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User: Vhalros

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  1. Re:Simple GPL, does not make me click on Court Finds Online Software License Not Binding · · Score: 3

    Well, as several people have already noted, the GPL is a little different. It's based entirly on copyright, and if you want to copy some ones copyrighted work (and, btw, you don't have to do anything to make your works copyrighted) you damn well have to abide by their terms(within reason). Similarly, you can't make a copy of a book and sell it on the net because the book never made you click "I Agree".

  2. Re:Why the big deal? on Capture MPEG From TiVo · · Score: 1

    Myself, I've never gotten a TV tuner card that I could make capture at anything near exceptable quality. It could be just some oddity with my setup though (It's a 900 Mhz duron with 128 meg of RAM by the way). It's not so much as an encoding problem as that the tuner seems incapable of giving me a good image to encode.

  3. Possible solution, no proxy, no aim.exe on Skirting AOL Checksumming -- Legally? · · Score: 1

    Okay, now there might be some flaw in my idea, but here it goes: What if they just store aim.exe backwards as an array in the client? When the server asks for the Md5 sum of bytes 1 through 6, just look at the array and give it the Md5 of bytes (size - 1) through (size - 6).

    Since you aren't actually distributing aim.exe (there is no way in hell it's going to run backwards), you aren't inviolation of the EULA. If just having it backwards makes it to similar, then you could divide the file up into segments, and have some of the segments backwards, and other things like this-- you could pretty easily make it irreconizable as aim.exe (with a little math) and still have it return the right sums.

    Any one see any obvious holes in my logic? Or would this actually work?

  4. Who cares? on What Happened To Intervideo's Linux DVD Player? · · Score: 1

    After all the stuff the MPAA has spewed out in court, would you really want to give in to them (and, indirectly, fund them) by using some 'approved' DVD players. What the MPAA has done is just plain wrong. Having to sit back and watch the bad guys win is to high a price to pay for a DVD.

  5. Re:What the hell is wrong with Emmett on Official AIM for Linux · · Score: 1

    We already have AIM clients software that are (arguably) better then the original AIM. (No stupid adds or obnoxious pop-ups for one thing). Maybe not every thing has to be open-source, but I think that open-source software is better. Why? Because the restrictions place by liscence agreements are upsurd, that's why. I'm not allowed to distribute the software as I see fit? I'm not allowed to reverse engineer it? Restrictions like these can only hurt the end-user, they make the consumers of software the enemy of the producers

    The Free Software/Open Source movement was supposed to change these things. Linux is the OS that was spawned from the ideals of free software.

    If linux becomes nothing but an open platform for closed apps, it has lost almost all the value it ever really had. It may as well go to the OS graveyard.

    So, forgive me, but even if this client is better, I'm not going to use it. I will never use a closed program where an open one exists, not even if it's a vastly infirior program. Why, because I believe in open-source. I won't help to perpetuatate a system I don't believe in.

    Sure, you don't have to agree with me, I'm not here to force my views upon you. But I just ask, next time your at one of those click-through liscence agreements, actually read it, do you really agree? Well, I don't, and that's why I use linux.

  6. Re:Vindictive Attitude. on Distributed Computing Applied to Medical Research · · Score: 1

    But wouldn't it be more honourable if, say, they didn't patent the "cure"? If instead any company could take the cure generated and make their own product (something like all the different brands of asprin... only better.)? Certainly, the prices would be lower if nothing else. It would be more beneficial to society, and probably help more people. I don't know about you, but I would certainly say that's more honourable.

  7. Re:Gee.... on Open Sourcing Closed Sourced Drivers? · · Score: 1

    Maybe I'm crazy, but isn't that fact that the linux kernel is open one of the things that's helped to make it great? I'm not trying to be an open-source zealot here, I'm just saying there are practical (not merely idealogical) reasons why we as a community shouldn't except binary drivers

    .

    Suppose you get a binary drivers for, say, a soundcard. They work great, no detectable errors at all. A while latter, you get a bianary driver for your Nic, it works great too. In a couple months, you have 5 or 6 of these binary drivers. Then things start to fuck up. You try going back and only having the drivers that worked well togeather, but things are still all messed up. So, what can you do? The hacker community is no help (okay, so they may have reverse engineered there own drivers, let's say they didn't, becsue if they did, those are open source drivers, which is outside this argument), becase they don't know anything about the internals of the drivers. So you call the driver vendors, and they blame one another. What do you do? Your stuck with either no drivers, or a linux box as stable as a win 95 PC (It might be tough for it to become that unstable, but bad hardware drivers were one of the most commong causes of those blue-screens of death... The linux kernel does work rather differently, admitedly.)

    Well, any way, that's my reasoning. This is why I think you should seriouly consider not using bianary drives, even if they do work well. If companies see that the linux community is willing to except bianary-only drivers, they will more then willing to keep shipping them out. So, just don't except them. That way, if they want to sell to linux users, they'll have to have open source drivers.
  8. There is another (portable) one: Ij-833 on MP3/CD Players Reviewed · · Score: 1

    I have a catalogue for Tiger Direct sitting on my desk right now. It has info on a product called the I-Jam 833 (IJ-833). It plays MP3's burned onto a Cd, but doesn't give much info. I tried to find it on their website, but couldn't get any where. Any one have more info?

  9. Enmcrypted Hardware on Encrypting Digital Music With Multiple Keys · · Score: 3

    They are just going to encrypte everything. You sound card will have hard ware encryption. It will only connect to special digital speakers. Upon connecting to these speakers, it will negotiate a special encrytion key with the speakers, and then only send encrypted music to the speakers. The same will be done for monitors and such, so that you can't FUCKING USE ANY OF YOUR STUFF!!!

  10. Re:Easy way around MS piracy thing -- No on Slashback: Secrecy, Toyware, France · · Score: 2

    Well, you could do that. But what if it checks with the BIOS lock every time you try to install anything from the CD, not just the whole OS?

    Windows will inevitably fuck itself up, and then you will need the CD for something. Windows tends to ask for the CD for changing even trivial things, and if it really fucks up (It does that about twice a year...), you'll have to install reinstall the whole OS.

    So, your solution would work, but every time you want to change anything, you'll have to rip out your hard drive and put it back in the dell. So you'd have to keep a functional dell box sitting around.

    This is actually the reason I switched over to linux, because I got tired of this kind of shit from MS. Linux's technical suppurioty isn't as great as people make it sound (Although it is nice to have an OS that doesn't piss all it's memory away...). And since I've been using it, I've really come to appriciate the idea of free-software (Stallman is right, damn it, free software is inherntly supirior _because_ it's free, not because of fewer bugs/better code, that's just a bonus). But I probably wouldn't have switched over to it in the first place if MS weren't a bunch of dick heads.

  11. Even if there is a DVD Player for Linux... on Slashback: Lunacy, Cinema, Parliament · · Score: 1

    It's not open source. The way the MPAA is, it's almost certain there never will be an open-source liscenced DVD player. So, I'd rather used some nice, open, DeCSS based thing.

    After all this stupidity, there is no way in hell I'm going to use some MPAA liscenced player.

  12. This is not the first island we have seen rise... on Slashback V: Espionage, Midwifery, Intrusion · · Score: 1

    Actually, this isn't the first island we've seen rise from the sea. There was one called Prometheus (Named after the Titan in greek mythology who brought fire to man), in the North Atlantic. I'd attempt to provide more info, but I'm on an incredibly slow connection (Slashdot litterally too 10 minutes to load in lynx). There may be other such islands as well.

    As for when it will stop "fiddling with itself", well, that will probably be a very long time. It's bassically been fiddling with itself for quite a long time and it's just now been fiddled enough to poke up out of the see. Other such islands, such as those that make up Hawaii, still aren't done growing.

  13. Linux GNU GPL'd DVD does exist on LSDVD Starts Cooking · · Score: 2

    There is a GPL'd Linux DVD player. It's availible at http://www.linuxvideo.org. Intructions on how to make the thing work are at http://www.opendvd.org. The player is still in early testing stages, and they are short on programmers (I think...). Making it work is kinda bitchy, but it does work more or less, although it's definatly pretty far from being called a stable release. Personnally, I won't run closed source software on my linux box (this is not my box), so this player gets my vote. I agree with some of the posts above that open source software is inherently supirior, not because of better fetures, coding, or anything like that, merely because it is open source. I would rather use a piece of shit free software app, then some full fetured, easy to use, intutive closed app.

  14. Lucky stiffs, actually having computers courses- on Linux & Education - How To Get It For Your School · · Score: 1

    Your lucky they mentioned computers at all in your highschool. In my school, they had one course that used Apple IIe's, with no hard drives, and double sided 5.25 that you had to manually flip to read the other side. If you were lucky, you could use the 'high-end' machine had advanced fetures like a 3.25 inch floppy drive that could read 720K disks, and a mouse.

    Toward the end of the class, the pased out pages of BASIC code and told us to copy it- they never bothered to explain what the language meant, they never even used the term "programming" or "language" as I recall. For this we got an official "computer literacy stamp" on our record.

    And, if you were wondering, I graduated in 1999. So this is fairly recent. Although I should mention that during my senior year, power-macs (don't recall exactly what kind) were place in all the class rooms, they seldom did anything except collect dust.

  15. Emulation of X-box on Microsoft Unveils The X Box · · Score: 1

    If it's an x86 based platform, usign DirectX, wouldn't it be easy to emulate the console and run them on a PC? Infact, would you even have to emulate anything, or just get a copy of the X-box's BIOS? I really don't understand the purpose of an x86 based console. It seems to me it would make more sense to just get a PC and have a more flexible machine if I am going to put up with all of x86's limitations. Am I missing something here?

  16. Re:Deathmatching setup on Ergonomic Keyboards · · Score: 1

    I usually used R-F-D-G for my death matches. I find I can hit _alot_ of keys with my pinky and thumb while still moveing with my other three fingers and the mouse.

  17. Do you know whats in windows? on Will Microsoft Open Windows Source Code? (No!) · · Score: 1

    "Asked specifically about the prospect of opening Windows source code, Gates told Time magazine in November: `The only thing we know for sure would be bad for consumers is anything that blocks us from being able to innovate Windows or anything that made it so that when people buy Windows they don't know what's in it.'" Okay, so, um... With out the source, how do I know exactly do I know what's in it?

  18. Front Mounted Ports on Creative Labs PC · · Score: 2

    I'm sorry, but I just don't get it, why do I want ports on the front? I mean, I can see why I might want USB's there if I was going to swap them alot, but why anything else? I don't want a bunch of cords coming out of the front and back of the damned thing.

  19. Automatic Updates on Get Ready for Rent-An-App · · Score: 1

    "All upgrades and new features are added automatically, without having to download and install updates," he said. Could you possibly imagine anything more annoying then software that updates itself with out telling you? And, with Microsoft doing it, can you imagine the security holes? In side a month trojans would download and install themselves on every MS OS connected to the net.

  20. Programmed Evolution on Virtual Immune Systems Headed for Market · · Score: 1

    I know this is a little far fetched, and probably beyond what could happen with the described system, but imagine a virus that could use the adaptive nature of the "immune system" itself. By reacting in certain ways, a virus could controll the "evolution" of such a system, eventually using it as a tool for destruction.