"If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy."
Wow - how great ! No more Independance Day movies, no more Jerry Springer show, no more Britney spears either... yeah, we would really miss the Hollywood studios "culture"
I perfectly agree - whatever is legal or illegal is getting quite irrelevant when any 10 y.o. can log into IRC and get all the warez, crackz, mp3z and moviez he wants in a few minuts. He might not be anonymous, but being lost in the middle of a big crowd is already a big protection.
Still, I think every concerned hacker around should help the Freenet project - the Death Star that will make all MPAA and RIAA resistance totally futile and useless.
we've all been screwed over by the government as they keep extending, even retroactively, the copyright term
Duh ! Why do you Americans, when you get screwed by big business, always blame your governement ? Those copyright laws were made BY corporations FOR corporations, they just bought a bunch of loosy officials that are there because YOU, the American citizens, are not voting the way you should.
Your sentence is really typical of the US : long rant about how your rights are taken away by corporations and capitalism, then you finish your rant by putting the blame on the governement. Well, I'm sorry, but your gov don't give a sh* about what you do with your DVD, it is the MPAA and Hollywood studios who do. Go after the REAL enemy, and if you don't like your governement, VOTE, or better, get into politics.
How about the cops visiting your home to take the PC that holds your very private collection of DeCSS and other soon to be illegal software and code ? Wouldn't it be nice that as soon as they unplug the PC to take it to their lab, they can't read the hard drive anymore ?
I'm sorry but Mozilla or Netscape 6.0 are still alpha or beta release and are MUCH more unstable than IE. So far IE 5 and 5.5 are very stable (I have work with IE 5.5 9h a day and it NEVER crashes on me). IE is more standard compliant than Netscape, and even non standard stuff in IE are very usefull. HTML+TIME or filters might not be W3C approved, but they are easy to use and VERY usefull (and cool).
I now write my pages for IE 4.0+. I take care to check that the page are readable under netscape 4+, but my pages looks much better under IE. No, I don't use IE specific tags - I use CSS features that Netscape doesn't support (such as table borders, alpha channel tranparency, etc.) but work under IE and mozilla. 85% of my visitors use IE 4+ so giving up neat eyes candy is not worth it anymore.
As a Christian, I think free thinking is vitally important. If you can't think critically, how can you be sure of your beliefs?
Duh - free thinking is the enemy of all religions. Religions are baised on FAITH, and faith requires you to trust something without hard proof of its existence. Free thinkers have been hunted down and prosecuted by most religions, because one day or another the free-thinkers start to question the religion teaching (ie "is earth really the center of the universe ?" or "why is the Bible so self contradicting ?").
They all say God or Jesus is in your heart because you think with your brain, not your heart...
Well if God was indeed interested in having as many humans being Christian as possible, he would just write in plain huge fire letters "Believe in Me in the sky" and make it visible from anywhere on earth. How can an omnipotent and omniscient entity use such a loosy medium (a book) to express itself, especially when it was supposed to be written at a time when even paper wasn't invented yet.
The bible is an open-source product, written by a bunch or religious nerds accross history, rewritten, updated, patched, translated, ported and compiled hundreds of times. If God ever written his words in it, there is probably not much left of it now.
Yeah - like someone can come up with anything serious about the possible 2000 years history that would have had happen if X or Y didn't happen. Humm, maybe western science wouldn't have been hindered by the stupid Holy Inquisition and we would have gained 2 or 3 centuries worth of science - meaning I would be typing this from my home on Mars.
One has to wonder about a religion claiming that pleasure is a sin and brings to hell, while suffering is good and brings to heaven. I mean, how more sick can this be ?
I think this is all just another myth... the reason why they go with the Rage128 Pro and not the Radeon is that, the Cube being fanless and cramped, they need a chipset that doesn't requires active cooling. A Rage128 Pro manufactured on the same process as Radeon will make a lot less heat.
You are wrong : supply and demand is when you set price according to competition and scarcity/abondance of products.
Setting psychological prices is NOT supply and demand. It is when you control the whole market (norrowly : you are the only one to have Starwars copyrights, or widely : you are the only one to make a win32 complient OS). In this situation you set the price according to what your customers are ready to pay for the product. Supply and demand is especially irrelevant in the information market (software/music/movies) because you can press about as many CDs/DVDs as you can sell. This is why there are region zones : to let the video industry set psychological prices in every region (higher in US & Europe, lower in China and India) without having people make gray imports from countries where the DVD is the cheapest.
Capitalism doesn't work that way anymore. It doesn't matter what people want :
a) spread a big amount of cash on advertising and marketing b) offer rabate, coupons and gold platted limited editions to convince the most resistant customers c) lock market (DeCSS, region codding) d) merge with your competitors (why compete when controlling the whole market can be so much more lucrative). merging with medias is also a good way of having a good way to control the consummers for a cheap price e) sue anybody who stands in your way
This is why most corporation now set the prices of their product not based on the real cost of manufacturing, or the competitor price, but on the psychological price people are ready to put for the item.
I bought Tank Police DVD in the US, and my native language not being English, I tried to have both the English dubbing track+English subtitles to help understanding. Well, it turned out I switched to Japanese soundtrack+English subtitles, because the English subtitles and English dubbing were significantly different ! It felt so weird !
I dunno, why do they all have to make expensive good looking computers - or ugly cheap looking PC boxes ? why can't some make a PC case as good looking as an Apple G4 or Cube ?
I think this is grossly underevaluated. Sure, moste companies in the western world have legit licences, but everywhere else (third-world & home users) there are not much licenced MS software. I'd said 80 to 90% of it is not legit. Of course if they didn't sold Excel alone for 500$ bucks over here, they wouldn't be pirated so much (wtf ! 500$ for a spreadsheet ? this is nuts)
But don't worry to much for MS, according to their financial datas, they make a gross margin of 86% and a profit margin of 40%. Any other business would DREAM of being so profitable.
What's the problem ? All apps into "Program files", all system in "Windows" and libs in "Windows\System", all user files into "My Document". Can't get easier than that. If you want to uninstall an app under windows, and don't feel like using the uninstall system (which is cool BTW) you can still just delete its directory and that's pretty much it. All apps configuration is kept into one single hierarchical system (the registry).
On the other most Unixes use several directories for executables (both system commands and extra-apps), several directories for libs, and worst, mixes everything together (ie "all apps binaries in the same dirs" and "all libs into the same dirs"). Configuration itself is done thru independent text files that are also sprayed all over the place. And all this even change between distro ! As far as I'm concerned, the way files are organised (or rather : not organised) in Linux totally sucks. It gets a little better with the *BSD, but still a mess anyway.
Are you speaking of the guys at the FBI who bait people in chat rooms into agreeing to have sex with underage kids ? Yeah - they are really nice people, since going after criminals who DID something wrong is so difficult for them, they need to lure disturbed people into commiting crimes so that they can arrest them. Sounds like the Soviet union to me...
Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 1
Not true : an OS might mature, but the hardware doesn't work that way. When X-Windows was created, the world of computer hardware was totally different. People used dumb text or graphic terminals to plug into mainframes. Remote computing was king because real computers were expensive, while at the same time things such as 2D and 3D hardware acceleration was merely a dream. In those times, X-Windows made sense. Now everybody can buy a PC for 400 $, and have an hardware accelerated display in it. This hardware is made to be FAST, not hindered by a display API which has huge overhead, especially since the vast majority of X-Windows users don't even use it for remote display. It is pathetic to put a GeForce 2 GTS and 64 Meg of DDR RAM, and then pilot this screaming hardware with the bloated X-Windows.
Hardware changes fast, and the software that harness it can't stay the same for 30 years, even if it is well thought. And since OS is the interface between apps and hardware, it sometimes has to be completely redesigned and not just incrementaly upgraded.
Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 1
20 years of development
you said it... it's outdated and bloated now. Look at BeOS : new, simple, lean == very fast, flexible, easy to maintain and code for.
I don't know how often you use remote display, but as far as my daily usage is concerned, I'd trade remote display against fast & clean graphic API anyday. Having fast games and responsive display is much more usefull than remote display, which can be done anyway with things like VNC.
Or where does it says it can bans "tactical nukes, bacteriologic and chimical nukes, cruse missiles, cluster bombs, napalm, battleships, mortars, etc..." . Do you think we shall let anybody buy any kind of destruction tool he/she can afford ? Where do you draw the line ? Why ? If you trully believe in the 2nd amendment then you should lobby for letting anyone buy or build his own neutron bomb in his backyard and carry it around in his car.
There's not much to understand - it means every able-bodied man has a gun and knows how to use it.
...except that in "well regulated miltia" there're the words "well regulated". So obviously the governement (who else ?) has to regulate the milita, which means controling who can and cannot carry a gun, train the people who can, etc... in fact there's already a "well regulated militia" : it's called the army !
The whole MacOS and MacOS apps used to be coded in Pascal, not C. OK it was in the 80s, but still, that would cound as a (very) large project. Borland has sold hundreds of thausands of copies of Delphi, so I bet many apps (including very big ones) are still written in Object Pascal.
The only reason (almost) everybody use C (or C++) is the same reason (almost) everybody uses Windows : it is the standard. Nobody seems to care that it really sucks.
Well for the DBE, you can use a ODBC component instead (like the free mODBC or some other paying ones). They integrate flawlessly with other Delphi DB components and you can then distribute the.exe alone (since all Windows installs come with the ODBC API)
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"If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy."
Wow - how great ! No more Independance Day movies, no more Jerry Springer show, no more Britney spears either... yeah, we would really miss the Hollywood studios "culture"
I perfectly agree - whatever is legal or illegal is getting quite irrelevant when any 10 y.o. can log into IRC and get all the warez, crackz, mp3z and moviez he wants in a few minuts. He might not be anonymous, but being lost in the middle of a big crowd is already a big protection.
Still, I think every concerned hacker around should help the Freenet project - the Death Star that will make all MPAA and RIAA resistance totally futile and useless.
we've all been screwed over by the government as they keep extending, even retroactively, the copyright term
Duh ! Why do you Americans, when you get screwed by big business, always blame your governement ? Those copyright laws were made BY corporations FOR corporations, they just bought a bunch of loosy officials that are there because YOU, the American citizens, are not voting the way you should.
Your sentence is really typical of the US : long rant about how your rights are taken away by corporations and capitalism, then you finish your rant by putting the blame on the governement. Well, I'm sorry, but your gov don't give a sh* about what you do with your DVD, it is the MPAA and Hollywood studios who do. Go after the REAL enemy, and if you don't like your governement, VOTE, or better, get into politics.
How about the cops visiting your home to take the PC that holds your very private collection of DeCSS and other soon to be illegal software and code ? Wouldn't it be nice that as soon as they unplug the PC to take it to their lab, they can't read the hard drive anymore ?
I'm sorry but Mozilla or Netscape 6.0 are still alpha or beta release and are MUCH more unstable than IE. So far IE 5 and 5.5 are very stable (I have work with IE 5.5 9h a day and it NEVER crashes on me). IE is more standard compliant than Netscape, and even non standard stuff in IE are very usefull. HTML+TIME or filters might not be W3C approved, but they are easy to use and VERY usefull (and cool).
I now write my pages for IE 4.0+. I take care to check that the page are readable under netscape 4+, but my pages looks much better under IE. No, I don't use IE specific tags - I use CSS features that Netscape doesn't support (such as table borders, alpha channel tranparency, etc.) but work under IE and mozilla. 85% of my visitors use IE 4+ so giving up neat eyes candy is not worth it anymore.
As a Christian, I think free thinking is vitally important. If you can't think critically, how can you be sure of your beliefs?
Duh - free thinking is the enemy of all religions. Religions are baised on FAITH, and faith requires you to trust something without hard proof of its existence. Free thinkers have been hunted down and prosecuted by most religions, because one day or another the free-thinkers start to question the religion teaching (ie "is earth really the center of the universe ?" or "why is the Bible so self contradicting ?").
They all say God or Jesus is in your heart because you think with your brain, not your heart...
Well if God was indeed interested in having as many humans being Christian as possible, he would just write in plain huge fire letters "Believe in Me in the sky" and make it visible from anywhere on earth. How can an omnipotent and omniscient entity use such a loosy medium (a book) to express itself, especially when it was supposed to be written at a time when even paper wasn't invented yet.
The bible is an open-source product, written by a bunch or religious nerds accross history, rewritten, updated, patched, translated, ported and compiled hundreds of times. If God ever written his words in it, there is probably not much left of it now.
Yeah - like someone can come up with anything serious about the possible 2000 years history that would have had happen if X or Y didn't happen. Humm, maybe western science wouldn't have been hindered by the stupid Holy Inquisition and we would have gained 2 or 3 centuries worth of science - meaning I would be typing this from my home on Mars.
One has to wonder about a religion claiming that pleasure is a sin and brings to hell, while suffering is good and brings to heaven. I mean, how more sick can this be ?
I dunno about the media, but he certainly had more guts than most people here (me included).
I think this is all just another myth... the reason why they go with the Rage128 Pro and not the Radeon is that, the Cube being fanless and cramped, they need a chipset that doesn't requires active cooling. A Rage128 Pro manufactured on the same process as Radeon will make a lot less heat.
You are wrong : supply and demand is when you set price according to competition and scarcity/abondance of products.
Setting psychological prices is NOT supply and demand. It is when you control the whole market (norrowly : you are the only one to have Starwars copyrights, or widely : you are the only one to make a win32 complient OS). In this situation you set the price according to what your customers are ready to pay for the product. Supply and demand is especially irrelevant in the information market (software/music/movies) because you can press about as many CDs/DVDs as you can sell. This is why there are region zones : to let the video industry set psychological prices in every region (higher in US & Europe, lower in China and India) without having people make gray imports from countries where the DVD is the cheapest.
Capitalism doesn't work that way anymore. It doesn't matter what people want :
a) spread a big amount of cash on advertising and marketing
b) offer rabate, coupons and gold platted limited editions to convince the most resistant customers
c) lock market (DeCSS, region codding)
d) merge with your competitors (why compete when controlling the whole market can be so much more lucrative). merging with medias is also a good way of having a good way to control the consummers for a cheap price
e) sue anybody who stands in your way
This is why most corporation now set the prices of their product not based on the real cost of manufacturing, or the competitor price, but on the psychological price people are ready to put for the item.
Just my 7.99 cents....
I bought Tank Police DVD in the US, and my native language not being English, I tried to have both the English dubbing track+English subtitles to help understanding.
Well, it turned out I switched to Japanese soundtrack+English subtitles, because the English subtitles and English dubbing were significantly different ! It felt so weird !
I dunno, why do they all have to make expensive good looking computers - or ugly cheap looking PC boxes ? why can't some make a PC case as good looking as an Apple G4 or Cube ?
I think this is grossly underevaluated. Sure, moste companies in the western world have legit licences, but everywhere else (third-world & home users) there are not much licenced MS software. I'd said 80 to 90% of it is not legit. Of course if they didn't sold Excel alone for 500$ bucks over here, they wouldn't be pirated so much (wtf ! 500$ for a spreadsheet ? this is nuts)
But don't worry to much for MS, according to their financial datas, they make a gross margin of 86% and a profit margin of 40%. Any other business would DREAM of being so profitable.
What's the problem ? All apps into "Program files", all system in "Windows" and libs in "Windows\System", all user files into "My Document". Can't get easier than that. If you want to uninstall an app under windows, and don't feel like using the uninstall system (which is cool BTW) you can still just delete its directory and that's pretty much it. All apps configuration is kept into one single hierarchical system (the registry).
On the other most Unixes use several directories for executables (both system commands and extra-apps), several directories for libs, and worst, mixes everything together (ie "all apps binaries in the same dirs" and "all libs into the same dirs"). Configuration itself is done thru independent text files that are also sprayed all over the place. And all this even change between distro ! As far as I'm concerned, the way files are organised (or rather : not organised) in Linux totally sucks. It gets a little better with the *BSD, but still a mess anyway.
Are you speaking of the guys at the FBI who bait people in chat rooms into agreeing to have sex with underage kids ? Yeah - they are really nice people, since going after criminals who DID something wrong is so difficult for them, they need to lure disturbed people into commiting crimes so that they can arrest them. Sounds like the Soviet union to me...
Not true : an OS might mature, but the hardware doesn't work that way. When X-Windows was created, the world of computer hardware was totally different. People used dumb text or graphic terminals to plug into mainframes. Remote computing was king because real computers were expensive, while at the same time things such as 2D and 3D hardware acceleration was merely a dream. In those times, X-Windows made sense. Now everybody can buy a PC for 400 $, and have an hardware accelerated display in it. This hardware is made to be FAST, not hindered by a display API which has huge overhead, especially since the vast majority of X-Windows users don't even use it for remote display. It is pathetic to put a GeForce 2 GTS and 64 Meg of DDR RAM, and then pilot this screaming hardware with the bloated X-Windows.
Hardware changes fast, and the software that harness it can't stay the same for 30 years, even if it is well thought. And since OS is the interface between apps and hardware, it sometimes has to be completely redesigned and not just incrementaly upgraded.
20 years of development
you said it... it's outdated and bloated now. Look at BeOS : new, simple, lean == very fast, flexible, easy to maintain and code for.
I don't know how often you use remote display, but as far as my daily usage is concerned, I'd trade remote display against fast & clean graphic API anyday. Having fast games and responsive display is much more usefull than remote display, which can be done anyway with things like VNC.
Or where does it says it can bans "tactical nukes, bacteriologic and chimical nukes, cruse missiles, cluster bombs, napalm, battleships, mortars, etc..." . Do you think we shall let anybody buy any kind of destruction tool he/she can afford ? Where do you draw the line ? Why ? If you trully believe in the 2nd amendment then you should lobby for letting anyone buy or build his own neutron bomb in his backyard and carry it around in his car.
There's not much to understand - it means every able-bodied man has a gun and knows how to use it.
...except that in "well regulated miltia" there're the words "well regulated". So obviously the governement (who else ?) has to regulate the milita, which means controling who can and cannot carry a gun, train the people who can, etc... in fact there's already a "well regulated militia" : it's called the army !
The whole MacOS and MacOS apps used to be coded in Pascal, not C. OK it was in the 80s, but still, that would cound as a (very) large project. Borland has sold hundreds of thausands of copies of Delphi, so I bet many apps (including very big ones) are still written in Object Pascal.
The only reason (almost) everybody use C (or C++) is the same reason (almost) everybody uses Windows : it is the standard. Nobody seems to care that it really sucks.
Well for the DBE, you can use a ODBC component instead (like the free mODBC or some other paying ones). They integrate flawlessly with other Delphi DB components and you can then distribute the .exe alone (since all Windows installs come with the ODBC API)