I've met Stallman. He's a hard man to respect because his social skills aren't up to par. The disrespect (and hostility) he gave me for being the only person in a suit at a University programmer's society meeting, and his dismissive answer a simple question ("How do you counter attacks that claim Linux is unfriendly". Basically he said it was news to him that it was unfriendly and moved on.)
Here's the thing us "nerds" need to remember. It's a lot easier to believe FUD uttered against an eccentric socially inept person with poor hygene and a bizzare sense of humour than it is against someone who's got some charisma and isn't an ass. Stallman may or may not be past it as a programmer, but he's got good ideas. His presentation of them lets him down big time.
Given your odds of receiving anything other than marketing speak from the MS rep, I'll go with number 1 MS-bashing please. And I'll have the side order of fries with that please. And a coke. Gotta have a drink.
Personally, I sometimes wish I had someone else who would lock me out of administering my own machine to keep me from fucking around and breaking things
Try here: www.careforkids.com.au/search/quick.asp
It must be that every sysadmin you ever had lock up your machine was both competent enough not to prevent you from getting your work done, and instantly available if something went wrong. Well either that or you have no idea what you're on about and have your head in the clouds.
If you record only (lossy) compressed data, that will limit your image quality. If you record things "pseudo-randomly", it'll be harder to get a predictable result If you record a billion pixels instead of a million, you'll need to store them. If you reduce the number of pixels, you reduce your redundancy.
It's still an interesting idea and probably has some specialist applications that will be very practical. But don't look for this in your Nikon or Canon camera in the next 10 years. Not sure what they are but if it can be made small enough I imagine a gigapixel camera on a space probe or better yet a space telescope (which can have more time to collect data) might be one. Of course it could also end up useless. That doesn't mean the technology shouldn't be explored. You never know what's going to provide the next breakthrough in understanding or application.
Or put more succinctly. People and life aren't easily reduced to simple math. Focus all your skills on simple math and you won't necessarily be good at practical things like socialising.
...and then blame them and their parents for being fat and lazy. You forgot to blame them for something. Very very important to (mis)allocate the blame.
Does that mean these devices will flood the spectrum???
I don't want to get rid of my cables if it means everything interfeers with everything else. Sounds like wireless hell. However it's the first I'm hearing of this technology so I'd be very happy to be corrected.
What would the earth be like without people? The fluffy pink ponies and unicorns would come out to play. Won't you plese think of the ponies.
How is this a slashdot article let alone a front page one? When I think of the stories I submitted that were rejected then think of this one it just annoys me.
Genuine advantage, and DRM are "a few blemishes" mixed in with a lot of good stuff???? And this is modded up on slashdot? Genuine advantage and DRM are a few blemishes the way Nazi war crimes are a blemish on humanity.It's not all good with a few bits of bad. Microsoft and many other companies have pretty much turned hostile against their own customer base. A few blemishes my left nut!
Companies have become openly hostile towards their target customers lately that it's not funny. They may as well plaster disclaimers about wanting your money without having to give you a product or services all over their goods. Record companies want to simulatenously label you theives and sue you while tricking you into downloading their advertising advertising through the p2p they insist is only for theives. Games companies want to install copy protection that destroys hardware, force you to activate if you even want to use your product (but hey not more than twice because if you need that you're obviously a theif) and are even installing spyware on the computer (not to mention their slave labour work practices).
So much for making an honest buck. So much for fucking customer service. So much for honesty and decency. These people get no sympathy from me. Fuck the lot of them.
You're not wrong about the 3rd grade education. I'd put my name to it, but only if I had a gun to my head quite literally. I don't believe he managed 220 signatures. I wouldn't be surprised if they were all the same person.
That said, I think you're very wrong about not just EA but the whole gaming industry. It use to be that you'd fire up a game and your only real worries were having the right hardware, meeting the specs, and making sure the reviews weren't so bad. Now you've got Starforce in demos (eg. lockon), dodgy activation in FSX, and now this spyware? It's getting so that main stream PC games aren't worth playing anymore. It's a headache and a pain doing RESEARCH to see if you've got any hope of the damn thing working. That's my leisure time, not your time to make a profit, that you're eating into. If you make it hell for me I'll simply move on to something more fun. I own a ton of games, some of which haven't left the box because of a lack of time. I intend no buying the best WinXP system I can in the next few months and then sitting out the upcoming Vista upheaval while i make sure of the games I've already paid for.
Finally, I'm guessing you're young and idealistic to make points 4 and 5 above. Do yourself a favour and learn not to do work unless you're paid in cold hard cash. If they can get it from you for free, why should they pay you? You can tell me money isn't everything, but I could take you into a hospital room and show you people that will literally die if they don't get cash. If you plan on having a family (who may get sick at the most inoportune time), or if you yourself get ill, believe me your company isn't going to show you the loyalty you're showing them now. What's more the best game you ever worked on will be a bargain bin dust gathering outdated piece of garbage in 5 years. You sound intelligent enough. I hope you make the realisation that you've swallowed a bunch of corporate baloni hook line and sinker. (Pardon the mixing of metaphors).
Paper books certainly don't have to be treated badly to stop working. Just get the thing a little wet. (Of course the electronic copy wouldn't fair better, just be a more expensive waste). DRM is not a necessary evil either, but the book publishers will have you believe it is.
Not so important for fiction but I'd love searchable reference material and I'd love to be able to carry one book and have an entire library at my fingertips. Greed on the part of the publishers unfortunately prevents this for anything still under copyright. Damn shame. We need this to move forward as a society damnit.
...invented relativity, Elle McPherson is known for her grand unified field theory, and the Olsen twins are known for their work on the human genome
What a complete and utter crock of horse shit. The correlation is meaningless. We all know some of the greatest minds were so focused on what they did that they were porkers. I know plenty of overweight people who it wouldn't pay to underestimate in the mental stakes. This is just just more ammo for the type of idiot that thinks there's nothing more to weight than being glutonous. Never mind different rates of metabolism, hunger working differently in different people and different lifestyles which though sometimes chosen aren't easily changed. No all that's too hard when you can have an attitude like "See I told you, let's pick on the fat kid cause he's stupid".
For all its bugs the reason that MS software took off is that it mostly works and does what you want it to with a little coaxing. There are exceptions and annoyances but businesses rely on Office and Windows and for the most part when they're bitten by a bug it's not too bad. Most people in business know this. Release a steaming pile of shit and that'll change quick smart. As for home users, take away their ability to play and copy media, mess with games cheaply, and mess with techy stuff etc. and they're out of there too.
We all know what piracy really does is it devalues software (by increasing supply without increasing demand - nothing at all to do with physical stealing as they would have us believe).
So to stop piracy they're going to make their software less valuable (less functional) which kinda defeats the point of preventing the piracy. Now you'll lose sales because less people will want your software because to a lot more people it's a useless piece of shit. Yep that'll teach them pirates.
Love the new MS leadership. Quick Jim, lets press the self destruct button and lets get out of here before she implodes!
Take a look at the EULA for Microsoft Flight Simulator 9 if you own it. You can only transfer license to someone else once. Latest version called FSX is coming out with activation (which amusingly has already been cracked before official release - already been distributed and some stores have accidentally sold it) and there are rumours that multiuser play is going to require a subscription.
What's new is that Microsoft seems to have convinced themselves of their own propaganda and think people will pay again and again endlessly for the same thing ala a subscription model, put up with restrictions that make the software useless in their personal circumstances, and that they'll still increase their profits because most people only do a handful of things and if they can do them will keep paying for them repeatedly.
I suspect Microsoft's going to have to deal with a rude awakening from their DRM dream in the next few years. I'll be very surprised if this tactic works. It's very much the same thing you're seeing with music and movie distributors wanting to live some economic fantasy instead of deal with the reality that some people are theives and most people won't buy things that are totally useless to them or worse actually a time wasting pain in the neck to use. In the mean time we're all in for a rough ride.
...sues their students for making fun of them? Had this come from someone not charged with educating the child, I might be more accepting. But the teachers have more face to face contact than the parents. Who cares if it happened at home or at school, if the educator hasn't taught them this is wrong, they should share the blame. Why doesn't this woman go sue herself? Pathetic.
Paper is just an early form of DRM:-) It's such a pain in the ass to copy a book that few people bother unless they have to.
I do think a paperback is easier to read than an ebook on my palm pilot. (I'm in my early 30s though so maybe that explains it). But I can carry hundreds of books on my palm and I can't do that with paper books. For me that outweighs the inconvenience.
Nothing's worse than DRM encumbered electronic text though. I HATE it when I can't search due to DRM. I hate it even more when a publisher decides to only give a printed copy to prevent copying. (I've actually had technical information on a hibernate course given to me in paper form only for this reason. Bloody ridiculous).
Slashdot Mirror
I've met Stallman. He's a hard man to respect because his social skills aren't up to par. The disrespect (and hostility) he gave me for being the only person in a suit at a University programmer's society meeting, and his dismissive answer a simple question ("How do you counter attacks that claim Linux is unfriendly". Basically he said it was news to him that it was unfriendly and moved on.)
Here's the thing us "nerds" need to remember. It's a lot easier to believe FUD uttered against an eccentric socially inept person with poor hygene and a bizzare sense of humour than it is against someone who's got some charisma and isn't an ass. Stallman may or may not be past it as a programmer, but he's got good ideas. His presentation of them lets him down big time.
Charles Simonyi is the Hungarian in Hungarian notation (you know, m_lpszUsrTxt and the like).
All in favour of shooting this guy off into space?
The I's have it. Motion carried.
You are so full of shit!
Given your odds of receiving anything other than marketing speak from the MS rep, I'll go with number 1 MS-bashing please. And I'll have the side order of fries with that please. And a coke. Gotta have a drink.
Personally, I sometimes wish I had someone else who would lock me out of administering my own machine to keep me from fucking around and breaking things
Try here:
www.careforkids.com.au/search/quick.asp
It must be that every sysadmin you ever had lock up your machine was both competent enough not to prevent you from getting your work done, and instantly available if something went wrong. Well either that or you have no idea what you're on about and have your head in the clouds.
Hasta la Visa!
If you record only (lossy) compressed data, that will limit your image quality.
If you record things "pseudo-randomly", it'll be harder to get a predictable result
If you record a billion pixels instead of a million, you'll need to store them.
If you reduce the number of pixels, you reduce your redundancy.
It's still an interesting idea and probably has some specialist applications that will be very practical. But don't look for this in your Nikon or Canon camera in the next 10 years. Not sure what they are but if it can be made small enough I imagine a gigapixel camera on a space probe or better yet a space telescope (which can have more time to collect data) might be one. Of course it could also end up useless. That doesn't mean the technology shouldn't be explored. You never know what's going to provide the next breakthrough in understanding or application.
Well I'm sure they wrote "rambling emotional emails that don't make much sense". It's called spam^H^H^H^Hadvertising.
Or put more succinctly. People and life aren't easily reduced to simple math. Focus all your skills on simple math and you won't necessarily be good at practical things like socialising.
...and then blame them and their parents for being fat and lazy. You forgot to blame them for something. Very very important to (mis)allocate the blame.
Does that mean these devices will flood the spectrum???
I don't want to get rid of my cables if it means everything interfeers with everything else. Sounds like wireless hell. However it's the first I'm hearing of this technology so I'd be very happy to be corrected.
slashdrivel - I like that.
What would the earth be like without people? The fluffy pink ponies and unicorns would come out to play. Won't you plese think of the ponies.
How is this a slashdot article let alone a front page one? When I think of the stories I submitted that were rejected then think of this one it just annoys me.
Genuine advantage, and DRM are "a few blemishes" mixed in with a lot of good stuff???? And this is modded up on slashdot? Genuine advantage and DRM are a few blemishes the way Nazi war crimes are a blemish on humanity.It's not all good with a few bits of bad. Microsoft and many other companies have pretty much turned hostile against their own customer base. A few blemishes my left nut!
Companies have become openly hostile towards their target customers lately that it's not funny. They may as well plaster disclaimers about wanting your money without having to give you a product or services all over their goods. Record companies want to simulatenously label you theives and sue you while tricking you into downloading their advertising advertising through the p2p they insist is only for theives. Games companies want to install copy protection that destroys hardware, force you to activate if you even want to use your product (but hey not more than twice because if you need that you're obviously a theif) and are even installing spyware on the computer (not to mention their slave labour work practices).
So much for making an honest buck. So much for fucking customer service. So much for honesty and decency. These people get no sympathy from me. Fuck the lot of them.
You're not wrong about the 3rd grade education. I'd put my name to it, but only if I had a gun to my head quite literally. I don't believe he managed 220 signatures. I wouldn't be surprised if they were all the same person.
That said, I think you're very wrong about not just EA but the whole gaming industry. It use to be that you'd fire up a game and your only real worries were having the right hardware, meeting the specs, and making sure the reviews weren't so bad. Now you've got Starforce in demos (eg. lockon), dodgy activation in FSX, and now this spyware? It's getting so that main stream PC games aren't worth playing anymore. It's a headache and a pain doing RESEARCH to see if you've got any hope of the damn thing working. That's my leisure time, not your time to make a profit, that you're eating into. If you make it hell for me I'll simply move on to something more fun. I own a ton of games, some of which haven't left the box because of a lack of time. I intend no buying the best WinXP system I can in the next few months and then sitting out the upcoming Vista upheaval while i make sure of the games I've already paid for.
Finally, I'm guessing you're young and idealistic to make points 4 and 5 above. Do yourself a favour and learn not to do work unless you're paid in cold hard cash. If they can get it from you for free, why should they pay you? You can tell me money isn't everything, but I could take you into a hospital room and show you people that will literally die if they don't get cash. If you plan on having a family (who may get sick at the most inoportune time), or if you yourself get ill, believe me your company isn't going to show you the loyalty you're showing them now. What's more the best game you ever worked on will be a bargain bin dust gathering outdated piece of garbage in 5 years. You sound intelligent enough. I hope you make the realisation that you've swallowed a bunch of corporate baloni hook line and sinker. (Pardon the mixing of metaphors).
"The process took hundreds of millions of years, and will take many more hundreds of millions of years".
Man the guy operating the camera needs to be sacked! Oh wait, they mean the galaxies not the picture.
http://www.mchawking.com/
Paper books certainly don't have to be treated badly to stop working. Just get the thing a little wet. (Of course the electronic copy wouldn't fair better, just be a more expensive waste). DRM is not a necessary evil either, but the book publishers will have you believe it is.
Not so important for fiction but I'd love searchable reference material and I'd love to be able to carry one book and have an entire library at my fingertips. Greed on the part of the publishers unfortunately prevents this for anything still under copyright. Damn shame. We need this to move forward as a society damnit.
...invented relativity, Elle McPherson is known for her grand unified field theory, and the Olsen twins are known for their work on the human genome
What a complete and utter crock of horse shit. The correlation is meaningless. We all know some of the greatest minds were so focused on what they did that they were porkers. I know plenty of overweight people who it wouldn't pay to underestimate in the mental stakes. This is just just more ammo for the type of idiot that thinks there's nothing more to weight than being glutonous. Never mind different rates of metabolism, hunger working differently in different people and different lifestyles which though sometimes chosen aren't easily changed. No all that's too hard when you can have an attitude like "See I told you, let's pick on the fat kid cause he's stupid".
Merde.
No bad plan.
For all its bugs the reason that MS software took off is that it mostly works and does what you want it to with a little coaxing. There are exceptions and annoyances but businesses rely on Office and Windows and for the most part when they're bitten by a bug it's not too bad. Most people in business know this. Release a steaming pile of shit and that'll change quick smart. As for home users, take away their ability to play and copy media, mess with games cheaply, and mess with techy stuff etc. and they're out of there too.
We all know what piracy really does is it devalues software (by increasing supply without increasing demand - nothing at all to do with physical stealing as they would have us believe).
So to stop piracy they're going to make their software less valuable (less functional) which kinda defeats the point of preventing the piracy. Now you'll lose sales because less people will want your software because to a lot more people it's a useless piece of shit. Yep that'll teach them pirates.
Love the new MS leadership. Quick Jim, lets press the self destruct button and lets get out of here before she implodes!
Take a look at the EULA for Microsoft Flight Simulator 9 if you own it. You can only transfer license to someone else once. Latest version called FSX is coming out with activation (which amusingly has already been cracked before official release - already been distributed and some stores have accidentally sold it) and there are rumours that multiuser play is going to require a subscription.
What's new is that Microsoft seems to have convinced themselves of their own propaganda and think people will pay again and again endlessly for the same thing ala a subscription model, put up with restrictions that make the software useless in their personal circumstances, and that they'll still increase their profits because most people only do a handful of things and if they can do them will keep paying for them repeatedly.
I suspect Microsoft's going to have to deal with a rude awakening from their DRM dream in the next few years. I'll be very surprised if this tactic works. It's very much the same thing you're seeing with music and movie distributors wanting to live some economic fantasy instead of deal with the reality that some people are theives and most people won't buy things that are totally useless to them or worse actually a time wasting pain in the neck to use. In the mean time we're all in for a rough ride.
...sues their students for making fun of them? Had this come from someone not charged with educating the child, I might be more accepting. But the teachers have more face to face contact than the parents. Who cares if it happened at home or at school, if the educator hasn't taught them this is wrong, they should share the blame. Why doesn't this woman go sue herself? Pathetic.
Paper is just an early form of DRM :-) It's such a pain in the ass to copy a book that few people bother unless they have to.
I do think a paperback is easier to read than an ebook on my palm pilot. (I'm in my early 30s though so maybe that explains it). But I can carry hundreds of books on my palm and I can't do that with paper books. For me that outweighs the inconvenience.
Nothing's worse than DRM encumbered electronic text though. I HATE it when I can't search due to DRM. I hate it even more when a publisher decides to only give a printed copy to prevent copying. (I've actually had technical information on a hibernate course given to me in paper form only for this reason. Bloody ridiculous).
In your position, I'd just grow a beard. The last thing you need to do is bring a razor as close as possible to your skin once every day or so.