Re:However, your rights end. . .
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 0
I deem it necessary to be available to people with my cell number.
That's the only criterion people like you think matters. So don't complain when others take similarly selfish action to preserve their peace.
Re:This would be in America. right?
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 1
This brings to mind an X-Files episode that had me rather incredulous -- not of the Roswell alien corpses piled up in the corner, but that Mulder was cheerfully making a cell phone call from inside a buried steel railway car in the middle of a desert. That's real coverage.
Re:However, your rights end. . .
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Some bar owner decided I shouldn't be able to use my cellphone because he's too much of a wussy to tell people to turn them to silent" doesn't cut it to save my job or the dying persons life.
I get pretty tired of everyone equating their "need" to receive phone calls anywhere anytime with a supposed heart surgeon's need to be called. Especially when it'd probably be illegal (or certainly he'd lose his licence and/or his malpractice insurance) for a doctor to operate if he's come straight from a bar; and doctors who do happen to be on call carry pagers which operate on different frequncies than cells and so are not subject to (focused) jamming of cellphones. So just talk about how it'd inconvenience you, not about "LIVES WILL BE LOST!" Or get a pager yourself for emergencies and turn your cell off when it might piss people off for you to take the 99.9% of non-emergency calls.
Hmm... what about Beijing vs Peking? Two different cities, or a name change?
Same place, different pronunciation. In Cantonese it's "Pak-geng", many Chinese words adopted into English come from Cantonese rather than Mandarin (typhoon, ketchup, for instance). It's amused me how using a name like "Peking" somehow labels one as a colonial imperialist. However, "China" of course is not what the country is called, it's "Chung Guo". (The Ch'ins were an ancient dynasty.) China doesn't seem to care about that. But no one tries to insist the Chinese use native pronunciations for Western cities or countries -- their words for foreign places are far removed from what they're called by the inhabitants. It's all lacking in any consistency.
A lot of related words remain, though. Peking Duck; and Peking University is the offical name of the institution.
sometimes when I load a document or spreadsheet, the font will look all jagged and screwed up. Highlighting the text and making it "normal" again fixes it. Though the downside to normalizing the text is that you lose all the formatting. Italics, bold, color, whatever.. If anyone knows why this happens, I'd love to hear about it. It's so aggravating that I'd almost be tempted to buy MS Office if there was a Linux port.
I don't use OO, but have seen this problem elsewhere -- usually due to a font specified not being found and somethng being synthesised (in your case, poorly). You can retain the other formatting if you select all the text and change the font to one you do have -- other formatting like italics etc should still be there.
Counterfeiters have been trying to get their hands on Windows source code for years. So have computer activists who say that programs could be made to work better with Windows if the source code were public.
Counterfeiters don't want the source code, they just copy the binaries and maybe a hack to circumvent registration.
"Computer activists" even less so -- copying Windows code would poison any GPL project.
In any case, Microsoft's code allows the company to keep its near-monopoly on computer operating systems, for the same reason Coca-Cola guards its secret formula.
True; but the reason Coke and MS have near monopolies is because of marketing, not innate superiority of their products (Pepsi wins most blind taste tests; Macs win all usability tests).
In parts of Asia and the former Soviet Union piracy rates approach 90 per cent, they said. As a result, the US software industry loses $US13 billion ($A16.52 billion) a year for counterfeiting and other forms of software piracy.
Debatable; but irrelevant anyway.
The US Congress is considering legislation designed to close a number of legal loopholes often allowing counterfeiters to get away with their activities, specifically prohibiting trafficking in genuine authentication components.
Again, the idea that this will make piracy more prevalent -- it will have no affect at all on MS warez.
(Bombay is Mumbai? So is Bombay an archaic usage(like Bangkok is for the capital of Thailand) or is it just an Anglicised version of the word?)
It's more that Mumbai is the "new" official usage. But I don't know where you got the idea that "Bangkok" is archaic -- it's a quite old usage; it's not what the Thais call it (that's Krungthep, for short) but it's the "official" English name.
the great thing about live linux cds is they are packed with utilities that can help with diagnostics. This is just a stripped down version of windows.
This is not "just a stripped down version". It DOES contain "utilities that can help with diagnostics". More, since you have to burn your own disk (the author can't redistribute the MS files needed) you can add other stuff than the default utilities.
Does anyone know which newsgroup it was posted to? If it was outside the aol.* heirarchy, then obviously Ellison has no idea how NNTP works. The minute that the message propagated, it was outside AOL's control on any but thier own servers.
RTFA. alt.binaries.ebook. And it wasn't originally posted via AOL at all.
No he doesn't. As the article write-up points out, he asked AOL to remove the (clearly) infringing articles, and AOL blew him off.
The actual complaint says that the guy who posted the stories did it through his local ISP. AOL came in only as it peered with that. What makes it a bit sleazy is that Ellison made a deal with the uploader, the only person wo deliberately copied his work, if he would give evidence in his case against AOL -- and obviously AOL is the target solely due to having deep pockets.
Distributing illegal software is moral? That's the dumbiest thing I've read here in ages. You must still be in school or something because no rational adult would think that taking property you don't own is the right thing to do.
There's no logical connection between "distributing illegal software" and "taking property". No one is stealing boxes out of shops. No "property" is involved at all. That's the reason the legal concepts of "intellectual property" (copyright, trademarks, patents, etc) were invented, because trying to apply rules derived from "real property" lead to ridiculous results. (All these statements that start with "stealing software is like stealing..." for a start.)
There's a heck of a lot more monetary value associated with Windows source code than there is with some windows binaries.
Hardly, unless by "associated with" you mean "cost to create" rather than "selling price", because the only people interested in it are hackers, in either sense. Anyone who wanted to use it commercially would be insane. They could license it if they needed access.
Windows binaries, on the other hand, can be sold in street stalls for $2/set in much of Asia, so they have a value.
>> Much more likely is that distributions will be created and advertised for free, or created with the express purpose of marketing them to governments at cut-rate pricing. As anyone can create and market a distribution, it's not far-fetched to imagine a version subsidized and supported by organizations that may not have U.S. or other government interests at heart.
> Which "the government" probably wouldn't purchase. Jones might not have noticed, but most linux installations run in government and the private sector are from the Big Name distributors.
That's what made me laugh. A government is going to buy an OS "subsidized and supported by organizations that may not have U.S. or other government interests at heart". The Defense Department is going to by alQaedix (or even RedFlag Linux) because it's cheap? Has this troll never heard of, say the NSA's Security-Enhanced Linux?
Anyway, he omits that subversion of an OS could almost as easily be done in any closed source software, especially with the trend to subcontract and outsource.
Palm probably started designing their new system around.Net, activex, ms access/outlook, visual studio and other technologies that nail them to Microsoft.
According to the article: "PalmSource made the decision due to changes in the hotsync architecture and how the new PIM apps work. The new PIM apps have be re-architected to more closely resemble Microsoft Outlook fields and the internal database use a new SQL like schema to store records."
So there goes the "adding value just lowers its value" stupidity too. It's an example where adding value, surprisingly enough, really _adds_ value for hundreds of millions of people who have better things to do with their time.
The value added of all your examples is at the end points, exactly as in the article. You seem to realise that now, but it wasn't what you said earlier.
Also, with your specific example of firewalling at the ISP level to save users the trouble you'd have to trust everyone on your side of the firewall: all the other customers. A lot of virus outbreaks in companies with firewalled LANs occur because someone plugged in an infected laptop.
(Reality check: radio or TV is also just an "aggreement". You aggree to modulate the signal in a certain way. Yet it doesn't mean you can show anything on TV. I'm sure if anyone tried showing child porn at noon on TV, they'd _very_ quickly learn that "it's just a protocol" isn't a legal defense.)
You've missed the point of the "stupidity" of the net. If you want to stop porn of some kind, you bust the people uploading it; you don't try to filter every packet passing through the Internet, (or have a nanny box mandated on every TV -- remember the V-chip?) which is clearly futile and open to massive abuse.
Yup. It is a repost. It's been several months though. That may be within the rules.
It's like TV sitcoms. After three or four years they have enough episodes in the bag to sell into syndication. Meanwhile the cast (editors) are getting stale and at the same time demanding more and more money; so it's a good time to call it a day and go to reruns.
World of Ends Public Draft
Posted by Hemos on Saturday March 08, 2003@09:39PM
from the and-i-feel-fine dept.
Doc Searls sent me the link over to the newest work that he and fellow Cluetrain person David Weinberger haveput together. It's called "World of Ends" although I like the subtitle "What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else" better - but that's just me. In any case, some interesting reading, particular if you like/d The Cluetrain Manifesto. Update: 03/08 14:42 GMT by CN: Yeah, this is a dupe of yesterday's story. Everyone point at Hemos and laugh.
World of Ends
Posted by michael on Saturday March 08, 2003 @01:41AM
from the it-starts-with-an-earthquake,-birds-and-snakes dept.
epeus writes "At World of Ends, Doc Searls and David Weinberger explain the End-to-End nature of the internet in terms so clear even your manager could understand them. 'The Internet isn't complicated. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement. The Internet is stupid. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.' and so forth."
Maybe the date on the linked article "Last update: 4.28.03" might have been a clue that this wasn't hot news.
Who do you trust? And who do you get to solve something like this?
Do you say, "Only certain government approved facilities can deal with this sort of information?"
The guy(s) were developing a database front end; what moron gave them real data to work with? He's the one who should be canned.
The real information should never have gone to the coders. How hard would it have been to munge some data to make a test file with all the names, phone numbers, etc in the same format but bogus? Unless you're working at the NSA, you're going to have all kinds of printouts and the like from this test data lying about while you're working on it, thrown in the trash if not posted online as in this case.
So why would it make sense to spend more money in making these reductions? Why not just give the standard package? I'm missing something here.
Because if the standard package was much cheaper in Thailand there'd be massive pressure from other customers to get the same price, and lots of grey-market trade. Somehow crippling it, maybe making only Thai system menus avaiable (currently I believe all language versions use the same code and most of the same files), for instance, would make this a different product and a different price justifiable.
There's more to it than that - I'm venturing they're releasing this in hopes that people will purchase something from them, not from the local "vendor" on the corner selling XP out of the back of his autorikshaw.
Actually, they hope that this will be OEM. There's no hope of any end-users buying real MS software in Thailand. A lot of the cheap Linux PCs sold under this program in Thailand had bootleg MS OS's installed the first time they booted. And the vendors in Tailand don't sell out warez off the back of a tuktuk, but in almost every computer shop (under the counter if there's a blitz).
It's funny, people complain about how MS forces you to install everything (IE, Outlook, etc) and call in "anti-competitive" and when they offer it somewhere with these things stripped out it's called "crippled".
I don't for a moment believe that the "reduced functionality" will mean cutting IE, Outlook Express or Windows Media. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if somehow this reduction made it harder to remove them or install competing apps.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the only criterion people like you think matters. So don't complain when others take similarly selfish action to preserve their peace.
This brings to mind an X-Files episode that had me rather incredulous -- not of the Roswell alien corpses piled up in the corner, but that Mulder was cheerfully making a cell phone call from inside a buried steel railway car in the middle of a desert. That's real coverage.
I get pretty tired of everyone equating their "need" to receive phone calls anywhere anytime with a supposed heart surgeon's need to be called. Especially when it'd probably be illegal (or certainly he'd lose his licence and/or his malpractice insurance) for a doctor to operate if he's come straight from a bar; and doctors who do happen to be on call carry pagers which operate on different frequncies than cells and so are not subject to (focused) jamming of cellphones. So just talk about how it'd inconvenience you, not about "LIVES WILL BE LOST!" Or get a pager yourself for emergencies and turn your cell off when it might piss people off for you to take the 99.9% of non-emergency calls.
Same place, different pronunciation. In Cantonese it's "Pak-geng", many Chinese words adopted into English come from Cantonese rather than Mandarin (typhoon, ketchup, for instance). It's amused me how using a name like "Peking" somehow labels one as a colonial imperialist. However, "China" of course is not what the country is called, it's "Chung Guo". (The Ch'ins were an ancient dynasty.) China doesn't seem to care about that. But no one tries to insist the Chinese use native pronunciations for Western cities or countries -- their words for foreign places are far removed from what they're called by the inhabitants. It's all lacking in any consistency.
A lot of related words remain, though. Peking Duck; and Peking University is the offical name of the institution.
I don't use OO, but have seen this problem elsewhere -- usually due to a font specified not being found and somethng being synthesised (in your case, poorly). You can retain the other formatting if you select all the text and change the font to one you do have -- other formatting like italics etc should still be there.
Yes, I was just going with the examples given and couldn't be bothered to footnote it. But between them Coke and Pepsi come pretty close.
Go to Woz.org and ask him -- he's got pages of letters and seems to reply to just about everyone.
In China this has been around for years. Chinese numerology gives great value to number 8. See for instance "A special phone number, 88888888, was auctioned Monday in this capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, for 2.33 million yuan (about 280,723 US dollars)." In Hong Kong there's a premium on lucky phone numbers and you can buy and sell them, the mobile phone companies usually have a board outside with lists of auspicious numbers available.
Counterfeiters don't want the source code, they just copy the binaries and maybe a hack to circumvent registration.
"Computer activists" even less so -- copying Windows code would poison any GPL project.
In any case, Microsoft's code allows the company to keep its near-monopoly on computer operating systems, for the same reason Coca-Cola guards its secret formula.
True; but the reason Coke and MS have near monopolies is because of marketing, not innate superiority of their products (Pepsi wins most blind taste tests; Macs win all usability tests).
In parts of Asia and the former Soviet Union piracy rates approach 90 per cent, they said. As a result, the US software industry loses $US13 billion ($A16.52 billion) a year for counterfeiting and other forms of software piracy.
Debatable; but irrelevant anyway.
The US Congress is considering legislation designed to close a number of legal loopholes often allowing counterfeiters to get away with their activities, specifically prohibiting trafficking in genuine authentication components.
Again, the idea that this will make piracy more prevalent -- it will have no affect at all on MS warez.
It's more that Mumbai is the "new" official usage. But I don't know where you got the idea that "Bangkok" is archaic -- it's a quite old usage; it's not what the Thais call it (that's Krungthep, for short) but it's the "official" English name.
This is not "just a stripped down version". It DOES contain "utilities that can help with diagnostics". More, since you have to burn your own disk (the author can't redistribute the MS files needed) you can add other stuff than the default utilities.
RTFA. alt.binaries.ebook. And it wasn't originally posted via AOL at all.
The actual complaint says that the guy who posted the stories did it through his local ISP. AOL came in only as it peered with that. What makes it a bit sleazy is that Ellison made a deal with the uploader, the only person wo deliberately copied his work, if he would give evidence in his case against AOL -- and obviously AOL is the target solely due to having deep pockets.
There's no logical connection between "distributing illegal software" and "taking property". No one is stealing boxes out of shops. No "property" is involved at all. That's the reason the legal concepts of "intellectual property" (copyright, trademarks, patents, etc) were invented, because trying to apply rules derived from "real property" lead to ridiculous results. (All these statements that start with "stealing software is like stealing..." for a start.)
Hardly, unless by "associated with" you mean "cost to create" rather than "selling price", because the only people interested in it are hackers, in either sense. Anyone who wanted to use it commercially would be insane. They could license it if they needed access.
Windows binaries, on the other hand, can be sold in street stalls for $2/set in much of Asia, so they have a value.
> Which "the government" probably wouldn't purchase. Jones might not have noticed, but most linux installations run in government and the private sector are from the Big Name distributors.
That's what made me laugh. A government is going to buy an OS "subsidized and supported by organizations that may not have U.S. or other government interests at heart". The Defense Department is going to by alQaedix (or even RedFlag Linux) because it's cheap? Has this troll never heard of, say the NSA's Security-Enhanced Linux?
Anyway, he omits that subversion of an OS could almost as easily be done in any closed source software, especially with the trend to subcontract and outsource.
According to the article: "PalmSource made the decision due to changes in the hotsync architecture and how the new PIM apps work. The new PIM apps have be re-architected to more closely resemble Microsoft Outlook fields and the internal database use a new SQL like schema to store records."
The value added of all your examples is at the end points, exactly as in the article. You seem to realise that now, but it wasn't what you said earlier.
Also, with your specific example of firewalling at the ISP level to save users the trouble you'd have to trust everyone on your side of the firewall: all the other customers. A lot of virus outbreaks in companies with firewalled LANs occur because someone plugged in an infected laptop.
You've missed the point of the "stupidity" of the net. If you want to stop porn of some kind, you bust the people uploading it; you don't try to filter every packet passing through the Internet, (or have a nanny box mandated on every TV -- remember the V-chip?) which is clearly futile and open to massive abuse.
It's like TV sitcoms. After three or four years they have enough episodes in the bag to sell into syndication. Meanwhile the cast (editors) are getting stale and at the same time demanding more and more money; so it's a good time to call it a day and go to reruns.
World of Ends Public Draft
Posted by Hemos on Saturday March 08, 2003@09:39PM
from the and-i-feel-fine dept.
Doc Searls sent me the link over to the newest work that he and fellow Cluetrain person David Weinberger haveput together. It's called "World of Ends" although I like the subtitle "What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else" better - but that's just me. In any case, some interesting reading, particular if you like/d The Cluetrain Manifesto. Update: 03/08 14:42 GMT by CN: Yeah, this is a dupe of yesterday's story. Everyone point at Hemos and laugh.
World of Ends
Posted by michael on Saturday March 08, 2003 @01:41AM
from the it-starts-with-an-earthquake,-birds-and-snakes dept.
epeus writes "At World of Ends, Doc Searls and David Weinberger explain the End-to-End nature of the internet in terms so clear even your manager could understand them. 'The Internet isn't complicated. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement. The Internet is stupid. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.' and so forth."
Maybe the date on the linked article "Last update: 4.28.03" might have been a clue that this wasn't hot news.
The guy(s) were developing a database front end; what moron gave them real data to work with? He's the one who should be canned.
The real information should never have gone to the coders. How hard would it have been to munge some data to make a test file with all the names, phone numbers, etc in the same format but bogus? Unless you're working at the NSA, you're going to have all kinds of printouts and the like from this test data lying about while you're working on it, thrown in the trash if not posted online as in this case.
Because if the standard package was much cheaper in Thailand there'd be massive pressure from other customers to get the same price, and lots of grey-market trade. Somehow crippling it, maybe making only Thai system menus avaiable (currently I believe all language versions use the same code and most of the same files), for instance, would make this a different product and a different price justifiable.
Actually, they hope that this will be OEM. There's no hope of any end-users buying real MS software in Thailand. A lot of the cheap Linux PCs sold under this program in Thailand had bootleg MS OS's installed the first time they booted. And the vendors in Tailand don't sell out warez off the back of a tuktuk, but in almost every computer shop (under the counter if there's a blitz).
I don't for a moment believe that the "reduced functionality" will mean cutting IE, Outlook Express or Windows Media. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if somehow this reduction made it harder to remove them or install competing apps.