Broadband/DSL is being actively sabataged by the baby bells in the US and quite possibly by similiar entities elsewhere in the world. These people own the last mile of copper, connecting that mostly unused glass network to your home.
This is exactly the issue. In the UK (which includes Scotland) BT (yes, the same people who thought they had a patent on hyperlinks) own the last mile. They have indeed been doing everything possible to sabotage DSL. Consequently, it's been extremely difficult for competing providers to deliver DSL services; this initiative by Hydro-Electric is essentially seeking to bypass BT.
Interestingly, Hydro Electric mostly services the highlands and islands - which is to say, the most remote rural communities in Europe. If it works here it will work anywhere.
IANAL, and I am not an American either. This is a genuine quetion.
Can something you give away for free, as a literary work (i.e. source code) infringe a patent? There's no device, there's no product, there's no sale. There's just a literary work, which as I understand it is protected anyway under your first ammendment.
I think there must be at least plenty of room for very considerable legal doubt and manouvreing in there. Does anyone really know?
Hey, I didn't say that programmers can't make good managers (although having done both I know I'm a beter programmer and enjoy it more). I said wannabe managers don't make good programmers. They probably don't make good managers either...
The best people I've ever hired were people I'd noticed posting consistently well informed and even-tempered advice on relevent technical usenet groups. When I was still employing people I would regularly write to the best people on the groups in my particular areas asking if they wanted a job. I got a lot of (mostly good natured) refusals, but the people I hired as a result were real gems - easily and consistently the best people I ever hired.
The other thing is I was browsing el Reg this evening, as you do, and noticed this story:
Q. Why, oh why, do you insist on Microsoft Word format for CV uploads?
When I hire people, I turf all CV's that arrive to me in a proprietary format, into the bit bucket.
Man's right.
Real geeks don't send CVs in Microsoft Word format - at least not to people they respect. If the CV is in TeX, or postscript, or plain text, or XML, or even, at a pinch, PDF, that's a good clue that the person who sent it is a geek. Likewise if it's in any proprietary format, even if it's the cool Linux Wordprocessor du jour, there's a good probability that the person who sent it is a luser.
Hey, so lots of large companies are members of the Internet Society. Could this possibly be because they're involved in the Internet and want to have input into Internet policy? Perhaps they want to take part in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is part of ISOC. This isn't a scandal or a conspiracy. Thousands of people in over a hundred countries are members; being a member of ISOC costs me US $ 75 a year, but you can join for free. Why aren't you a member?
... and so do many of my customers. This may not be as good an endorsement as it sounds as none of the sites concerned is particularly high traffic and performance isn't really a big issue. However I've also tried JRun (fundamentally broken and useless), BEA WebLogic (huge, over-complex, bloated) and Jigsaw (very nice for small installations but last time I used it didn't yet support Servlet 2.2).
I would have no hesitation in recommending Tomcat for low and medium traffic sites; I don't really know enough to recommend it for very high traffic sites.
"Making the internet run faster"/might/ be considered puffery as it's a fairly vapid claim (does "the internet" include, say, running the Flash / Shockwave / Java applets that abound online?).
If they/have/ been making specific, non-puffery, bogus claims however, then I wouldn't mind seeing them smacked around for it, so long as the same reasoning gets applied in other cases as well.
'Makes the Internet run faster' is a very specific claim. Either it can get more packets through a given piece of fibre-optic cable in a given unit of time, or it can't. As a matter of fact, it can't. The speed of the Internet has nothing whatever to do with the processors in terminal nodes; it has something to do with the processors in the routers, but most of those are special purpose and are not likely to be Intel chips of any kind.
And for heaven's sake, here on Slashdot we should not be confusing the performance of an application, or indeed even the performance of an application layer protocol, with transport layer performance. The Web is to the Internet as the bus is to the highway.
Think about all of the things that real-life actors do and real-life scenarios do, which would have to be emulated. All of the little habbits, motions, etc etc -- not to mention voice and emotion.
This is a fallacy which comes out of not understanding the nature of software. Write a procedure which allows one CGI actor to make coffee, and suddenly all your CGI actors can make coffee. If the level of abstraction is right, all of your other CGI actors will know how to make coffee while exhibiting their own individual personality quirks.
Next week, you're making another film about another set of characters, and one of them has to make coffee. Do you write the procedure again? No, you use the one that's already in the library. Over a very short period you build up a very rich palette of behaviours which are available to all your CGI actors. Furthermore, each actor has some 'while undirected' behaviours so that it isn't just standing around like a dummy when it hasn't specifically been given things to do.
It's not just feasible that we will soon have a system which takes as input an XML representation of a screenplay, and outputs a complete movie; it's inevitable that we will soon have that system. Initially the movies produced might not be very good, but let's face it the average movie isn't very good now anyway; the synthetic ones should be at able to compete.
I could today sit down and write the high-level architecture for the system I've described. I know in principle how all the modules would work and none of them are rocket science. The only bits I don't know how to automate are how to write a satisfying screenplay, and how to rate screenplays in order to determine which one to film.
This is the future, whether you like it or not; and although initially building the libraries of locations, physical appearances, and behaviours is going to be need a lot of human creative input, once they're built endlessly reusing them is not. If you don't believe me think about what you can achieve today with a modern 3d role playing game toolkit like (for example) the Neverwinter Aurora toolkit. It isn't up to movie quality but it's not really that far off.
CGI will, of course, be very useful in many movies (don't count on it being used for Soap Operas, though).
On the contrary, soap operas will most likely be what gets fully automated first. The sets are limited and endlessly re-used; the range of characters is limited; the budget is low; the audience expectation is low; and episodes need to be produced quickly. With a fully automated all-CGI soap opera, the investment in the initial design of sets, characters and costumes would be high but this investment would be ammortised over a very high number of episodes. The CGI actors wouldn't get sick, need holidays, get drunk, or have unscripted affairs. Neither weather nor unions would interrupt the shooting schedule. All you'd need would be a chunky render farm and a pool of scriptwriters.
What an idiot. Firstly, there's the false impliction that since a guy at CERN wrote the first specs for the WWW that this means the internet was made by Europeans. (First off, it was the university of illinois that was communicating with CERN that worked on actually making mosaic and httpd to implement the spec, and secondly there's the fact that "the internet" != "the WWW".)
Yeah, yeah, we know. Just because the original graphical web client was written at CERN (in Switzerland, not the United States) by Tim Berners Lee (an Englishman, not an American), and the original HTTPD was written at CERN, isn't important because it's the first American implementation that goes in the history books. The American history books can comfortably ignore the fact that the University of Manchester (that's Manchester, England) had a programmable computer before anywhere in the United States, because, hey, England's a long long way away and probably doesn't really exist anyway. I could go on.
Bill Thompsons article is over the top and fundamentally wrong headed, but this is exactly the sort of blind, ignorant, narrow, uneducated US arrogance which makes you so disliked in the rest of the world, and which irritates people like Bill enough to make them go over the top.
For the record: no, you didn't invent the Internet. You didn't invent packet switched networking. You did build ARPAnet, at about the same time as the UK built JANET (and other European countries developed similar initiatives); and later, ARPAnet, JANET and several other networks were linked together to form the Internet. For the record, my first email address was @uk.ac.lancs.csvax, because the UK equivalent of DNS ordered name segments from the most general to the most particular.
An excellent site for those of us living in the UK is http://www.techtronics.com/.
These guys supply premodded DVD players, I bought my Panasonic from here last Christmas. Apart from the long delivery time, they were perfect.
There seem to be a number of chipping shops around. We got a pre-chipped Sony from people called LinkOnline. It works fine, too. There's a newsgroup uk.media.dvd with a lot of discussion of chipping, and where to get chipped players in the UK.
Can it really be true that the best tool we have for heavy duty computing is a 25 year old language, or have you found anything better - free or non-free?"
Actually, the the best tool we have for heavy duty computing is a forty-seven year old language which, among other things, handles arbitrary size and arbitrary precision numbers transparently, handles memory allocation automatically, handles recursive functions naturally as a key part of the language. As for efficiency, I can code factorial in three lines (70 bytes) of code, and compute the factorial of 10000 in 2.08 seconds:
* (defun fact (n)
(cond ((= n 1) 1)
(t (* n (fact (- n 1))))))
FACT
* (time (progn (fact 10000) nil))
Evaluation took:
2.08 seconds of real time
1.91 seconds of user run time
0.16 seconds of system run time
[Run times include 1.66 seconds GC run time]
0 page faults and
70756080 bytes consed.
NIL
*
Beat that in any language. Note: only core features of the language used, no special libraries, no special constructs. Note also: I didn't declare n as an integer, I didn't have to. I didn't declare n a bignum, I din't have to. The language handles all that sort of detail automatically, and if I wanted the imaginary part of the factorial of 1000 all I'd have to do is ask for (imagpart (fact 1000)). Not only are complex numbers supported in the core language, they're supported transparently too.
People get put off by the fact that LISP looks different and has a slightly different vocabulary from the ALGOL-derived languages they're used to. Once you're over the initial hurdles it's a very natural and extremely powerful language to use.
Obviously, Free Software producers must be able to deny warranties, since they are not getting the consideration (money) necessary to provide them. People who want warranties should be able to buy them, either from the software producer, another software shop, or an insurance company.
I confess I'm not cognisant with United States law, but I think you're missing the point. People who sell goods - cars or software - have a contract with the purchasor, because a purchase has occurred and a consideration (usually money) has changed hands. Consequently, the purchasor has the right to expect the goods to be (to use the language of UK law) of merchantable quality, and to seek some degree of redress if they're not.
If someone takes somthing that someone else has made freely available, there's no contract. There's no consideration, and consequently there's no responsibility on anyone's part to ensure the goods were of any particular quality. There is, if I may be excused the pun, no quo pro quid - there's no quid at all.
Suppose you left a raku pot you'd made on your garden wall, and a passer by took it home, drank from it, and suffered from lead poisoning. Would you be responsible, even under United States law?
Yes, I know the lawyers are coming. They'll keep on coming unless we keep on calling their bluff, until no creative work of any kind is possible without ten lawyers scrutinising every least part of it. The only thing to say to the lawyers is no, we won't accept your hegemony over our space, keep your noses out. Certain basic concepts are seen as part of natural justice in most cultures in the world, and are part of the common law both east and west of the Atlantic. One of those is that without a quid pro quo, there's no transaction, there's no contract, and there's no liability. Do not let the lawyers blur that line.
You go to the Slashdot meetup website, register with your email address and zip code, and the site tells you where the meetup is in your area.
Oh, wow, brilliant. Go to the website, select country. No 'Scotland', so I'm pissed off already, but I select 'United Kingdom'. The 'Zipcode' box changes to a pulldown menu labeled 'City'. Click on it, no cities listed. Click continue and get a popup 'You must select your city'. Two possibilities:
It's an Internet Exploder only website
There aren't any meetups in the UK.
Not having MSWindows, I can't test hypothesis (i).
the whole issue is that slashdot isn't what it pretends to be : a free forum about stuff for nerds.
It isn't free (beer nor speech)
it's not for nerds anymore. It's for computer illeterates and laywers
Most of the articles on/. are offtopic ! I wish we could metamoderate the editors when they select or reject
If you don't like it, there's an easy solution. Set up your own server, install a copy of slash (or write your own system), and run your own site. It's like any open source project - if you don't like the way the maintainers are taking it, you can always fork the codebase.
Obviously you'll need to pay for the bandwidth, sort out the arguments over moderation policy, and decide what appears on the front page...
... is MSN's games page. [msn.com] (Note: You will see an error if you're not using IE.)
Oh, beautiful. From the page:
If you do not want to upgrade your browser, you can still use the Zone, however some pages may not render properly and some games may not function properly. To continue using the Zone without upgrading your browser, click here
What happens if you click there? Why, you get to see exactly the same error message all over again.
Having given this some thought, I still think Palladium is a very bad thing as far as I'm concerned, but I don't believe Microsoft is going to be able to cram it down our throats.
Anecdote: yesterday, I phoned one of my suppliers to order a new machine with a dual athlon plus SCSI motherboard. I asked him how many he'd supplied and what operating systems they'd had on them. The answer was thirty-five, and all various versions of Linux. It strikes me that probably ninety odd percent of dual athon machines are running Linux, but at least four manufacturers are producing motherboards. Which tells me that there's enough market for Linux machines - even at the high end - for the capitalist system to go on producing them. Furthermore, none of these motherboards makers are headquartered in the United States. So no matter what Senator Hollings manages to impose in the US, the rest of us will still have usable computers.
Seen from this point of view, Palladium may on balance even be a good thing. Lusers who aren't fit to be trusted will get computers which they can't break, and the rest of us will still be able to buy computers we can...
We've been through and scanned every family photograph dating back to 1890 (yes, I do mean 18). Consequently I've been able to give every member of the family a CD with all the photographs, and some of the older, more faded photographs we've been able to electronically enhance.
Advantages - everyone has a copy of all the photographs, and digital images won't degrade. I'd strongly recommend it. And yes, provided oyu've got the negatives, negative scanners are better.
4. Transfer the following files from your Windows installation to a directory in Linux:
Gee thanks. That's all we need. They haven't even released the client for Linux yet, and already you're telling people how to rip them off. How many companies do you think are going to waste time developing games for Linux if that's the attitude of the Linux gaming community?
For the record, I want this game, and I'm going to buy it; and I would probably buy it even if I didn't want it, because anyone who's prepared to ship a commercial game for Linux needs to be rewarded. Financially.
Re:Leftist Propaganda **SPOILERS**
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
First off, it seems the department of precrime has done away with the entire judicial system. You're caught and then hauled off and put in your little halo/tube thing with no trial or investigation. Also, if you think the American public would be cool with prisoners being plugged into the Matrix and sealed off, you're a moron.
The prisoners could be held for interrogation only - or in what is known as preventive detention to try to halt further attacks being planned and executed....
As long as the prisoners are not on US soil they are denied the rights guaranteed to criminals under the American constitution, such as a presumption of innocence and a trial by jury.
I don't think that that is a good enough standard. When a television show is broadcast, or when a book is published, it is publicly available -- but we don't think that the publisher looses their right to copyright protection in these cases. Publishing on the web is similar. The creator wants people to see his/her creation, but does not automatically give visitors the right to archive and retransmit the works.
We cannot have it both ways.
Either there is an information commons, with rights to fair use of copyright information, or there is a DMCA-inspired world where ultimately it becomes illegal to so much as quote a phrase anyone else has previously used. If you said a thing, you said it; it's a fact and it's part of the historical record. You might reasonably have reason to complain if the wayback machine altered what you said in any way, or made it appear that you had said something you had not said; but so long as it merely archives and keeps an historical record, as far as I am concerned it is entirely legitimate and proper.
I also hope that the wayback machine is archiving material that is hidden by robots.txt files, and will make them public after normal copyright has lapsed. It is part of the historical record, too.
MS's own JVM works flawlessly on every web site I've ever visited which required Java. Joe Average Consumer doesn't care who wrote it or or even what it is, as long as it works.
Which is exactly what the monopolist was seeking to achieve. By preventing a consistent, modern Java VM from being distributed to Joe Average Consumer, they've created a situation where we can only deploy obsolete Java apps to the client, thus preventing any real competition with the monopolists own rip-off clone of Java, 'C#' and '.net'.
As others may have pointed out, this is total bull on the part of Sun.
As others may have pointed out, this is your favourite monopolist up to its old tricks again.
Sun:you can't make java any more!
But Sun never said that. They said that Microsoft could not ship, as 'Java', something which didn't comply with the Java specification. In other words, Microsoft couldn't embrace and extend Java and still call it 'Java'. What's unfair about that? Microsoft are still shipping the embraced and extended Java, of course, but now they call it 'C#'.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly the issue. In the UK (which includes Scotland) BT (yes, the same people who thought they had a patent on hyperlinks) own the last mile. They have indeed been doing everything possible to sabotage DSL. Consequently, it's been extremely difficult for competing providers to deliver DSL services; this initiative by Hydro-Electric is essentially seeking to bypass BT.
Interestingly, Hydro Electric mostly services the highlands and islands - which is to say, the most remote rural communities in Europe. If it works here it will work anywhere.
Can something you give away for free, as a literary work (i.e. source code) infringe a patent? There's no device, there's no product, there's no sale. There's just a literary work, which as I understand it is protected anyway under your first ammendment.
I think there must be at least plenty of room for very considerable legal doubt and manouvreing in there. Does anyone really know?
Hey, I didn't say that programmers can't make good managers (although having done both I know I'm a beter programmer and enjoy it more). I said wannabe managers don't make good programmers. They probably don't make good managers either...
If you ever meet a programmer who wants to be a manager, don't hire him. He's a lousy programmer. Good programmers want to cut code.
The other thing is I was browsing el Reg this evening, as you do, and noticed this story:
Man's right.
Real geeks don't send CVs in Microsoft Word format - at least not to people they respect. If the CV is in TeX, or postscript, or plain text, or XML, or even, at a pinch, PDF, that's a good clue that the person who sent it is a geek. Likewise if it's in any proprietary format, even if it's the cool Linux Wordprocessor du jour, there's a good probability that the person who sent it is a luser.
Hey, so lots of large companies are members of the Internet Society. Could this possibly be because they're involved in the Internet and want to have input into Internet policy? Perhaps they want to take part in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is part of ISOC. This isn't a scandal or a conspiracy. Thousands of people in over a hundred countries are members; being a member of ISOC costs me US $ 75 a year, but you can join for free. Why aren't you a member?
I would have no hesitation in recommending Tomcat for low and medium traffic sites; I don't really know enough to recommend it for very high traffic sites.
'Makes the Internet run faster' is a very specific claim. Either it can get more packets through a given piece of fibre-optic cable in a given unit of time, or it can't. As a matter of fact, it can't. The speed of the Internet has nothing whatever to do with the processors in terminal nodes; it has something to do with the processors in the routers, but most of those are special purpose and are not likely to be Intel chips of any kind.
And for heaven's sake, here on Slashdot we should not be confusing the performance of an application, or indeed even the performance of an application layer protocol, with transport layer performance. The Web is to the Internet as the bus is to the highway.
Indeed. No-one has done more to destroy the British computer industry.
This is a fallacy which comes out of not understanding the nature of software. Write a procedure which allows one CGI actor to make coffee, and suddenly all your CGI actors can make coffee. If the level of abstraction is right, all of your other CGI actors will know how to make coffee while exhibiting their own individual personality quirks.
Next week, you're making another film about another set of characters, and one of them has to make coffee. Do you write the procedure again? No, you use the one that's already in the library. Over a very short period you build up a very rich palette of behaviours which are available to all your CGI actors. Furthermore, each actor has some 'while undirected' behaviours so that it isn't just standing around like a dummy when it hasn't specifically been given things to do.
It's not just feasible that we will soon have a system which takes as input an XML representation of a screenplay, and outputs a complete movie; it's inevitable that we will soon have that system. Initially the movies produced might not be very good, but let's face it the average movie isn't very good now anyway; the synthetic ones should be at able to compete.
I could today sit down and write the high-level architecture for the system I've described. I know in principle how all the modules would work and none of them are rocket science. The only bits I don't know how to automate are how to write a satisfying screenplay, and how to rate screenplays in order to determine which one to film.
This is the future, whether you like it or not; and although initially building the libraries of locations, physical appearances, and behaviours is going to be need a lot of human creative input, once they're built endlessly reusing them is not. If you don't believe me think about what you can achieve today with a modern 3d role playing game toolkit like (for example) the Neverwinter Aurora toolkit. It isn't up to movie quality but it's not really that far off.
On the contrary, soap operas will most likely be what gets fully automated first. The sets are limited and endlessly re-used; the range of characters is limited; the budget is low; the audience expectation is low; and episodes need to be produced quickly. With a fully automated all-CGI soap opera, the investment in the initial design of sets, characters and costumes would be high but this investment would be ammortised over a very high number of episodes. The CGI actors wouldn't get sick, need holidays, get drunk, or have unscripted affairs. Neither weather nor unions would interrupt the shooting schedule. All you'd need would be a chunky render farm and a pool of scriptwriters.
Yeah, yeah, we know. Just because the original graphical web client was written at CERN (in Switzerland, not the United States) by Tim Berners Lee (an Englishman, not an American), and the original HTTPD was written at CERN, isn't important because it's the first American implementation that goes in the history books. The American history books can comfortably ignore the fact that the University of Manchester (that's Manchester, England) had a programmable computer before anywhere in the United States, because, hey, England's a long long way away and probably doesn't really exist anyway. I could go on.
Bill Thompsons article is over the top and fundamentally wrong headed, but this is exactly the sort of blind, ignorant, narrow, uneducated US arrogance which makes you so disliked in the rest of the world, and which irritates people like Bill enough to make them go over the top.
For the record: no, you didn't invent the Internet. You didn't invent packet switched networking. You did build ARPAnet, at about the same time as the UK built JANET (and other European countries developed similar initiatives); and later, ARPAnet, JANET and several other networks were linked together to form the Internet. For the record, my first email address was @uk.ac.lancs.csvax, because the UK equivalent of DNS ordered name segments from the most general to the most particular.
There seem to be a number of chipping shops around. We got a pre-chipped Sony from people called LinkOnline. It works fine, too. There's a newsgroup uk.media.dvd with a lot of discussion of chipping, and where to get chipped players in the UK.
Actually, the the best tool we have for heavy duty computing is a forty-seven year old language which, among other things, handles arbitrary size and arbitrary precision numbers transparently, handles memory allocation automatically, handles recursive functions naturally as a key part of the language. As for efficiency, I can code factorial in three lines (70 bytes) of code, and compute the factorial of 10000 in 2.08 seconds:
* (defun fact (n)(cond ((= n 1) 1)
(t (* n (fact (- n 1))))))
FACT
* (time (progn (fact 10000) nil))
Evaluation took:
2.08 seconds of real time
1.91 seconds of user run time
0.16 seconds of system run time
[Run times include 1.66 seconds GC run time]
0 page faults and
70756080 bytes consed.
NIL
*
Beat that in any language. Note: only core features of the language used, no special libraries, no special constructs. Note also: I didn't declare n as an integer, I didn't have to. I didn't declare n a bignum, I din't have to. The language handles all that sort of detail automatically, and if I wanted the imaginary part of the factorial of 1000 all I'd have to do is ask for (imagpart (fact 1000)). Not only are complex numbers supported in the core language, they're supported transparently too.
People get put off by the fact that LISP looks different and has a slightly different vocabulary from the ALGOL-derived languages they're used to. Once you're over the initial hurdles it's a very natural and extremely powerful language to use.
I confess I'm not cognisant with United States law, but I think you're missing the point. People who sell goods - cars or software - have a contract with the purchasor, because a purchase has occurred and a consideration (usually money) has changed hands. Consequently, the purchasor has the right to expect the goods to be (to use the language of UK law) of merchantable quality, and to seek some degree of redress if they're not.
If someone takes somthing that someone else has made freely available, there's no contract. There's no consideration, and consequently there's no responsibility on anyone's part to ensure the goods were of any particular quality. There is, if I may be excused the pun, no quo pro quid - there's no quid at all.
Suppose you left a raku pot you'd made on your garden wall, and a passer by took it home, drank from it, and suffered from lead poisoning. Would you be responsible, even under United States law?
Yes, I know the lawyers are coming. They'll keep on coming unless we keep on calling their bluff, until no creative work of any kind is possible without ten lawyers scrutinising every least part of it. The only thing to say to the lawyers is no, we won't accept your hegemony over our space, keep your noses out. Certain basic concepts are seen as part of natural justice in most cultures in the world, and are part of the common law both east and west of the Atlantic. One of those is that without a quid pro quo, there's no transaction, there's no contract, and there's no liability. Do not let the lawyers blur that line.
Oh, wow, brilliant. Go to the website, select country. No 'Scotland', so I'm pissed off already, but I select 'United Kingdom'. The 'Zipcode' box changes to a pulldown menu labeled 'City'. Click on it, no cities listed. Click continue and get a popup 'You must select your city'. Two possibilities:
Not having MSWindows, I can't test hypothesis (i).
If you don't like it, there's an easy solution. Set up your own server, install a copy of slash (or write your own system), and run your own site. It's like any open source project - if you don't like the way the maintainers are taking it, you can always fork the codebase.
Obviously you'll need to pay for the bandwidth, sort out the arguments over moderation policy, and decide what appears on the front page...
Just like /.
Oh, beautiful. From the page:
What happens if you click there? Why, you get to see exactly the same error message all over again.
Anecdote: yesterday, I phoned one of my suppliers to order a new machine with a dual athlon plus SCSI motherboard. I asked him how many he'd supplied and what operating systems they'd had on them. The answer was thirty-five, and all various versions of Linux. It strikes me that probably ninety odd percent of dual athon machines are running Linux, but at least four manufacturers are producing motherboards. Which tells me that there's enough market for Linux machines - even at the high end - for the capitalist system to go on producing them. Furthermore, none of these motherboards makers are headquartered in the United States. So no matter what Senator Hollings manages to impose in the US, the rest of us will still have usable computers.
Seen from this point of view, Palladium may on balance even be a good thing. Lusers who aren't fit to be trusted will get computers which they can't break, and the rest of us will still be able to buy computers we can...
Advantages - everyone has a copy of all the photographs, and digital images won't degrade. I'd strongly recommend it. And yes, provided oyu've got the negatives, negative scanners are better.
Gee thanks. That's all we need. They haven't even released the client for Linux yet, and already you're telling people how to rip them off. How many companies do you think are going to waste time developing games for Linux if that's the attitude of the Linux gaming community?
For the record, I want this game, and I'm going to buy it; and I would probably buy it even if I didn't want it, because anyone who's prepared to ship a commercial game for Linux needs to be rewarded. Financially.
Two words: Guantanamo Bay.
To quote the BBC:
We cannot have it both ways.
Either there is an information commons, with rights to fair use of copyright information, or there is a DMCA-inspired world where ultimately it becomes illegal to so much as quote a phrase anyone else has previously used. If you said a thing, you said it; it's a fact and it's part of the historical record. You might reasonably have reason to complain if the wayback machine altered what you said in any way, or made it appear that you had said something you had not said; but so long as it merely archives and keeps an historical record, as far as I am concerned it is entirely legitimate and proper.
I also hope that the wayback machine is archiving material that is hidden by robots.txt files, and will make them public after normal copyright has lapsed. It is part of the historical record, too.
And, hey, what do you know. It's in TVs and coffee makers. And phones. And Lego, for God's sake. Your problem is?.
And hey, what do you know, it did
Yup, it works server side as well. It always did. Nothings changed. Your problem is?
Which is exactly what the monopolist was seeking to achieve. By preventing a consistent, modern Java VM from being distributed to Joe Average Consumer, they've created a situation where we can only deploy obsolete Java apps to the client, thus preventing any real competition with the monopolists own rip-off clone of Java, 'C#' and '.net'.
You think this is reasonable?
As others may have pointed out, this is your favourite monopolist up to its old tricks again.
But Sun never said that. They said that Microsoft could not ship, as 'Java', something which didn't comply with the Java specification. In other words, Microsoft couldn't embrace and extend Java and still call it 'Java'. What's unfair about that? Microsoft are still shipping the embraced and extended Java, of course, but now they call it 'C#'.