Yeah we need to start increaing the signal to noise ratio around here. Maybe anonymous posters should have a 15 min delay on postings so they won't get instant gratification from posts of grit pouring or other adventurous misdeeds. At least that will kill most of the first post junk.
There are some things in life that will never be free. For all other things use Free Software.
The point is to make more software free. A DVD player is not an extremely complex project. Compiler, kernel, httpd server, desktop environment, the list goes on and on.
The point is that it is not the technical hurdles and manpower we are missing, but it is the red tape and the typical overtly-protective stance of the movie industry. Think what happened with VHS at the time they came out. The MPAA cried foul.
Supposedly. EMP tech should of come after the matrix was built. If the humans used EMP to blow up the matrix, then 'most' of mankind in the matrix would be killed. Their goal is not to kill everyone, but to save them one by one.
Yeah, I can spend all day "debating" with some self-righteous protector of freedoms. Sure.
You can do a lot of things that can cause damage to others, that are perfectly legal too. If they can find the guy who did it, they can take him in for damages under tort law.
I don't think it's a good idea to criminalize everything that causes finacial damage, or else god will have to spend a lot of time in the slammer.
You get my point now? Hopefully next time I don't need to spell it out for you.
I'm not interested in your "debate". I did not "attack" your post. I merely pointed out a flaw in your analogy. If you can't take that, go pop a blue pill and get some rest.
Your analogy is fundamentally flawed. Sending DOS attacks is no different than setting up a roadblock in front of a store. There is no actual property being damaged. To address your "blocking a service" concern, it may be unethical to hire several scores of people to call your competitors technical support line causing what amounts to a DOS attack, but probably not illegal. If your network is open, just like your door, you have to trust your visitors AND take the necessary security precautions. Also, there should be insurance for this kind of thing.
I will never "buy" Starcraft for Linux. FGS, it's two years after they relased the game. That's an eternity in the gaming world. We asked Blizzard b4, and they said, "No, no market". Now that Starcraft is showing it's age they want to milk every single last ounce of profit for it.
NO, NO WAY....
I have my CD-KEY, and I bought Starcraft once it got out. So, if Blizzard really wants to show some goodwill, they better release the game binaries free to people who already have the windows version (Just do a CD-KEY check).
Most probably they won't since they got bought out by that big firm (that had a little problem with their accounting, hehehehe).
Then again if Diablo II for Linux is good, I might consider buying it, but I will never ever buy the same game twice so I can run it on two platforms.
Games I can do without, especially those from companies that don't give about anything other than their bottom line.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Excuse me, this quote is too often used.
If Slashdot excercises editorial control over the content of the submittions it would be effectively censoring it as the true intent of the submission is discounted. Slashdot is an open forum, and not a debate. The submittion was written to convey a statment, and fortunately that statement was recieved by us intact.
This type of censorship you propose is the most dangerous, since it is the begining of the long erosion of free speech on slashdot. No-one will notice and no-one will figure it out until it is too late.
If all citizens remained content and agreeable with the laws, we would not need police to enforce them, and legislature to change them. The voice of dissent is the voice of freedom, for it symbolizes that the people still have their right to express what they believe is wrong with our society.
Without this right, both you and me are nothing more than mere drones.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin Excuse me, this quote is too often used. If Slashdot excercises editorial control over the content of the submittions it would be effectively censoring it as the true intent of the submission is discounted. Slashdot is an open forum, and not a debate. The submittion was written to convey a statment, and fortunately that statement was recieved by us intact. This type of censorship you propose is the most dangerous, since it is the begining of the long erosion of free speech on slashdot. No-one will notice and no-one will figure it out until it is too late. If all citizens remained content and agreeable with the laws, we would not need police to enforce them, and legislature to change them. The voice of dissent is the voice of freedom, for it symbolizes that the people still have their right to express what they believe is wrong with our society. Without this right, both you and me are nothing more than mere drones.
Most artists make their money going on tour. Napster is good, because it is their best promotional tool.
Why do big name bands and singers have to go on tour?
1. They like performing live 2. It's their bread and butter (income).
Why do artist need to sign on to record labels to grow?
1. They get a tiny fraction of the profit from CD sales. 2. The promotional activities that the label do aids their popularity especially when they go on tour.
Why is the RIAA scared of Napster?
1. Every 18 year old freshman can serve thousands and thousands of ripped songs on his own machine
2. However, what they are really afraid is that artist can get big and earn big bucks without going through a record label. They are scared shit because once artists realize this, the industry will go in for a major overhaul.
Naspter was not explicitly designed to pirate music, just as guns were not designed explicitly for murder. IANAGRA, however. What the RIAA and the DVD CCA is afraid of is that they will lose their iron grip on the industry, and that their cartel position would be challenged. Yes they are concerned about piracy, but they are more concerned about the common guy having access to tools which could revolutionalize music distribution and promotion.
It's like a totalitarian regime, in which the governement has control over the distribution of information because that's what keeps it in power. The same goes for these industry group. If they lose control over distribution, their days as cartels are limited.
The obvious solution which other people have suggested - filing criminal fraud charges against the record store and label - are unlikely to go anywhere because no DA will prosecute a case where the loss is the cost of a CD. Individuals will probably win in small claims court, but that's a hassle and BMG will continue to rake in money from the public -- and harm the reputation of its artists.
Alpha channel support is already in CVS as implemented as a part of GDK-pixbuf. However, to achieve a fully hardware accelerated alpha channel would require a extention to the X protocol, which the Xfree team is very intrested in, and might be eventually based on the current code, if the code is re-released under the X license. There are anti-aliasing widgets for gnome, ala Gnome-Canvas, but it is no where as low level as quartz.
However, to laugh at X is arrogant. Yes, it is ancient, but the protocol was well designed for networks, and it is very extensible.
The reason why the Nvidia driver is butt slow is because they do not support DMA. What's worse, they released obfuscated "resource manager" source releases for linux that can't even compile.
The problem with Nvidia is they want to get publicity without fully commiting. Yes, they have a problem with commitment, and yes they are run by egotistical males.
China is not a socialist country anymore. Marx's idea of state socialism did not turn out too good for the russians and the chinese. The communist party isn't really communist; they are one big tolitarian political entity doing whatever they please.
Hi Mr despite-my-age-i-have-used-many-oses, I would like to use a recent personal example to illustrate how crap Windows 2000 is.
Recently I had to chance to take on a rather odd task. I work for a telecomunications provider which has its customer service database written as a DOS program. I beleive the work was contracted out and for some reason the source was not avaible to us. Currently we have to run the program from different novell servers at different locations, connected with slow ISDN links, with syncronization only happening every night. Clearly, this posed a lot of problems for the CS deparment with different locations getting outdated infomration at different degrees.
My task was to provide a quick fix to the problem. I believe the best and cheapest way to do this was to set up a telnet server which served this program. I found the goodtech telnet server for Win9X and tried it out. It crashed the first few hours. Then I got into a w2k machine and tried the telnet server there. As I suspected, the telnet behaved exactly like my NT4 distribution did. It did not trap ANSI screen updates and escape sequences correctly. Consequently the application looked like a big mess with any terminal emulator, even the default WinNT one.
What's my point? Well, you see my final solution was to run a dosemu session in a telnet seesion in Linux. It's stable and provided all the features that I need. Most important of all, it's free, in the sense that I can know what's going on under the hood, and that it's gratis.
This is something that WTS was supposed to solve. However, my old dos apps that are still in use in the organization isn't supported in the same extent win apps are. You know something? I don't need fancy menus that fade-in in my OS. I need an OS that can provide reliable solutions to everyday problems. I don't want to, or have the time and resources to shop around for the best commercial solutions, because commercial solutions are coded by people that do not face the problems that it solves; however, most free software *is* coded by hackers who are faced with those very problems.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against w2k. I only think it is a waste of resources that I can spend much more effectively using free solutions. It is most ironic that the best solution to serving legacy DOS programs is not a MS W2k/WTS or commecial solution, but one that depends almost entirely on free software.
If your standards on judging how good an OS is is by looking if the OS has alpha-blended fade-in menus, then YES W2K is the BEST OS ON EARTH.
But I don't think it solved any more problems than NT4 did. My Linux boxens do much more and cost much less. Yes NT4 supports com+, active directory and all that shit, but I have heard that every time a new version of XXX comes out. We are not a big company that can afford a horde of developers working on big projects using the new "standards" that MS is promoting. Our staff is a bunch of hard working geeks that try to fix what's not working, and trying to make what's working work more smoothly.
State communism will not work no-matter what scale on which it is introduced. The problem lies in the fact that the enforced distribution of resources requires a strong and closed hierarchy.
The presence of a closed hierarchy promotes corruption due to unaccountable power and control over the populace, no matter if it is 100 million or 10.
A democratic political structure would be a more open hierarchy and anarchy would be the most open political structure, contrary to popular belief.
The patent system was created to protect the investment of individuals and companys and encourage the dissemination of information. However, the patent system has beeen transformed over the years as a business weapon, in which those who can afford and survive the multi-million dollar lawsuits would win. The crux of the problem lies with the perception of what a patent is. American society at the current state is so used to the concept that ideas are not only owned by individuals (but more often corporations), but also to the idea that it is a god given right for someone to exploit his or her idea, regardless of prior art, or common sense. Patents should not be thought as "owned" but rather "assigned". Patents are assigned as an incentive to make investments feasible, and that goal is noble. However, the current attitude that patents are "intellectual property" is plain wrong, and the current mess with business process patents can be attributed to this attitude. Just because a company patents a obvious process, does not by any means the company owns it. The patent is a conditional grant of a local monopoly by the government (which can be challenged), and it should be viewed as such, no more and no less.
Maybe you should update yourself on the status of GNOME development before you litter your post with shameless KDE plugs.
There several fronts on which GNOME is giving KDE a run for it's.. well.. download time..
1. Pango - GTK+ 1.4, universal text layout 2. GTK+ - Win32 port 3. GDK-pixbuf, improved image handling, alpha support 4. Gnome-vfs, virtual filesystem layer 5. lib-glade, dynamically loads a UI from XML
These are some, and there are more, fronts in which GNOME is taking the initative, most of which is work on the infrastructure. Yes KDE is futher along in applications, but there is no need to denounce GNOME because it uses esound. They decided to junk that long ago and they need a simple lightweight solution, not aRts.
The mayor should of done his research, rather than listening to Christian PAC threats to cut his campaign dollars next year.
1. The sensations exhibit was privately funded, by Christy's.
2. The art in question was produced by a nigerian/british yound artists. In that culture, elephant dung is a sign of vitality, and the use of it in that sculpture, and many others, is both paying respects to a venerating the subject matter.
I don't see your point. If you find it offensive, yes, it might be to you. However, it only shows that America has a large number of rambling bigots like Gulilani, who doesn't appreciate good art from other cultures.
Katz is right, Americans are not viewed very highly in this regard. Being arrogant on other culture's art is not good way to start changing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah we need to start increaing the signal to noise ratio around here. Maybe anonymous posters should have a 15 min delay on postings so they won't get instant gratification from posts of grit pouring or other adventurous misdeeds. At least that will kill most of the first post junk.
Not free as in beer.
There are some things in life that will never be free. For all other things use Free Software.
The point is to make more software free. A DVD player is not an extremely complex project. Compiler, kernel, httpd server, desktop environment, the list goes on and on.
The point is that it is not the technical hurdles and manpower we are missing, but it is the red tape and the typical overtly-protective stance of the movie industry. Think what happened with VHS at the time they came out. The MPAA cried foul.
Now they make billions off VHS every year.
Yup.. running them now on RH 6.1. All I can say is the XF4 is damn fast.. And KDE2 beta as well.. enjoy.. :)
Supposedly. EMP tech should of come after the matrix was built. If the humans used EMP to blow up the matrix, then 'most' of mankind in the matrix would be killed. Their goal is not to kill everyone, but to save them one by one.
Yeah, I can spend all day "debating" with some self-righteous protector of freedoms. Sure.
You can do a lot of things that can cause damage to others, that are perfectly legal too. If they can find the guy who did it, they can take him in for damages under tort law.
I don't think it's a good idea to criminalize everything that causes finacial damage, or else god will have to spend a lot of time in the slammer.
You get my point now? Hopefully next time I don't need to spell it out for you.
I'm not interested in your "debate". I did not "attack" your post. I merely pointed out a flaw in your analogy. If you can't take that, go pop a blue pill and get some rest.
Your analogy is fundamentally flawed. Sending DOS attacks is no different than setting up a roadblock in front of a store. There is no actual property being damaged. To address your "blocking a service" concern, it may be unethical to hire several scores of people to call your competitors technical support line causing what amounts to a DOS attack, but probably not illegal. If your network is open, just like your door, you have to trust your visitors AND take the necessary security precautions. Also, there should be insurance for this kind of thing.
I will never "buy" Starcraft for Linux. FGS, it's two years after they relased the game. That's an eternity in the gaming world. We asked Blizzard b4, and they said, "No, no market". Now that Starcraft is showing it's age they want to milk every single last ounce of profit for it.
NO, NO WAY....
I have my CD-KEY, and I bought Starcraft once it got out. So, if Blizzard really wants to show some goodwill, they better release the game binaries free to people who already have the windows version (Just do a CD-KEY check).
Most probably they won't since they got bought out by that big firm (that had a little problem with their accounting, hehehehe).
Then again if Diablo II for Linux is good, I might consider buying it, but I will never ever buy the same game twice so I can run it on two platforms.
Games I can do without, especially those from companies that don't give about anything other than their bottom line.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Excuse me, this quote is too often used.
If Slashdot excercises editorial control over the content of the submittions it would be effectively censoring it as the true intent of the submission is discounted. Slashdot is an open forum, and not a debate. The submittion was written to convey a statment, and fortunately that statement was recieved by us intact.
This type of censorship you propose is the most dangerous, since it is the begining of the long erosion of free speech on slashdot. No-one will notice and no-one will figure it out until it is too late.
If all citizens remained content and agreeable with the laws, we would not need police to enforce them, and legislature to change them. The voice of dissent is the voice of freedom, for it symbolizes that the people still have their right to express what they believe is wrong with our society.
Without this right, both you and me are nothing more than mere drones.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin Excuse me, this quote is too often used. If Slashdot excercises editorial control over the content of the submittions it would be effectively censoring it as the true intent of the submission is discounted. Slashdot is an open forum, and not a debate. The submittion was written to convey a statment, and fortunately that statement was recieved by us intact. This type of censorship you propose is the most dangerous, since it is the begining of the long erosion of free speech on slashdot. No-one will notice and no-one will figure it out until it is too late. If all citizens remained content and agreeable with the laws, we would not need police to enforce them, and legislature to change them. The voice of dissent is the voice of freedom, for it symbolizes that the people still have their right to express what they believe is wrong with our society. Without this right, both you and me are nothing more than mere drones.
Yeah I would setting for a couple of millions of dollars.. Yeah..
Most artists make their money going on tour. Napster is good, because it is their best promotional tool.
Why do big name bands and singers have to go on tour?
1. They like performing live
2. It's their bread and butter (income).
Why do artist need to sign on to record labels to grow?
1. They get a tiny fraction of the profit from CD sales.
2. The promotional activities that the label do aids their popularity especially when they go on tour.
Why is the RIAA scared of Napster?
1. Every 18 year old freshman can serve thousands and thousands of ripped songs on his own machine
2. However, what they are really afraid is that artist can get big and earn big bucks without going through a record label. They are scared shit because once artists realize this, the industry will go in for a major overhaul.
Naspter was not explicitly designed to pirate music, just as guns were not designed explicitly for murder. IANAGRA, however. What the RIAA and the DVD CCA is afraid of is that they will lose their iron grip on the industry, and that their cartel position would be challenged. Yes they are concerned about piracy, but they are more concerned about the common guy having access to tools which could revolutionalize music distribution and promotion.
It's like a totalitarian regime, in which the governement has control over the distribution of information because that's what keeps it in power. The same goes for these industry group. If they lose control over distribution, their days as cartels are limited.
The obvious solution which other people have suggested - filing criminal fraud charges against the record store and label - are unlikely to go anywhere because no DA will prosecute a case where the loss is the cost of a CD. Individuals will probably win in small claims court, but that's a hassle and BMG will continue to rake in money from the public -- and harm the reputation of its artists.
This is what class action lawsuits are for.
Alpha channel support is already in CVS as implemented as a part of GDK-pixbuf. However, to achieve a fully hardware accelerated alpha channel would require a extention to the X protocol, which the Xfree team is very intrested in, and might be eventually based on the current code, if the code is re-released under the X license. There are anti-aliasing widgets for gnome, ala Gnome-Canvas, but it is no where as low level as quartz.
However, to laugh at X is arrogant. Yes, it is ancient, but the protocol was well designed for networks, and it is very extensible.
*DMA*
The reason why the Nvidia driver is butt slow is because they do not support DMA. What's worse, they released obfuscated "resource manager" source releases for linux that can't even compile.
The problem with Nvidia is they want to get publicity without fully commiting. Yes, they have a problem with commitment, and yes they are run by egotistical males.
Opps... you just took away the 4 years of improvements that went into NT5 :)
China is not a socialist country anymore. Marx's idea of state socialism did not turn out too good for the russians and the chinese. The communist party isn't really communist; they are one big tolitarian political entity doing whatever they please.
Hi Mr despite-my-age-i-have-used-many-oses, I would like to use a recent personal example to illustrate how crap Windows 2000 is.
Recently I had to chance to take on a rather odd task. I work for a telecomunications provider which has its customer service database written as a DOS program. I beleive the work was contracted out and for some reason the source was not avaible to us. Currently we have to run the program from different novell servers at different locations, connected with slow ISDN links, with syncronization only happening every night. Clearly, this posed a lot of problems for the CS deparment with different locations getting outdated infomration at different degrees.
My task was to provide a quick fix to the problem. I believe the best and cheapest way to do this was to set up a telnet server which served this program. I found the goodtech telnet server for Win9X and tried it out. It crashed the first few hours. Then I got into a w2k machine and tried the telnet server there. As I suspected, the telnet behaved exactly like my NT4 distribution did. It did not trap ANSI screen updates and escape sequences correctly. Consequently the application looked like a big mess with any terminal emulator, even the default WinNT one.
What's my point? Well, you see my final solution was to run a dosemu session in a telnet seesion in Linux. It's stable and provided all the features that I need. Most important of all, it's free, in the sense that I can know what's going on under the hood, and that it's gratis.
This is something that WTS was supposed to solve. However, my old dos apps that are still in use in the organization isn't supported in the same extent win apps are. You know something? I don't need fancy menus that fade-in in my OS. I need an OS that can provide reliable solutions to everyday problems. I don't want to, or have the time and resources to shop around for the best commercial solutions, because commercial solutions are coded by people that do not face the problems that it solves; however, most free software *is* coded by hackers who are faced with those very problems.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against w2k. I only think it is a waste of resources that I can spend much more effectively using free solutions. It is most ironic that the best solution to serving legacy DOS programs is not a MS W2k/WTS or commecial solution, but one that depends almost entirely on free software.
If your standards on judging how good an OS is is by looking if the OS has alpha-blended fade-in menus, then YES W2K is the BEST OS ON EARTH.
But I don't think it solved any more problems than NT4 did. My Linux boxens do much more and cost much less. Yes NT4 supports com+, active directory and all that shit, but I have heard that every time a new version of XXX comes out. We are not a big company that can afford a horde of developers working on big projects using the new "standards" that MS is promoting. Our staff is a bunch of hard working geeks that try to fix what's not working, and trying to make what's working work more smoothly.
State communism will not work no-matter what scale on which it is introduced. The problem lies in the fact that the enforced distribution of resources requires a strong and closed hierarchy.
The presence of a closed hierarchy promotes corruption due to unaccountable power and control over the populace, no matter if it is 100 million or 10.
A democratic political structure would be a more open hierarchy and anarchy would be the most open political structure, contrary to popular belief.
The patent system was created to protect the investment of individuals and companys and encourage the dissemination of information. However, the patent system has beeen transformed over the years as a business weapon, in which those who can afford and survive the multi-million dollar lawsuits would win. The crux of the problem lies with the perception of what a patent is. American society at the current state is so used to the concept that ideas are not only owned by individuals (but more often corporations), but also to the idea that it is a god given right for someone to exploit his or her idea, regardless of prior art, or common sense. Patents should not be thought as "owned" but rather "assigned". Patents are assigned as an incentive to make investments feasible, and that goal is noble. However, the current attitude that patents are "intellectual property" is plain wrong, and the current mess with business process patents can be attributed to this attitude. Just because a company patents a obvious process, does not by any means the company owns it. The patent is a conditional grant of a local monopoly by the government (which can be challenged), and it should be viewed as such, no more and no less.
1 Slow news day
1 1/2 cups bad osOpinion author, finely chopped
1 Holy war
1/2 tsp. Microsoft beer humour
Put the slow news day and holy war into the blender and add Microsoft beer humour to taste. Garnish with bad osOpinion author.
Serve cold. Makes about 1-2 servings.
Maybe you should update yourself on the status of GNOME development before you litter your post with shameless KDE plugs.
There several fronts on which GNOME is giving KDE a run for it's.. well.. download time..
1. Pango - GTK+ 1.4, universal text layout
2. GTK+ - Win32 port
3. GDK-pixbuf, improved image handling, alpha support
4. Gnome-vfs, virtual filesystem layer
5. lib-glade, dynamically loads a UI from XML
These are some, and there are more, fronts in which GNOME is taking the initative, most of which is work on the infrastructure. Yes KDE is futher along in applications, but there is no need to denounce GNOME because it uses esound. They decided to junk that long ago and they need a simple lightweight solution, not aRts.
set the
Resolution
line in XF86Config to
Resolution 200
or
Resolution 300
Hopefully, the XFree86 team will not stop development on 4.0, even if it is true.
However, maybe it's time for the XF86 developers to open up more. I know that the 3.9.xx betas were supposed to start that process up.
The mayor should of done his research, rather than listening to Christian PAC threats to cut his campaign dollars next year.
1. The sensations exhibit was privately funded, by Christy's.
2. The art in question was produced by a nigerian/british yound artists. In that culture, elephant dung is a sign of vitality, and the use of it in that sculpture, and many others, is both paying respects to a venerating the subject matter.
I don't see your point. If you find it offensive, yes, it might be to you. However, it only shows that America has a large number of rambling bigots like Gulilani, who doesn't appreciate good art from other cultures.
Katz is right, Americans are not viewed very highly in this regard. Being arrogant on other culture's art is not good way to start changing it.
Hey, you know that driving on the right hand side is not really a standard. Japan and the rest of the commonweath drives on the left. :)
:)
Maybe they could change, but anyways, I'm not a brit. Thank you very much.