Fortunatly, we don't neen that kind of support in the UK and Europe, but in a few months when the IP laws and EU/UK version of DMCA get through we will need the likes of the EFF.
That's the wrong attitude. You should try and organize something like the EFF there BEFORE that comes to a vote, to try and make people aware of it, and how it's a bad thing.
Try being proactive, rather than reactive. It's easier to kill a bill from becoming law instead of killing the law, which (in the US, at least, not sure about European countries/EU) can only happen after it's used against someone.
I think that's the idea. If consoles aren't upgraded, and have a useful life of, say, 3 years, then for all that time developers are forced to make stuff efficient so it will run on that hardware.
Is $200-$300 every 2/3 years for a new console more expensive than the incremental upgrades on current PCs during that time to run the newest games?
But then you get stuck paying for postage. Better idea is to put his address as the return address, some made-up recipient, and then not use a return address.
Agreed. Now, if they would just be a little more upfront about this sort of thing, I'd feel a little better.
It seems like most of what we have in this regard is leaked stuff, so internally MS knows, but their public face would never admit to it (IMHO).
They'll probably forget to change the behavior when that box is checked, and so it'll still "Always trust content from Microsoft Corp."
And then they'll call it a feature.
I used to work at a supermarket where it was all too easy to get away with something like that.
There were coupons codes (4 digit, the bar code was 00000 0xxxx) for things like a BOGO shrimp ($12.99), free 1st birthday cake ($18), and so on. Plus there were lots of little ones, nothing as significant as that though, but they were sequential. One could make a night out of trying groups of codes, and in fact a few of us did.
The funny part was that the system never checked to see if you actually had bought (rather, were buying) the item that the coupon was good for, and would take off the amount anyway.
After I left, the store replaced it's backend system as part of a routine upgrade, and there were stricter controls over that, and also ways to be alerted when something odd was going on, so while it worked then, it's much harder to get away with now, at least for employees. I'm sure that any of us, as customers, could work something like that at another store where the cashiers have no idea.
For those who don't know, BOGO = Buy One Get One, as in by one, get one free.
I'll vouch for that. Having tried a number of other distros, I came to Slack and have been using it ever since; I've installed in on at least 4 computers and I recommend it wherever I can (to people who could use it, at least).
3. It's easy to use. KDE and Gnome need to be scrapped and replaced with a consistent, intuitive desktop environment.
I don't think that KDE and Gnome need to be replaced by a single app; I think they need to work together, and have their apps work together. Some people swear by Gnome, others by KDE; we saw with RH8 that some people get quite upset when you take away some of what each is.
One of the big draws (for some people) is the number of choices that they have. They're not locked into using a single WM, they can select from a few.
That said, I do believe there needs to be more standardization between Gnome and KDE, so that apps written 'natively' for one will run just as well under the other. (The clipboard comes to mind for this one.)
It definitely seems that way to me, like me picked out a small part of a question and went into detail about that, leaving other issues unaddresses (some of which I think SHOULD have been).
I don't know, seems to me that "News for Nerds. Stuf that matters" might classify as a mission statement of some kind.
That said, I don't mind much, I just found it rather strange that something like this were to be posted to the main page (less surprising would have been non-main page), still funny though.
At some point writing I must have forgotten that it was a desktop CPU in the article. Point conceded:)
You're also right about the half thing, my 800MHz goes down to 550 or 600, I believe.
has the same feature (Compaq Armada E500), although you need to enable it by installing a SpeedStep (I believe is the name) 'applet' from Intel (it's a PIII chip).
I don't see why you would need it to run at the full speed on battery anyway. If you're doing something CPU-intensive enough to need the full speed of the chip, then you can almost certainly plug it in; for most other things, half speed is more than enough and doesn't even get noticed. It's not like you're only running with half the RAM active or something like that.
In fact, you mentioned that you saw it on THG. Did you notice it at all yourself when using the laptop? Or did it run just as well, and you just like getting offended at these sort of things (which seems like exactly what you're doing here).
it obtained its monopoly freely
I'll concede that Microsoft obtained it's Windows monopoly freely. It's virtual monopoly of the browser share is hardly something I would consider having been obtained freely, though.
Microsoft began including IE with Windows, and allowed it to perform tasks that other apps simply could not do. (Hell, IE sometimes has updates to the Windows kernel code for new features).
As PCs have become more popular, more and more 'average' people have started using them. When someone brand-new to computers begins using them, they don't even know about alternatives for web browsers. They see an icon for Internet Explorer right there and they click on it, blissfully unaware that other browsers like Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. exist.
It's not harmful to those kinds of people, but what about those of us who choose to use Mozilla (or Netscape, or whatever else) and find that a good number of sites on the web are designed to only work right with IE (using IE's very lax enforcement of standards)? There was an article here on/. about how some sites are blocking non-IE browsers from even accessing them.
So we have a case of MS using it's freely established Windows monopoly to generate a browser monopoly (which is not freely established).
The reason that competitors to Windows have been so far only marginally successful is because Microsoft's actions have generally not been harmful enough to enough people to convince them that it is in their best interests to switch platforms. I don't think that's the case; I think most people don't even know that there are viable alternatives to MS software, and as such DON'T switch. What needs to happen is that these people need to be educated (although that makes this side seem like the 100% right one, which I'm sure it's not) about these alternatives, told what MS is doing, and try to convince them that the alternatives are better (which in many cases they are).
What if you were to kill/terminate the browser process? You didn't close the window, you terminated the app, and the OS closed the window. Could your copy of Windows then be bound to the agreement?
True that they could be held responsible for misconduct, but would they be? Would they try and keep any evidence of misconduct from getting out?
It wouldn't be the first time (Worldcom et al), and I think it would have been better to mandate their be at least one (possibly more) unbiased, impartial representative on any such committee; someone who didn't answer to MS and wasn't on their payroll (although odds are they would be at some point, maybe have someone in for a set term?)
When the law doesn't protect The People, then The People are not bound by the law.
The law is made to be followed. If we don't agree with what a law is, our first step should not be to immediately go out and defy it as openly and loudly as we can.
Civil disobedience is ONE way to protest a law you felt was unfair, but it should by no means be your first resort.
We The People have thus been granted the absolute moral right to hack, pirate, and reverse engineer any Microsoft product or protocol to ensure competition and compatibility.
I don't see how any court decision can grant anyone any kind of absolute moral right. A court does not make law, it interprets law, nothing to do with granting moral rights. What a person considers moral is up to them. No court can tell anyone what is and what is not moral. Courts decide what is legal and what is not, a person decides for themselves what is and is not moral. The fact that a number of laws probibit behavior most people consider immoral does not make that behavior immoral to everyone, only illegal.
But it went beyond them just bundling other products with Windows. They provided these applications with hooks into the OS that were not available to third-party developers so that no other product for the Windows platform could perform certain functions. They also seem fond of changing protocols and APIs between releases of their software as to destroy any interoperability between third-party products or replacements (Samba comes to mind).
While that doesn't make them a monopoly on their own, it's definitely exploiting a monopolistic position in order to maintain their position.
Slashdot Mirror
Any idea why he did it? The article is slashdotted already.
That's the wrong attitude. You should try and organize something like the EFF there BEFORE that comes to a vote, to try and make people aware of it, and how it's a bad thing.
Try being proactive, rather than reactive. It's easier to kill a bill from becoming law instead of killing the law, which (in the US, at least, not sure about European countries/EU) can only happen after it's used against someone.
African or European swallow?
I think that's the idea. If consoles aren't upgraded, and have a useful life of, say, 3 years, then for all that time developers are forced to make stuff efficient so it will run on that hardware.
Is $200-$300 every 2/3 years for a new console more expensive than the incremental upgrades on current PCs during that time to run the newest games?
But then you get stuck paying for postage. Better idea is to put his address as the return address, some made-up recipient, and then not use a return address.
Agreed. Now, if they would just be a little more upfront about this sort of thing, I'd feel a little better.
It seems like most of what we have in this regard is leaked stuff, so internally MS knows, but their public face would never admit to it (IMHO).
They'll probably forget to change the behavior when that box is checked, and so it'll still "Always trust content from Microsoft Corp."
And then they'll call it a feature.
How long before Bush is pushing for some law that requires the gov't to be given a copy of every one of those made?
Bah! Walmart was just the first that came to mind, that's what I get for not shopping there much. ;)
s/Walmart/Target/ and we should be alright.
It seems that prices are copyrighted. It's just a matter of time before someone like Walmart sues anyone whose prices end in .99.
There were coupons codes (4 digit, the bar code was 00000 0xxxx) for things like a BOGO shrimp ($12.99), free 1st birthday cake ($18), and so on. Plus there were lots of little ones, nothing as significant as that though, but they were sequential. One could make a night out of trying groups of codes, and in fact a few of us did.
The funny part was that the system never checked to see if you actually had bought (rather, were buying) the item that the coupon was good for, and would take off the amount anyway.
After I left, the store replaced it's backend system as part of a routine upgrade, and there were stricter controls over that, and also ways to be alerted when something odd was going on, so while it worked then, it's much harder to get away with now, at least for employees. I'm sure that any of us, as customers, could work something like that at another store where the cashiers have no idea.
For those who don't know, BOGO = Buy One Get One, as in by one, get one free.
I'll vouch for that. Having tried a number of other distros, I came to Slack and have been using it ever since; I've installed in on at least 4 computers and I recommend it wherever I can (to people who could use it, at least).
I don't think that KDE and Gnome need to be replaced by a single app; I think they need to work together, and have their apps work together. Some people swear by Gnome, others by KDE; we saw with RH8 that some people get quite upset when you take away some of what each is.
One of the big draws (for some people) is the number of choices that they have. They're not locked into using a single WM, they can select from a few.
That said, I do believe there needs to be more standardization between Gnome and KDE, so that apps written 'natively' for one will run just as well under the other. (The clipboard comes to mind for this one.)
Thank you much.
All I can figure out how to do is exclude from the main page, how exactly does one provide a more inclusive main page?
It definitely seems that way to me, like me picked out a small part of a question and went into detail about that, leaving other issues unaddresses (some of which I think SHOULD have been).
That said, I don't mind much, I just found it rather strange that something like this were to be posted to the main page (less surprising would have been non-main page), still funny though.
Why is an article from a humor/satire site (Humorix) being posted main-page to /. ?
At some point writing I must have forgotten that it was a desktop CPU in the article. Point conceded :)
You're also right about the half thing, my 800MHz goes down to 550 or 600, I believe.
I don't see why you would need it to run at the full speed on battery anyway. If you're doing something CPU-intensive enough to need the full speed of the chip, then you can almost certainly plug it in; for most other things, half speed is more than enough and doesn't even get noticed. It's not like you're only running with half the RAM active or something like that.
In fact, you mentioned that you saw it on THG. Did you notice it at all yourself when using the laptop? Or did it run just as well, and you just like getting offended at these sort of things (which seems like exactly what you're doing here).
I'll concede that Microsoft obtained it's Windows monopoly freely. It's virtual monopoly of the browser share is hardly something I would consider having been obtained freely, though.
Microsoft began including IE with Windows, and allowed it to perform tasks that other apps simply could not do. (Hell, IE sometimes has updates to the Windows kernel code for new features).
As PCs have become more popular, more and more 'average' people have started using them. When someone brand-new to computers begins using them, they don't even know about alternatives for web browsers. They see an icon for Internet Explorer right there and they click on it, blissfully unaware that other browsers like Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. exist.
It's not harmful to those kinds of people, but what about those of us who choose to use Mozilla (or Netscape, or whatever else) and find that a good number of sites on the web are designed to only work right with IE (using IE's very lax enforcement of standards)? There was an article here on
So we have a case of MS using it's freely established Windows monopoly to generate a browser monopoly (which is not freely established).
The reason that competitors to Windows have been so far only marginally successful is because Microsoft's actions have generally not been harmful enough to enough people to convince them that it is in their best interests to switch platforms.
I don't think that's the case; I think most people don't even know that there are viable alternatives to MS software, and as such DON'T switch. What needs to happen is that these people need to be educated (although that makes this side seem like the 100% right one, which I'm sure it's not) about these alternatives, told what MS is doing, and try to convince them that the alternatives are better (which in many cases they are).
What if you were to kill/terminate the browser process? You didn't close the window, you terminated the app, and the OS closed the window. Could your copy of Windows then be bound to the agreement?
True that they could be held responsible for misconduct, but would they be? Would they try and keep any evidence of misconduct from getting out?
It wouldn't be the first time (Worldcom et al), and I think it would have been better to mandate their be at least one (possibly more) unbiased, impartial representative on any such committee; someone who didn't answer to MS and wasn't on their payroll (although odds are they would be at some point, maybe have someone in for a set term?)
The law is made to be followed. If we don't agree with what a law is, our first step should not be to immediately go out and defy it as openly and loudly as we can.
Civil disobedience is ONE way to protest a law you felt was unfair, but it should by no means be your first resort.
We The People have thus been granted the absolute moral right to hack, pirate, and reverse engineer any Microsoft product or protocol to ensure competition and compatibility.
I don't see how any court decision can grant anyone any kind of absolute moral right. A court does not make law, it interprets law, nothing to do with granting moral rights. What a person considers moral is up to them. No court can tell anyone what is and what is not moral. Courts decide what is legal and what is not, a person decides for themselves what is and is not moral. The fact that a number of laws probibit behavior most people consider immoral does not make that behavior immoral to everyone, only illegal.
While that doesn't make them a monopoly on their own, it's definitely exploiting a monopolistic position in order to maintain their position.