If anyone has been paying attention to the Debian Linux ISP mailing list, people may recall that Craig recently got in to a nasty flame war with Dan Bernstein about the importance of a DNS server supporting the legacy BIND Zone file format.
To make a long story short (and the flame war got ugly), Craig feels that a DNS server needs to support the legacy BIND zone file format. Dan, obviously, does not; he feels that it only matters that one can transfer the zone file over to the new format (losing all comments in the zone file in the process).
Now, I will side with Dan here. Keep in mind that my viewpoint is rather biased, being the person responsible for the MaraDNS server, a server which Craig uses but feels is "poorly written code". Now, the only specific that Craig went in to when pointing out that he did not like my DNS server is that fact that, like Dan's TinyDNS, MaraDNS has no support for BIND's zone file format.
Now, with all due respect for Dan, I think he should not knock a gift horse in the mouth. The fact of the matter is that the code for MaraDNS is open; if support for BIND-style zone files is important to Craig, I suggest that he start coding it himself. I will gladly accept code which can read BIND-style zone files and make it part of MaraDNS.
I am not saying that BIND style zone file support is unimportant. However, I think Craig should be a little more courtious in requesting this feature than badmouthing MaraDNS on the Debian ISP mailing list.
I am sure he is an excellent system administrator; I really wish that he would start up a serious open-source project so that he understands how we OSS coders feel. I think it would make him interact with us in a more mature fashion; and save both him and the developers he flames some grief.
- Sam
P.S. I know Craig already knows this, but there is a non-BIND DNS server which supports BIND style zone files called NSI. It is on the list of DNS servers on my web page.
Well, I was going to celebrate New Year's wih a long-time friend at his family's house, but they kicked me out under two hours before the ball dropped for no apparent reason and without warning.
They have this notion that they can call me up and get technical support from me for free. That notion went, well, down the tubes. I expect to be treated better for New Year's.
This is the worse New Year's I have had since 1995, when I had to work at a lousy job which was giving me no hours, but expected me to work every holiday with them.
I prefer electrionic books because they don't take up nearly as much room. I am the kind of person who likes to have the freedom to move to get a better paying job or go where the girls think I am sexy--having a lot of books which I have to lug with me every time I move gets tiring after a while.
My goal right now is to have a bunch of e-books which are on CD-ROMs; lugging around half a dozen huge case-logic carriers of CD-ROMs is much easier than lugging around a couple of bookshelves of books.
It looks like the creationists (or, at least, trolls pretending to be creationists) haven't come out of the woodwork yet. That in mind, some thoughts of my own on the "origin of life" bit of bait which this article has.
I do not think a scientist is rejecting God when they try to look at something like the origin of life. I think a scientist is not asking who did it as much as they are asking how it was done. The agent is not relevent to the scientist; only the method matters.
I think, personally, that God is plain simply too elegant to make the creation of life something which would require the temporary changing of the laws of physics to accomplish. God created the laws of nature also; why not make them ones which make life possible (the gravitation constant, for example, has to be very finely tuned to make life possible).
My God is a God of surprises which does not put answers to all of life's problems in simple, small packages. To me creationism is a form of denial; no worse than the denial of a chronic alcholic who says they don't really have a drinking problem.
Thinking about the immensity of the universe gives me a profound sense of wonder; I really enjoyed reading this list.
I think the comparison to civil engineering is appropriate; back in the middle ages, people were building cathedrals to be as tall as possible, without properly reinforcing their structures. A number of cathedrals collapsed, killing people and otherwise being undesirable.
They made the same mistake back then people make with programmers today: They demanded features above everything else. While features look glamourous, they have the same problem a non-reinforced vault which is too tall has: They eventually cause the entire structure to collapse. In the case of code, the result is unmaintainable code.
This is why I prefer doing open source development; I don't have any managers breathing down my neck trying to make me add features more quickly than the code base can handle. Instead, I can concentrate on security and stability, only very slowly adding features.
This is why I think Linux has an edge. Yes, the UI is not as full-featured as that of other OSes. However, the code is far more stable; I will take stability over features any day of the week.
Well, with everything except games. Which is why games are the only proprietary software on my system right now (well, OK, I also have a copy of XV which I actually payed for).
I'm coding myself here. I am finally working on the development branch of my current open source project again after a two-month hiatus (school and finals, grrrr). It feels good to finally fix a long-standing issue.
I'm with family, but they are pretty low-key so pleanty of time to code away.
Once, and for all, this is why anonymous postings need to have their IP recorded so that assholes like this can not post this kind of bullshit without fear of retribution.
How would you feel if you had a missing daughter and someone posted something like this in reply to a plea to help find her?
Go ahead, mod me down. I have karma to burn.
As to the original poster: God knows who you are, and you will pay for what you have done.
Oh, enlightment is to be found in the use of libre software. Since this is Slashdot, let me tell you about the wonderfulness of software libre. A concept so wonderful, everyone needs to understand it to be a part of the Slashdot in crowd. English does not even have a word which can truly grasp its wonderfulness! A concept do daring, speaking in languages which do have a word for libre give you funny looks (or have been exposed to a Linux fanatic before, so know what you are talking about) and correct your bad Spanish.
More to the point, one piece of software libre called Mozilla allows one to set up images so they only cycle through their animated loop once. Mozilla also has options to stop JavaScript from opening up unwanted windows.
Since it is software libre, it is also software gratis, which means you do not have to pay anyone to have this program. Of course, Mozilla has a way of not working on JavaScript-heavy sites which are not correctly debugged (read: Written by people that feel that the whole world uses IE. Or should); I can not, for example, sign for classes online using Mozilla. However, for most browsing, it is just like IE. Except without popups. Or non-stop animated GIFs. Now, if only the Mozilla team made an open source flash player...
IN closing, the deep question is: What does libre mean? Well, we could tell you, but we need to make being part of the in crowd a little more difficult. Or just tell people that their user ID needs to have four digits or less to be, like, totally cool dude.
how will this increase revenue for the advertising companies?
Well, see, we are dealing with the accountants of the 21st century. We are in a world where Webvan and Enron were roaring successes because they were able to generate revenue. Never mind other pesky accounting details, like expenses.
And, well, as we know, in a day and age where the marketing department knows their new pop-up ad is a roaring success because it generates so many clickthroughs. Well, OK, lets ignore such minor details like the ads actually are drag-them-to-our-site-kicking-and-screaming-throug hs, because, as long as we are getting clickthroughs, we have the potential to have all sorts of revenue. In fact, we can call a clickthrough "revenue" since, there is always the possibility that a given clickthrough will actually give us money. Maybe to pay off the company so that the poor hapless user no longer has to deal with our drag^H^H^H^Hclickthrough ads any more.
This article is obviously written by someone working for the RIAA trying to get people to start listening to CDs and stop listening to MP3s any more.
In fact, the newer formats, such as DSM (SACD), have so many more frequenceis, that listening to these formats will, in fact, improve your hearing. So, everyone, listen to SACDs instead of normal CDs. beecause even CDs may cause brain damage.
Never mind the fact that SACDs are copy-protected 15 different ways, and that our methods for copy-protecting normal CDs have been shown to be ineffective. We want people to listen to SACDs for, well, their hearing.
Again: Do not listen to MP3s! they only damage your hearing (and promote bands which are not approved by us).
After the doom source code was released (1997) and the Heretic source code released (1998), I was hoping that ROTT was going to get released quickly. Well, it finally happened! This should cause a spike in interest (and sales) of the game, as people using alternative OSes will finally be able to play it.
I would like to thank 3D realms for doing this. Whether you liked the game or not, it is good to see more code being preserved in the GPL pool.
Since you know enough Spanish to know what I was saying before, I will explain what I was thinking when I wrote that.
Someone pointed out that, yes, we stole the land from México during the Mexico-American war of the mid-1800s (we also slaughtered children that were defending the castle in Chapultepec). Your reply, in this context, was "Spoils of war is not stealing". The expression "Spoils of war" implies that it was just and right for us to take the land from México. Saying "...is not stealing" supports this idea that it was morally right.
Now, if, by making this statement, you were saying besides "Of course it was OK for the United States to take half of México's land", you write and understand English differently than I do.
You have the right to have the opinion that the US's forced annexation of Mexican land is just, but your opinion is a minority opinion, and one that is extremely disrespectful of both Mexican people and Chicanos on this side of the border. It is the equivalent of telling people on Slashdot that programmers who write GPL code are a bunch of losers who can't write code people would want to pay for.
Also, the Americans of the time did not feel taking the Mexican land was just. This is why we gave México so much money in the Gadison purchase.
Until you learn to respect other people's feelings more, and learn to respect the Mexican people and the Mexican culture, you will continue to act in a manner which will make people who are either Latino or have an interest in Latino culture think you are a pubic hair.
Do I make myself clear?
- Sam (who used to have similar problems with not having empathy when I took anti-depressent medication, so I can see why this person honestly can not see how incredibly rude and disrespectful they are acting)
I lived in México for four moths myself. I never saw anyone burn an American flag there. Never.
The strongest anti-American sentiment I saw was a sentiment that we caused September 11th by having a foreign policy which pissed off foreign countries. There is also a sentiment that the current adminstration is a bunch of war mongers.
There is no sentiment that America is the great Satan or the other kind of nonsense which is common in some middle eastern countries. In fact, Acapulco has a lot of large banners saying "God Bless America" when I was there a year ago.
Anyway, call me weird, but I'm just not that worried about the Mexican army storming into San Antonio, hell-bent on reclaiming Aztlan any time soon.
Exactly. The only way that Mexico's knowledge of how the United States stole their land has changed their foreign policy is that some Mexicans feel they have a right to cross the border without immigration restrictions.
And, no, it was not OK for us to take the land the way we did, anymore than it was OK for Iraq to take Kuwait they way they did ten years ago.
The only reason I am able to post this article right now is because Linux supports binary-only modules. namely, there is no interest in the free software community to develop a driver for the various Winmodems out there. I have a laptop with a built-in Winmodem. The only way I am able to use this modem is to use a binary module.
On the downside, the module (for the Lucent winmodems) was originally released for the 2.2.x kernel. It was never updated by Lucent, but some people on the net figured out how to change the headers so it works with the 2.4.x kernels.
If it becomes impossible to use this module with 2.6, and it looks like the changes to the module interface are large enough to make the module completely incompatible, I have a few choices:
Stick with an older Linux distro which uses a 2.4.x kernel.
Spend over $100 for an external modem (I'm a college student, so no).
Drop out of school for the next semester, and abandon my current open-source project so I have the time to develop an open-source driver for win modems. I want to graduate ASAP, so alas no.
- Sam
Then again, Lucent may force people to use older drivers for newer versions of Windows, like XP. Then again, Windows 98 is still supported (name one Linux distribiution which came out in 1998 which is still officially supported), and it should be possible to use a Win98 driver with XP.
These kinds of busts of people who willfully infringe on copyright is the kind of activity that the RIAA should be using, instead of attempting to encumber everyone's computers, regardless of the guilt of the computer user.
When the HRAA (home recording rights act) was passed, it set a dangerous precedent of being presumed guilty. No matter how one wished to use home stereo equipment which can copy audio digitally, one was treated like a media pirate.
For example, when I was burning a CD of my own music (which I own the copyright on) two years ago, I was not allowed to make a digital copy of one of my songs to the new CD. What happened was that a flag saying the song was a copy was set; my CD recorder does not allow me to make digital copies of copies. It assumes that all such activity is piracy, even though I use this equipment to make copies of my own songs.
In addition, the CD player forces me to pay extra for CD blanks because it assumes that my activities are copyright infringment activities. In other words, I have to pay the media companies royalties for the privledge of copying my own music. Fortunatly , there is a bug in the firmware which allows me to work around this issue and use far more inexpensive "computer" CDR blanks.
The RIAA and MPAA are trying to cripple computers in a similar manner, which such abominations as the SSSCA. They should stop treating honest computer users like criminials and start persecuting people who willfully engage in piracy.
People who do not think piracy is a problem are mainly in the US, where it is not the kind of problem it is in other countries. In México, for example, one can hardly walk down a street in a shopping district without noticing stands where people sell burned copies of music CDs, complete with inkjet printouts of the cover art for the CD. These kinds of sales do hurt the profits of the RIAA. Obviously not to the extent that every person who buys a burned copy is someone who would have bought a legitimate copy otherwise, but certaintly to a lesser extent.
The people who willfully pirate music and movies need to be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law; I will go so far as to say that the law needs to be set up to make persecuting these people easier. But only the guilty should be punsished; methods for duplicating and distributing music and movies, which are very helpful for promoting independent artists, should not be crippled by the media companies.
You are welcome to your opinion, of course, but keep in mind that Star Trek IV was the first really sucessful Star Trek film with the general public. It has the best adjusted-for-inflation box office success for any Star Trek film. It was the film that was sucessful enough that it became possible to make Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The reason for that is that certain styles of music have some really unpleasant harmonics in them which a vinyl pressing gets rid of. CDs are a more faithful and better reproduction of the sound, so sound worse for those styles of music.
For anything where the original music does not have unpleasant harmonics, like classical, CD kills vinyl any day of the week. Well, unless you are one of those rec.audio.opinion freaks that actually thinks having to compress the dynamic range and not having any frequencies above 12khz or so, nor any frequencies below 80hz sounds better than an accurate reproduction of the sound in question.
Or, if you one of those old fogies who got used to the vinyl sound and think CDs sound worse because you listened to LPs for the first time when you were 13, and CDs the first time when you were 43, and had a happier life when you were 13. Our ears are remarkably adaptive; someone who has learned to like vinyl's distortions will not like the sound of CD.
OK, I second you on this. If I wanted to buy a new IBM Thinkpad T30, I can easily get it without Microsoft Office. No, I can not get it without Windows 2000 or Windows XP. With a 40gb hard disk, I may as well dual boot anyway.
For the record, I use Abiword for writing documents. I am well aware that it is, to put it mildly, not as feature rich as other offerings (and is somewhat buggy, to boot) [1]; however it is good enough, lightweight, and, most importantly, free.
As an aside, I do not think one of your earlier comments should have been moderated down. You said that file sharing takes money away from people who make content and were modded down for saying so.
- Sam
[1] Problem with inserting greyscale PNGs (in their bugzilla); problem with spelling suggestins going off of the screen when misspelled word is near bottom of the screen (I need to check bugzilla); problem with headers being too high to be printed (again, I need to check their bugzilla); and a problem with their ability to export documents to Word which have non-standard spacing (again, I need to check their bugzilla; I can't help them with this because a machine with Word on it is not handy).
The problem faced by the EFF and like organizations will be convincing the public that they are not a bunch of.mp3-trading IP thieves
Actually, I am getting the sense that Slashdot is becoming more and more dominated by mp3 traders who spout empty slogans like "Information wants to be free" or "Oh, I don't like the cost of CDs, so it's perfectly OK for me to copy them and share them with all my friends".
The problem with these kinds of people is that it is obvious that such people are really not concerned with the people who make the music in question; they are only concerned about getting the fruit of those people's labor at the lowest possible cost.
When comments like this get moderated down, I know too many people who blindly support self-serving file trading and have no consideration for the people who actually make the music are becoming moderators.
Let me put my position out there: I am opposed to any type of software piracy. I think Microsoft software costs too much, so I use Linux. I think most CDs cost too much, so I go over to mp3.com or buy the RAP CD ($15, 4 CDs full of music) instead of buying mainstream music. I think most movies and TV suck, so I only watch movies or TV as a social gathering. Instead, I hang out with college students or go online.
Yes, I am opposed to legislated technological solutions because they make anyone with a digital recorder guilty. The RIAA's efforts of 15 years ago, which created the HRRA, killed the DAT audio format. I am sure that the RIAA, unfrettered, would destroy the PC revolution.
There is no disagreement that some bloke (OK, evil mega-corporation) has the copyright on "Happy Birthday to You". The question, however, is whether there really is a group of little old ladies who go to restuarants and threaten to sue the restuarant for singing "Happy Birthday" there.
Please provide reference to an article detailing the antics of these little old ladies.
Slashdot Mirror
To make a long story short (and the flame war got ugly), Craig feels that a DNS server needs to support the legacy BIND zone file format. Dan, obviously, does not; he feels that it only matters that one can transfer the zone file over to the new format (losing all comments in the zone file in the process).
Now, I will side with Dan here. Keep in mind that my viewpoint is rather biased, being the person responsible for the MaraDNS server, a server which Craig uses but feels is "poorly written code". Now, the only specific that Craig went in to when pointing out that he did not like my DNS server is that fact that, like Dan's TinyDNS, MaraDNS has no support for BIND's zone file format.
Now, with all due respect for Dan, I think he should not knock a gift horse in the mouth. The fact of the matter is that the code for MaraDNS is open; if support for BIND-style zone files is important to Craig, I suggest that he start coding it himself. I will gladly accept code which can read BIND-style zone files and make it part of MaraDNS.
I am not saying that BIND style zone file support is unimportant. However, I think Craig should be a little more courtious in requesting this feature than badmouthing MaraDNS on the Debian ISP mailing list.
I am sure he is an excellent system administrator; I really wish that he would start up a serious open-source project so that he understands how we OSS coders feel. I think it would make him interact with us in a more mature fashion; and save both him and the developers he flames some grief.
- Sam
P.S. I know Craig already knows this, but there is a non-BIND DNS server which supports BIND style zone files called NSI. It is on the list of DNS servers on my web page.
They have this notion that they can call me up and get technical support from me for free. That notion went, well, down the tubes. I expect to be treated better for New Year's.
This is the worse New Year's I have had since 1995, when I had to work at a lousy job which was giving me no hours, but expected me to work every holiday with them.
Ugh.
- Sam
My goal right now is to have a bunch of e-books which are on CD-ROMs; lugging around half a dozen huge case-logic carriers of CD-ROMs is much easier than lugging around a couple of bookshelves of books.
- Sam
- Sam
I do not think a scientist is rejecting God when they try to look at something like the origin of life. I think a scientist is not asking who did it as much as they are asking how it was done. The agent is not relevent to the scientist; only the method matters.
I think, personally, that God is plain simply too elegant to make the creation of life something which would require the temporary changing of the laws of physics to accomplish. God created the laws of nature also; why not make them ones which make life possible (the gravitation constant, for example, has to be very finely tuned to make life possible).
My God is a God of surprises which does not put answers to all of life's problems in simple, small packages. To me creationism is a form of denial; no worse than the denial of a chronic alcholic who says they don't really have a drinking problem.
Thinking about the immensity of the universe gives me a profound sense of wonder; I really enjoyed reading this list.
- Sam
I think the comparison to civil engineering is appropriate; back in the middle ages, people were building cathedrals to be as tall as possible, without properly reinforcing their structures. A number of cathedrals collapsed, killing people and otherwise being undesirable.
They made the same mistake back then people make with programmers today: They demanded features above everything else. While features look glamourous, they have the same problem a non-reinforced vault which is too tall has: They eventually cause the entire structure to collapse. In the case of code, the result is unmaintainable code.
This is why I prefer doing open source development; I don't have any managers breathing down my neck trying to make me add features more quickly than the code base can handle. Instead, I can concentrate on security and stability, only very slowly adding features.
This is why I think Linux has an edge. Yes, the UI is not as full-featured as that of other OSes. However, the code is far more stable; I will take stability over features any day of the week.
Well, with everything except games. Which is why games are the only proprietary software on my system right now (well, OK, I also have a copy of XV which I actually payed for).
- Sam
I'm with family, but they are pretty low-key so pleanty of time to code away.
- Sam
Oh, the joys of having a laptop. My compter is right here, in front of me.
- Sam
Slashdot editors:
Once, and for all, this is why anonymous postings need to have their IP recorded so that assholes like this can not post this kind of bullshit without fear of retribution.
How would you feel if you had a missing daughter and someone posted something like this in reply to a plea to help find her?
Go ahead, mod me down. I have karma to burn.
As to the original poster: God knows who you are, and you will pay for what you have done.
- Sam
annoying me with a loop animated
Oh, enlightment is to be found in the use of libre software. Since this is Slashdot, let me tell you about the wonderfulness of software libre. A concept so wonderful, everyone needs to understand it to be a part of the Slashdot in crowd. English does not even have a word which can truly grasp its wonderfulness! A concept do daring, speaking in languages which do have a word for libre give you funny looks (or have been exposed to a Linux fanatic before, so know what you are talking about) and correct your bad Spanish.
More to the point, one piece of software libre called Mozilla allows one to set up images so they only cycle through their animated loop once. Mozilla also has options to stop JavaScript from opening up unwanted windows.
Since it is software libre, it is also software gratis, which means you do not have to pay anyone to have this program. Of course, Mozilla has a way of not working on JavaScript-heavy sites which are not correctly debugged (read: Written by people that feel that the whole world uses IE. Or should); I can not, for example, sign for classes online using Mozilla. However, for most browsing, it is just like IE. Except without popups. Or non-stop animated GIFs. Now, if only the Mozilla team made an open source flash player...
IN closing, the deep question is: What does libre mean? Well, we could tell you, but we need to make being part of the in crowd a little more difficult. Or just tell people that their user ID needs to have four digits or less to be, like, totally cool dude.
- Sam
how will this increase revenue for the advertising companies?
g hs, because, as long as we are getting clickthroughs, we have the potential to have all sorts of revenue. In fact, we can call a clickthrough "revenue" since, there is always the possibility that a given clickthrough will actually give us money. Maybe to pay off the company so that the poor hapless user no longer has to deal with our drag^H^H^H^Hclickthrough ads any more.
Well, see, we are dealing with the accountants of the 21st century. We are in a world where Webvan and Enron were roaring successes because they were able to generate revenue. Never mind other pesky accounting details, like expenses.
And, well, as we know, in a day and age where the marketing department knows their new pop-up ad is a roaring success because it generates so many clickthroughs. Well, OK, lets ignore such minor details like the ads actually are drag-them-to-our-site-kicking-and-screaming-throu
- Sam
This article is obviously written by someone working for the RIAA trying to get people to start listening to CDs and stop listening to MP3s any more.
In fact, the newer formats, such as DSM (SACD), have so many more frequenceis, that listening to these formats will, in fact, improve your hearing. So, everyone, listen to SACDs instead of normal CDs. beecause even CDs may cause brain damage.
Never mind the fact that SACDs are copy-protected 15 different ways, and that our methods for copy-protecting normal CDs have been shown to be ineffective. We want people to listen to SACDs for, well, their hearing.
Again: Do not listen to MP3s! they only damage your hearing (and promote bands which are not approved by us).
- the RIAA
I would like to thank 3D realms for doing this. Whether you liked the game or not, it is good to see more code being preserved in the GPL pool.
- Sam
Someone pointed out that, yes, we stole the land from México during the Mexico-American war of the mid-1800s (we also slaughtered children that were defending the castle in Chapultepec). Your reply, in this context, was "Spoils of war is not stealing". The expression "Spoils of war" implies that it was just and right for us to take the land from México. Saying "...is not stealing" supports this idea that it was morally right.
Now, if, by making this statement, you were saying besides "Of course it was OK for the United States to take half of México's land", you write and understand English differently than I do.
You have the right to have the opinion that the US's forced annexation of Mexican land is just, but your opinion is a minority opinion, and one that is extremely disrespectful of both Mexican people and Chicanos on this side of the border. It is the equivalent of telling people on Slashdot that programmers who write GPL code are a bunch of losers who can't write code people would want to pay for.
Also, the Americans of the time did not feel taking the Mexican land was just. This is why we gave México so much money in the Gadison purchase.
Until you learn to respect other people's feelings more, and learn to respect the Mexican people and the Mexican culture, you will continue to act in a manner which will make people who are either Latino or have an interest in Latino culture think you are a pubic hair.
Do I make myself clear?
- Sam (who used to have similar problems with not having empathy when I took anti-depressent medication, so I can see why this person honestly can not see how incredibly rude and disrespectful they are acting)
The strongest anti-American sentiment I saw was a sentiment that we caused September 11th by having a foreign policy which pissed off foreign countries. There is also a sentiment that the current adminstration is a bunch of war mongers.
There is no sentiment that America is the great Satan or the other kind of nonsense which is common in some middle eastern countries. In fact, Acapulco has a lot of large banners saying "God Bless America" when I was there a year ago.
I've frequently read one of the more radical newspapers, La Jornada; it is left-wing, but no more so than the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
- Sam
Exactly. The only way that Mexico's knowledge of how the United States stole their land has changed their foreign policy is that some Mexicans feel they have a right to cross the border without immigration restrictions.
And, no, it was not OK for us to take the land the way we did, anymore than it was OK for Iraq to take Kuwait they way they did ten years ago.
- Sam
- Samuel
On the downside, the module (for the Lucent winmodems) was originally released for the 2.2.x kernel. It was never updated by Lucent, but some people on the net figured out how to change the headers so it works with the 2.4.x kernels.
If it becomes impossible to use this module with 2.6, and it looks like the changes to the module interface are large enough to make the module completely incompatible, I have a few choices:
- Stick with an older Linux distro which uses a 2.4.x kernel.
- Wipe Linux and use Windows. [1]
- Spend over $100 for an external modem (I'm a college student, so no).
- Drop out of school for the next semester, and abandon my current open-source project so I have the time to develop an open-source driver for win modems. I want to graduate ASAP, so alas no.
- SamThen again, Lucent may force people to use older drivers for newer versions of Windows, like XP. Then again, Windows 98 is still supported (name one Linux distribiution which came out in 1998 which is still officially supported), and it should be possible to use a Win98 driver with XP.
These kinds of busts of people who willfully infringe on copyright is the kind of activity that the RIAA should be using, instead of attempting to encumber everyone's computers, regardless of the guilt of the computer user.
When the HRAA (home recording rights act) was passed, it set a dangerous precedent of being presumed guilty. No matter how one wished to use home stereo equipment which can copy audio digitally, one was treated like a media pirate.
For example, when I was burning a CD of my own music (which I own the copyright on) two years ago, I was not allowed to make a digital copy of one of my songs to the new CD. What happened was that a flag saying the song was a copy was set; my CD recorder does not allow me to make digital copies of copies. It assumes that all such activity is piracy, even though I use this equipment to make copies of my own songs.
In addition, the CD player forces me to pay extra for CD blanks because it assumes that my activities are copyright infringment activities. In other words, I have to pay the media companies royalties for the privledge of copying my own music. Fortunatly , there is a bug in the firmware which allows me to work around this issue and use far more inexpensive "computer" CDR blanks.
The RIAA and MPAA are trying to cripple computers in a similar manner, which such abominations as the SSSCA. They should stop treating honest computer users like criminials and start persecuting people who willfully engage in piracy.
People who do not think piracy is a problem are mainly in the US, where it is not the kind of problem it is in other countries. In México, for example, one can hardly walk down a street in a shopping district without noticing stands where people sell burned copies of music CDs, complete with inkjet printouts of the cover art for the CD. These kinds of sales do hurt the profits of the RIAA. Obviously not to the extent that every person who buys a burned copy is someone who would have bought a legitimate copy otherwise, but certaintly to a lesser extent.
The people who willfully pirate music and movies need to be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law; I will go so far as to say that the law needs to be set up to make persecuting these people easier. But only the guilty should be punsished; methods for duplicating and distributing music and movies, which are very helpful for promoting independent artists, should not be crippled by the media companies.
- Sam
You are welcome to your opinion, of course, but keep in mind that Star Trek IV was the first really sucessful Star Trek film with the general public. It has the best adjusted-for-inflation box office success for any Star Trek film. It was the film that was sucessful enough that it became possible to make Star Trek: The Next Generation.
- Sam
The reason for that is that certain styles of music have some really unpleasant harmonics in them which a vinyl pressing gets rid of. CDs are a more faithful and better reproduction of the sound, so sound worse for those styles of music.
For anything where the original music does not have unpleasant harmonics, like classical, CD kills vinyl any day of the week. Well, unless you are one of those rec.audio.opinion freaks that actually thinks having to compress the dynamic range and not having any frequencies above 12khz or so, nor any frequencies below 80hz sounds better than an accurate reproduction of the sound in question.
Or, if you one of those old fogies who got used to the vinyl sound and think CDs sound worse because you listened to LPs for the first time when you were 13, and CDs the first time when you were 43, and had a happier life when you were 13. Our ears are remarkably adaptive; someone who has learned to like vinyl's distortions will not like the sound of CD.
- Sam
- Sam
Wget supports this; is free and available for Linux and Windows.
We need WinZip of course
Unzip is free and is available for both Windows and Linux.
WindowBlinds FX looks nice
Every single modern window manager and desktop environment for Linux is fully themeable.
The BBC only streams in RealAudio
Real Networks does make a plug-in for Linux.
- Sam
OK, I second you on this. If I wanted to buy a new IBM Thinkpad T30, I can easily get it without Microsoft Office. No, I can not get it without Windows 2000 or Windows XP. With a 40gb hard disk, I may as well dual boot anyway.
For the record, I use Abiword for writing documents. I am well aware that it is, to put it mildly, not as feature rich as other offerings (and is somewhat buggy, to boot) [1]; however it is good enough, lightweight, and, most importantly, free.
As an aside, I do not think one of your earlier comments should have been moderated down. You said that file sharing takes money away from people who make content and were modded down for saying so.
- Sam
[1] Problem with inserting greyscale PNGs (in their bugzilla); problem with spelling suggestins going off of the screen when misspelled word is near bottom of the screen (I need to check bugzilla); problem with headers being too high to be printed (again, I need to check their bugzilla); and a problem with their ability to export documents to Word which have non-standard spacing (again, I need to check their bugzilla; I can't help them with this because a machine with Word on it is not handy).
Actually, I am getting the sense that Slashdot is becoming more and more dominated by mp3 traders who spout empty slogans like "Information wants to be free" or "Oh, I don't like the cost of CDs, so it's perfectly OK for me to copy them and share them with all my friends".
The problem with these kinds of people is that it is obvious that such people are really not concerned with the people who make the music in question; they are only concerned about getting the fruit of those people's labor at the lowest possible cost.
When comments like this get moderated down, I know too many people who blindly support self-serving file trading and have no consideration for the people who actually make the music are becoming moderators.
Let me put my position out there: I am opposed to any type of software piracy. I think Microsoft software costs too much, so I use Linux. I think most CDs cost too much, so I go over to mp3.com or buy the RAP CD ($15, 4 CDs full of music) instead of buying mainstream music. I think most movies and TV suck, so I only watch movies or TV as a social gathering. Instead, I hang out with college students or go online.
Yes, I am opposed to legislated technological solutions because they make anyone with a digital recorder guilty. The RIAA's efforts of 15 years ago, which created the HRRA, killed the DAT audio format. I am sure that the RIAA, unfrettered, would destroy the PC revolution.
- Sam
Please provide reference to an article detailing the antics of these little old ladies.
- Sam