This story is not very timely, as
the entire issue has been resolved for at least a week now. Audiogalaxy did include the VX2 spyware in their application, was thoroughly lambasted for it, and finally gave in to user complaints and removed it. The current version of audiogalaxy available on their website has no spyware in it (or at least no VX2 spyware, and no mandatory-install spyware; it might still include Gator or something as an optional install, I haven't checked).
Begging pardon, but the issue hasn't been resolved until (a) there are no longer people whose form submissions and other data silently leeching off to an unknown 3rd party, and (b) the legal ramifications of what's been going on are tested in court. Judging by the number of Code Red hits I'm still getting on a daily basis, I'd say Joe Windows User will obliviously exist with this illegal spyware for some time to come.
And don't say that nobody's broken any laws here. Minors aren't held responsible for for small type warranties and disclaimers in the United States. All that's needed to take this to court is proof that one minor ended up installing something that sent his daddy's VISA number to a spyware company, or proof that personal information about a kid under 13 was sent as a result of the spyware, even if the kid knew exactly what he or she was installing.
So the google we all know and love is really a "proof of concept" for it's sales team. Interesting, thanks.
Well, it's proof of concept and a testing and development platform. Google also makes money by selling the little highlighted advertisements you'll get with many search terms.
Google is one of the few internet businesses that I just adore. It's fast, free, and the advertising is functional and unintrusive. The more flashy and annoying an advertisement is, the less interested I am in following it. The more intrusive it is, the more I'll actively avoid the seller's services. With Google's search term results, I believe I've clicked through dozens of adverts, and I've spent several thousand with their advertisers.
A reminder that this was originally going to be the OS used for the new Amiga hardware, before Amiga up and went in a strange, new direction which didn't involve new hardware.
I guess this is a peek at what the new Amiga could have been. It doesn't look as nice as 3.9, though the underlying technology is pretty neat.
The ratio of response to this post, as compared to any others today, is incredibly small. Could this be indicative of a general user base that doesn't understand the issues, or simply doesn't care?
It's not a front page story. About one in five stories aren't posted to the front page, and are only visible via searches, clicking topic icons, or browsing with next/previous instead of via the front page.
Nickelodeon went and ran clumps of episodes all at once. It sholdn't be a surprise that 6 months down the line, nobody's watching, when they unloaded the whole season in a couple of weekends.
If they'd mete out the series at a sane pace, leaving people looking forward to each new episode and hanging about to see what's on afterward, they'd get a lot more bang for their animation dollar.
A few other networks have taken to doing this same thing. Somebody needs to up and shoot whoever the program managers are that covered Invader Zim, and The Tick, which enjoyed the very same problem.
You're overgeneralizing in your subject line there. People shop online for a number of reasons.
I spent just over $24k online in the last year, and price was always the first thing I looked at. I do still buy things locally, but if I can save a buck by buying online, I'll do it.
Convenience probably ranks 3rd or 4th. Some things are so esoteric that you can't find them locally, but that may be part of convenience. My big number two is that I'll always go with a smaller merchant, or a merchant known for providing good service. Part of me constantly roots for the underdog, so if I can pass on the big online and local retailers and still get a price within a few bucks of what I'd have paid, I'll do it every time.
This is the new face of consumer relations. There's a growing trend toward replacing consumer relations with customer dissociation. Here's what I'm talking about:
On the web, companies provide a link maze filled with what looks to be a lot of content, but which is really a collection of half-answers for technical concerns and a whole lot of happy-faced double talk. Visit the site above, AT&T internet's abuse department, or Half.com's stonewalling customer support for examples.
On the phone, companies make people jump through hoops in the form of voice mail prompts laced with cheery propaganda and endure vague answers and advertisements before they can jump through the next hoop. Customers give up after a certain number of hoops unless they've got a problem so critical that it's worth half an hour of their time to speak with a representative. Call NextCard, SprintPCS customer support or most politicians' offices for examples.
Basically, this isn't going to change. It cuts costs, and it's relatively effective for shutting up unhappy customers and dumping additional advertising-grade propaganda on the visitor.
So long as people are buying on price and advertising image rather than service, this isn't going to change. And so long as we're faced with near monopolies for most products and services because of the above, we're stuck.
If you don't like what you see on the new web site, vote with your dollars. Stop buying, stay aware of the world around you, and encourage others to do the same.
So, SGI fell for the oldest (Microsoft) trick in the book. All they had to do was read the traderags to figure out what was going on. When MS released DirectX 7 or something, they said "this is Fahrenheit!" -- SGI could have done something similar, but instead they are still diddling around with OpenGL 2.0 talkshops.
I find it remarkable that someone could poke fun at OpenGL's standard committees while posting a website predominately aimed at the UNIX community.
Remember how MS made their own Java VM and modified the language to suit themselves?
Perhaps they're aiming for MS OpenGL (MS OpenJelly, lube up and aim for penetration)
People have short memories.
Remember Fahrenheit, the SGI/Microsoft/etc initiative for the next OpenGL plus scene graph?
MS walked all over the specs, doing strange and troublesome things to it, yet only ever had two people actively "working" on it, all while racing to get Direct3D out the door before OpenGL (or later Fahrenheit) could get a hold in the Windows development community.
As I hear it second-hand from an ex-SGI guy, SGI was pouring incredible resources into Fahrenheit, while MS was essentially blocking progress, while waving the promise of MS-acceptance in order to prevent their dropping MS' involvement.
When they realized they were burning cash and talent to go nowhere fast, SGI eventually gave up and said "Stick with OpenGL and Inventor or whatever -- we don't care anymore."
I'm not sure how to post this without getting it tagged as flamebait. I've had major problems with Computer Geeks, as have several friends and coworkers.
Rather than taking my word, ask around in your own office, put a query on a newsgroup or what have you. See what you hear.
That said, for older hardware, searching for specific item names on both pricewatch and shop.yahoo.com is usually your best bet. You can find virtually anything there, from super old hardware to "new" refurbished stuff.
Mind, if you wanted to be a brat about it, I suppose another way to scare.doc users would be to look at the embedded meta data, and point out that you can see what directory they kept the doc in, who owns the copy of MS Word, part of the registration key, as well as anything else you can dig out of there.
Most people don't take too kindly to others knowing about them and their computers, especially when they don't even realize they're sharing the information.
I like responding to Word documents by picking another esoteric file format. Even EPS is as good as opaque to most users.
When they reply with a "huh?" then I share some of my views on proprietary and non-standard text formats and suggest RTF when sharing docs with others. With simpler users, I'll just simplify, explaining that "RTF is the form you use when emailing documents, DOC is mostly meant for local editing before you 'publish' by printing or saving in a public format."
Until they experience the annoyance of unavailable or cyrptic data first hand, most folks will write you off as a quack for complaining. They just can't imagine a world where e-mail attachments don't open nicely so long as you know how to double-click.
I maintain that good programming is about 2/3 planning and about 1/3 development. So yeah, it's impossible to accurately schedule without a complete plan, because until you've done this, you don't know everything that needs to be written.
With a bit of experience under your belt, you can approximate up front, but anything claiming to be more accurate than an order of magnitude is somebody blowing smoke.
That said, an honest and honorable programmer will always do one of two things: (1) swallow his or her pride and give the high end of the above estimate, or (2) knock as much time off the high estimate as he or she is willing to compensate for by putting in the extra hours UP FRONT to deliver in the timeframe promised.
There is an open-source nvidia driver (nv) project under way. It doesn't support many things like the DVI-D output, and it's slower than the nvidia driver. I'm not in any way involved, so I don't know whether they've had a look at the nvidia drivers. I'd expect there would be legal problems in doing so, however.
Matrox has had better Linux support than ATI or Nvidia for a long, long time. To be fair, their offerings don't compare when you're playing games, but if you aren't building a gaming box, you're quite likely to be very happy with a Matrox card. And there are top-notch *open source* Matrox drivers. And Matrox drivers are pretty stable, unlike (cough) Nvidia's.
I'll second, but clarify as well. Matrox is much closer to open source than most any other accelerated driver provided by a card/chipset manufacturer.
It does include a closed-source portion however, but I believe it's limited to the microcode that gets downloaded to the card. It would be nice to have that as well, but so far it hasn't stood in the way of fixing bugs and porting the driver to non-PC architectures.
I don't see why you'd even want a decent graphics card for a Linux box. It would just be a waste of money. Unless you like to go around telling people that your server/development machine has a bitchin' video card.
Judging by the number of presenters using Linux at Siggraph, the number of people playing games under Linux, and the number of people like myself who make video games for a living and prototype things under Linux, I'd say that your view of Linux is a bit more narrow than the reality of the situation.
What the heck are you talking about?! NVidia provides full source code for their linux drivers. Just download them from the driver page!
They are just not GNU licensed. So I guess we can't upgrade them ourselves. Big friggin deal, I'd rather the HW manufaturer did that anyway. The Kernel hackers can still see what's going on in the code, for debugging purposes.
They do not provide the full source. They provide what amounts to a bunch of stub functions which link to closed-source binaries.
This is akin to saying that Microsoft gives full source because you have header files for using their libraries.
It seems like a 'Linux System of the Year' ought to fully embody the Linux spirit, which nvidia does not. I'd much rather see a Radeon in there.
nvidia cards are severely limited if you're not willing to run the closed-source drivers. nvidia still won't share all of the information about their cards needed for activating DVI-D and other parts of the display output hardware, as well as pieces of the rendering hardware.
Admittedly, nvidia has done a decent job of keeping the closed-source drivers up to date for 98% of the users out there, but simple things like using an nvidia card as your secondary/tertiary display can still lock your system up, and there's not much you can realistically do to fix that without the source.
It's one thing when you're too lazy to read the linked story before responding. It's quite another when you're too lazy to read the write up before responding! Egads!
But if that's my only option, I'd rather not upgrade. It reeks too much of "'free' Microsoft browser," and we all know where that's gotten us.
What the hell are you talking about? Are you trying to be an asshole? They aren't giving away the razor, they don't even own the razors, Sony and Phillips do. TiVo the company is not making money just because you bought another piece of hardware, they're making money because you sign up for the service. If everyone could transfer their subscription when a new version came out, it would be difficult to maintain the busines
TiVo may not make the hardware, but the own the technology, and every TiVo that ships ships with TiVo-owned software.
If TiVo isn't making a profit when a new TiVo is sold, then TiVo is effectively giving away the product, then attempting to recoup by charging for the ability to use it. TiVo sets the price for the TiVo software and branding.
The parallel to giving away the razor then charging for the blades is quite clear.
This belongs on the front page if ever a programming article did.
Any programmer worth his salt has at least thumbed through the Knuth books. The set is one of half a dozen things I'd want to see on every programmer's bookshelf, and possibly even at the top of that list.
Knuth's getting on in years. Let's all pray/hope/whatever that he makes it through the remaining volumes. If not, it'll be a major loss.
If I upgrade to a new TiVo, am I screwed out of my lifetime subscription?
No, just put that TiVo in your bedroom or basement and but a new subscription for the new unit. Some people complain about this, but it's the only way TiVo the company is making money. They don't make or sell the hardware, so they don't get anything (or much) if you buy a new PVR.
Your solution is all well and good if my goal is to subsidize TiVo's selling at no profit or a loss in order to dominate the marketplace.
But if that's my only option, I'd rather not upgrade. It reeks too much of "'free' Microsoft browser," and we all know where that's gotten us.
I wish it was still illegal to give away the razor and charge double for the blades.
I'm good with the command line; I use bash all the time at home and telnetted into a Solaris system all the time in college. How is FreeBSD in terms of maintainability of things like NFS, Samba and Apache servers?
The standard configuration tools that you'll see in most Linux distributions work. The FreeBSD folks are also very good about including documentation and plenty of sample configuration files for manual reference.
Anyone who feels at home with a Linux distribution such as Debian should be quite happy with FreeBSD as well. If you want a central configurator for everything, such as is offered with RedHat, you may have difficulty.
Check out the Daemon News site. You can order a very nicely written FreeBSD book to go along with the CDs. It covers many common BSD and UNIX tasks, as well as pretty much everything that's unique to FreeBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
Begging pardon, but the issue hasn't been resolved until (a) there are no longer people whose form submissions and other data silently leeching off to an unknown 3rd party, and (b) the legal ramifications of what's been going on are tested in court. Judging by the number of Code Red hits I'm still getting on a daily basis, I'd say Joe Windows User will obliviously exist with this illegal spyware for some time to come.
And don't say that nobody's broken any laws here. Minors aren't held responsible for for small type warranties and disclaimers in the United States. All that's needed to take this to court is proof that one minor ended up installing something that sent his daddy's VISA number to a spyware company, or proof that personal information about a kid under 13 was sent as a result of the spyware, even if the kid knew exactly what he or she was installing.
Well, it's proof of concept and a testing and development platform. Google also makes money by selling the little highlighted advertisements you'll get with many search terms.
Google is one of the few internet businesses that I just adore. It's fast, free, and the advertising is functional and unintrusive. The more flashy and annoying an advertisement is, the less interested I am in following it. The more intrusive it is, the more I'll actively avoid the seller's services. With Google's search term results, I believe I've clicked through dozens of adverts, and I've spent several thousand with their advertisers.
I guess this is a peek at what the new Amiga could have been. It doesn't look as nice as 3.9, though the underlying technology is pretty neat.
It's not a front page story. About one in five stories aren't posted to the front page, and are only visible via searches, clicking topic icons, or browsing with next/previous instead of via the front page.
If they'd mete out the series at a sane pace, leaving people looking forward to each new episode and hanging about to see what's on afterward, they'd get a lot more bang for their animation dollar.
A few other networks have taken to doing this same thing. Somebody needs to up and shoot whoever the program managers are that covered Invader Zim, and The Tick, which enjoyed the very same problem.
I spent just over $24k online in the last year, and price was always the first thing I looked at. I do still buy things locally, but if I can save a buck by buying online, I'll do it.
Convenience probably ranks 3rd or 4th. Some things are so esoteric that you can't find them locally, but that may be part of convenience. My big number two is that I'll always go with a smaller merchant, or a merchant known for providing good service. Part of me constantly roots for the underdog, so if I can pass on the big online and local retailers and still get a price within a few bucks of what I'd have paid, I'll do it every time.
On the web, companies provide a link maze filled with what looks to be a lot of content, but which is really a collection of half-answers for technical concerns and a whole lot of happy-faced double talk. Visit the site above, AT&T internet's abuse department, or Half.com's stonewalling customer support for examples.
On the phone, companies make people jump through hoops in the form of voice mail prompts laced with cheery propaganda and endure vague answers and advertisements before they can jump through the next hoop. Customers give up after a certain number of hoops unless they've got a problem so critical that it's worth half an hour of their time to speak with a representative. Call NextCard, SprintPCS customer support or most politicians' offices for examples.
Basically, this isn't going to change. It cuts costs, and it's relatively effective for shutting up unhappy customers and dumping additional advertising-grade propaganda on the visitor. So long as people are buying on price and advertising image rather than service, this isn't going to change. And so long as we're faced with near monopolies for most products and services because of the above, we're stuck.
If you don't like what you see on the new web site, vote with your dollars. Stop buying, stay aware of the world around you, and encourage others to do the same.
I find it remarkable that someone could poke fun at OpenGL's standard committees while posting a website predominately aimed at the UNIX community.
Zing! ;)
People have short memories.
Remember Fahrenheit, the SGI/Microsoft/etc initiative for the next OpenGL plus scene graph?
MS walked all over the specs, doing strange and troublesome things to it, yet only ever had two people actively "working" on it, all while racing to get Direct3D out the door before OpenGL (or later Fahrenheit) could get a hold in the Windows development community.
As I hear it second-hand from an ex-SGI guy, SGI was pouring incredible resources into Fahrenheit, while MS was essentially blocking progress, while waving the promise of MS-acceptance in order to prevent their dropping MS' involvement.
When they realized they were burning cash and talent to go nowhere fast, SGI eventually gave up and said "Stick with OpenGL and Inventor or whatever -- we don't care anymore."
Rather than taking my word, ask around in your own office, put a query on a newsgroup or what have you. See what you hear.
That said, for older hardware, searching for specific item names on both pricewatch and shop.yahoo.com is usually your best bet. You can find virtually anything there, from super old hardware to "new" refurbished stuff.
Most people don't take too kindly to others knowing about them and their computers, especially when they don't even realize they're sharing the information.
When they reply with a "huh?" then I share some of my views on proprietary and non-standard text formats and suggest RTF when sharing docs with others. With simpler users, I'll just simplify, explaining that "RTF is the form you use when emailing documents, DOC is mostly meant for local editing before you 'publish' by printing or saving in a public format."
Until they experience the annoyance of unavailable or cyrptic data first hand, most folks will write you off as a quack for complaining. They just can't imagine a world where e-mail attachments don't open nicely so long as you know how to double-click.
With a bit of experience under your belt, you can approximate up front, but anything claiming to be more accurate than an order of magnitude is somebody blowing smoke.
That said, an honest and honorable programmer will always do one of two things: (1) swallow his or her pride and give the high end of the above estimate, or (2) knock as much time off the high estimate as he or she is willing to compensate for by putting in the extra hours UP FRONT to deliver in the timeframe promised.
There is an open-source nvidia driver (nv) project under way. It doesn't support many things like the DVI-D output, and it's slower than the nvidia driver. I'm not in any way involved, so I don't know whether they've had a look at the nvidia drivers. I'd expect there would be legal problems in doing so, however.
Anyone know for sure?
It does include a closed-source portion however, but I believe it's limited to the microcode that gets downloaded to the card. It would be nice to have that as well, but so far it hasn't stood in the way of fixing bugs and porting the driver to non-PC architectures.
Judging by the number of presenters using Linux at Siggraph, the number of people playing games under Linux, and the number of people like myself who make video games for a living and prototype things under Linux, I'd say that your view of Linux is a bit more narrow than the reality of the situation.
They do not provide the full source. They provide what amounts to a bunch of stub functions which link to closed-source binaries.
This is akin to saying that Microsoft gives full source because you have header files for using their libraries.
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
It seems like a 'Linux System of the Year' ought to fully embody the Linux spirit, which nvidia does not. I'd much rather see a Radeon in there.
nvidia cards are severely limited if you're not willing to run the closed-source drivers. nvidia still won't share all of the information about their cards needed for activating DVI-D and other parts of the display output hardware, as well as pieces of the rendering hardware.
Admittedly, nvidia has done a decent job of keeping the closed-source drivers up to date for 98% of the users out there, but simple things like using an nvidia card as your secondary/tertiary display can still lock your system up, and there's not much you can realistically do to fix that without the source.
And +4!?
If TiVo isn't making a profit when a new TiVo is sold, then TiVo is effectively giving away the product, then attempting to recoup by charging for the ability to use it. TiVo sets the price for the TiVo software and branding.
The parallel to giving away the razor then charging for the blades is quite clear.
Any programmer worth his salt has at least thumbed through the Knuth books. The set is one of half a dozen things I'd want to see on every programmer's bookshelf, and possibly even at the top of that list.
Knuth's getting on in years. Let's all pray/hope/whatever that he makes it through the remaining volumes. If not, it'll be a major loss.
Your solution is all well and good if my goal is to subsidize TiVo's selling at no profit or a loss in order to dominate the marketplace.
But if that's my only option, I'd rather not upgrade. It reeks too much of "'free' Microsoft browser," and we all know where that's gotten us.
I wish it was still illegal to give away the razor and charge double for the blades.
The standard configuration tools that you'll see in most Linux distributions work. The FreeBSD folks are also very good about including documentation and plenty of sample configuration files for manual reference.
Anyone who feels at home with a Linux distribution such as Debian should be quite happy with FreeBSD as well. If you want a central configurator for everything, such as is offered with RedHat, you may have difficulty.
Check out the Daemon News site. You can order a very nicely written FreeBSD book to go along with the CDs. It covers many common BSD and UNIX tasks, as well as pretty much everything that's unique to FreeBSD.
As I understand it, the subscription can be transferred only once, and only for warranty repair.
If I upgrade to a new TiVo, am I screwed out of my lifetime subscription?