Last I checked, all the same search engines I used to use still exist: Altavista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Hotbot, Yahoo, AskJeeves. If you're talking about some obscure engine that doesn't exist anymore I hardly blame Google for that since they never made it out of obscurity.
Granted, Google is my (and most people's) primary search engine because it is most accurate most often and is very fast with lots of nice tools (site:, cache:, etc.).
I don't know about you, but when I saw the movie the trailer immediately preceeding it was for "The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl". Now, somehow I don't think that target audience is me being a male age 25-30, and as far as I could tell, the movie it self (H2G2) was targeted for the same audience as the trailers.
What kid is going to have a good time parsing out a lot of complex language that, while funny, makes no sense to a pre-teen. The slapstick will come across. The sight gags will come across. And maybe even the love scene will make some sort of impression. But you have to face the reality, this movie was not produced for the fans of Douglas Adams' work -- it was produced for the pop culture that Hollywood always produces for.
As for how I personally enjoyed the movie, I found it to be entertaining and I did laugh at several parts - out loud even. But on the whole I found it an almost completely new story that I don't fully consider part of the Hitchhiker's world simply because while the other variants of the story deviated from each other, they were all bascially the same retelling of the story. This one was a new story almost completely. That is, this story had a specific plot even if it doesn't make any sense given the original story.
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the worst, I give this movie a 6. I've certainly seen worse films that didn't make me laugh or even crack a smile (I'm thinking Say It Isn't So).
When they were just infants, nothing more than swirling balls of gas, the were separated and Sinistar took the path of eating passing spaceships where as Registar went on to become the largest purveyor of domain names in the universe.
The DRM problem comes in when you don't want to play the music in an iPod or on Windows/Mac and you don't want to burn a CD of compressed-quality music (because who knows what quality level the music is compressed at before it's sold to you to keep the bandwidth low).
As I'm running linux with an icecast stream playing all my favorite OGG tracks in my home LAN and DRM prevents me from playing my music for my listening pleasure without having to carry a device. No thanks.
I think the main argument was the DRM on the downloaded tracks. Not everyone runs Windows Media Player or iTunes or has a Mac. Some of us geeks here on Slashdot (and around the world) use an operating system free (as in speech and beer) of DRM technologies and thus are not allowed to play these downloaded songs. However, with a CD I can rip it into any format (at any quality level) that I want and then I'm free to play those tracks wherever I may be (import into iTunes, run in XMMS, play on my iRiver, broadcast in my LAN using icecast).
So your wife was looking at sex sites, and from your post I take it you were offended by this and it has been the cause of some turmoil in your relationship?
Firstly, you are clearly not the typical slashdot poster who only dreams of having a girlfriend/wife who would watch porn with them.
Stereotypes aside I understand that pornography is completely offensive to many people so I'm not judging. But doesn't this suggest that perhaps you and she need to communicate more about what each desires sexually from the other so she doesn't have to go looking other places (or you for that matter in other female acquaintences -- companionship, not necessarily sex)?
I am certainly not any sort of authority on relationships, but your post made it sound like after the first offense you were ready to throw in the towel and divorce this woman without evaluating what brought you both to this point.
Just an innocent question. I don't mean to pry, accuse, or otherwise offend you - perhaps just get you to elaborate and/or reflect on the situation.
I really like your last point about the opportunity for censorship, but if you think about it that already happens.
Look at AOL and the filters they put on their browser and chat rooms. Look at any number of broadband providers that provide *some* usenet newsgroups and not others. Besides, if the municipal wireless network is restrictive, that could very well be a selling point of a commercial broadband company. "Sign up with FreedomNet and you'll have unfiltered access to the Internet for $44.95 a month!"
The other issue I wonder about is the wireless nature of this broadband. What type of wifi would it support? A? B? G? all of them? B & G only? What interference would this cause for cordless phones and microwaves? What about CB radio or police band? (I don't know much about radio frequencies, but I don' know that wireless can be interrupted and/or cause interference with some of these things.)
What is the practicality of municipal wireless zones? Would I have to leave my house to get access or would they put powerful access points on all the streetlights and telephone poles?
As of release 3 of Eclipse, it has a lot more features you find in JBuilder as well. Eclipse has built-in integration with CVS and Ant and JUnit (as do most other major IDEs like JBuilder and IDEA) and for those of you who are stuck (or *shudder* LIKE) using Visual Source Safe - there's an Eclipse plug-in that allows you to use it in a very similar way to the CVS plugin.
Basically, Eclipse has everything every major IDE has in terms of code assist, refactoring, integration with plugins, debugging (including remote) and syntax highlighting/templates. The difference is Eclipse is free and has a very large base of support for plugins including majors like Altova (XMLSpy) and IBM.
Personally, my experience with JBuilder wasn't horrible except that for some reason JBuilder could magically get code to work that wouldn't run outside of the IDE. In one case, it completely built a jar file incorrectly (omitted files that were selected to be in the jar). I've not run into these problems with Eclipse.
I use Eclipse at home on Windows and Linux and at work on Windows (but run the code on Linux and Solaris).
I highly doubt it was Bill Gates' Master Plan(TM) to build up Microsoft and trample other smaller companies like Netscape into the ground just so he could donate to charity like an insane philanthropist.
In short, no - Microsoft's corporate actions are not justified just as most abusive monopolist's actions are not justified. However, it is very generous of him and his wife to donate such a large share for their excess wealth to charities. But don't kid yourself, it's not like he's going to have to sell his 300,000 acre mansion and live in a normal three bedroom house because he's given so much of his money away.
Bill and Melinda are fine people. Bill is an incredibly shrewd businessman and Microsoft can be ruthless. Please don't confuse the issue for the sake of boiling people's blood and getting a reaction.
I explicitly said "stakeholders" because "shareholders" don't necessarily have any voting power -- power to change the company. The "stakeholders" are a much smaller group that controls exactly what directions the company will go and what promotions to run, etc., etc. In linux each shareholder is a potential stakeholder because they have equal access to contribute to the kernel and to software everyone else can use. Publicly traded companies make public offerings to get an influx of capital and they share (to some degree) in the success or failure of the governing body's decisions. Even an employee who owns stock does not have a say in how the operations of the company are executed.
Unfortunately this article, while interesting does not show the context of the series of articles in which this one appeared. The series was talking about Gilberto Gil and how he (and Brazil) have embraced the Creative Commons copyright licenses.
Creative Commons is based on a few simple principles, one of which being that new things are built from the past. Copying/stealing ideas and modifying or improving them is how we get new and better technology, art, and other things. Very little of what you see today is truely innovative and not based on anything prior.
The Linux pricetag isn't a marketing scheme (or at least wasn't Linus' intent originally). It's free because Linus (and others) wanted to share what a collective of people worked together to build, and invited others to help improve it. As mentioned by others, Apple does some innovation, but mostly they innovate by taking what exists and modifying it to look cool and be hip.
Apple didn't create the GUI interface, Xerox did - Apple stole it and MS stole it from Apple. Apple didn't create it's OS X core, they took the BSD kernel, tweaked it, and then slapped on a shiny UI. Don't get me wrong, I really like OS X and what Apple's done with a BSD kernel (especially after my own attempts at running FreeBSD) and a nicer UI than X. But I would not say I ever thought twice about owning a Mac prior to OS X - I didn't. They were ugly and underpowered without the ability to do true multitasking (much like Windows 3.1).
Finally, your analogy is weak in that WalMart is a large (multi?)national chain owned by a single, small group of people/stakeholders. Linux is an open, community-owned system that cannot easily be contributed to one person anymore. Yes, Linus is still in charge of what gets into the kernel, but he's not developing it all. He's not writing all the kernel modules for new devices and hardware.
I wasn't saying the movie was going to be a success. I was just outlining that Doom isn't an overly complex game/story and it wouldn't take much for a movie to be "true" to the game.
I guess this movie is only similar in name....like I, Robot.
I never claimed to have RTFA and I've got too much work to do at work to be RTFAing all day.:-) If I make a claim about the article or something stipulated contrary in the article (such as saying the movie IS based on Mars) then you can kiss me with an RTFA.
Since Doom's plot (even Doom 3's plot) is very weak and really has no substance, the movie has a potential to make up whatever story they want. Ideally, they'll leave the setting on Mars/in hell and throw in some recognizable artifacts (such as the chaingun or plasma cannon -- maybe the BFG) and put the main character - a marine - in some dirty green uniform; slap UAC on a few walls and signs and you've got yourself a Doom movie! If you REALLY want to stick to the game - add pinky demons, imps, and maybe a death knight or arch vile.
Why would you want to tarnish the "knight in shining armor" Windows alternative image of F/OSS with some scummy, low-life, underhanded marketing tactics just to turn some heads?
I feel dirty just thinking about it...where's my brain floss?
True, but no one ever said the dish has to be nailed into anything. I have seen satellite dishes in apartments and townhouses sitting outside the back door and on patios. As long as there's line of sight to the southern sky and you have more than just a closet rented, it's likely you can get a dish installed.
I realize there are some practical limitations to uncommon circumstances (such as the closet renter), but my point was it's not that you can't have satellite because the landlord doesn't want you to have it. If you have the access to the sky and possibly a planter you can fill with concrete, you can have satellite TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked, all the same search engines I used to use still exist: Altavista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Hotbot, Yahoo, AskJeeves. If you're talking about some obscure engine that doesn't exist anymore I hardly blame Google for that since they never made it out of obscurity.
Granted, Google is my (and most people's) primary search engine because it is most accurate most often and is very fast with lots of nice tools (site:, cache:, etc.).
What kid is going to have a good time parsing out a lot of complex language that, while funny, makes no sense to a pre-teen. The slapstick will come across. The sight gags will come across. And maybe even the love scene will make some sort of impression. But you have to face the reality, this movie was not produced for the fans of Douglas Adams' work -- it was produced for the pop culture that Hollywood always produces for.
As for how I personally enjoyed the movie, I found it to be entertaining and I did laugh at several parts - out loud even. But on the whole I found it an almost completely new story that I don't fully consider part of the Hitchhiker's world simply because while the other variants of the story deviated from each other, they were all bascially the same retelling of the story. This one was a new story almost completely. That is, this story had a specific plot even if it doesn't make any sense given the original story.
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the worst, I give this movie a 6. I've certainly seen worse films that didn't make me laugh or even crack a smile (I'm thinking Say It Isn't So).
why do you think we get so many dupes?
When they were just infants, nothing more than swirling balls of gas, the were separated and Sinistar took the path of eating passing spaceships where as Registar went on to become the largest purveyor of domain names in the universe.
That is, until Network Associates bought it out.
As I'm running linux with an icecast stream playing all my favorite OGG tracks in my home LAN and DRM prevents me from playing my music for my listening pleasure without having to carry a device. No thanks.
I think the main argument was the DRM on the downloaded tracks. Not everyone runs Windows Media Player or iTunes or has a Mac. Some of us geeks here on Slashdot (and around the world) use an operating system free (as in speech and beer) of DRM technologies and thus are not allowed to play these downloaded songs. However, with a CD I can rip it into any format (at any quality level) that I want and then I'm free to play those tracks wherever I may be (import into iTunes, run in XMMS, play on my iRiver, broadcast in my LAN using icecast).
Thanks for the candid response. Sounds like you've got an even head on your shoulders. My best wishes to you guys to work it out amicably.
Call me names if you will, but sometimes it's the free stuff that can make you the most money.
Firstly, you are clearly not the typical slashdot poster who only dreams of having a girlfriend/wife who would watch porn with them.
Stereotypes aside I understand that pornography is completely offensive to many people so I'm not judging. But doesn't this suggest that perhaps you and she need to communicate more about what each desires sexually from the other so she doesn't have to go looking other places (or you for that matter in other female acquaintences -- companionship, not necessarily sex)?
I am certainly not any sort of authority on relationships, but your post made it sound like after the first offense you were ready to throw in the towel and divorce this woman without evaluating what brought you both to this point.
Just an innocent question. I don't mean to pry, accuse, or otherwise offend you - perhaps just get you to elaborate and/or reflect on the situation.
How much do you need Dr. Dwambo? Just name your price - no amount is too large!
*ducks*
Look at AOL and the filters they put on their browser and chat rooms. Look at any number of broadband providers that provide *some* usenet newsgroups and not others. Besides, if the municipal wireless network is restrictive, that could very well be a selling point of a commercial broadband company. "Sign up with FreedomNet and you'll have unfiltered access to the Internet for $44.95 a month!"
The other issue I wonder about is the wireless nature of this broadband. What type of wifi would it support? A? B? G? all of them? B & G only? What interference would this cause for cordless phones and microwaves? What about CB radio or police band? (I don't know much about radio frequencies, but I don' know that wireless can be interrupted and/or cause interference with some of these things.)
What is the practicality of municipal wireless zones? Would I have to leave my house to get access or would they put powerful access points on all the streetlights and telephone poles?
Basically, Eclipse has everything every major IDE has in terms of code assist, refactoring, integration with plugins, debugging (including remote) and syntax highlighting/templates. The difference is Eclipse is free and has a very large base of support for plugins including majors like Altova (XMLSpy) and IBM.
Personally, my experience with JBuilder wasn't horrible except that for some reason JBuilder could magically get code to work that wouldn't run outside of the IDE. In one case, it completely built a jar file incorrectly (omitted files that were selected to be in the jar). I've not run into these problems with Eclipse. I use Eclipse at home on Windows and Linux and at work on Windows (but run the code on Linux and Solaris).
Admittedly, a VERY bad pun.
In short, no - Microsoft's corporate actions are not justified just as most abusive monopolist's actions are not justified. However, it is very generous of him and his wife to donate such a large share for their excess wealth to charities. But don't kid yourself, it's not like he's going to have to sell his 300,000 acre mansion and live in a normal three bedroom house because he's given so much of his money away.
Bill and Melinda are fine people. Bill is an incredibly shrewd businessman and Microsoft can be ruthless. Please don't confuse the issue for the sake of boiling people's blood and getting a reaction.
I explicitly said "stakeholders" because "shareholders" don't necessarily have any voting power -- power to change the company. The "stakeholders" are a much smaller group that controls exactly what directions the company will go and what promotions to run, etc., etc. In linux each shareholder is a potential stakeholder because they have equal access to contribute to the kernel and to software everyone else can use. Publicly traded companies make public offerings to get an influx of capital and they share (to some degree) in the success or failure of the governing body's decisions. Even an employee who owns stock does not have a say in how the operations of the company are executed.
But my argument isn't affected -- OS X borrows from others, be it BSD for the whole core or just the user portion and Next for the core.
Unfortunately this article, while interesting does not show the context of the series of articles in which this one appeared. The series was talking about Gilberto Gil and how he (and Brazil) have embraced the Creative Commons copyright licenses.
Creative Commons is based on a few simple principles, one of which being that new things are built from the past. Copying/stealing ideas and modifying or improving them is how we get new and better technology, art, and other things. Very little of what you see today is truely innovative and not based on anything prior.
The Linux pricetag isn't a marketing scheme (or at least wasn't Linus' intent originally). It's free because Linus (and others) wanted to share what a collective of people worked together to build, and invited others to help improve it. As mentioned by others, Apple does some innovation, but mostly they innovate by taking what exists and modifying it to look cool and be hip.
Apple didn't create the GUI interface, Xerox did - Apple stole it and MS stole it from Apple. Apple didn't create it's OS X core, they took the BSD kernel, tweaked it, and then slapped on a shiny UI. Don't get me wrong, I really like OS X and what Apple's done with a BSD kernel (especially after my own attempts at running FreeBSD) and a nicer UI than X. But I would not say I ever thought twice about owning a Mac prior to OS X - I didn't. They were ugly and underpowered without the ability to do true multitasking (much like Windows 3.1).
Finally, your analogy is weak in that WalMart is a large (multi?)national chain owned by a single, small group of people/stakeholders. Linux is an open, community-owned system that cannot easily be contributed to one person anymore. Yes, Linus is still in charge of what gets into the kernel, but he's not developing it all. He's not writing all the kernel modules for new devices and hardware.
PR is not his strong suit.
...everything's pre-emptive with this administration!
I wasn't saying the movie was going to be a success. I was just outlining that Doom isn't an overly complex game/story and it wouldn't take much for a movie to be "true" to the game.
:-) If I make a claim about the article or something stipulated contrary in the article (such as saying the movie IS based on Mars) then you can kiss me with an RTFA.
I guess this movie is only similar in name....like I, Robot.
I never claimed to have RTFA and I've got too much work to do at work to be RTFAing all day.
Since Doom's plot (even Doom 3's plot) is very weak and really has no substance, the movie has a potential to make up whatever story they want. Ideally, they'll leave the setting on Mars/in hell and throw in some recognizable artifacts (such as the chaingun or plasma cannon -- maybe the BFG) and put the main character - a marine - in some dirty green uniform; slap UAC on a few walls and signs and you've got yourself a Doom movie! If you REALLY want to stick to the game - add pinky demons, imps, and maybe a death knight or arch vile.
Why would you want to tarnish the "knight in shining armor" Windows alternative image of F/OSS with some scummy, low-life, underhanded marketing tactics just to turn some heads?
I feel dirty just thinking about it...where's my brain floss?
umm...have you forgotten what article thread you're posting in? :-P
I realize there are some practical limitations to uncommon circumstances (such as the closet renter), but my point was it's not that you can't have satellite because the landlord doesn't want you to have it. If you have the access to the sky and possibly a planter you can fill with concrete, you can have satellite TV.