However, I do not believe the job market is as bad as some people say it is. I still get "cold calls" from recruiters. A friend of mine recently posted avability at dice.com and received 20 calls. People with solid technical skills are still being hired.
Some other data points from my circle of friends:
One friend whose dot-com went completely under got a job within one or two weeks.
As I mentioned, another friend got 20 calls after posting availbility on dice.
A non-techniical friend found a job about two months after losing their dot-com job.
Maybe I just hand around the kind of people who have what it takes to get good jobs.
Also, if you turn hamburgers long enough, your work skills become obsolete, and your potential employers know that.
Very, very true. Back, before I got a tech job, I was working at a gas station. We had a very intelligent, older gentleman who worked graveyard. Since I worked Graveyard also, I got to know this person fairly well. He used to talk to me about programming mainframes and about operating systems and languages I never heard of (the letters PL/I spring to mind). However, he now has (and still has, I just went there yesterday) a job manning the gas station, being the person behind the counter who handles "10 on pump 5".
He is in a trap. He works graveyard (late at night), so he can't take day classes to become up-to-date on his computer skills. He is from the generation of "keep the same job forever", so it is difficult for him to move to another job. Point of reference: He is the only person who still works at this Gas station who worked there when I worked there, six years ago.
I also met another person, in his 40s, who used to work for EPYX during the video game boom of the 1980s. In 1990 or so, EPYX finally went under, surviving the post-video-game crash for six or seven years, and he lost his job. He never recovered from that to get another technical job. He is, last time I talked to him, a janitor who cleans buses.
However, I do not believe the job market is as bad as some people say it is. I still get "cold calls" from recruiters. A friend of mine recently posted avability at dice.com and received 20 calls. People with solid technical skills are still being hired.
OK, completely unrelated to the issue at hand, but I used to be friends with Gwen Stefani's little sister back when I went to college. I even once met Gwen--I remember preaching to her about the virtues of the internet (this was just before the beginning of the dot-com explosion).
I don't know about a new TV episode; AFAIK the movie is about curently in pre?) production
(I would take this to email, but I see that you do not have an email address handy)
The best place to get information on the new Blake's Seven TV movie is by subscribing to the list over at http://www.blakes7.com
it's B7 that I've obsessively collected on video. 25 tapes at $25 a pop... worth every penny.
There has been talk about making region 2 DVDs of Blake's Seven. If those DVDs ever get made, I will purchase them.
On the subject of your username, I don't need Google to know that imipak was the delayed-kill weapon from the episode Weapon. Personally, my favorite episode was always Gambit (I used to call my music recording studio Freedon City as a homage), with Shadow (with its excellent music) and Star One being close seconds. I always felt the second season was the best season of Blake's Seven.
Having been a huge fan of Doctor Who for a long time, and having closely watched the various attempts to bring back Doctor Who, I think there are some problems with bringing it back as a show.
First of all, there is the matter of special effects. When I was a kid, the low-cos special effects of Doctor Who did not bother me, because I had rnough imagination to pretend that the special effects were not so cheesy. Also, the level of expectation people had for quality special effects in the 1970s and 1980s were not the level of expectations people have today.
While computer graphics can do much to minimize the cost of special effects, it is still more expensive to do the level of special effects today's TV viewers expect than it was when Doctor Who was made in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
The other is that Doctor Who ran for nearly 30 years, with a wide variety of different actors playing the lead role, and a variety of producors producing the show. Needless to say, the "flavor" of Doctor Who has changed greatly over those years.
Doctor Who has many different fans: Some expect the Doctor Who of the Pertwee years, others expect the Doctor of the early Tom Baker years, and others yet expect the doctor of the late Tom Baker years.
When the TV movie came out, many were shocked that it included a car chase scene, saying that this was not a part of Doctor Who. Of course, the John Pertwee and early Tom Baker eras had plenty of car chases (the one from Planet of the Spiders comes to mind), but there is a large group of fans who were not aware of this.
No matter what the BBC does, it will be impossible for them to make a Doctor Who that meets the expectations of what all their fans want. Even if they make an excellent TV show, and I believe they could if they threw the money at it to give it decent special effects, a lot of fans will complain, no matter how excellent it is. Look at the number of fans of Dune who complained about the excellent recent TV miniseries for an example of this.
Do I want to see Doctor Who come back? Yes. The BBC can not expect to make many long-standing fans of Doctor Who happy.
As an aside, anyone know what is happeneing with the new TV episode of Blakes' Seven that they have been talking about?
ut the question remains, if it is acceptable for desktop flat panels, why is it not acceptable for laptop ones?
Dead pixels are acceptable for laptop displays.
Last time I checked, the rule for IBM Thinkpads is that you can only get the panel replaced if it has eight or more dead pixels.
The joy of Mozilla. I would hit "submit", and Mozilla would freeze at "Resolving slashdot.org", which implies (incorrectly, as I learned) that it is still performing a gethostbyname(), and that it has not gotten the IP of Slashdot.org yet, much less submitted the article in question.
Note to self: When mozilla says it is "resolving host", Mozilla is lying.
OK, I know this is Slashdot, where any idiot who can look half-intelligent can get moderated up to five, but I think the moderators why this post deserves a rating of 1 instead of a rating of five:
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.
This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
OK, I know this is Slashdot, where any idiot who can look half-intelligent can get moderated up to five, but I think the moderators why this post deserves a rating of 1 instead of a rating of five:
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.
This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
OK, I know this is Slashdot, where any idiot who can look half-intelligent can get moderated up to five, but I think the moderators why this post deserves a rating of 1 instead of a rating of five:
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.
This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
Anyone who is a verteran in the anti-spam wars knows that PSI was, not too long ago, notorious for doing nothing about spammers who used PSI-owned dialup connections to connect to the internet and spam to their heart's content.
It was not uncommon, in the heyday of PSI-originated spam, for people to not allow anyone from 38.x.x.x to send email to them.
The problem with not properly handling one spammers is that it causes an ISPs reputation to go down. Now, I have not paid real close attention to what has happened at PSI since spammers stopped using their dialups as spam-originating points, but I would not be surprised that PSI reputation as a spam-friendly ISP is one of the reasons they are having the financial problems they have now.
The ICANN's fundamental assumption is that there is only one (set of) root name servers, all of which contain the same data set.
This, however, is not how DNS itself works. The way DNS itself works is like this:
The client sends to a resolver a request like, www.go.shop.
The DNS resolver looks in its cache. It sees if www.go.shop is in its cache. If not, then it looks for a name server for www.go.shop. If a nameserver for www.go.shop does not exist, it next looks for a name server for go.shop in its local cache. If a nameserver for go.shop does not exist, it looks for a nameserver for shop in its local cache. If a name server for shop does not exist, the DNS resolver asks one of the root namservers (as listed in its local cache) what to do.
To get around the idea of there being only one nameserver, one has to implement a nameserver to, in addition to setting the root namservers when creating a new cache, setting the name servers for alternate non-ICANN TLDs and placing those names and IP addresses in the cache.
This way, when one goes to www.example.com, they ask the ICANN nameservers where to go. When one goes to www.go.shop, they ask the DNS servers that the DNS administrator has specified where to go. Anyone with a reasonable amount of clue can set up their won DNS cache and be in control of what TLDs they wish to resolve.
This is very similiar to how USENET works. To create a newsgroup in one of the "big seven" (comp., soc., talk., rec., news., sci., and misc.) hierarchys, you have to get approval from David Lawrence. To create a newsgroup under the "alt" hierarchy, there is much less red tape involved. Less news servers (traditionally) carry the alt. newsgroups, but there is more freedom under the alt. hierarchy.
There are also a number of other Usenet hierarchys which have even less propergation than the "big seven" and the "alt" Usenet hierarchys.
DNS can be set up in a similiar fashion. The amount of code that needs to be changed is fairly trivial (there is a technical concern about what to do if the "root servers" for shop. give you a referral to different name servers that actually serve the shop domain instead of a referral to an appropriate subdomain, but that is easily enough handled compared to the amount of effort involved in making a caching nameserver). The only thing that has stopped this is mainly Paul Vixie's notion that non-ICANN TLDs are somehow evil.
- Sam
What are the ethical implications here?
on
BoyCott Advance
·
· Score: 4
As I am about to go to sleep (I just got the built-in Winmodem on my new Linux Laptop to work with the 2.2.19 kernel. Yipee!), this thought comes to my head:
At what point does it become unethical to use one of these emulators?
Note that I said ethical, and not legal.
Certainly, using an emulator to play games you already own is ethical. Using an emulator to play games one does not own is probably not ethical, though. If you wish to refute this point, please use a logical and not an emotional argument--the kinds of reactions I get when I point this out can be rather emotional and confrontational. A confrontational reaction is the reaction of someone who is knowingly doing something against their own set of ethics and values.
Here is where I draw the line: Playing an emulated game is ethical if it is not possible to buy the same game online or at a store. For games that can only be bought used on ebay or at Funcoland, the area is a little more grey--the original company is not making any revenue on Funcoland and ebay sales, so it is probably still ethical, if somewhat less so.
This in mind, it is ethical to play most Atari 2600 games from the early 80s. The only exception to this rule is playing games which have been made on "Activision Video Games Classics" (A $20 game that gives you a 2600 emulator and a handful of old 2600 games). It is also ethical to play most PC games form the same era.
It is ethical to play a good portion of 8-bit Nintendo games. However, this is moving away from ethical behavior (as I defined it above), since some Nintendo games are re-released as Game Boy and Game Boy advanced games.
As the game systems get more advanced, the ethics of playing the game in an emulated environment become a darker shade of grey. I personally draw the line at eight-bit non-portable video games. In a few years, I will probably move the line up to 16-bit video games.
If one makes it a point to purchase any game which they got an emulatoed copy of and found they enjoy playing enough to play the game for more than, say, 10 minutes, this makes the emulation use far more ethical.
The important thing to realize is that these ethics can not be drawn in shades of black and white. There is a large grey area, starting at playing an otherwise forgotten 2600 game which one never purchased, to playing on an emulator for a Game Boy advanced a game to see if the game is worth buying, to playing a game on a Game Boy advanced which the person in question has no intention of buying.
Another factor, of course, is the income of the person in question.
When will the manufacturers ever learn that putting strong copy protection in to consumer devices simply does not work. It does not work because the first people who will adopt a new technology are the technology-savvy users, users who do not want to be told by the big media companies how they are allowed to use their technology.
DAT died for anything but professional (read: Not copy protected) use in the early 90s. DIVX's failure is well known among the Slashdot crowd. Don't think for one second that DVD would have caught on the way it has if mod chips to defeat region coding were not so readily available. CPRM caused such an uproar that it was forced to be stopped, despite the refusal of many major media outlets (ZDNet, news.com, etc.) to discuss CPRM.
I do not see digital TV replacing analog TV until a form of digital TV without the onerous restrictions becomes available.
As a minor correction, CDDB doe appear to have Linux support. Even they are not follish enough to force people to use windows to access their protocol.
And, yes, Gracenote does not have a chance to win this lawsuit. What they are hoping for is that the people at Roxio will back down instead of taking this to court.
Keep in mind that Sun has two licenses: The Sun Community Source License (which is not a free software license) and the the Sun Public License.
And, yes, I agree that Dan is free to do as he wishes with his code. The current license, for better or for worse, however, will stop it from being adopted by any of the major distributions.
- Sam (Since Dan ain't gonna change his license, back to coding my alternative to BIND and DjbDNS)
[...]it lacks essential freedoms such as publication of modified versions[...]
Here the FSF is describing Sun's "community source license" and why it is not open-source compatible. While they have not put up an explicit statement about Dan's license up there, since Dan's license lacks the same "essential freedom" (see my last post in this thread for citations), it is safe to conclude that the FSF would consider Dan's license "unfree".
For the record, I feel that:
Dan is a brillant programmer who has not had to make any changes to Qmail in the last three years--since Qmail has not had one security problem of note ever. The only reason Dan has to make changes to DjbDNS is because of the way the BIND developers makes changes to how they interpret the vaguely-worded DNS RFCs.
Dan does give away his software, and he does allow people to freely use it and freely separately distribute patches for it.
While I do not completely agree with Dan w.r.t. the license he chose, I feel Dan has valid concerns about Linux fragmenting the way Unix fragmented. His license stops Qmail or DjbDNS from fragmenting.
- Sam (Who could very well stop development of his DNS server if Dan made a GPL version of DjbDNS)
One problem Konqueror has is with font handling. For example, any page encoded in UTF-8 is butt-ugly in Konqueror until you set the font size to be precisely 15 points.
Pages encoded in Japanese are ugly unless you set the font size to 16 points.
The way Mozilla works around this problem is by, instead of performing a "we will scale the closest sized font we have, even if it looks ugly", they perform a "we will resize the size of the letters rendered to the closest font available, without scaling". Which results in much more satisfactory results.
Section three of the open source definition requires that derived works are allowed:
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
Contrast this to this excerpt of Dan's license:
You may distribute a precompiled package if installing your package produces exactly the same files, in exactly the same locations, that a user would obtain by installing one of my packages listed above;
I hope this clears up any confusion people may have with whether Dan's license is open source.
- Sam (Posting this at one since this is a rather heated discussion)
Well, "slashdot" is Barrapunto when translated in to Spanish, so the verb would be "barrapuntar". E.g. ellos barrapuntaron el pagina (They slashdotted the page).
I don't think the ones linked to on that Spanish site are worthy of the name
Keep in mind that the article starts out by saying "This is a little more rigourous than what was posted to the mailing list the other day". Also says "This comparison only measures one aspect of the filesystems, and there are other important aspects to consider when deciding on a filesystem".
Slashdot Mirror
Some other data points from my circle of friends:
Maybe I just hand around the kind of people who have what it takes to get good jobs.
- Sam
Very, very true. Back, before I got a tech job, I was working at a gas station. We had a very intelligent, older gentleman who worked graveyard. Since I worked Graveyard also, I got to know this person fairly well. He used to talk to me about programming mainframes and about operating systems and languages I never heard of (the letters PL/I spring to mind). However, he now has (and still has, I just went there yesterday) a job manning the gas station, being the person behind the counter who handles "10 on pump 5".
He is in a trap. He works graveyard (late at night), so he can't take day classes to become up-to-date on his computer skills. He is from the generation of "keep the same job forever", so it is difficult for him to move to another job. Point of reference: He is the only person who still works at this Gas station who worked there when I worked there, six years ago.
I also met another person, in his 40s, who used to work for EPYX during the video game boom of the 1980s. In 1990 or so, EPYX finally went under, surviving the post-video-game crash for six or seven years, and he lost his job. He never recovered from that to get another technical job. He is, last time I talked to him, a janitor who cleans buses.
However, I do not believe the job market is as bad as some people say it is. I still get "cold calls" from recruiters. A friend of mine recently posted avability at dice.com and received 20 calls. People with solid technical skills are still being hired.
- Sam
OK, completely unrelated to the issue at hand, but I used to be friends with Gwen Stefani's little sister back when I went to college. I even once met Gwen--I remember preaching to her about the virtues of the internet (this was just before the beginning of the dot-com explosion).
- Sam
(I would take this to email, but I see that you do not have an email address handy)
The best place to get information on the new Blake's Seven TV movie is by subscribing to the list over at http://www.blakes7.com
it's B7 that I've obsessively collected on video. 25 tapes at $25 a pop... worth every penny.
There has been talk about making region 2 DVDs of Blake's Seven. If those DVDs ever get made, I will purchase them.
On the subject of your username, I don't need Google to know that imipak was the delayed-kill weapon from the episode Weapon. Personally, my favorite episode was always Gambit (I used to call my music recording studio Freedon City as a homage), with Shadow (with its excellent music) and Star One being close seconds. I always felt the second season was the best season of Blake's Seven.
- Sam
First of all, there is the matter of special effects. When I was a kid, the low-cos special effects of Doctor Who did not bother me, because I had rnough imagination to pretend that the special effects were not so cheesy. Also, the level of expectation people had for quality special effects in the 1970s and 1980s were not the level of expectations people have today.
While computer graphics can do much to minimize the cost of special effects, it is still more expensive to do the level of special effects today's TV viewers expect than it was when Doctor Who was made in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
The other is that Doctor Who ran for nearly 30 years, with a wide variety of different actors playing the lead role, and a variety of producors producing the show. Needless to say, the "flavor" of Doctor Who has changed greatly over those years.
Doctor Who has many different fans: Some expect the Doctor Who of the Pertwee years, others expect the Doctor of the early Tom Baker years, and others yet expect the doctor of the late Tom Baker years.
When the TV movie came out, many were shocked that it included a car chase scene, saying that this was not a part of Doctor Who. Of course, the John Pertwee and early Tom Baker eras had plenty of car chases (the one from Planet of the Spiders comes to mind), but there is a large group of fans who were not aware of this.
No matter what the BBC does, it will be impossible for them to make a Doctor Who that meets the expectations of what all their fans want. Even if they make an excellent TV show, and I believe they could if they threw the money at it to give it decent special effects, a lot of fans will complain, no matter how excellent it is. Look at the number of fans of Dune who complained about the excellent recent TV miniseries for an example of this.
Do I want to see Doctor Who come back? Yes. The BBC can not expect to make many long-standing fans of Doctor Who happy.
As an aside, anyone know what is happeneing with the new TV episode of Blakes' Seven that they have been talking about?
- Sam
Dead pixels are acceptable for laptop displays. Last time I checked, the rule for IBM Thinkpads is that you can only get the panel replaced if it has eight or more dead pixels.
- Sam
Well, at least I am helping the original poster next time he feels like ranting against open source.
Note to self: When mozilla says it is "resolving host", Mozilla is lying.
Sigh.
- Sam
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
- Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
- OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
- Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
- OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
- Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
- OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
Considering that Yahoo uses Goole as their search engine for "Web page matches", Yahoo hits == Google hits.
- Sam
It was not uncommon, in the heyday of PSI-originated spam, for people to not allow anyone from 38.x.x.x to send email to them.
The problem with not properly handling one spammers is that it causes an ISPs reputation to go down. Now, I have not paid real close attention to what has happened at PSI since spammers stopped using their dialups as spam-originating points, but I would not be surprised that PSI reputation as a spam-friendly ISP is one of the reasons they are having the financial problems they have now.
- Sam
This, however, is not how DNS itself works. The way DNS itself works is like this:
To get around the idea of there being only one nameserver, one has to implement a nameserver to, in addition to setting the root namservers when creating a new cache, setting the name servers for alternate non-ICANN TLDs and placing those names and IP addresses in the cache.
This way, when one goes to www.example.com, they ask the ICANN nameservers where to go. When one goes to www.go.shop, they ask the DNS servers that the DNS administrator has specified where to go. Anyone with a reasonable amount of clue can set up their won DNS cache and be in control of what TLDs they wish to resolve.
This is very similiar to how USENET works. To create a newsgroup in one of the "big seven" (comp., soc., talk., rec., news., sci., and misc.) hierarchys, you have to get approval from David Lawrence. To create a newsgroup under the "alt" hierarchy, there is much less red tape involved. Less news servers (traditionally) carry the alt. newsgroups, but there is more freedom under the alt. hierarchy.
There are also a number of other Usenet hierarchys which have even less propergation than the "big seven" and the "alt" Usenet hierarchys.
DNS can be set up in a similiar fashion. The amount of code that needs to be changed is fairly trivial (there is a technical concern about what to do if the "root servers" for shop. give you a referral to different name servers that actually serve the shop domain instead of a referral to an appropriate subdomain, but that is easily enough handled compared to the amount of effort involved in making a caching nameserver). The only thing that has stopped this is mainly Paul Vixie's notion that non-ICANN TLDs are somehow evil.
- Sam
Note that I said ethical, and not legal.
Certainly, using an emulator to play games you already own is ethical. Using an emulator to play games one does not own is probably not ethical, though. If you wish to refute this point, please use a logical and not an emotional argument--the kinds of reactions I get when I point this out can be rather emotional and confrontational. A confrontational reaction is the reaction of someone who is knowingly doing something against their own set of ethics and values.
Here is where I draw the line: Playing an emulated game is ethical if it is not possible to buy the same game online or at a store. For games that can only be bought used on ebay or at Funcoland, the area is a little more grey--the original company is not making any revenue on Funcoland and ebay sales, so it is probably still ethical, if somewhat less so.
This in mind, it is ethical to play most Atari 2600 games from the early 80s. The only exception to this rule is playing games which have been made on "Activision Video Games Classics" (A $20 game that gives you a 2600 emulator and a handful of old 2600 games). It is also ethical to play most PC games form the same era.
It is ethical to play a good portion of 8-bit Nintendo games. However, this is moving away from ethical behavior (as I defined it above), since some Nintendo games are re-released as Game Boy and Game Boy advanced games.
As the game systems get more advanced, the ethics of playing the game in an emulated environment become a darker shade of grey. I personally draw the line at eight-bit non-portable video games. In a few years, I will probably move the line up to 16-bit video games.
If one makes it a point to purchase any game which they got an emulatoed copy of and found they enjoy playing enough to play the game for more than, say, 10 minutes, this makes the emulation use far more ethical.
The important thing to realize is that these ethics can not be drawn in shades of black and white. There is a large grey area, starting at playing an otherwise forgotten 2600 game which one never purchased, to playing on an emulator for a Game Boy advanced a game to see if the game is worth buying, to playing a game on a Game Boy advanced which the person in question has no intention of buying.
Another factor, of course, is the income of the person in question.
Food for thought.
- Sam (time to sleep)
DAT died for anything but professional (read: Not copy protected) use in the early 90s. DIVX's failure is well known among the Slashdot crowd. Don't think for one second that DVD would have caught on the way it has if mod chips to defeat region coding were not so readily available. CPRM caused such an uproar that it was forced to be stopped, despite the refusal of many major media outlets (ZDNet, news.com, etc.) to discuss CPRM.
I do not see digital TV replacing analog TV until a form of digital TV without the onerous restrictions becomes available.
- Sam
And, yes, Gracenote does not have a chance to win this lawsuit. What they are hoping for is that the people at Roxio will back down instead of taking this to court.
- Sam
And, yes, I agree that Dan is free to do as he wishes with his code. The current license, for better or for worse, however, will stop it from being adopted by any of the major distributions.
- Sam (Since Dan ain't gonna change his license, back to coding my alternative to BIND and DjbDNS)
Options -> Configure Konqueror -> Navigator Konqueror -> Appearance -> Minimum Font size
- Sa,
For the record, I feel that:
- Dan is a brillant programmer who has not had to make any changes to Qmail in the last three years--since Qmail has not had one security problem of note ever. The only reason Dan has to make changes to DjbDNS is because of the way the BIND developers makes changes to how they interpret the vaguely-worded DNS RFCs.
- Dan does give away his software, and he does allow people to freely use it and freely separately distribute patches for it.
- While I do not completely agree with Dan w.r.t. the license he chose, I feel Dan has valid concerns about Linux fragmenting the way Unix fragmented. His license stops Qmail or DjbDNS from fragmenting.
- Sam (Who could very well stop development of his DNS server if Dan made a GPL version of DjbDNS)Pages encoded in Japanese are ugly unless you set the font size to 16 points.
The way Mozilla works around this problem is by, instead of performing a "we will scale the closest sized font we have, even if it looks ugly", they perform a "we will resize the size of the letters rendered to the closest font available, without scaling". Which results in much more satisfactory results.
- Sam
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the license Dan puts on his programs and whether this license is Open Source.
Section three of the open source definition requires that derived works are allowed:
Contrast this to this excerpt of Dan's license:
I hope this clears up any confusion people may have with whether Dan's license is open source.
- Sam (Posting this at one since this is a rather heated discussion)
Well, "slashdot" is Barrapunto when translated in to Spanish, so the verb would be "barrapuntar". E.g. ellos barrapuntaron el pagina (They slashdotted the page).
- Sam
How about barrapuntar: "to slashdot".
- Sam
Keep in mind that the article starts out by saying "This is a little more rigourous than what was posted to the mailing list the other day". Also says "This comparison only measures one aspect of the filesystems, and there are other important aspects to consider when deciding on a filesystem".
- Sam