True, but you can't believe that such power can be handed over to entities that have proven themselves so rapacious in the past (RIAA, MPAA) with no consequences for the average *non*-criminal.
p2p tools are *not* instruments of theft, it's just terribly popular to use them as such. They're like crowbars... powerful, with a legitimate purpose, but subject to the goodness or evilness of their operator.
Remember, if draconian access controls are allowed, and *enforced*, it certainly won't stop with the college kids with forty gig of DMB. Witness DeCSS: "But only *pirates* use it!" "Oh, okay, let's make reverse engineering a crime." Do you really believe that taking power out of the hands of the hacker/common man/scr1pt k1dd13 and giving it to these companies (who have their stockholders' interests in mind, *and no one else's*, not you, not me, certainly not the artists who they hide behind) will solve anything?
Perhaps 'copyright protection' is the wrong phrase. But believe me, it's not about the pirates; they don't cost the companies an appreciable sum, they never have.
About the 'right' to the Nappy... I won't argue there. I still can't believe what I hear when my roommates complain that the school blocked Napster.
"We have to have DeCSS, because there are no Linux DVD players!"
"But what about that one from SigmaDesigns?"
"Uhh..."
Remember? It's quite authorized. Linux isn't an 'unauthorized system'. Such a beast doesn't exist. Windows is 'unauthorized' if you don't have a DVD card...
Subbed! Subbed is the way to go! Right on, man! I cannot *stand* bad voice-acting and dub jobs... after the first two episodes of 'The Slayers' I watched subtitled, I was hooked. After a while, you don't even notice them anymore...
Not just blood in a cartoon... EXPLODING PINK BUBBLE-GUMMY MELTING MUTATING FLESH in a cartoon! And death. Lots of death. You know how in most Hollywood movies, when a house or something collapses, people jump out, or move out of the way... in Akira, they don't. Seems to be a hallmark of Otomo's work; I read 'Domu', he does the same thing there.
But back to the topic at hand. The story warrants watching it three times. The characters are *archetypal*, not cardboard. (I'm a big fan of the General, personally.) I never read the manga, I still love the movie.
And... "chinese"? What makes the characters Chinese? They have Japanese names, as far as I can tell...
And the soundtrack! (Swooning.) Seriously, get the soundtrack. It's great. Strange, very strange, but great stuff.
Re:Get it at thinkgeek!!!
on
Think Unix
·
· Score: 1
Great shit, you might be on to something, Holmes! This 'Linux' OS is sold by Redhat and Linux-Mandrake, put on hardware from VA... and what OS does Slashdot talk about? You guessed it -- Linux!
Does anyone remember the Comics Code? (It's still in effect today.)
What happened was that the government was cracking down on comics as a cause of juvenile deliquency, and as a gesture of "Look, government! We're policing ourselves! Go away!", they enforced ratings -- if you worked for one of the big boys (the *only* boys, with one exception I'll get to in a moment), your comics had to be 'clean'. Except that it was all a dastardly ploy to get rid of EC Comics by ostracizing them. No one sold EC comics, and they folded.
Are there parallels here? I think so. Any rating system enforced like ours is causes a separation of for-kids and not-for-kids. Cinema split into Hollywood and 'One Day Wonder' porn flicks. Will we see specialty shops where the basest desires of violence and carnality are expressed in video-game form, on an under-the-counter business which everyone buys from but no one admits?
I've had some bad experiences with Medical Manager. A supposed sysadmin who *never* got it to work properly (at $75/hr), hideously expensive service contracts that didn't really serve, and y2k incompliance leading to "Hey, why not just upgrade? Only $30k!" and the demise of a medical practice.
But I'm sure they're good if you're large enough to burn the money.
Significantly more people can use a web browser quicker than even the most intuitive legacy-type system you can put together.
We're quite aware of what we're going up against. We believe that we're doing it The Right Way. We're not making a billing system with patient records stapled onto it to appease the docs. We're coding for the doctors, not the insurers. (I feel rather strongly about this point.)
Enough proselytizing. Even though our products may look similar, they're like bats' wings and moths' wings -- evolved in totally different ways.
While billing is a necessary part of any doctor's office, we're attempting to focus on profession-standard record-keeping tools to track outcomes. One of the project architects has been a doc for over twenty years, and this is the result of his complaints against the current crop of $30,000-per-doctor monolithic systems that he'd been working with.
There's a release coming up RSN. (Was supposed to be Friday, but we're still bug-squashing. Except me. I'm reading/.)
And as for the differing-regulations bit, we have fully changed out (previously proprietary/pain-in-the-ass/kludgy) i18n system over to gettext (I think we're the first big PHP project to do so), and we can already do some of the little things like format phone numbers differently based on locale... as for actual forms generation, it's completely user-configurable.
And we support Oracle, dammit. We're meant to be scalable, extensible and lightweight on the client. (All the commercial 'web-based' solutions I've seen involve JavaScript, Java, or an entirely separate client. It may look pretty, but it's *wrong*.)
Enough marketing. Look us up on SourceForge, www.freemed.org will have a release within the week, and give us your input!
... is why version increments keep getting smaller on venerable standards. For instance, if you look at the early days of UNIX, SVR3 was soon followed by SVR4, and BSD went from 4.2 to 4.3 to 4.4 in a reasonable amount of time. Likewise, we went from X11R5 to X11R6. But now, we're stuck in X11R6.5.1.blah.
Is this TeX syndrome, where the version number asymptotically approaches some ideal number? X is already past 2*pi, but I'm sure there's a constant they're working toward...
Hmm... I suppose it's a good think Little Johnny isn't doing a report about large, tree-chewing rodents or domesticated felines... or 1940s noir detectives...
But, of course, if you can operate a newsreader, like, say Agent, it's all fair game.
I think the problem is that we don't trust children enough.
I've recently left adolescence, and *boy* did I ever have a lot of porn. In fact, at my first year of college, I was known as the 'Mad Porn King of [dorm]'. No, really. I was.
But I turned out fine. I'm not violent. I have a firm grip on reality. I'm an honors student at a good school.
Despite what you think, the majority of children old enough to use a computer are capable of knowing the difference between fantasy and reality, and between right and wrong.
Does this mean they don't need any supervision? No, but it does mean that they probably won't spontaneously combust when you leave them alone for five minutes. Sounds like you're more afraid of having to answer embarrassing questions than anything else.
Hmm -- on their 'look what SGI stuff can do!' page, most of the applications are still computer graphics-based, like the glowing first down line for the Super Bowl, VR software for a University and 3D simulations. As I understands it, IBM works more with the mainframe/enterprise-server crowd. They may be competing head-to-head with *Sun*, but I still don't see SGI abandoning the graphics market any time in the foreseeable future.
They used to be Silicon Graphics, Incorporated. And they had the coolest damn logo of any computer company, but now all it is is those rounded-off letters. Waaah! I want my cool cubey-thing!
It can also act as a substitute for real change: "Oh, look! We're a completely new company! We may do everything the same, but look -- we have a new name! Whee!"
Free SCO stuff sucked because they didn't want to release it. Their low-end server share was getting eaten alive by Linux (though it had been on its way out for quite a while) and so they thought they could jump on the bandwagon and keep making their money.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Since they didn't offer anything (well, certainly nothing worth the price) that Linux didn't, they couldn't compete.
SGI, on the other hand, has the right idea. By giving up IRIX and supporting Linux development, they're
freeing up mucho resources to work on hardware, their primary source of revenue (which usually came with the software) and
making an already good operating system even better, by working on the XFS port, XFree86 development, and numerous smaller projects (like the testing suite)
SGI makes out well, and Linux makes out well. This is how free software can help companies, not a half-hearted attempt at releasing stuff that the company doesn't even want.
Okay, I was wrong. They're truly idiots (or perhaps this is part of that 'marketing' black magic I keep hearing about) -- naming themselves after a superstitious tradition for warding off impending doom...
Why didn't they just call themselves 'Death Throes Unix' or 'We're Dead Meat, We Just Haven't Stopped Moving'?
If the reverse had happened... if they were changing their name from Tarantella to SCO...
Would we all be making Sour Cream and Onion jokes?
(Really! That's what SCO makes me think of!)
I suppose the old name just got too loaded down with bad 'legacy Unix' mojo, though -- you can see that they're trying to reinvent themselves: 'very much like a start-up' -- ha!
Ten to one they haven't done a damn thing to change the way the company works internally, so they'll just churn out the same stuff yet again.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but you can't believe that such power can be handed over to entities that have proven themselves so rapacious in the past (RIAA, MPAA) with no consequences for the average *non*-criminal.
p2p tools are *not* instruments of theft, it's just terribly popular to use them as such. They're like crowbars... powerful, with a legitimate purpose, but subject to the goodness or evilness of their operator.
Remember, if draconian access controls are allowed, and *enforced*, it certainly won't stop with the college kids with forty gig of DMB. Witness DeCSS: "But only *pirates* use it!" "Oh, okay, let's make reverse engineering a crime." Do you really believe that taking power out of the hands of the hacker/common man/scr1pt k1dd13 and giving it to these companies (who have their stockholders' interests in mind, *and no one else's*, not you, not me, certainly not the artists who they hide behind) will solve anything?
Perhaps 'copyright protection' is the wrong phrase. But believe me, it's not about the pirates; they don't cost the companies an appreciable sum, they never have.
About the 'right' to the Nappy... I won't argue there. I still can't believe what I hear when my roommates complain that the school blocked Napster.
No, stupid, we went over this in court, remember?
"We have to have DeCSS, because there are no Linux DVD players!"
"But what about that one from SigmaDesigns?"
"Uhh..."
Remember? It's quite authorized. Linux isn't an 'unauthorized system'. Such a beast doesn't exist. Windows is 'unauthorized' if you don't have a DVD card...
grendel drago
Subbed! Subbed is the way to go! Right on, man! I cannot *stand* bad voice-acting and dub jobs... after the first two episodes of 'The Slayers' I watched subtitled, I was hooked. After a while, you don't even notice them anymore...
grendel drago
[Neo-Tokyo EXPLODES.]
Tetsuo: KANEDA!
Kaneda: TETSUO!
[Neo-Tokyo EXPLODES.]
[CONFUSING METAPHYSICAL THINGS happen.]
[Credits.]
apologies to RinkWorks,
grendel drago
What are you smoking?
Not just blood in a cartoon... EXPLODING PINK BUBBLE-GUMMY MELTING MUTATING FLESH in a cartoon! And death. Lots of death. You know how in most Hollywood movies, when a house or something collapses, people jump out, or move out of the way... in Akira, they don't. Seems to be a hallmark of Otomo's work; I read 'Domu', he does the same thing there.
But back to the topic at hand. The story warrants watching it three times. The characters are *archetypal*, not cardboard. (I'm a big fan of the General, personally.) I never read the manga, I still love the movie.
And... "chinese"? What makes the characters Chinese? They have Japanese names, as far as I can tell...
And the soundtrack! (Swooning.) Seriously, get the soundtrack. It's great. Strange, very strange, but great stuff.
grendel drago
Umm... "Door Hinge"?
Great shit, you might be on to something, Holmes! This 'Linux' OS is sold by Redhat and Linux-Mandrake, put on hardware from VA... and what OS does Slashdot talk about? You guessed it -- Linux!
Schmuck.
-grendel drago
Does anyone remember the Comics Code? (It's still in effect today.)
What happened was that the government was cracking down on comics as a cause of juvenile deliquency, and as a gesture of "Look, government! We're policing ourselves! Go away!", they enforced ratings -- if you worked for one of the big boys (the *only* boys, with one exception I'll get to in a moment), your comics had to be 'clean'. Except that it was all a dastardly ploy to get rid of EC Comics by ostracizing them. No one sold EC comics, and they folded.
Are there parallels here? I think so. Any rating system enforced like ours is causes a separation of for-kids and not-for-kids. Cinema split into Hollywood and 'One Day Wonder' porn flicks. Will we see specialty shops where the basest desires of violence and carnality are expressed in video-game form, on an under-the-counter business which everyone buys from but no one admits?
Or am I on a wild tangent here?
-grendel drago
Yuck.
I've had some bad experiences with Medical Manager. A supposed sysadmin who *never* got it to work properly (at $75/hr), hideously expensive service contracts that didn't really serve, and y2k incompliance leading to "Hey, why not just upgrade? Only $30k!" and the demise of a medical practice.
But I'm sure they're good if you're large enough to burn the money.
-grendel drago
Which is why FreeMED is web-based.
Significantly more people can use a web browser quicker than even the most intuitive legacy-type system you can put together.
We're quite aware of what we're going up against. We believe that we're doing it The Right Way. We're not making a billing system with patient records stapled onto it to appease the docs. We're coding for the doctors, not the insurers. (I feel rather strongly about this point.)
Enough proselytizing. Even though our products may look similar, they're like bats' wings and moths' wings -- evolved in totally different ways.
-grendel drago, FreeMED
Of course, you know that insurance companies *already* do this, feed it to a large national database, sell it to the Black Helicopter Conspiracy...
Well, maybe not that last bit.
-grendel drago
I'm one of the (rather few) FreeMED developers.
/.)
While billing is a necessary part of any doctor's office, we're attempting to focus on profession-standard record-keeping tools to track outcomes. One of the project architects has been a doc for over twenty years, and this is the result of his complaints against the current crop of $30,000-per-doctor monolithic systems that he'd been working with.
There's a release coming up RSN. (Was supposed to be Friday, but we're still bug-squashing. Except me. I'm reading
And as for the differing-regulations bit, we have fully changed out (previously proprietary/pain-in-the-ass/kludgy) i18n system over to gettext (I think we're the first big PHP project to do so), and we can already do some of the little things like format phone numbers differently based on locale... as for actual forms generation, it's completely user-configurable.
And we support Oracle, dammit. We're meant to be scalable, extensible and lightweight on the client. (All the commercial 'web-based' solutions I've seen involve JavaScript, Java, or an entirely separate client. It may look pretty, but it's *wrong*.)
Enough marketing. Look us up on SourceForge, www.freemed.org will have a release within the week, and give us your input!
-grendel drago
Hey, you can get netatalk-1.23.35-beta-2-asun34... (I'm probably exaggerating, but that's the latest release, I believe.)
-grendel drago
... is why version increments keep getting smaller on venerable standards. For instance, if you look at the early days of UNIX, SVR3 was soon followed by SVR4, and BSD went from 4.2 to 4.3 to 4.4 in a reasonable amount of time. Likewise, we went from X11R5 to X11R6. But now, we're stuck in X11R6.5.1.blah.
Is this TeX syndrome, where the version number asymptotically approaches some ideal number? X is already past 2*pi, but I'm sure there's a constant they're working toward...
-grendel drago
Hmm... I suppose it's a good think Little Johnny isn't doing a report about large, tree-chewing rodents or domesticated felines... or 1940s noir detectives...
But, of course, if you can operate a newsreader, like, say Agent, it's all fair game.
-grendel drago
I think the problem is that we don't trust children enough.
I've recently left adolescence, and *boy* did I ever have a lot of porn. In fact, at my first year of college, I was known as the 'Mad Porn King of [dorm]'. No, really. I was.
But I turned out fine. I'm not violent. I have a firm grip on reality. I'm an honors student at a good school.
Despite what you think, the majority of children old enough to use a computer are capable of knowing the difference between fantasy and reality, and between right and wrong.
Does this mean they don't need any supervision? No, but it does mean that they probably won't spontaneously combust when you leave them alone for five minutes. Sounds like you're more afraid of having to answer embarrassing questions than anything else.
-grendel drago
> who reads porn sites anyway?
http://www.asstr.org
Lots of people.
-grendel drago
Hmm -- on their 'look what SGI stuff can do!' page, most of the applications are still computer graphics-based, like the glowing first down line for the Super Bowl, VR software for a University and 3D simulations. As I understands it, IBM works more with the mainframe/enterprise-server crowd. They may be competing head-to-head with *Sun*, but I still don't see SGI abandoning the graphics market any time in the foreseeable future.
-grendel drago
They used to be Silicon Graphics, Incorporated. And they had the coolest damn logo of any computer company, but now all it is is those rounded-off letters. Waaah! I want my cool cubey-thing!
-grendel drago
It can also act as a substitute for real change: "Oh, look! We're a completely new company! We may do everything the same, but look -- we have a new name! Whee!"
I'll believe in a new SCO when I see it.
-grendel drago
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Since they didn't offer anything (well, certainly nothing worth the price) that Linux didn't, they couldn't compete.
SGI, on the other hand, has the right idea. By giving up IRIX and supporting Linux development, they're
SGI makes out well, and Linux makes out well. This is how free software can help companies, not a half-hearted attempt at releasing stuff that the company doesn't even want.
-grendel drago
Okay, I was wrong. They're truly idiots (or perhaps this is part of that 'marketing' black magic I keep hearing about) -- naming themselves after a superstitious tradition for warding off impending doom...
Why didn't they just call themselves 'Death Throes Unix' or 'We're Dead Meat, We Just Haven't Stopped Moving'?
In short, What Were They Thinking?!
-grendel drago
If the reverse had happened... if they were changing their name from Tarantella to SCO...
Would we all be making Sour Cream and Onion jokes?
(Really! That's what SCO makes me think of!)
I suppose the old name just got too loaded down with bad 'legacy Unix' mojo, though -- you can see that they're trying to reinvent themselves: 'very much like a start-up' -- ha!
Ten to one they haven't done a damn thing to change the way the company works internally, so they'll just churn out the same stuff yet again.
-grendel drago
The first thing I thought of was the director of 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Reservoir Dogs', but perhaps it's just me...
-grendel drago
As stated above:
VAX Linux is dead.
VAX FreeBSD is dead.
NetBSD has a nearly-working port.
Oh, stop whining, BSD is remarkably similar...
-grendel drago