The EULA snippet from above appears in WMPlayer versions 7 onward. This is why they went with 6.4, as this requirement does not show up in 6.4's EULA.
I'm pretty sure I saw the "you must own a licensed copy" restriction when I skimmed the 6.4 EULA, but as someone else pointed out, it doesn't actually say that you have to install WMP on that OS specifically.
I think CodeWeavers is just leaving the responsibility for the legality of installing WMP in the hands of their users (rightly so) -- I noticed when installing there were instructions to "read the EULA carefully" or somesuch.
Any comment that starts off by saying "Ha, damn those creationist bastards, they're all stupid and don't believe in science.", makes you look about as intelligent as the cockroach in my bathroom.
Hey, be careful, that cockroach could someday mutate and evolve into the dominant species on this planet.
(Sorry, couldn't resist -- your point is valid nevertheless)
# This works best if you run a web server that sends a redirect to
# a transparent image for non-found errors.
Oh, I disagree. I personally get a little twinge of joy every time my browser shows a grey banner ad-shaped box with "Not Found" in big black letters at the top of a web page. But that's just me.
How the Chinese government runs China is the business of exactly one group: the Chinese government.
Allow me to disagree: How the Chinese government runs China is the business of the Chinese people.
Now, cultural relativism is fine and all, and China certainly has a lot of unique problems to deal with. But I think there are some cases where the line must be drawn. If the government is deliberately putting its own interests above those of the people it supposedly serves then I for one think the moral imperative to "meddle" exists, at least through non-aggressive means such as lobbying and trade restrictions.
This is only true when you are faster than the system. The user's resources are limited, there's no way to upgrade the processor inside your head (afawk). The processor on your desk, however, will be 2x faster in 18 months anyway, so system resources should always take second place to user resources.
Actually, it's even simpler than you think. You never need to put the machine ahead of the user, you just have to take into account the fact that an overloaded machine, performing poorly, wastes the user's time as well as its own.
It always grinds down to the user's time.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Comments get caught in a vicious cycle of failing to be moderated up once an article topic has reached a hundred posts or more
Yes. This, obviously, is a consequence of people's reading habits: moderators tend to be those who read stories within a few minutes of their being posted, thereby diminishing the chances of later posts being moderated.
Since changing that pattern would seem to be pretty much impossible, I'd suggest separating the pattern from moderation instead. Thus, we'd have something like M2: You have to go to a separate page and get a random selection of posts to moderate. Unfortunately, this would make moderation substantially more work -- which may or may not be a bad thing. Who knows, it could even reduce abuses. On the other hand, you'd probably want a bigger moderators pool to compensate for those who won't bother.
I'm not sure how bad that problem is, though. How heavily is M2 used? I know I never use it (but I hardly ever use my moderator points when I get them either.)
Anonymous coward posting needs to be seriously rethought. CmdrTaco will insist on it being allowed. I'd propose a "Yale Wall" solution
Mmmmph. I don't know about this. Is it substantially different from using a +1 score threshold if you don't want to see the "unvetted" AC comments? I suppose one might miss less with your solution, but instructing moderators to focus on raising good AC posts above 0 and increasing the number of points + moderators available might alleviate that.
Notification of current moderation status of a post should be given before moderation points are committed
Absolutely. It's a wonder this hasn't been implemented yet! Although you realize it's not a complete solution -- there will still be a window of time where people can submit duplicate moderations -- it'd just be a smaller one.
Score based filters are limited. [...] allow filtering out posts according to criterion.
Also agreed. Along those same lines, and somewhat aside, I'd like to see stories be assigned more than one topic (eg a story about SGI supporting Linux doesn't just get in the "Linux" category or just the "SGI" category.) Along with which users should be granted more flexibility in filtering what stories they see on the main page.
Let's see, it's been 11 hours since the story was posted. No moderation for me!
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
but I thought the point to Mozilla is that it was going to have a *smaller* footprint than, say, Netscape.
Eh. I don't know if low memory consumption was one of the primary design goals, but if so they haven't reached it yet. I've compiled my own with sources from 4 days ago and it's distressingly worse than Netscape in terms of memory use.
And that was with --enable-optimize and --disable-debug arguments passed to configure. I desperately want to see Mozilla succeed, and I've no doubt it will be a worthy rival to IE, but I'm not sure if it will be suitable for low-memory machines.
On the other hand, I remember reading about it being adopted for some low-cost "web appliances", which I have to assume won't be very memory-rich. So perhaps this is just pre-code optimization bloat. I sure hope so.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
The Katz entry: Are consumers really well served when one company controls more content and access than any other company in the world?
Well, John, hasn't one company or another always been #1?
In content or access, yes. Not both at once; that's the problem. My God, I'm defending Katz./me takes a deep breath
From Brock Meeks: no company should be allowed to own the content as well as the conduit
Hmmm... guess that puts an end to home delivery of newspapers. And those damn local TV stations better quit doing local newscasts as well.
Newspapers do not own the streets. TV stations do not own the electromagnetic spectrum. Again, you're not thinking this through far enough. The difference is that in your examples, content providers do not control the means of distribution, and therefore cannot prevent anyone else from using them.
Whether TWAOL would actually try to do such a thing is of course debatable, but the situation is uncomfortable nonetheless. . SNF.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
"Racist" is putting it pretty strongly. Seems to me the site's humour is mainly based on the Québec spoken-only version of French ("joual") put into written form. A Yahoo! site is really just a convenient backdrop.
The rest of the joke is really just the ironic link targets, like a the a link to "Ottawa" (capital of Canada) pointing to a site about the semi-terroristic separatist group FLQ (now demised, as far as I know).
If you do consider writing down joual racist, I'm not really the butt of the joke being an anglo (English-speaking Québecer don't get me started), but I don't think any Québecer with any detectable sense of humour would find this offensive.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Mr. Dvorak thinks that either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs should have been Person of the Year in Time? I mean, c'mon, Jeff Beezos (sorry if spelled wrong) isn't worthy, but in all honesty, he's more worthy than either of those two.
Not to mention the fact that not ten lines later his "biggest event #3" is "E-commerce shows no signs of stopping."
Hello? Anybody home?
Yeesh. I'm seriously beginning to think ZD keeps this guy around either for comedy relief or flamage generation, under the assumption that there's no such thing as bad attention.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Well, it's kind of hard to compare data here. When you say "days at a time", what kind of days are they? Hour upon hour of frantic link-clicking through all kinds of weird-ass CSS2/HTML4/JavaScript whatever sites, or just reloading Slashdot every 30 minutes?
They're using FullCircle info from their milestone builds, so I guess their metric is one hour of "average use" -- that is, the average use by people who like to run pre-alpha browsers. I would guess that means more stressful use than normal.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
No, I'd say an hour is fairly acceptable for an alpha version. That would already be an improvement over Netscape 4.x.
You see, this, as everything, is a question of compromise. Do you want to wait another few years until they can get it absolutely perfect without any outside help, or do you want a pre-release that will be widely circulated so that they can see how the code in its current state stands up to real-world use and abuse, potentially accelerating the bugfixing by several orders of magnitude?
Your comparison with machine shop equipment is bogus. Downtime on such gear is extremely expensive and nearly intolerable. If your browser crashes, you sigh and kick it back up. Nevertheless, I will agree that an hour MTBF is completely unacceptable for a true release. Fortunately, thanks to open source development, it doesn't have to be.
And please, it's "horribly inadequate". Isn't it embarrassing to put glaring spelling mistakes in bold?
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Wine and this Bridge utility serve completely different purposes, and I have no idea what leap of logic could lead one to the conclusion that Corel is dropping Wine support.
Corel wants Wine mainly for winelib, which allows it to build Linux native executable versions from its existing Windows codebase with a minimum of fuss.
GraphOn's Bridges allows you to run Windows applications on a remote server, and have them displayed locally (much like X clients). Unless Corel has suddenly dropped the licensed-software model in favour of "application rentals" from the desktop, which would be a pretty rash move even by Corel's standards, I really don't see the "threat" here.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Actually, it's so loose it can't even be likened to the GPL. It's in the public domain, which means anyone can do any kind of derivitave work from it and copyright the results if they care to.
In other words, it's BSD-licensed.
This is truly hilarious; having a GPL vs. BSD argument over an 1100-year old book.
Priceless.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
For example, how can you be accountable for your lies about a product, but at the same time anonymous enough to speak out against a totalitarian regime? One requires untraceability, one requires traceability.
You've missed the possibility of a system where one can choose whether one wants to be traceable or not, on a per-message basis. In the former case, if you're issuing (possibly false) claims about a product, you're credibility is close to nil if you're deliberately masking your identity. In the latter case, simply choose anonymity.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Eh? The non-commercial version is now priced at US$99. The commercial version, incidentally, is US$299. I'd love to be able to use it at work, but I can't get approval at that price... Sigh.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
What do you mean, reading past the first page! Dammit, used to be that you the goody-two-shoes contingent on slashdot was content with demanding readers just click the link to the story! Now you want us not only to read it, we should read past the first page? This is going too far.
Due to the effects of moderation, karma, and the "10 hot comments" box, Slashdot discussions are becoming increasingly contaminated by worthwhile opinions supported by actual "facts". The proportion of trolls and flamewars is dropping dangerously.
We need immediate action. I propose that any user introducing unjustifiable amounts of well-researched information into a discussion be immediately punished by having a link to his webserver published in an article, or, failing that, the equivalent penalty of ICMP flooding.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Volkerding (sp?) has shown excellent judgment, methinks. While glibc 2.0 was very nice, and indeed very stable, it was never meant to be put to such wide use as it has. People have bitched at the glibc team for breaking compatibility between 2.0 and 2.1, but that's entirely their prerogative, especially since there were warnings attached to 2.0 anyways. The blame really belongs with all the distros that put what they knew (or at least should have known) to be pre-release software into such heavy use.
I understand this is the same reason the XFree team has closed their development process as well...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Ok, I'm not so sure anymore. Although that setting blocked the extraneous cookies from C|Net, I just got prompted for cookies from oz.valueclick.com while viewing www.osnews.com.
I guess whatever check Netscape is using to determine that condition (cookie originating from a different server than the page) fails under certain conditions.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Slashdot Mirror
It also has controllers that fit human hands
Look at the page source -- there is no CGI, it's all done in JavaScript.
Oh yes, in 2003, to be exact.
It's unclear to me how anyone could confuse serial numbers with a placenta. I think the word you're looking for is "panacea".
Are you saying you can play Sorenson-encoded QuickTime movies with Xine? If so, this is (big) news to me.
That's RIAA, just FYI.
I'm pretty sure I saw the "you must own a licensed copy" restriction when I skimmed the 6.4 EULA, but as someone else pointed out, it doesn't actually say that you have to install WMP on that OS specifically.
WMP7 just doesn't work yet, to wit.
I think CodeWeavers is just leaving the responsibility for the legality of installing WMP in the hands of their users (rightly so) -- I noticed when installing there were instructions to "read the EULA carefully" or somesuch.
Hey, be careful, that cockroach could someday mutate and evolve into the dominant species on this planet.
(Sorry, couldn't resist -- your point is valid nevertheless)
# a transparent image for non-found errors.
Oh, I disagree. I personally get a little twinge of joy every time my browser shows a grey banner ad-shaped box with "Not Found" in big black letters at the top of a web page. But that's just me.
Allow me to disagree: How the Chinese government runs China is the business of the Chinese people.
Now, cultural relativism is fine and all, and China certainly has a lot of unique problems to deal with. But I think there are some cases where the line must be drawn. If the government is deliberately putting its own interests above those of the people it supposedly serves then I for one think the moral imperative to "meddle" exists, at least through non-aggressive means such as lobbying and trade restrictions.
Actually, it's even simpler than you think. You never need to put the machine ahead of the user, you just have to take into account the fact that an overloaded machine, performing poorly, wastes the user's time as well as its own.
It always grinds down to the user's time.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Yes. This, obviously, is a consequence of people's reading habits: moderators tend to be those who read stories within a few minutes of their being posted, thereby diminishing the chances of later posts being moderated.
Since changing that pattern would seem to be pretty much impossible, I'd suggest separating the pattern from moderation instead. Thus, we'd have something like M2: You have to go to a separate page and get a random selection of posts to moderate. Unfortunately, this would make moderation substantially more work -- which may or may not be a bad thing. Who knows, it could even reduce abuses. On the other hand, you'd probably want a bigger moderators pool to compensate for those who won't bother.
I'm not sure how bad that problem is, though. How heavily is M2 used? I know I never use it (but I hardly ever use my moderator points when I get them either.)
Anonymous coward posting needs to be seriously rethought. CmdrTaco will insist on it being allowed. I'd propose a "Yale Wall" solution
Mmmmph. I don't know about this. Is it substantially different from using a +1 score threshold if you don't want to see the "unvetted" AC comments? I suppose one might miss less with your solution, but instructing moderators to focus on raising good AC posts above 0 and increasing the number of points + moderators available might alleviate that.
Notification of current moderation status of a post should be given before moderation points are committed
Absolutely. It's a wonder this hasn't been implemented yet! Although you realize it's not a complete solution -- there will still be a window of time where people can submit duplicate moderations -- it'd just be a smaller one.
Score based filters are limited. [...] allow filtering out posts according to criterion.
Also agreed. Along those same lines, and somewhat aside, I'd like to see stories be assigned more than one topic (eg a story about SGI supporting Linux doesn't just get in the "Linux" category or just the "SGI" category.) Along with which users should be granted more flexibility in filtering what stories they see on the main page.
Let's see, it's been 11 hours since the story was posted. No moderation for me!
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Eh. I don't know if low memory consumption was one of the primary design goals, but if so they haven't reached it yet. I've compiled my own with sources from 4 days ago and it's distressingly worse than Netscape in terms of memory use.
And that was with --enable-optimize and --disable-debug arguments passed to configure. I desperately want to see Mozilla succeed, and I've no doubt it will be a worthy rival to IE, but I'm not sure if it will be suitable for low-memory machines.
On the other hand, I remember reading about it being adopted for some low-cost "web appliances", which I have to assume won't be very memory-rich. So perhaps this is just pre-code optimization bloat. I sure hope so.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Well, John, hasn't one company or another always been #1?
In content or access, yes. Not both at once; that's the problem. /me takes a deep breath
My God, I'm defending Katz.
From Brock Meeks: no company should be allowed to own the content as well as the conduit
Hmmm... guess that puts an end to home delivery of newspapers. And those damn local TV stations better quit doing local newscasts as well.
Newspapers do not own the streets. TV stations do not own the electromagnetic spectrum.
Again, you're not thinking this through far enough. The difference is that in your examples, content providers do not control the means of distribution, and therefore cannot prevent anyone else from using them.
Whether TWAOL would actually try to do such a thing is of course debatable, but the situation is uncomfortable nonetheless. . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
The rest of the joke is really just the ironic link targets, like a the a link to "Ottawa" (capital of Canada) pointing to a site about the semi-terroristic separatist group FLQ (now demised, as far as I know).
If you do consider writing down joual racist, I'm not really the butt of the joke being an anglo (English-speaking Québecer don't get me started), but I don't think any Québecer with any detectable sense of humour would find this offensive.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Not to mention the fact that not ten lines later his "biggest event #3" is "E-commerce shows no signs of stopping."
Hello? Anybody home?
Yeesh. I'm seriously beginning to think ZD keeps this guy around either for comedy relief or flamage generation, under the assumption that there's no such thing as bad attention.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Well, it's kind of hard to compare data here. When you say "days at a time", what kind of days are they? Hour upon hour of frantic link-clicking through all kinds of weird-ass CSS2/HTML4/JavaScript whatever sites, or just reloading Slashdot every 30 minutes?
They're using FullCircle info from their milestone builds, so I guess their metric is one hour of "average use" -- that is, the average use by people who like to run pre-alpha browsers. I would guess that means more stressful use than normal.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
You see, this, as everything, is a question of compromise. Do you want to wait another few years until they can get it absolutely perfect without any outside help, or do you want a pre-release that will be widely circulated so that they can see how the code in its current state stands up to real-world use and abuse, potentially accelerating the bugfixing by several orders of magnitude?
Your comparison with machine shop equipment is bogus. Downtime on such gear is extremely expensive and nearly intolerable. If your browser crashes, you sigh and kick it back up. Nevertheless, I will agree that an hour MTBF is completely unacceptable for a true release. Fortunately, thanks to open source development, it doesn't have to be.
And please, it's "horribly inadequate". Isn't it embarrassing to put glaring spelling mistakes in bold?
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Corel wants Wine mainly for winelib, which allows it to build Linux native executable versions from its existing Windows codebase with a minimum of fuss.
GraphOn's Bridges allows you to run Windows applications on a remote server, and have them displayed locally (much like X clients). Unless Corel has suddenly dropped the licensed-software model in favour of "application rentals" from the desktop, which would be a pretty rash move even by Corel's standards, I really don't see the "threat" here.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
In other words, it's BSD-licensed.
This is truly hilarious; having a GPL vs. BSD argument over an 1100-year old book.
Priceless.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
You've missed the possibility of a system where one can choose whether one wants to be traceable or not, on a per-message basis. In the former case, if you're issuing (possibly false) claims about a product, you're credibility is close to nil if you're deliberately masking your identity. In the latter case, simply choose anonymity.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Eh? The non-commercial version is now priced at US$99. The commercial version, incidentally, is US$299. I'd love to be able to use it at work, but I can't get approval at that price... Sigh.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Due to the effects of moderation, karma, and the "10 hot comments" box, Slashdot discussions are becoming increasingly contaminated by worthwhile opinions supported by actual "facts". The proportion of trolls and flamewars is dropping dangerously.
We need immediate action. I propose that any user introducing unjustifiable amounts of well-researched information into a discussion be immediately punished by having a link to his webserver published in an article, or, failing that, the equivalent penalty of ICMP flooding.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
I understand this is the same reason the XFree team has closed their development process as well...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
I guess whatever check Netscape is using to determine that condition (cookie originating from a different server than the page) fails under certain conditions.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty