Actually that is indeed the case. Many companies use exactly that strategy and are even able to raise significant amounts of money for exactly such a "business plan".
As far as I'm concerned, that's the kind of people that the media should be calling "pirates". Such actions are openly malicious and predatory. Unlike internet pirates, who are rarely malicious and incapable of causing any real world damages other than some sort of make-believe lost-possible-sales bullshit.
Agreed. The Gimp's greatest flaw is it's interface. And from the screenshots it doesn't look like it's improved much. If the interface is as flexible as they claim, they really should do some interface-templates. When you start the Gimp, it should ask whether you want the UI to look like Photoshop, MSPaint, or Paint Shop Pro, and set things up accordingly. Then Users could define their own templates to improve the UI over time. That should solve all the interface problems.
I have also been annoyed by all the taskbar entries (as others have already commented). There's really no excuse for opening so many windows.
I'm not a coder, but I have to say that I'm surprised that Gimp hasn't split off/forked into more projects. If I were a talented coder, it seems like these interface problems could be fixed relatively easily?
I don't think it's intended as a deterrent. It's ammo for MPAA lawyers. If there is an FBI warning on every DVD, it's difficult to say "i didn't realize it was wrong" when you get to court.
Please check out the RIAA website at www.riaa.com. if anyone knows of other sites that are relevant to this, please post them. If anyone has it, I'd also like to find a phone number so that I can call in and let them know how I feel, would appreciate it if someone could post the relevant info.
Here's my brief summary of "Bush was not AWOL", as printed in The Chicago Sun-Times:
Bush never went AWOL because he was exempt from duty in the first place! All this hoopla about 'Bush never showed up for duty' is true, because Bush wasn't required to report to anyone! SO THERE! PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT YOU LIBERAL FAGS! Bush was allowed to go anywhere he wanted during the Vietnam war, and was never required to show up anywhere for the duration! So how can you liberals say that he "skipped out" on the whole Vietnam War thing when he clearly had his father's permission to stay out of it???
Of course, I'm exaggerating slightly, but they're trying to say that Bush was excused from participating in the war, on account of his wanting to get involved in politics and also due to the fact that he didn't want to go. Normal Americans, of course, had to either shoot themselves in the foot or flee to Canada.
I think the greatest benefit of open source software comes not from the openness but from the evolutionary forces that develop as a result of that openness. That is, the openness provides important benefits, but that in turn allows evolutionary forces to come in to play. The good stuff gets adopted, reused, recycled, and improved, and then snowballs, and we end up with extremely efficient, useful software.
When trying to translate the opensource model to non-software entities, the most important thing to simulate is the evolutionary forces - I'm afraid that the openness may not be the most vital part.
It seems to me that the best way to fight the current legal approach to intellectual property is to "water it down".
For example: if I recall correctly, the owners of the word "Kleenex" were unable to pursue legal avenues because their trademark was diluted. Perhaps the best way to combat intellectual property would be to encourage this kind of dilution - like the "fair and balanced" blog thing that happened when Al Franken's book came out*.
Maybe a few ballsy coders could peruse the microsoft source and anonymously release dozens of open-source programs using similar but not-quite-exact code - this is easily possible with p2p distribution. Isn't the Penguin Liberation Front doing something like this now? I'll leave it to the reader to consider the possible results of this sort of action. Of course, intentionally diluting somebody's IP could easily put one on the wrong side of the law...
*When Al Franken's book, subtitled "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" came out, Fox News tried to sue him. Thousands of bloggers added the "Fair and Balanced" tagline to their blogs to dilute the trademark and to furthur demonstrate the absurdity of the lawsuit.
that's what they said about mandrake 9.1 . then those bastards put all the modem stuff on the 3rd cd. i think i had a similar problem with redhat 9, now that i think of it
This is true. By sending out jobs overseas, we actually gain jobs. We are giving jobs away to ourselves!!! By the same token, When we give breaks to large corporations and rich people, it is the average people who benefit!
Also, by killing people in Iraq, we are actually improving their lives.
I've just recently started building large media collections - lots of JPG images (digital photos), lots of pdf files (saved articles - is there a better text + graphics format than pdf?), mp3s, xvid movies.
Of course we know how useful mp3 metadata is. Are there useful solutions for organizing pdf, jpg, and other metadata? I've started to try and enter info about my photos in the JPG data fields that Irfanview provides. Am I wasting my time doing this? Are there other apps that can read this JPG metadata? Does anyone have experience with video file metadata?
If you play a Playstation game on a PC using an emulator, it's possible to play at higher resolutions than the original Playstation (if I remember correctly, you could get better anti-aliasing as well, in addition to other goodies). Is that the case for PS2 and PS1 games as well? Do PS1 games look better when you play them on a PS2? If so, it's a pretty good argument in favor of backward compatability in consoles.
specialized case (quiet, small, looks like it's an HT component), motherboard (because full-size ATX wouldn't fit in that case)
I always figured that when I get my "HT" system ready for display, that I would go to a pawn shop and buy the nicest looking piece of junk stereo equipment I can find. In fact, I would ask for one that looks nice but doesnt work, hopefully to save on cash. Then do some quick and dirty case modding, and squeeze my computer (complete with silent cooling system) into an old CD player or something. Actually it probly won't be quick...
There are 2 features that I *need* on my cellphone. Unfortunately, it's hard enough to find either one of them, much less both. The features are:
Speaker phone. Nowadays, I won't even buy a phone that doesn't have a speakerphone. The old way of holding a little contraption against your head is not just outdated, it's dumb. We are advanced enough that there is no reason to ever have to touch a piece of plastic to your head to communicate.
Portable address book. Cellphone address books should be easily portable to a pc. Don't the people who design cellphones use computers? Oh, and this *has* to be done using non-proprietary hardware and software or it doesn't count.
That's what I need on my cellphone.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The right decision would have been not to allow policital ads at all. By airing an ad from the whitehouse, which I paid for (and I would much prefer that the money be used for education instead of fucking superbowl ads), they have basically dumped politics into the superbowl. They should either remove all the politics (arguably the wise choice) or allow everyone to advertise. Again, I agree that the superbowl should be an all-fun event. Politics and fun don't mix well. But they have clearly chosen sides, and that has already taken some of the fun out of it.
Re:Being English, I have to ask...
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't use those exact words, but there's plenty of debauchery and rioting that happens around football. When I was in college we used to storm the field and tear the goal posts down and drag them through the streets of the town. It was usually done by 50-100 people, maybe more. I would bet that violent crime surges around football time, especially the big events. I would also bet that there have been a few full-fledged riots at American football games (or at least shortly thereafter).
stop buying things. seriously. dont buy a cell phone unless your old one is dead. check product reviews online before buying *anything*. return anything that doesnt work exactly as you expected it to. this might sound a bit extreme, but americans are totally hooked on the whole consumer culture thing. hopefully the rest of the world will be able to avoid getting sucked into it like us.
First of all, is anyone interested in keeping track of where this stuff is happening? I'd like to see a website that tells where these people are operating and where they are doing their raids. I'd be glad to crack some heads over this sort of thing. If the mafia comes to my town, I'll be swingin' a baseball bat till they leaves.
It would also be fun to set up a fake piracy ring selling legit CDs that appear to be pirated and "entrap" the RIAA - it would be pretty easy to provoke them into saying something that would get them into a lot of trouble: "Are you guys with the governement?" "Are you guys cops?" I'm sure that with a few carefully worded questions they would say yes. Just make sure you start the video camera at the right moment...
"No doubt all geeks are familiar with this scream"
newsflash: "slashdotters", although often stereotyped and pigeonholed, are in fact an extremely diverse and varied lot. There are slashdot readers who don't even care for star wars. There are slashdot readers who don't work in the computer industry! There are even -gasp- slashdot readers who don't consider themselves nerds!
To suggest that "all geeks are familiar with this scream" is naive at best, and this kind of dogmatic encouragement of the "groupthink" so often mentioned here is surely harmful to the breadth of opinion and depth of knowledge that makes slashdot what it is.
I've had a strange feeling this whole time that this was a carefully orchestrated attack on the GPL and the free software movement by a few investors. In fact I get the feeling that the people who instigated this whole thing might actually see themselves as corporate crusaders, defending the rights of corporations to make money for intellectual property. I have no evidence, though - just a feeling
With regards to the article, though, the most exciting part is right here:
SCO [may be]...answerable in damages not only to IBM but to all kernel contributors.
That's right, there is a chance that all kernel developers get to sue SCO for damages! That would be some pretty sweet poetic justice! Too bad the corporation shields those responsible from any real liability...
I recently attended a lecture on globalization. One of the main topics was the export of jobs from USA to cheaper labor markets.
They pointed out that when investing money, given several options, it is wisest to invest in whatever gives the highest return (the example given was a farmer who can invest in land, labor, or machinery). Whatever you invest in eventually will decline to the point that it is no longer the highest return (if land gives the highest return, eventually you will need labor or machinery to farm the land, so at that point investing in land gives a lower return than labor or machinery). At that point you should switch - invest your money elsewhere. Eventually all the options will equalize for the most part.
American corporations are the farmer. They can invest in USA, China, India, or wherever. Right now, investing in American labor has very low returns when compared with other countries. Unfortunately, this suggests that the labor market in America will eventually decline until it is equal with countries like China and India (actually the US labor market will decline considerably but China and India should rise dramatically as well).
Seems like sound logic to me. If this is indeed true, Americans should brace themselves for economic disaster as long as jobs continue to exported at current rates.
I've never seen the need to understand bizarre sexual behavior to "fit in" with the guys at the water cooler.
like I said, the anonymity of the internet has relaxed our traditional sexual values to the point that the old taboos are disappearring. nowadays, it's conservative sexual attitudes that are more bizarre! You've just proven my point!
You need to stop listening to Ashcroft, Pastor John and the D.A.R.E squad and wake the fuck up. Drugs are a part of our society, whether it's Caffeine, Prozac, Viagra, Red Bull, Marijuana, Vicodin, Aspirin or Cocaine. If you haven't figured that out then you're just not very social. Or maybe the Moral Majority has you confused into thinking that some drugs are good and some drugs are bad. Either way, step away from the computer for a few moments and you'll find a society that uses chemicals to fix their problems day in and day out, and often with great results.
I have a little surprise for you:
sex isn't dirty.
actually it's quite nice. i'm not a hundred percent sure, but there's some pretty good evidence that sex is what we were designed to do. that's why normal male humans don't normally go very long without thinking about sex. i believe it's often referred to as "survival", and sex is how we do the whole "survival" thing.
for those of you who really think that sex is "dirty", you need to see a therapist, seriously. that's a very unhealthy attitude, and it could very well cause some serious problems.
Example: Murdering is wrong but i should allow my child to experience it for themselves so that they *understand* murdering.
That's a terrible analogy. my dad gave me a cigarette when i was like 12, and i coughed for like 15 minutes. There was no way anyone could ever talk me into smoking a cigarette after that.
I plan on drinking my kid's first beers with them, and i plan on smoking the first joint with them as well. Both are very dangerous, but also quite normal and socially acceptable in moderation. similarly, it would be wise to talk openly with children about sex and sexuality (both must be done carefully of course) because if my kid is gonna be a perv, i would rather know about it than have him hide it and end up being a murderer/rapist because of pent up sexual frustration and aggression.
So what can we learn from the wonderful world of Internet Porn? Well, it turns out that everybody likes sex! Some people like it in different ways than others. Some people went through weird shit growing up, and now they get off on weird shit as adults. Who is to say what is normal and what is abnormal? As far as the kids go - you can't stop them from seeing porn. They will find it. And they will find the weirdest, nastiest shit you can imagine, far weirder than anything we were ever exposed to growing up. So your best bet is to work on building an honest, open dialog with them, and build a trusting relationship. If ya don't, your kids will still find the weird porn, but they won't be able to relate it to society, and they won't be able to bring it into the context of real people. They will hide it and keep it all inside, and that will cause much worse problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that is indeed the case. Many companies use exactly that strategy and are even able to raise significant amounts of money for exactly such a "business plan".
As far as I'm concerned, that's the kind of people that the media should be calling "pirates". Such actions are openly malicious and predatory. Unlike internet pirates, who are rarely malicious and incapable of causing any real world damages other than some sort of make-believe lost-possible-sales bullshit.
Agreed. The Gimp's greatest flaw is it's interface. And from the screenshots it doesn't look like it's improved much. If the interface is as flexible as they claim, they really should do some interface-templates. When you start the Gimp, it should ask whether you want the UI to look like Photoshop, MSPaint, or Paint Shop Pro, and set things up accordingly. Then Users could define their own templates to improve the UI over time. That should solve all the interface problems.
I have also been annoyed by all the taskbar entries (as others have already commented). There's really no excuse for opening so many windows.
I'm not a coder, but I have to say that I'm surprised that Gimp hasn't split off/forked into more projects. If I were a talented coder, it seems like these interface problems could be fixed relatively easily?
I don't think it's intended as a deterrent. It's ammo for MPAA lawyers. If there is an FBI warning on every DVD, it's difficult to say "i didn't realize it was wrong" when you get to court.
Please check out the RIAA website at www.riaa.com. if anyone knows of other sites that are relevant to this, please post them. If anyone has it, I'd also like to find a phone number so that I can call in and let them know how I feel, would appreciate it if someone could post the relevant info.
Here's my brief summary of "Bush was not AWOL", as printed in The Chicago Sun-Times:
Bush never went AWOL because he was exempt from duty in the first place! All this hoopla about 'Bush never showed up for duty' is true, because Bush wasn't required to report to anyone! SO THERE! PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT YOU LIBERAL FAGS! Bush was allowed to go anywhere he wanted during the Vietnam war, and was never required to show up anywhere for the duration! So how can you liberals say that he "skipped out" on the whole Vietnam War thing when he clearly had his father's permission to stay out of it???
Of course, I'm exaggerating slightly, but they're trying to say that Bush was excused from participating in the war, on account of his wanting to get involved in politics and also due to the fact that he didn't want to go. Normal Americans, of course, had to either shoot themselves in the foot or flee to Canada.
I think the greatest benefit of open source software comes not from the openness but from the evolutionary forces that develop as a result of that openness. That is, the openness provides important benefits, but that in turn allows evolutionary forces to come in to play. The good stuff gets adopted, reused, recycled, and improved, and then snowballs, and we end up with extremely efficient, useful software.
When trying to translate the opensource model to non-software entities, the most important thing to simulate is the evolutionary forces - I'm afraid that the openness may not be the most vital part.
It seems to me that the best way to fight the current legal approach to intellectual property is to "water it down".
For example: if I recall correctly, the owners of the word "Kleenex" were unable to pursue legal avenues because their trademark was diluted. Perhaps the best way to combat intellectual property would be to encourage this kind of dilution - like the "fair and balanced" blog thing that happened when Al Franken's book came out*.
Maybe a few ballsy coders could peruse the microsoft source and anonymously release dozens of open-source programs using similar but not-quite-exact code - this is easily possible with p2p distribution. Isn't the Penguin Liberation Front doing something like this now? I'll leave it to the reader to consider the possible results of this sort of action. Of course, intentionally diluting somebody's IP could easily put one on the wrong side of the law...
*When Al Franken's book, subtitled "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" came out, Fox News tried to sue him. Thousands of bloggers added the "Fair and Balanced" tagline to their blogs to dilute the trademark and to furthur demonstrate the absurdity of the lawsuit.
that's what they said about mandrake 9.1 . then those bastards put all the modem stuff on the 3rd cd. i think i had a similar problem with redhat 9, now that i think of it
This is true. By sending out jobs overseas, we actually gain jobs. We are giving jobs away to ourselves!!! By the same token, When we give breaks to large corporations and rich people, it is the average people who benefit!
Also, by killing people in Iraq, we are actually improving their lives.
I've just recently started building large media collections - lots of JPG images (digital photos), lots of pdf files (saved articles - is there a better text + graphics format than pdf?), mp3s, xvid movies.
Of course we know how useful mp3 metadata is. Are there useful solutions for organizing pdf, jpg, and other metadata? I've started to try and enter info about my photos in the JPG data fields that Irfanview provides. Am I wasting my time doing this? Are there other apps that can read this JPG metadata? Does anyone have experience with video file metadata?
If you play a Playstation game on a PC using an emulator, it's possible to play at higher resolutions than the original Playstation (if I remember correctly, you could get better anti-aliasing as well, in addition to other goodies). Is that the case for PS2 and PS1 games as well? Do PS1 games look better when you play them on a PS2? If so, it's a pretty good argument in favor of backward compatability in consoles.
I always figured that when I get my "HT" system ready for display, that I would go to a pawn shop and buy the nicest looking piece of junk stereo equipment I can find. In fact, I would ask for one that looks nice but doesnt work, hopefully to save on cash. Then do some quick and dirty case modding, and squeeze my computer (complete with silent cooling system) into an old CD player or something. Actually it probly won't be quick...
Speaker phone. Nowadays, I won't even buy a phone that doesn't have a speakerphone. The old way of holding a little contraption against your head is not just outdated, it's dumb. We are advanced enough that there is no reason to ever have to touch a piece of plastic to your head to communicate.
Portable address book. Cellphone address books should be easily portable to a pc. Don't the people who design cellphones use computers? Oh, and this *has* to be done using non-proprietary hardware and software or it doesn't count.
That's what I need on my cellphone.
The right decision would have been not to allow policital ads at all. By airing an ad from the whitehouse, which I paid for (and I would much prefer that the money be used for education instead of fucking superbowl ads), they have basically dumped politics into the superbowl. They should either remove all the politics (arguably the wise choice) or allow everyone to advertise. Again, I agree that the superbowl should be an all-fun event. Politics and fun don't mix well. But they have clearly chosen sides, and that has already taken some of the fun out of it.
I wouldn't use those exact words, but there's plenty of debauchery and rioting that happens around football. When I was in college we used to storm the field and tear the goal posts down and drag them through the streets of the town. It was usually done by 50-100 people, maybe more. I would bet that violent crime surges around football time, especially the big events. I would also bet that there have been a few full-fledged riots at American football games (or at least shortly thereafter).
stop buying things. seriously. dont buy a cell phone unless your old one is dead. check product reviews online before buying *anything*. return anything that doesnt work exactly as you expected it to. this might sound a bit extreme, but americans are totally hooked on the whole consumer culture thing. hopefully the rest of the world will be able to avoid getting sucked into it like us.
I guess they're in southern california/la. still, it would be nice to keep very close tabs on these people...
First of all, is anyone interested in keeping track of where this stuff is happening? I'd like to see a website that tells where these people are operating and where they are doing their raids. I'd be glad to crack some heads over this sort of thing. If the mafia comes to my town, I'll be swingin' a baseball bat till they leaves.
It would also be fun to set up a fake piracy ring selling legit CDs that appear to be pirated and "entrap" the RIAA - it would be pretty easy to provoke them into saying something that would get them into a lot of trouble: "Are you guys with the governement?" "Are you guys cops?" I'm sure that with a few carefully worded questions they would say yes. Just make sure you start the video camera at the right moment...
"No doubt all geeks are familiar with this scream"
newsflash: "slashdotters", although often stereotyped and pigeonholed, are in fact an extremely diverse and varied lot. There are slashdot readers who don't even care for star wars. There are slashdot readers who don't work in the computer industry! There are even -gasp- slashdot readers who don't consider themselves nerds!
To suggest that "all geeks are familiar with this scream" is naive at best, and this kind of dogmatic encouragement of the "groupthink" so often mentioned here is surely harmful to the breadth of opinion and depth of knowledge that makes slashdot what it is.
With regards to the article, though, the most exciting part is right here:
That's right, there is a chance that all kernel developers get to sue SCO for damages! That would be some pretty sweet poetic justice! Too bad the corporation shields those responsible from any real liability...
I recently attended a lecture on globalization. One of the main topics was the export of jobs from USA to cheaper labor markets.
They pointed out that when investing money, given several options, it is wisest to invest in whatever gives the highest return (the example given was a farmer who can invest in land, labor, or machinery). Whatever you invest in eventually will decline to the point that it is no longer the highest return (if land gives the highest return, eventually you will need labor or machinery to farm the land, so at that point investing in land gives a lower return than labor or machinery). At that point you should switch - invest your money elsewhere. Eventually all the options will equalize for the most part.
American corporations are the farmer. They can invest in USA, China, India, or wherever. Right now, investing in American labor has very low returns when compared with other countries. Unfortunately, this suggests that the labor market in America will eventually decline until it is equal with countries like China and India (actually the US labor market will decline considerably but China and India should rise dramatically as well).
Seems like sound logic to me. If this is indeed true, Americans should brace themselves for economic disaster as long as jobs continue to exported at current rates.
I've never seen the need to understand bizarre sexual behavior to "fit in" with the guys at the water cooler. like I said, the anonymity of the internet has relaxed our traditional sexual values to the point that the old taboos are disappearring. nowadays, it's conservative sexual attitudes that are more bizarre! You've just proven my point!
You need to stop listening to Ashcroft, Pastor John and the D.A.R.E squad and wake the fuck up. Drugs are a part of our society, whether it's Caffeine, Prozac, Viagra, Red Bull, Marijuana, Vicodin, Aspirin or Cocaine. If you haven't figured that out then you're just not very social. Or maybe the Moral Majority has you confused into thinking that some drugs are good and some drugs are bad. Either way, step away from the computer for a few moments and you'll find a society that uses chemicals to fix their problems day in and day out, and often with great results.
sex isn't dirty.
actually it's quite nice.
i'm not a hundred percent sure, but there's some pretty good evidence that sex is what we were designed to do. that's why normal male humans don't normally go very long without thinking about sex. i believe it's often referred to as "survival", and sex is how we do the whole "survival" thing.
for those of you who really think that sex is "dirty", you need to see a therapist, seriously. that's a very unhealthy attitude, and it could very well cause some serious problems.
I plan on drinking my kid's first beers with them, and i plan on smoking the first joint with them as well. Both are very dangerous, but also quite normal and socially acceptable in moderation. similarly, it would be wise to talk openly with children about sex and sexuality (both must be done carefully of course) because if my kid is gonna be a perv, i would rather know about it than have him hide it and end up being a murderer/rapist because of pent up sexual frustration and aggression.
So what can we learn from the wonderful world of Internet Porn? Well, it turns out that everybody likes sex! Some people like it in different ways than others. Some people went through weird shit growing up, and now they get off on weird shit as adults. Who is to say what is normal and what is abnormal? As far as the kids go - you can't stop them from seeing porn. They will find it. And they will find the weirdest, nastiest shit you can imagine, far weirder than anything we were ever exposed to growing up. So your best bet is to work on building an honest, open dialog with them, and build a trusting relationship. If ya don't, your kids will still find the weird porn, but they won't be able to relate it to society, and they won't be able to bring it into the context of real people. They will hide it and keep it all inside, and that will cause much worse problems.