It's actually very simple: people pay for convenience. If the price is right, of course. On P2P it's sometimes hard to find a reliable source, and some people don't want to wait an hour or so for their download to finish.
I, for one, often do not even know what I'm looking for when I start browsing for music on the web.
I would definitely be willing to pay $10 a month or so for a music site, where I can browse through my favorite artists or genres and download what I like.
I know that I could have the same results if I just go to the "official" sites for browsing and then download on P2P once I found something I like. But it's simply not very convenient.
The two important points are just that the price is right, and that the selection is large enough, so I am guaranteed to find what I'm looking for. The latter point probably means that some of the bigger labels would have to get together and set up a common site, if they want to create something successful.
Yes, it's really hard indeed (N-O-T). './setup -net' as root, click 'next' a few times, then run $INSTALLDIR/setup as the user that wants to use Openoffice, and then you can start it using the KDE menu (or probably the Gnome menu, I suppose it supports that as well). Wow...exactly as the documentation describes you should do. Real hard, ain't it?
(sigh) How many times did we have this discussion already? How many times will we still have to go over this again? (I fear the answer is somewhere close to infinity...)
The installation is indeed very easy for the average Joe Slashdotreader. I simply follow the detailed instructions, and everything worked fine. No problem.
But how do you explain to somebody who is used to some 'Installshield' stuff, why he has to select the network setup to install on a single-user pc? Or that he has to install the program two times, once as root, and once as user? Come on, most Average-Joe-Users will run away waving their hands and screaming if you ask them to use the command line to run an install script!
Most people don't want to learn about the inner workings of their computer. Most people simply want to write letters, calculate spreadsheets, read their email, and maybe play some games. And they want to do this as hassle-free as possible. Most people are not like us nerds, who love tweaking around with their system. Command-line interfaces and specific commands and command options are perceived as a huge hassle. Tell the user to click the 'Install' button, and he understands (or at least he has the impression he understands). Tell him to type './setup -net' in a command-line window and he will feel completely clueless (well, you could say that's only because he IS indeed clueless, but that's not the point. Nobody wants to feel clueless and most people feel disinclined to use any tools that make them feel that way).
It doesn't seem like a huge task to write a simple point-and-click interface to guide Joe User through the installation process. And one could simply have the user-installation script automatically executed the first time a user runs the program. Anyways, the upshot is: If you think that OSS is only for geeks, there is indeed no need to improve the installation. For folks like us it's already as easy as heck. If you want to improve OSS's popularity with the mainstream, on the other hand, we better make this work more smoothly!
Opt-out policies on spam are usually frowned upon, because we don't want to have our email addresses stored in some centralized database (that could easily be sold to illegal spammers by a corrupt employee, for example). Nor do we want to be required to contact every single company on the planet to request being added to their opt-out list.
So how about the following twist: It should be made illegal by law to send spam to any email address containing the phrase 'nospam'. As simple as that. People that are annoyed by spam can get a 'nospam' address; people that actually like to receive spam (if there are any) can stick to a regular address. Of course after a while everybody would have addresses like me@nospam.myprovider.com, but who cares (except for the spammers)?
Alternatively, one could make it illegal to send spam to any address not containing the string 'ilikespam'. But while I would personally favor this solution, it would probably be harder to pass.
I bet some people at Coca Cola Corporation would be very happy about this. I, on the other hand, don't like the idea that I would be required to buy a coke for every movie I go to, just to get back at those damn cell-phone users. Can we agree that I have a right to spit on them or something along these lines?
Has it occured to anyone that maybe Toho is bringing up this suit only to comply with the requirement that you have to actively defend a trademark in order to keep the exclusive rights to the trademark?
In other words: Let's say the company just sits around and does nothing about Mozilla, DaveZilla, WhateverZilla. A few years from now some toy company (let's call them ToyZilla.com) starts selling some green dinosaurs, calling them Godzilla. Of course Toho is going to sue them over trademark infringement, but ToyZilla.com's lawyers argue that Toho lost all rights to the trademark, since it didn't do anything about Mozilla and the like.
Therefore Toho's exec's say: Kill them while they're still small!
Don't blame the company for doing stupid things if stupid laws require them to do so.
And most importantly - MS could file a suit against the whole SOFTware industry! Imagine that: only MS is allowed to call their products software, all other software is a trademark infringement on their name!
Oh, and... what about MICROwave? NOOOOOO!!!! Bastards!!! Everything but my microwave!!!!
The second the computer hardware industry gets over it's undying need to profit and destroy its competitors, it can finally do something about Microsoft
Uhh... yea, thats the whole point of running a business, you know? to make money? Espeically publicly traded ones...
Agreed - the purpose of a business is to make money. But to say that the purpose of a business is to destroy its competitors, is capitalism taken to the extreme. Competition is the soul of capitalism, because it forces companies to offer the best possible product to the lowest possible price (in an ideal world, that is). If, on the other hand, companies use their brute financial power and their monopoly status to force other companies out of business, this is counterproductive. It does not lead to progress, but rather obstructs progress, because not the best product wins, but the biggest fistful of cash. This is the reason why restrictions are placed on monopolies, and why they (again in an ideal world) should be enforced against Microsoft to the harshest extent.
Memo to Congress: Get your fucking priorities straight.
\begin{sarcasm}
What are you talking about? Congress has its priorities straightened out perfectly: Innocent little kids that share music files over the internet don't have any economic value, and they're hurting big business. Off to jail with them! We got no use for them here!
Corrupt and greedy CEOs on the other hand, ARE the economy! All they were trying to do is to boost the American status as economic power #1 on the planet. And they were probably contributing generously to the congresspeople's wallets, too. Of course we want to keep them out of jail, so they can continue to pay huge amounts of tax and contribute financially to the political progress.
We should stop whining: All we have to do is to form a filesharer's lobby that contributes a few billion dollars to each election campaign, and we can be sure that congress will be much more open minded towards our wishes.
Hold your breath... the algorithm is log2(n)^12 where n represents the number to be tested, not the number of digits. If you denote the number of digits by m, that is, m = log2(n), you get a complexity of O(m^12). The algorithm is therefore polynomial in the number of digits, with a very large exponent of 12. This large exponent could easily hamper the practical use of the algorithm, as Adam correctly demonstrated. The upshot is: Adam is right, RelliK is wrong!
If I am informed correctly, similar laws have been in effect for the longest time regarding phone solicitors: You can ask them to put you on a no-call list, and if they ever call you again, you can go to a small-claims court and collect $500 (see e.g. this site for some basic info).
But have these laws stopped telemarketers? No, because the public at large doesn't know or doesn't care about them. The few people agressive enough to sue them for $100 will not even make a small dent in the budget of a big spam-producing company. But the upside is: those of us who are willing to take them to court can have an easy source of extra income!
Computer AI is a topic that always fascinated me, but I never found time to delve into it a little bit deeper. I'm a theoretical scientist myself, so I have a pretty fair math background. Does anyone have some good recommendations on books that give an introduction to AI and particular to game AI?
You are right: PwC Consulting was supposed to rename itself to "Monday". What a name! Supposedly the decision was influenced by cellphone static:
Partner A: "So have you decided on a new name yet?"
Partner B: "No, we'll decide how to name it on monday!"
Partner A hears: "(fshshfsh...) we decided (fshshfsh) to name it (fshshfsh) 'Monday'!"
So what were the partners to do after the new name was announced? Stick to the name, and risk losing all their employees (who would want to work for Monday)? Or revise the name and admit they're too stupid to name their own company. No, the only possible solution that allowed to save the company and to save their own face was...
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, it's 1930 and the internet has been already invented. You publish an essay on the evils of uncontrolled capitalism on the internet. Now it's twenty years later - 1950 - and McCarthyism is at its height. Suddenly everybody against whom there is the faintest suspicion of sympathizing with communist thinking has to face investigation, repressions, and harassment. Anyone who doesn't consider being a martyr as one of his life goals would seriously think about deleting the old writings in order to stay out of trouble. Now you suddenly find you can't do that anymore, because a copy of the essay by now rests in hundreds of search engine caches on the web.
Granted, the same thing can happen (and did happen many times, of course) with printed media. But the point is that it's so much easier to have your ideas distributed over the whole world on a single mouseclick. We enjoy freedom of speech nowadays, but "officially" the same was true during the McCarthy era, just not in practice. And it is not entirely unlikely that the government will curb our freedom of speech more severely than today some time in the intermediate future (the Operation TTips is an example that we're already moving in that direction, in my view). Then our careless rantings on slashdot could suddenly have serious consequences.
And yes, I got the message that it is easy to protect yourself by using aliases, 'robots.txt' files, and the like. Slashdotters know these things, but you cannot necessarily expect the general public to know. Not everybody is a computer geek. And even for a geek it takes time to learn, and by the time somebody became aware of the danger, he might have a few dozen political essays with his signature sitting around in caches around the world already. This is a serious issue, but of course limiting the power of search engines would be a vast overreaction. But the least one can do about it is to bring the issue to public attention.
That gives us a chance of less than one in a million of getting hit. So I guess it's a bit too early to take the next spaceship to mars and never look back.
If you went to see FOTR again in March, you could have seen a three-minute teaser that shows Merry (or was it Pippin? The two are too alike) climbing around on Treebeard's nose. So don't worry - they'll be there.
How could Jackson have left out my favorite characters anyways?
I agree. I was really impressed by the Australian bills when I visited the country last year: they don't tear, don't crumple, are waterproof, and have very cheerful pictures on them. Arguably, currency shouldn't be specifically designed for entertainment purposes, but still - it's nice. And they make good souvenirs, with the additional advantage that you can "return them for a full refund" if you're tired of them.
Open standards vs. company-imposed standards
on
United Linux is Here
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· Score: 2
There are de-facto standards which are imposed more or less by a single company (such as RedHat), and there are standards which are developed by independent organizations (such as the Free Standards Group). I think an open (in every sense) operating system such as Linux deserves a standard that has grown dynamically out of the collaboration of a multitude of people, from companies as well as from independent organizations. If a company like RedHat is powerful enough to impose de-facto standards on the Linux community, this might hurt the evolution of Linux in the long run.
While basically all major Linux distributions contribute to the Linux Standard Base, not all of them follow the specifications equally well. The general opinion seems to be that RedHat in particular does not implement the LSB very strictly. One goal of the United Linux project, as far as I understand, is to create a distribution that follows the LSB very closely, and has enough market share to compete with RedHat. So instead of imposing yet another standard, one should see the project as an attempt to strengthen an already existing standard.
so this is the reason why the DOJ and most states are so hesitant to drop some severe punishment on Microsoft: the NSA has long been using the operating system to spy on both US and foreign citizens and foreign governments. Every modern Windows installation contains spyware with a direct hotline to the US secret service. Brilliant! Of course the government would be stupid to do anything that could harm Microsoft's dominance of the OS market. They would compromise their best secret agent!
It's a national laboratory, meaning it's run by the government (by the Department of Energy to be precise). The Sandia Labs were once part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and both labs were involved in the Manhattan project. Here you can read an overview of the Lab's history.
Hey, it's called globalization. And globalization makes the world a better place for all us. At least I always thought so... After all, George W. Bush is supporting it... um, I mean, except for that steel import tax thingy...
It is true that there is no great risk involved in being close to an Uranium source, since the radiation level is very low. The danger lies in the risk of contaminating the environment with radioactive materials. Imagine something like the Challenger disaster happening to a spacecraft transporting nuclear fuel: the Uranium would be spread over vast areas of inhabited land, getting into the soil, into the crops, being eaten by cattle, and finally end up on our dinner plates. And Uranium will affect your health very badly if it is in your system, not to speak of Plutonium. Not an immediate effect, but probably you'd die of cancer some decades later.
There is an immense risk involved in shipping any larger amount of radioactive material into space. Sooner or later the spaceship would blow up, since it is impossible to construct anything 100% safe. The effects on our environment and health would be severe. That's why we have to be very careful with projects like that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually very simple: people pay for convenience. If the price is right, of course. On P2P it's sometimes hard to find a reliable source, and some people don't want to wait an hour or so for their download to finish. I, for one, often do not even know what I'm looking for when I start browsing for music on the web. I would definitely be willing to pay $10 a month or so for a music site, where I can browse through my favorite artists or genres and download what I like. I know that I could have the same results if I just go to the "official" sites for browsing and then download on P2P once I found something I like. But it's simply not very convenient. The two important points are just that the price is right, and that the selection is large enough, so I am guaranteed to find what I'm looking for. The latter point probably means that some of the bigger labels would have to get together and set up a common site, if they want to create something successful.
Yes, it's really hard indeed (N-O-T). './setup -net' as root, click 'next' a few times, then run $INSTALLDIR/setup as the user that wants to use Openoffice, and then you can start it using the KDE menu (or probably the Gnome menu, I suppose it supports that as well). Wow...exactly as the documentation describes you should do. Real hard, ain't it?
(sigh) How many times did we have this discussion already? How many times will we still have to go over this again? (I fear the answer is somewhere close to infinity...)
The installation is indeed very easy for the average Joe Slashdotreader. I simply follow the detailed instructions, and everything worked fine. No problem.
But how do you explain to somebody who is used to some 'Installshield' stuff, why he has to select the network setup to install on a single-user pc? Or that he has to install the program two times, once as root, and once as user? Come on, most Average-Joe-Users will run away waving their hands and screaming if you ask them to use the command line to run an install script!
Most people don't want to learn about the inner workings of their computer. Most people simply want to write letters, calculate spreadsheets, read their email, and maybe play some games. And they want to do this as hassle-free as possible. Most people are not like us nerds, who love tweaking around with their system. Command-line interfaces and specific commands and command options are perceived as a huge hassle. Tell the user to click the 'Install' button, and he understands (or at least he has the impression he understands). Tell him to type './setup -net' in a command-line window and he will feel completely clueless (well, you could say that's only because he IS indeed clueless, but that's not the point. Nobody wants to feel clueless and most people feel disinclined to use any tools that make them feel that way).
It doesn't seem like a huge task to write a simple point-and-click interface to guide Joe User through the installation process. And one could simply have the user-installation script automatically executed the first time a user runs the program. Anyways, the upshot is: If you think that OSS is only for geeks, there is indeed no need to improve the installation. For folks like us it's already as easy as heck. If you want to improve OSS's popularity with the mainstream, on the other hand, we better make this work more smoothly!
So how about the following twist: It should be made illegal by law to send spam to any email address containing the phrase 'nospam'. As simple as that. People that are annoyed by spam can get a 'nospam' address; people that actually like to receive spam (if there are any) can stick to a regular address. Of course after a while everybody would have addresses like me@nospam.myprovider.com, but who cares (except for the spammers)?
Alternatively, one could make it illegal to send spam to any address not containing the string 'ilikespam'. But while I would personally favor this solution, it would probably be harder to pass.
I bet some people at Coca Cola Corporation would be very happy about this. I, on the other hand, don't like the idea that I would be required to buy a coke for every movie I go to, just to get back at those damn cell-phone users. Can we agree that I have a right to spit on them or something along these lines?
In other words: Let's say the company just sits around and does nothing about Mozilla, DaveZilla, WhateverZilla. A few years from now some toy company (let's call them ToyZilla.com) starts selling some green dinosaurs, calling them Godzilla. Of course Toho is going to sue them over trademark infringement, but ToyZilla.com's lawyers argue that Toho lost all rights to the trademark, since it didn't do anything about Mozilla and the like.
Therefore Toho's exec's say: Kill them while they're still small!
Don't blame the company for doing stupid things if stupid laws require them to do so.
Oh, and... what about MICROwave? NOOOOOO!!!! Bastards!!! Everything but my microwave!!!!
the demo worked fine on Konqueror :)
The second the computer hardware industry gets over it's undying need to profit and destroy its competitors, it can finally do something about Microsoft
Uhh... yea, thats the whole point of running a business, you know? to make money? Espeically publicly traded ones...
Agreed - the purpose of a business is to make money. But to say that the purpose of a business is to destroy its competitors, is capitalism taken to the extreme. Competition is the soul of capitalism, because it forces companies to offer the best possible product to the lowest possible price (in an ideal world, that is). If, on the other hand, companies use their brute financial power and their monopoly status to force other companies out of business, this is counterproductive. It does not lead to progress, but rather obstructs progress, because not the best product wins, but the biggest fistful of cash. This is the reason why restrictions are placed on monopolies, and why they (again in an ideal world) should be enforced against Microsoft to the harshest extent.
Memo to Congress: Get your fucking priorities straight.
\begin{sarcasm}
What are you talking about? Congress has its priorities straightened out perfectly: Innocent little kids that share music files over the internet don't have any economic value, and they're hurting big business. Off to jail with them! We got no use for them here!
Corrupt and greedy CEOs on the other hand, ARE the economy! All they were trying to do is to boost the American status as economic power #1 on the planet. And they were probably contributing generously to the congresspeople's wallets, too. Of course we want to keep them out of jail, so they can continue to pay huge amounts of tax and contribute financially to the political progress.
We should stop whining: All we have to do is to form a filesharer's lobby that contributes a few billion dollars to each election campaign, and we can be sure that congress will be much more open minded towards our wishes.
\end{sarcasm}
You're right: It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Hold your breath... the algorithm is log2(n)^12 where n represents the number to be tested, not the number of digits. If you denote the number of digits by m, that is, m = log2(n), you get a complexity of O(m^12). The algorithm is therefore polynomial in the number of digits, with a very large exponent of 12. This large exponent could easily hamper the practical use of the algorithm, as Adam correctly demonstrated. The upshot is: Adam is right, RelliK is wrong!
Did this strike anyone else as funny? Since when does the Department of Defense care about "collateral damage"?
But have these laws stopped telemarketers? No, because the public at large doesn't know or doesn't care about them. The few people agressive enough to sue them for $100 will not even make a small dent in the budget of a big spam-producing company. But the upside is: those of us who are willing to take them to court can have an easy source of extra income!
TIA for any feedback
Kavau
You are right: PwC Consulting was supposed to rename itself to "Monday". What a name! Supposedly the decision was influenced by cellphone static:
Partner A: "So have you decided on a new name yet?"
Partner B: "No, we'll decide how to name it on monday!"
Partner A hears: "(fshshfsh...) we decided (fshshfsh) to name it (fshshfsh) 'Monday'!"
So what were the partners to do after the new name was announced? Stick to the name, and risk losing all their employees (who would want to work for Monday)? Or revise the name and admit they're too stupid to name their own company. No, the only possible solution that allowed to save the company and to save their own face was...
Sell it! Quick!!!!
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, it's 1930 and the internet has been already invented. You publish an essay on the evils of uncontrolled capitalism on the internet. Now it's twenty years later - 1950 - and McCarthyism is at its height. Suddenly everybody against whom there is the faintest suspicion of sympathizing with communist thinking has to face investigation, repressions, and harassment. Anyone who doesn't consider being a martyr as one of his life goals would seriously think about deleting the old writings in order to stay out of trouble. Now you suddenly find you can't do that anymore, because a copy of the essay by now rests in hundreds of search engine caches on the web.
Granted, the same thing can happen (and did happen many times, of course) with printed media. But the point is that it's so much easier to have your ideas distributed over the whole world on a single mouseclick. We enjoy freedom of speech nowadays, but "officially" the same was true during the McCarthy era, just not in practice. And it is not entirely unlikely that the government will curb our freedom of speech more severely than today some time in the intermediate future (the Operation TTips is an example that we're already moving in that direction, in my view). Then our careless rantings on slashdot could suddenly have serious consequences.
And yes, I got the message that it is easy to protect yourself by using aliases, 'robots.txt' files, and the like. Slashdotters know these things, but you cannot necessarily expect the general public to know. Not everybody is a computer geek. And even for a geek it takes time to learn, and by the time somebody became aware of the danger, he might have a few dozen political essays with his signature sitting around in caches around the world already. This is a serious issue, but of course limiting the power of search engines would be a vast overreaction. But the least one can do about it is to bring the issue to public attention.
Until now, the scientists can only specify the Asteroid's position on February 1st 2019 within an error margin of several million kilometers. (Translation by me).
That gives us a chance of less than one in a million of getting hit. So I guess it's a bit too early to take the next spaceship to mars and never look back.
Kavau
Games DON'T affect kids. If PacMan did, we'd all be eating pills and listening to repeditive music...
But we DO! They're called Ecstasy and Rave!
If you went to see FOTR again in March, you could have seen a three-minute teaser that shows Merry (or was it Pippin? The two are too alike) climbing around on Treebeard's nose. So don't worry - they'll be there.
How could Jackson have left out my favorite characters anyways?
I agree. I was really impressed by the Australian bills when I visited the country last year: they don't tear, don't crumple, are waterproof, and have very cheerful pictures on them. Arguably, currency shouldn't be specifically designed for entertainment purposes, but still - it's nice. And they make good souvenirs, with the additional advantage that you can "return them for a full refund" if you're tired of them.
There are de-facto standards which are imposed more or less by a single company (such as RedHat), and there are standards which are developed by independent organizations (such as the Free Standards Group). I think an open (in every sense) operating system such as Linux deserves a standard that has grown dynamically out of the collaboration of a multitude of people, from companies as well as from independent organizations. If a company like RedHat is powerful enough to impose de-facto standards on the Linux community, this might hurt the evolution of Linux in the long run.
While basically all major Linux distributions contribute to the Linux Standard Base, not all of them follow the specifications equally well. The general opinion seems to be that RedHat in particular does not implement the LSB very strictly. One goal of the United Linux project, as far as I understand, is to create a distribution that follows the LSB very closely, and has enough market share to compete with RedHat. So instead of imposing yet another standard, one should see the project as an attempt to strengthen an already existing standard.
so this is the reason why the DOJ and most states are so hesitant to drop some severe punishment on Microsoft: the NSA has long been using the operating system to spy on both US and foreign citizens and foreign governments. Every modern Windows installation contains spyware with a direct hotline to the US secret service. Brilliant! Of course the government would be stupid to do anything that could harm Microsoft's dominance of the OS market. They would compromise their best secret agent!
It's a national laboratory, meaning it's run by the government (by the Department of Energy to be precise). The Sandia Labs were once part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and both labs were involved in the Manhattan project. Here you can read an overview of the Lab's history.
Hey, it's called globalization. And globalization makes the world a better place for all us. At least I always thought so... After all, George W. Bush is supporting it... um, I mean, except for that steel import tax thingy...
It is true that there is no great risk involved in being close to an Uranium source, since the radiation level is very low. The danger lies in the risk of contaminating the environment with radioactive materials. Imagine something like the Challenger disaster happening to a spacecraft transporting nuclear fuel: the Uranium would be spread over vast areas of inhabited land, getting into the soil, into the crops, being eaten by cattle, and finally end up on our dinner plates. And Uranium will affect your health very badly if it is in your system, not to speak of Plutonium. Not an immediate effect, but probably you'd die of cancer some decades later. There is an immense risk involved in shipping any larger amount of radioactive material into space. Sooner or later the spaceship would blow up, since it is impossible to construct anything 100% safe. The effects on our environment and health would be severe. That's why we have to be very careful with projects like that.