I have had a PSP for about six months now, and if I want to watch a movie on it, I buy a DVD and rip and encode the movie for the PSP. If the UMD format discs were not so ridiculously expensive, I would certainly buy them, but in Ireland you can pay anything between 150% and 200% of the price of the DVD for the UMD version.
Sony have nobody to blame but themselves, and I have no sympathy for them.
It really is. Michael Robertson sees his Linspire Linux desktop as Linux for the masses. This is his number one priority over-riding all else. He probably knows, is probably well aware of every reason that it's inadvisable to run as root, and his technical staff are probably tearing their hair out now because they think he wasn't listening.
I think people here are misunderstanding his motives. Linspire is not a server distribution. It's not even marketed as a multi-user desktop distribution. Linspire is marketed as a single-user PC OS, with great multimedia capabilites. It's designed to appeal to the Windows users.
And if anything can break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop it's what Linspire is trying to be; a freely distributable OS that matches and exceeds the functionality and user-friendliness of MS Windows.
Give the guy a break. It might not be our cup of tea, but so what? We don't have to use it. We have a choice, unlike the Windows users.
Look -for example - at the Sellafield plant in West Britain. It has a ludicrously, disgracefully bad safety record. As a reprocessing plant also, Sellafield is slowly poisoning the Irish sea. Nuclear waste is buried beneath the waves in containers which are - allegedly - likely to rupture within 50 years of storage. It'll be a HELL of a lot longer before the waste stops polluting the sea and killing the fish and plants in the vicinity. Nuclear power could be a very viable source of power if there was any viable long term solution for storage of waste products. When one takes in security there are currently NO viable methods for disposing of nuclear waste.
And by the way, to all the rednecks who pronounce it "nucular", learn to enunciate!!!
1. Assuming said Fortune 1000 company claims to have purchased the Linux distribution in good faith, liability lies with the vendor.
2. Surely evidence supporting the suit must be provided? There is no admissable evidence that there is SCO IP in Linux, and won't be until the IBM case is settled. SCO are just blowing smoke.
I can't decide if their antics are funny, or just sad.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Many people just don't care for the idea that perhaps their country is wrong. The attitude I hear most often from US citizens when I comment on US foreign policy is one of indignation that anyone dare question the policies of the "Greatest Nation on Earth".
While I won't accuse these people of fanaticism, they seem to honestly believe that eveything their government does outside it's borders is good and right. Interestingly, these are some of the same people who condemn the same governments for "human rights abuses" within their borders.
In many cases it seems to be an extreme version of national pride, the unwillingness to admit to an outsider the possibility that somebody may have screwed up along the way. I can't say where this is derived from, though I suspect it has its roots in the same place as the witch-hunt for "Commies" of the '60's & 70's.
Other people just don't seem to care. One of these people told me last year - during a discussion about the US which had led to middle-eastern policy - that he had better things to worry about than a foreign policy that didn't affect him.
I doubt very much that the US leadership wants their Middle-Eastern policies for the last 30 years scrutinised. The status quo is that the majority of US citizens doesn't care about their governments abuses in the region, and this gives these governments much greater freedom.
As a slashdot reader of long standing, I'm disgusted that such a blatantly antagonistic and rude post should have been moderated to the highest level.
The original poster is asking for advice and whatever ulterior motive he may have there is no call to be rude. Slashdot as a forum would be much improved without baseless accusations and jealousy being moderated up.
In finishing, I'd like to make an observation: if the individual in question was as egotistical as you claim, he would probably have linked to his homepage or a CV (resume), but he didn't.
But when you have to spend 75% of your time reading websites and manuals and going back and forth to websites and trying to figure out the terminal, and... Well, it's frustrating.
My uncle, technophobe extraordinaire uses RedHat 7.1 happily, ever since I removed the various icons for terminals from his KDE panel and menus. When I installed it for him (he had previously tried RH7.0) I told him to forget the terminal, that in this "new & improved" version, there's no need for him to access the console at all. Well, in the 4 short weeks since, he's come along in leaps & bounds and is now more proficent with configuring KDE than I am. (I run X for the X-terms not a pretty GUI).
I have been criticised by a number of people for "hiding the true power of Linux" from him, but the fact is these people grew up on Windows and what they're really looking for is Windows without the instability, high price and copyright restrictions.
Civil Disobedience is done in the name of change, and therefore *requires* accountability. Doing this like an anonymous coward, distributing it and not letting yourself be known is lame, and will be seen rightly as an act of cowardice. Granted, the cowardice is justified as a certain russian programmer can tell you.
You make a good case. However, I don't believe it's a good idea unless you're guaranteed enough backing to make them see the light. Up to 25 years in prison, and a $250,000 fine is a pretty high penalty to pay, especially if you're Skylarov who is being detained for breaking an arcane law of a country of which he isn't even a native.
Yes, if ENOUGH people were prepared to put their necks on the line this could work. But how many people do you see standing up and saying "Lock me up too!"? Look outside our "techie" community and ask how many people understand this law. Of those few how many are willing to risk the penalties? You're right: the only way to fight this law is to ignore it... but risking everything is not the way to go about it.
Use your resources, use your friends in foreign countries, get your anti-DMCA code published outside the US. Fight the "establishment" who are limiting your freedom, fight the companies who are backing these laws. But keep your freedom, there isn't enough public awareness to make a difference by going to prison... YET.
I'm outside the US, and have no intention of ever visiting it as long as the DMCA remains in place.
If anybody would like to publish some code that violates the DMCA, forward it to me and I'll publish it immediately on a subdomain of tech-mad.org. No need to supply your identity or any other details.
... let's not forget, they can always release the bug fixes at a later point, as they do with all of their products. In fact, releleasing the X-B(oll)ox on time with a number of bugs would only make them money... you DON'T think they'll give away their "upgrades" free, do you?
Maybe this will help the idiots dual-booting Windows for games realise that Loki isn't there to spend a whole load of money on a loss-making venture.
You have to buy their games to keep them going dammit. I personally don't play games but I have bought many games from them as Christmas & birthday gifts for my brothers and friends. This has had the side effect of making my brothers and friends of theirs switch entirely to Linux, and buy Loki products themselves.
I wonder if Loki put up a donations page like Mandrake, how many people would contribute? Probably not many of the hypocrites who advocate Linux right up to the point where they have to spend money.
Interesting to note that if any post here says anything that even the most right-wing American neo-nazi would take offence at, it either gets ignored or called flamebait. It's a disgraceful American tendency to attempt to ignore reasoned and logical debate on US policy.
Then why is the US still part of the UN? The US has memership of the UN voluntarily, it hasn't been forced into it. Either they're in and should abide by policy or they're not an can tell the UN to go get fscked.
As a big fan and user of Slackware for years, I am continually pissed off that people consider me a newbie because I use Mandrake on my work machine.
Rubbish. I use Mandrake because it is easiest to accomplish all that I must do immediately in this distribution. Slackware and Debian users typically look down their noses at Mandrake and this bugs me. I find I can do everything in Mandrake that I can do in either Debian or Slackware and not only that, I can find a handy gui app to assist me in getting things done when I am in a hurry, where I am much less likely to do so (IME) in either of these other distros.
I don't have the time to use Slackware or Debian for work purposes. I'm far too busy to waste time figuring out how to use the multitude of commandline switches in a new application at work. I use both Slackware and Debian at home where I have the time and leisure to experiment.
The US government needs a lesson in what is and isn't good practice. Innovation in the US will over time become crippled by the arcane and Ultra-Conservative DMCA.
It's no secret that Republicans are so right-wing it's almost feasible to think of them as neo-Nazis, but what is surprising that such a HUGE chunk of US society with all it's false morals decided to vote in a president whose only allegiance is to himself, and to the big business interests that will no doubt fund his campaign for a second term in office.
What should be our course of action? Boycott US trade shows to begin with. After all in the US innovation means a prison sentence. Any civilised country would have sent Skylarov home by now. Don't bother contacting US congressmen, contact US businessmen, and let them know that you are not going to buy their products while Skylarov is imprisoned and the DMCA remains in place.
Remember Bush listens to big business. Big business is his key to a well-funded election campaign. Make sure that these business interests know it's not in their interest to back these medieval practices and Bush will follow like the simple-minded sheep he is.
I can't decide whether this is a good or a bad thing.
Great, another company conforms to the GPL and the world is safe for (democracy|socialism) once again. And of course if this had gone to court and the notoriously short-sighted and conservative US courts had given the verdict to Vidomi, it would have opened the floodgates for cases against the GPL.
On the other hand companies may still try it on just as Vidomi did because there still hasn't been a verdict FOR the GPL. In the long run, we need to see the GPL upheld by the courts before we are really safe from the marauding pirates.
To clear up a point: There were two incarnations of the Swastika, the right-handed swastika, ancient symbol of goodness and light, and the left-handed swastika, Nazi symbol, reversed right-handed symbol, and one of the reasons Hitler was believed to have been involved in Satanism.
It is a truly ancient symbol the true origins of which are lost in time though it has been postulated that they may be in the old hunter-gather traditions of Sun symbols, as are Stonehenge and other stone circles. The swastika arises in the history of most great and not-so-great) empires.
The reversal of the swastika by the 3rd Reich, was seen by some as a symbol similar to the inversion of the cross by satanists.
This is just wonderful... what could be a very informative and interesting discussion being ruined by 1) a bunch of morons carrying on a "my country is better than yours" argument and 2) the bloody moderators feeding the egos of these same morons by moderating them up to 4 and 5 points.
I think perhaps it would be better if the debate stuck to the actual topic of the proposed Mars mission by Canada rather than denigrate into a row about who did what first, who's better than who, and whose bloody currency is worth more.
The (proposed?) undersea 25GB pipeline between US & Europe could REALLY benefit from this... but I don't see the advantage in using it over short ( 1 mile (1.609 kilometers)) distances, other than for testing purposes.
And of course it's a cool thing to do.;)
What will be interesting to see is what the price difference is between super-conducting & standard copper cable when produced in bulk, because this is the real make or break for it. If it doesn't produce a high enough medium term saving, then I can't see very many power/comms companies rushing out to pull up their existing cables.
However, assuming that the wholesale price doesn't cancel medium term savings then perhaps we'll see it being installed in all the new cabling contracts in 2/3 years.
Four years to realise that fighting the whole world in a battle that no one cared about - except for it's (mildly) humourous connotations - is counter-productive.
Of course they may have been told by their legal advisers that "spam" is now a defacto part of the English language (look iy up in the newer Oxford English dictionary) in both of it's meanings, and as such the use of the word to describe unsolicited e-mail could probably not have been challenged in court.
There are other sides to this though. Eventually, as time and technology progresses, it will become a lot cheaper than it is today to produce anti-matter in quantities sufficient to fuel huge numbers of missions to Mars, Jupiter and beyond. Such technology shouldn't be ditched because of expense when it's potential is so huge.
As regards the potential use to the military, increased fuel economy in motor vehicles is also beneficial to the military... but because it benefits everybody else also, work in this area continues apace. Nuclear power, much as I dislike it, is clean and efficient and yes it produces a byproduct that can be used in weapons of mass destruction.
We can't really complain about the potential military uses of new technologies when assault weapons are on sale to Joe Soap in the worlds more powerful country.
I'd been pretty much ignoring back pain for about 6 years until recently, when I finally caved in and went to a chiropractor about it.
As it happened, it was just as well, as other ailments such as shortness of breath I'd been suffering turned out to be directly related to it. Years of hunching over a keyboard means that I walk with enough of a stoop that my ribs are encroaching my lungs space... not a good situation, and apparently not all that uncommon either. I've now got a rigid regime of exercises to combat this... but it could have got a lot worse if my girlfriend hadn't badgered me into going to the doctor about it.
So take my advice and go see your doctor about back pain.
It (Open Source) has produced some pretty good stuff in it's day... Does Mozilla need AOL? If AOL drop Mozilla, aren't there enough skilled Open Source developers out there with an interest to take it over?
In fact it might be a good thing... I find Mozilla too big and cumbersome, maybe someone with a different focus might decide to split it into its component parts and we could even get a nice lightweight, standards compliant and stable browser out of it.
This doesn't NEED to be a Bad Thing(tm). Open Source has a way of coming up with the goods.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had a PSP for about six months now, and if I want to watch a movie on it, I buy a DVD and rip and encode the movie for the PSP. If the UMD format discs were not so ridiculously expensive, I would certainly buy them, but in Ireland you can pay anything between 150% and 200% of the price of the DVD for the UMD version.
Sony have nobody to blame but themselves, and I have no sympathy for them.
It really is. Michael Robertson sees his Linspire Linux desktop as Linux for the masses. This is his number one priority over-riding all else. He probably knows, is probably well aware of every reason that it's inadvisable to run as root, and his technical staff are probably tearing their hair out now because they think he wasn't listening.
I think people here are misunderstanding his motives. Linspire is not a server distribution. It's not even marketed as a multi-user desktop distribution. Linspire is marketed as a single-user PC OS, with great multimedia capabilites. It's designed to appeal to the Windows users.
And if anything can break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop it's what Linspire is trying to be; a freely distributable OS that matches and exceeds the functionality and user-friendliness of MS Windows.
Give the guy a break. It might not be our cup of tea, but so what? We don't have to use it. We have a choice, unlike the Windows users.
Look -for example - at the Sellafield plant in West Britain. It has a ludicrously, disgracefully bad safety record. As a reprocessing plant also, Sellafield is slowly poisoning the Irish sea. Nuclear waste is buried beneath the waves in containers which are - allegedly - likely to rupture within 50 years of storage. It'll be a HELL of a lot longer before the waste stops polluting the sea and killing the fish and plants in the vicinity. Nuclear power could be a very viable source of power if there was any viable long term solution for storage of waste products. When one takes in security there are currently NO viable methods for disposing of nuclear waste.
And by the way, to all the rednecks who pronounce it "nucular", learn to enunciate!!!
This should be fun...
1. Assuming said Fortune 1000 company claims to have purchased the Linux distribution in good faith, liability lies with the vendor.
2. Surely evidence supporting the suit must be provided? There is no admissable evidence that there is SCO IP in Linux, and won't be until the IBM case is settled. SCO are just blowing smoke.
I can't decide if their antics are funny, or just sad.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Many people just don't care for the idea that perhaps their country is wrong. The attitude I hear most often from US citizens when I comment on US foreign policy is one of indignation that anyone dare question the policies of the "Greatest Nation on Earth".
While I won't accuse these people of fanaticism, they seem to honestly believe that eveything their government does outside it's borders is good and right. Interestingly, these are some of the same people who condemn the same governments for "human rights abuses" within their borders.
In many cases it seems to be an extreme version of national pride, the unwillingness to admit to an outsider the possibility that somebody may have screwed up along the way. I can't say where this is derived from, though I suspect it has its roots in the same place as the witch-hunt for "Commies" of the '60's & 70's.
Other people just don't seem to care. One of these people told me last year - during a discussion about the US which had led to middle-eastern policy - that he had better things to worry about than a foreign policy that didn't affect him.
I doubt very much that the US leadership wants their Middle-Eastern policies for the last 30 years scrutinised. The status quo is that the majority of US citizens doesn't care about their governments abuses in the region, and this gives these governments much greater freedom.
--
As a slashdot reader of long standing, I'm disgusted that such a blatantly antagonistic and rude post should have been moderated to the highest level.
The original poster is asking for advice and whatever ulterior motive he may have there is no call to be rude. Slashdot as a forum would be much improved without baseless accusations and jealousy being moderated up.
In finishing, I'd like to make an observation: if the individual in question was as egotistical as you claim, he would probably have linked to his homepage or a CV (resume), but he didn't.
--
My uncle, technophobe extraordinaire uses RedHat 7.1 happily, ever since I removed the various icons for terminals from his KDE panel and menus. When I installed it for him (he had previously tried RH7.0) I told him to forget the terminal, that in this "new & improved" version, there's no need for him to access the console at all. Well, in the 4 short weeks since, he's come along in leaps & bounds and is now more proficent with configuring KDE than I am. (I run X for the X-terms not a pretty GUI).
I have been criticised by a number of people for "hiding the true power of Linux" from him, but the fact is these people grew up on Windows and what they're really looking for is Windows without the instability, high price and copyright restrictions.
You make a good case. However, I don't believe it's a good idea unless you're guaranteed enough backing to make them see the light. Up to 25 years in prison, and a $250,000 fine is a pretty high penalty to pay, especially if you're Skylarov who is being detained for breaking an arcane law of a country of which he isn't even a native.
Yes, if ENOUGH people were prepared to put their necks on the line this could work. But how many people do you see standing up and saying "Lock me up too!"? Look outside our "techie" community and ask how many people understand this law. Of those few how many are willing to risk the penalties? You're right: the only way to fight this law is to ignore it... but risking everything is not the way to go about it.
Use your resources, use your friends in foreign countries, get your anti-DMCA code published outside the US. Fight the "establishment" who are limiting your freedom, fight the companies who are backing these laws. But keep your freedom, there isn't enough public awareness to make a difference by going to prison... YET.
I'm outside the US, and have no intention of ever visiting it as long as the DMCA remains in place.
If anybody would like to publish some code that violates the DMCA, forward it to me and I'll publish it immediately on a subdomain of tech-mad.org. No need to supply your identity or any other details.
... let's not forget, they can always release the bug fixes at a later point, as they do with all of their products. In fact, releleasing the X-B(oll)ox on time with a number of bugs would only make them money... you DON'T think they'll give away their "upgrades" free, do you?
Maybe this will help the idiots dual-booting Windows for games realise that Loki isn't there to spend a whole load of money on a loss-making venture.
You have to buy their games to keep them going dammit. I personally don't play games but I have bought many games from them as Christmas & birthday gifts for my brothers and friends. This has had the side effect of making my brothers and friends of theirs switch entirely to Linux, and buy Loki products themselves.
I wonder if Loki put up a donations page like Mandrake, how many people would contribute? Probably not many of the hypocrites who advocate Linux right up to the point where they have to spend money.
Interesting to note that if any post here says anything that even the most right-wing American neo-nazi would take offence at, it either gets ignored or called flamebait. It's a disgraceful American tendency to attempt to ignore reasoned and logical debate on US policy.
Then why is the US still part of the UN? The US has memership of the UN voluntarily, it hasn't been forced into it. Either they're in and should abide by policy or they're not an can tell the UN to go get fscked.
This however is just pure hypocrisy.
As a big fan and user of Slackware for years, I am continually pissed off that people consider me a newbie because I use Mandrake on my work machine.
Rubbish. I use Mandrake because it is easiest to accomplish all that I must do immediately in this distribution. Slackware and Debian users typically look down their noses at Mandrake and this bugs me. I find I can do everything in Mandrake that I can do in either Debian or Slackware and not only that, I can find a handy gui app to assist me in getting things done when I am in a hurry, where I am much less likely to do so (IME) in either of these other distros.
I don't have the time to use Slackware or Debian for work purposes. I'm far too busy to waste time figuring out how to use the multitude of commandline switches in a new application at work. I use both Slackware and Debian at home where I have the time and leisure to experiment.
So he got released on bail. Big deal. So does pretty much anyone who is awaiting trial for a non-violent crime.
Why hype it so much?
The US government needs a lesson in what is and isn't good practice. Innovation in the US will over time become crippled by the arcane and Ultra-Conservative DMCA.
It's no secret that Republicans are so right-wing it's almost feasible to think of them as neo-Nazis, but what is surprising that such a HUGE chunk of US society with all it's false morals decided to vote in a president whose only allegiance is to himself, and to the big business interests that will no doubt fund his campaign for a second term in office.
What should be our course of action? Boycott US trade shows to begin with. After all in the US innovation means a prison sentence. Any civilised country would have sent Skylarov home by now. Don't bother contacting US congressmen, contact US businessmen, and let them know that you are not going to buy their products while Skylarov is imprisoned and the DMCA remains in place.
Remember Bush listens to big business. Big business is his key to a well-funded election campaign. Make sure that these business interests know it's not in their interest to back these medieval practices and Bush will follow like the simple-minded sheep he is.
I can't decide whether this is a good or a bad thing.
Great, another company conforms to the GPL and the world is safe for (democracy|socialism) once again. And of course if this had gone to court and the notoriously short-sighted and conservative US courts had given the verdict to Vidomi, it would have opened the floodgates for cases against the GPL.
On the other hand companies may still try it on just as Vidomi did because there still hasn't been a verdict FOR the GPL. In the long run, we need to see the GPL upheld by the courts before we are really safe from the marauding pirates.
To clear up a point: There were two incarnations of the Swastika, the right-handed swastika, ancient symbol of goodness and light, and the left-handed swastika, Nazi symbol, reversed right-handed symbol, and one of the reasons Hitler was believed to have been involved in Satanism.
It is a truly ancient symbol the true origins of which are lost in time though it has been postulated that they may be in the old hunter-gather traditions of Sun symbols, as are Stonehenge and other stone circles. The swastika arises in the history of most great and not-so-great) empires.
The reversal of the swastika by the 3rd Reich, was seen by some as a symbol similar to the inversion of the cross by satanists.
... never ind construction workers... now we've got "space cowboy"s(tm) as well!
This is just wonderful... what could be a very informative and interesting discussion being ruined by 1) a bunch of morons carrying on a "my country is better than yours" argument and 2) the bloody moderators feeding the egos of these same morons by moderating them up to 4 and 5 points.
I think perhaps it would be better if the debate stuck to the actual topic of the proposed Mars mission by Canada rather than denigrate into a row about who did what first, who's better than who, and whose bloody currency is worth more.
The (proposed?) undersea 25GB pipeline between US & Europe could REALLY benefit from this... but I don't see the advantage in using it over short ( 1 mile (1.609 kilometers)) distances, other than for testing purposes.
;)
And of course it's a cool thing to do.
What will be interesting to see is what the price difference is between super-conducting & standard copper cable when produced in bulk, because this is the real make or break for it. If it doesn't produce a high enough medium term saving, then I can't see very many power/comms companies rushing out to pull up their existing cables.
However, assuming that the wholesale price doesn't cancel medium term savings then perhaps we'll see it being installed in all the new cabling contracts in 2/3 years.
Four years to realise that fighting the whole world in a battle that no one cared about - except for it's (mildly) humourous connotations - is counter-productive.
Of course they may have been told by their legal advisers that "spam" is now a defacto part of the English language (look iy up in the newer Oxford English dictionary) in both of it's meanings, and as such the use of the word to describe unsolicited e-mail could probably not have been challenged in court.
There are other sides to this though. Eventually, as time and technology progresses, it will become a lot cheaper than it is today to produce anti-matter in quantities sufficient to fuel huge numbers of missions to Mars, Jupiter and beyond. Such technology shouldn't be ditched because of expense when it's potential is so huge.
As regards the potential use to the military, increased fuel economy in motor vehicles is also beneficial to the military... but because it benefits everybody else also, work in this area continues apace. Nuclear power, much as I dislike it, is clean and efficient and yes it produces a byproduct that can be used in weapons of mass destruction.
We can't really complain about the potential military uses of new technologies when assault weapons are on sale to Joe Soap in the worlds more powerful country.
I'd been pretty much ignoring back pain for about 6 years until recently, when I finally caved in and went to a chiropractor about it.
As it happened, it was just as well, as other ailments such as shortness of breath I'd been suffering turned out to be directly related to it. Years of hunching over a keyboard means that I walk with enough of a stoop that my ribs are encroaching my lungs space... not a good situation, and apparently not all that uncommon either. I've now got a rigid regime of exercises to combat this... but it could have got a lot worse if my girlfriend hadn't badgered me into going to the doctor about it.
So take my advice and go see your doctor about back pain.
It (Open Source) has produced some pretty good stuff in it's day... Does Mozilla need AOL? If AOL drop Mozilla, aren't there enough skilled Open Source developers out there with an interest to take it over?
In fact it might be a good thing... I find Mozilla too big and cumbersome, maybe someone with a different focus might decide to split it into its component parts and we could even get a nice lightweight, standards compliant and stable browser out of it.
This doesn't NEED to be a Bad Thing(tm). Open Source has a way of coming up with the goods.