guidance as to which pharmaceutical products Omnicare believes to be most effective" the "licensee" was nonetheless prohibited from disclosing any of the information in the book to third parties.
It struck me that this license put the doctor in an awkward position. As far as he knew, neither he nor any of the other doctors in his office (most of whom had received their own copies the book) were Omnicare customers, and he did not know where his "local Omnicare pharmacy" might be. Even if he wanted to keep the book, as a non-Omnicare customer the license prohibited him from doing so. And since Omnicare claimed to retain ownership of his copy, he couldn't destroy it either. If the license agreement was to be taken seriously, he either had to go to the trouble of trying to ship the book back or he had to become an Omnicare customer somehow.
The doctor wondered if Omnicare was trying to make him feel obligated to them. "Sometimes my less-than-favorite charities send me greeting cards or stickers or a writing instrument in the mail," the doctor noted. "They are hoping to provoke enough sense of obligation in me to extract a contribution, but legally I am not required to acknowledge, or pay for, or return, or refrain from using what they send. So what is my obligation when sent an unsolicited book? Am I legally required not to use it or to return it if I don't agree with the sender's intended use?"
So just what was Omnicare's purpose in putting a classic shrinkwrap agreement (it was even printed in small, poorly-contrasted type) on a book that was clearly intended to promote use of the company's pharmaceutical products? I hoped Omnicare officials might have a simple explanation, but if they did, they decided not to share it with me. After two months of going back and forth with their public relations staff, I did not even get an answer on the basic question of what a noncustomer was supposed to do with the book.
While I was waiting in vain for answers from Omnicare, though, I heard from another reader with a shrinkwrapped book. Interestingly enough, he was also a doctor, but his book was a membership directory published by a medical society. I'm not going to identify the organization, partly because my deadline didn't allow them much time to respond to my questions and partly because their license was much less restrictive than Omnicare's. But their spokesperson was also unable to offer any explanations for why they felt it necessary to attach a license agreement to that book.
As I thought about it, however, it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter why we're suddenly seeing these books in the medical field with shrinkwrap licenses. Perhaps the publishers have good reasons for using them, perhaps they don't. But if someone wants to slap some legalese of dubious merit on the front of a book, why shouldn't they? Software publishers have been doing it for years, after all, so it only seems fair that publishers of other forms of intellectual property should have the same right to try to put restrictions on how customers use their products.
And, if there's no real justification for prohibiting book publishers from doing what software publishers do, how can we draw the line even at products containing intellectual property? Perhaps lamps will soon come with fine print legalese on the inside of the lampshade banning them from being resold at yard sales without the manufacturer's permission. And tearing that tag off your mattress really will bring the police pounding on your door.
Last week we talked about how we've already lost some of the basic rights we used to enjoy under traditional interpretations of copyright law. Loaning a book to a friend is not yet one of them, but who knows how much longer we'll be able to say that. Today we might still reasonably expect that any sane judge would just laugh if someone tried to get him or her to enforce a license such as Omnicare's limited-use license agreement. We must remember though that there are very powerful forces in this country working to give all sneakwrap agreements the full force of a binding contract. Next week we'll pay them another visit.
There was a story at The Register almost a week ago about this.
Most interestingly is Sincere Choice, created by Bruce Perens and Michael Robertson.
From their main page:
We stand for these principles:
Open Standards
Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards that are sincerely open for all to implement, without royalty fees or discrimination.
Choice Through Interoperability
No user should be required to use a particular product simply because other users do. Competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards.
Competition by Merit
Software vendors should compete fairly on the merit of their products, rather than by attempting to lock each other's products out of the market. Research Availability The people pay for government-funded research, its fruits should be available to all of them equally. We promote Open Source / Free Software licensing as a means of distributing research results fairly.
Range of Copyright Policies
We support a broad range of copyright policies, from Public Domain through Open Source and Free Software to Proprietary. We support use of the GPL and LGPL licenses when appropriate. We assert that Open Source and Proprietary models can be used together effectively. A number of our companies deploy software under the GPL license and proprietary software in the same product.
Freedom to Set Policy
Individual users, businesses, and government should all be free to set their own policies regarding what sorts of software they will acquire and use. They should not force their policies upon others.
So I have a TV with a DVD player in my living room, and a TV with a VCR in my bedroom. If I buy a movie on DVD then do I not have the right to watch that movie anywhere?
There's a very good reason why we need to be able to copy DVDs. I don't want to move my DVD player to my bedroom to watch a movie, and I don't want to buy another one, so I should have the right to copy the movie I legally own onto VHS tape so I can watch it my bedroom.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally don't want anyone messing with my coffee's flavour. I like it black.
If others don't like the taste, why are they drinking it?? It can't be for the caffine content, since then they could drink tea or Coke, or hell, even take caffine pills.
I think you're the one on drugs pal. I just installed Gnome 2.2 on my Gentoo box and it has nothing to do with Ximian.
Ximian Desktop is based on Gnome, but Ximian has made their own customizations to it. The current Ximian Desktop is based on Gnome 1.4.
So why don't you learn about stuff before you comment on it??
I have a Rio Volt (which is made by SonicBlue unless I'm mistaken) and I've had no problems with it whatsoever. Maybe I was just lucky?
Except for the Simpsons! Woohoo!
Who will decide whether a piece of software will "promote fundamental human rights of end-users"?
If your interested in the init scripts, you could just read the Gentoo Init System documentation.
The Gentoo install guide is great. The only problem I had with it was the lack of instructions on how to use fdisk (the first time I did it I had to play a bit), but other than that it was great.
The long part is the compilation.
...but I just closed my Paypal account and sent them an email expressing my disgust. I urge others to do the same.
:P
Do you look before you post?
Nvidia's driver page clearly has source tarballs for the GLX and kernel drivers.
You can buy mp3s of every Epitaph release (even the out of print ones I believe) from Emusic, then do what ever you want with them, like make your own mixed cds.
I hope the 5 crash and burn.
Yes there is. It's called gaim.
...but the farthest I got with WineX was getting Warcraft 3 to install. After that, nothing.
Now, I wasn't using their membership-based binary release though, but still, why should I go through the hell of manually editing config files and removing the cinematics from my game when I could just reboot?
I emailed Rio asking if they would be supporting Ogg in a later version of their firmware. No answer... :(
...is not truly OO. If it was there would be no primitive data types. Sure, there's Integer, etc, classes, but having primitive data types in the first place excludes it from being purely OO.
I do manually install updates. I think the EULA comment refered to the fact that even if you had that option disabled, Microsoft was still giving themselves the right to force software updates/removal.
So I have to choose between a dangerously insecure system, or one which Microsoft has some control over. Hrm....lets see...I don't patch and risk losing everthing to a malicious hacker, or I do patch and maybe, at some point on the future Microsoft MIGHT push a update onto my machine.
I think I'd rather have the secure machine...
Well in my experience their support was good. My original harddrive started making an extremely annoying high piched whine. The drive seemed to be working fine but the sound was killing me. Called them up, and had a brand new drive in less than a week. And that was close to 3 years after I bought the system (a couple months away from the warranty expiring I think.)
Maybe their server support is worse, I don't know as I've never used it...
Yep.
One of my first PCs was a Dell, and I still have it running as a linux router. Whenever someone that doesn't know much about computers asks me about buying one, I tell them to check out Dell, mostly because of the excellent support, and pretty decent quality hardware.
To have them available in a store is even better, since the hefty shipping costs to Canada can be a bit of a deterent.
You mean Asia Carrera is going to be there? Sweet!
Here's the text in case the server goes down. Took a while to load at my end...
--
Open with caution
I SUPPOSE IT was inevitable. With sneakwrap terms showing up in everything from charity Web sites to pornographic spam, it was just a matter of time. Books with shrinkwrap license agreements have arrived.
The first report of this phenomena to The Gripe Line came a few months ago when a reader who is a physician received an unsolicited tome in the mail entitled Geriatric Pharmaceutical Care Guidelines, 2002 Edition, from Omnicare. "This book arrived wrapped in plastic with a shrinkwrap license on the front," the doctor wrote. "It plainly says that by breaking the seal you agree to the terms of the license and if you don't agree you should return the book unopened. Is this what software licensing has led us to? This license says the book remains the property of Omnicare. Will they come up with a way to remotely disable the book if someone else reads it?"
The doctor obligingly faxed me a copy of the license, and I saw that it was indeed a sneakwrap agreement worthy of Microsoft or VeriSign. "In the event that you do not agree with any terms of this agreement you should promptly return the material unopened to your local Omnicare pharmacy," it read in bold letters near the top.
The license was nontransferable and would "terminate immediately if the Licensee or his or her employer ceased to be an Omnicare customer." And although the Omnicare "Guidelines are intended only to provide guidance as to which pharmaceutical products Omnicare believes to be most effective" the "licensee" was nonetheless prohibited from disclosing any of the information in the book to third parties.
It struck me that this license put the doctor in an awkward position. As far as he knew, neither he nor any of the other doctors in his office (most of whom had received their own copies the book) were Omnicare customers, and he did not know where his "local Omnicare pharmacy" might be. Even if he wanted to keep the book, as a non-Omnicare customer the license prohibited him from doing so. And since Omnicare claimed to retain ownership of his copy, he couldn't destroy it either. If the license agreement was to be taken seriously, he either had to go to the trouble of trying to ship the book back or he had to become an Omnicare customer somehow.
The doctor wondered if Omnicare was trying to make him feel obligated to them. "Sometimes my less-than-favorite charities send me greeting cards or stickers or a writing instrument in the mail," the doctor noted. "They are hoping to provoke enough sense of obligation in me to extract a contribution, but legally I am not required to acknowledge, or pay for, or return, or refrain from using what they send. So what is my obligation when sent an unsolicited book? Am I legally required not to use it or to return it if I don't agree with the sender's intended use?"
So just what was Omnicare's purpose in putting a classic shrinkwrap agreement (it was even printed in small, poorly-contrasted type) on a book that was clearly intended to promote use of the company's pharmaceutical products? I hoped Omnicare officials might have a simple explanation, but if they did, they decided not to share it with me. After two months of going back and forth with their public relations staff, I did not even get an answer on the basic question of what a noncustomer was supposed to do with the book.
While I was waiting in vain for answers from Omnicare, though, I heard from another reader with a shrinkwrapped book. Interestingly enough, he was also a doctor, but his book was a membership directory published by a medical society. I'm not going to identify the organization, partly because my deadline didn't allow them much time to respond to my questions and partly because their license was much less restrictive than Omnicare's. But their spokesperson was also unable to offer any explanations for why they felt it necessary to attach a license agreement to that book.
As I thought about it, however, it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter why we're suddenly seeing these books in the medical field with shrinkwrap licenses. Perhaps the publishers have good reasons for using them, perhaps they don't. But if someone wants to slap some legalese of dubious merit on the front of a book, why shouldn't they? Software publishers have been doing it for years, after all, so it only seems fair that publishers of other forms of intellectual property should have the same right to try to put restrictions on how customers use their products.
And, if there's no real justification for prohibiting book publishers from doing what software publishers do, how can we draw the line even at products containing intellectual property? Perhaps lamps will soon come with fine print legalese on the inside of the lampshade banning them from being resold at yard sales without the manufacturer's permission. And tearing that tag off your mattress really will bring the police pounding on your door.
Last week we talked about how we've already lost some of the basic rights we used to enjoy under traditional interpretations of copyright law. Loaning a book to a friend is not yet one of them, but who knows how much longer we'll be able to say that. Today we might still reasonably expect that any sane judge would just laugh if someone tried to get him or her to enforce a license such as Omnicare's limited-use license agreement. We must remember though that there are very powerful forces in this country working to give all sneakwrap agreements the full force of a binding contract. Next week we'll pay them another visit.
Most interestingly is Sincere Choice, created by Bruce Perens and Michael Robertson.
From their main page:
We stand for these principles:
Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards that are sincerely open for all to implement, without royalty fees or discrimination.
No user should be required to use a particular product simply because other users do. Competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards.
Software vendors should compete fairly on the merit of their products, rather than by attempting to lock each other's products out of the market.
Research Availability
The people pay for government-funded research, its fruits should be available to all of them equally. We promote Open Source / Free Software licensing as a means of distributing research results fairly.
We support a broad range of copyright policies, from Public Domain through Open Source and Free Software to Proprietary. We support use of the GPL and LGPL licenses when appropriate. We assert that Open Source and Proprietary models can be used together effectively. A number of our companies deploy software under the GPL license and proprietary software in the same product.
Individual users, businesses, and government should all be free to set their own policies regarding what sorts of software they will acquire and use. They should not force their policies upon others.
So I have a TV with a DVD player in my living room, and a TV with a VCR in my bedroom. If I buy a movie on DVD then do I not have the right to watch that movie anywhere?
There's a very good reason why we need to be able to copy DVDs. I don't want to move my DVD player to my bedroom to watch a movie, and I don't want to buy another one, so I should have the right to copy the movie I legally own onto VHS tape so I can watch it my bedroom.