Google has a feedback form for the Google Talk service. We can rant here all day on Slashdot, but we're not going to get anywhere. Spend a few minutes out of your day to send some constructive feedback. I just did. Maybe we'll get the functionality we want.
Agreed. I used to have a big comment spam problem on my blog (low traffic, mainly only read by a few people I know), but after implementing a captcha (yeah, it really is a terrible fake word), I haven't had a single comment spam. And they didn't go just coincidentally go away and stop trying: I updated from Wordpress 1.1 to 1.5 at one point, forgot to reinstall the authimage plugin, and had a comment spam waiting for me within 24 hours.
Maybe it is an inconvenience to people reading my site, but I generally don't get too many comments, and I'd rather get only a few comments that are useful/amusing/whatever than a load of crap I have to delete.
Ignoring the fact that "feels" is a terribly non-quantitative term, my X11 desktop on my 4-year-old Athlon 1.33GHz "feels" much faster to me than WinXP on my 4-month-old P4 1.7GHz laptop. To make matters worse, the video card on my X11 desktop is a 6-year-old nvidia card, while the laptop has a pretty new radeon 7500. And yet, the X11 box still "feels" faster.
3. There is a whole wealth of information of what consititutes a valid contract, and a EULA is not one. If you press a "button" on your screen that says "I Agree," that does not mean you have agreed to anything in a legal sense.
Except that there's a good amount of existing case law setting a precedent that EULAs are indeed valid, enforceable contracts. I suggest you google for things like "eula case law". You might find something like this. However, in some jurisdictions, some EULAs have been found to be unenforceable. I think the jury's still out on this one, but, for the time being, it's very very dangerous to assume that you can ignore EULAs at will.
4. Apple, Microsoft, Linus own the *copyright* on their respective works. It means they get to dictate the terms of *distribution* and nothing else. Otherwise, you can use the software any way you want.
Even assuming for a moment that your point in #3 was correct, this is an incredible oversimplification. Sure, they have control over distribution, due to their copyright interest. But they can simply refuse to distribute, unless the recipient agrees to certain terms. In essence, a contract. If you want to get all formal and pedantic about it, they could have a legal document that you have to sign before purchasing the software. If you refuse to sign the contract, they refuse to sell you the software. Does anyone actually do that? No - not for mass produced consumer-grade software, anyway. But sure, their copyright interest can - if they so desire - give them much more control than just "distribution rights".
Funny, poking around the Crimson Editor website, it doesn't appear to be open source. The license says it's redistributable, but there doesn't appear to be a source package. The download page calls it 'freeware', and says you can redistribute it as long as you don't modify it (though the actual license on the 'tips & notice' page doesn't say anything about modification). Not that not being OSS is a bad thing, necessarily (I don't subscribe to RMS' religion), but it's kinda lame to label something OSS when it clearly isn't.
TDMA is on its way out and CDMA is basically North america only. With a 4 band GSM phone you can use your phone in > 180 countries.
Except that GSM is torture on the US's limited frequency spectrum. CDMA uses the available spectrum much more efficiently. In the sense of user-visibility, CDMA is also generally associated with slightly better voice quality (this varies across handsets, of course).
I'd wager that most people from the US don't care about roaming capabilities in the rest of the world. The last time I was in Europe (in March, on vacation), I didn't really mind not having a cellphone. There were only a couple times I really missed it, and I still did without just fine. The bulk of people who really care about international roaming are business travelers, which probably make up a small percentage of all US cell phone users.
What it actually means is that information tends to gravitate towards wide dissemination.
But it really doesn't. Information that is 1) published, and 2) of interest to a wide audience, tends to gravitate toward wide dissemination.
Examples:
1) Someone gets ahold of leaked internal emails detailing security issues in a high-profile, security-critical product. They publish the information. Because it's of use to a lot of people (many people use the product), the information spreads, is republished, etc., etc. Think Diebold here.
2) I publish my phone number on my website (on my resume, to be exact). The people who care about it probably already have it. It's not likely to get republished. I don't get any telemarketing calls (it's a cell phone), so it's not spreading like wildfire to people who would want to use it.
Bottom line: In the general case, you have to expend effort to keep information private, but you also have to expend effort to disseminate it.
Did the professor techincally infringe on the copyright by making those copies? Yeah, looks like he did.
I think the more important question here isn't whether or not something is commercially viable after a certain period of time, but whether or not we (our gov't) should grant commercial protection for something that has been out for 20-odd years. I'd say no. For a publication of that nature, 23 years is more than enough.
On a side note, what would you suggest the professor have done? I seriously doubt it would be possible to buy extra copies of a 23-year-old issue of a magazine. So not only does copyright impose an unreasonable burden on the consumer (after a certain period of time), but it looks like most companies don't even have an interest in keeping their copyrighted product on the market for anywhere near the full copyright term. So essentially, it's a waste, and that issue of that magazine should have fallen into the public domain years ago.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. I'm glad we have you here to tell us insightful things, like "squares have four sides" and "people always say that they are people".
Just because someone is whining, it doesn't mean they don't have a valid complaint. Some people can only whine because they feel they have no control over the situation, a feeling that is pretty prevalent when corporate America is concerned. And rightly so, IMHO.
Perhaps, but I have no problem with hypocrisy in general, as long as it's recognised and admitted.
I'm just saying that the impact is orders of magnitude different:
Slashdot is insecure and not standards-compliant. Result: Maybe someone occasionally loses a throwaway password (you aren't using an important password for/., are you?), and maybe it doesn't render so well on some browsers sometimes. Relatively benign in either case.
MS IE is insecure and not standards-compliant. Result: Because of MS' monopoly and almost endless resources, IE is on the desktop of pretty much every Windows user. The lack of strong security for IE means that attackers can use IE to gain control of sensitive information, e.g. banking records, which can cause money to be irretrievably lost. The lack of standards compliance means that every web developer in the entire world that cares about making a website that works in more than just IE has to bend over backwards to deal with IE's broken rendering engine.
I think it's fairly obvious that Slashdot's hypocrisy (one that's acknowledged in the developers of Slashcode, evidenced by their recent standards-compliance work) is relatively benign and harmless, while MS' browser problems can hurt a lot of people financially and make a lot of people's jobs much much harder.
Still, you really just don't get it. Qt and GTK+ represent two different ways of thinking with regards to how a GUI toolkit should be written and used. Telling the open source world to "pick one toolkit" is tantamount to telling half the OSS GUI community that their way of thinking -- something rather subjective and variable -- is wrong. Is that something you really want to do? I didn't think so...
Hmm, but then later on, everyone would complain about GDE and KNOME having two different feature sets, and we'd have to unify again. GKNOME? KGDE? GDEK?
Ok, so we merge KDE and GNOME into KNOME. What next? Well, why should we choose between the great features of KNOME and Mac OS X? Well, ok, let's merge them too. So now we have MaKNOME X. Well, there's Windows out there too, and it does have a few nice features, so why not do another merge? And thus WinMaKNOME VistaX is born. And a thousand marketing gurus' heads explode.
Seriously, though, why should unification be the ultimate goal? Different people have different ideas about what makes a good, productive, usable desktop environment. Trying to make a one-size-fits-all monstrosity would be just that: a monstrosity.
And remember, we're talking about OSS here. Put up or shut up. If you're a GNOME user and like a certain feature KDE has, bust out some coding skills and write it yourself. If you can't do that for whatever reason, find someone with the ability and pay them to do it. In the end, no one is beholden to you, and there's no such thing as a free lunch.
(Linus seems to be an exception to that, for the most part.)
Really? By all accounts, he seems just as egotistical and arrogant as those you've mentioned. He just tends to be quieter about it (doesn't speak outside of lkml quite so much), and (dare I say it) more sensible and practical in his ideas than true zealots like RMS, ESR, de Raadt, etc. I guess that's the difference: he may be an ass from time to time, but at least OSS isn't a religion to him.
I would hope it doesn't, actually, at least not by default. The X Composite extension is still buggy as hell, and requires a recent video card with good drivers (pretty much only nvidia, and then only using the binary-only driver, and to some extent ATI), otherwise it's painfully slow. Hopefully that should improve with X.0rg 6.9.0/7.0.0 onwards, but I don't think that'll be timely enough for GNOME 2.12.
Slashdot Mirror
Google has a feedback form for the Google Talk service. We can rant here all day on Slashdot, but we're not going to get anywhere. Spend a few minutes out of your day to send some constructive feedback. I just did. Maybe we'll get the functionality we want.
Agreed. I used to have a big comment spam problem on my blog (low traffic, mainly only read by a few people I know), but after implementing a captcha (yeah, it really is a terrible fake word), I haven't had a single comment spam. And they didn't go just coincidentally go away and stop trying: I updated from Wordpress 1.1 to 1.5 at one point, forgot to reinstall the authimage plugin, and had a comment spam waiting for me within 24 hours.
Maybe it is an inconvenience to people reading my site, but I generally don't get too many comments, and I'd rather get only a few comments that are useful/amusing/whatever than a load of crap I have to delete.
Ignoring the fact that "feels" is a terribly non-quantitative term, my X11 desktop on my 4-year-old Athlon 1.33GHz "feels" much faster to me than WinXP on my 4-month-old P4 1.7GHz laptop. To make matters worse, the video card on my X11 desktop is a 6-year-old nvidia card, while the laptop has a pretty new radeon 7500. And yet, the X11 box still "feels" faster.
Go figure.
What's wrong with flaming someone for having an opinion that disrespects the developers that work on the software they (presumably) use, at no cost?
Sincerely yours,
Your friendly neighborhood word-choice Nazi.
Funny, poking around the Crimson Editor website, it doesn't appear to be open source. The license says it's redistributable, but there doesn't appear to be a source package. The download page calls it 'freeware', and says you can redistribute it as long as you don't modify it (though the actual license on the 'tips & notice' page doesn't say anything about modification). Not that not being OSS is a bad thing, necessarily (I don't subscribe to RMS' religion), but it's kinda lame to label something OSS when it clearly isn't.
I'd wager that most people from the US don't care about roaming capabilities in the rest of the world. The last time I was in Europe (in March, on vacation), I didn't really mind not having a cellphone. There were only a couple times I really missed it, and I still did without just fine. The bulk of people who really care about international roaming are business travelers, which probably make up a small percentage of all US cell phone users.
How about receiving calls?
Sorry, couldn't help it...
Examples:
1) Someone gets ahold of leaked internal emails detailing security issues in a high-profile, security-critical product. They publish the information. Because it's of use to a lot of people (many people use the product), the information spreads, is republished, etc., etc. Think Diebold here.
2) I publish my phone number on my website (on my resume, to be exact). The people who care about it probably already have it. It's not likely to get republished. I don't get any telemarketing calls (it's a cell phone), so it's not spreading like wildfire to people who would want to use it.
Bottom line: In the general case, you have to expend effort to keep information private, but you also have to expend effort to disseminate it.
Did the professor techincally infringe on the copyright by making those copies? Yeah, looks like he did.
I think the more important question here isn't whether or not something is commercially viable after a certain period of time, but whether or not we (our gov't) should grant commercial protection for something that has been out for 20-odd years. I'd say no. For a publication of that nature, 23 years is more than enough.
On a side note, what would you suggest the professor have done? I seriously doubt it would be possible to buy extra copies of a 23-year-old issue of a magazine. So not only does copyright impose an unreasonable burden on the consumer (after a certain period of time), but it looks like most companies don't even have an interest in keeping their copyrighted product on the market for anywhere near the full copyright term. So essentially, it's a waste, and that issue of that magazine should have fallen into the public domain years ago.
From TFA, Google owns 2.6%, actually, not 5%.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. I'm glad we have you here to tell us insightful things, like "squares have four sides" and "people always say that they are people".
Just because someone is whining, it doesn't mean they don't have a valid complaint. Some people can only whine because they feel they have no control over the situation, a feeling that is pretty prevalent when corporate America is concerned. And rightly so, IMHO.
I'm just saying that the impact is orders of magnitude different:
- Slashdot is insecure and not standards-compliant. Result: Maybe someone occasionally loses a throwaway password (you aren't using an important password for
/., are you?), and maybe it doesn't render so well on some browsers sometimes. Relatively benign in either case.
- MS IE is insecure and not standards-compliant. Result: Because of MS' monopoly and almost endless resources, IE is on the desktop of pretty much every Windows user. The lack of strong security for IE means that attackers can use IE to gain control of sensitive information, e.g. banking records, which can cause money to be irretrievably lost. The lack of standards compliance means that every web developer in the entire world that cares about making a website that works in more than just IE has to bend over backwards to deal with IE's broken rendering engine.
I think it's fairly obvious that Slashdot's hypocrisy (one that's acknowledged in the developers of Slashcode, evidenced by their recent standards-compliance work) is relatively benign and harmless, while MS' browser problems can hurt a lot of people financially and make a lot of people's jobs much much harder.Slashdot isn't a multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporation with a stranglehold monopoly on the desktop operating system market.
(Laugh, it's funny! Well, maybe...)
What, no rear spoiler? Chrome buttons? R-type stickers? Puh-leeze.
(Hint: corporate users. Corporate support from MS for Win2k doesn't run out until 2010 or so.)
Still, you really just don't get it. Qt and GTK+ represent two different ways of thinking with regards to how a GUI toolkit should be written and used. Telling the open source world to "pick one toolkit" is tantamount to telling half the OSS GUI community that their way of thinking -- something rather subjective and variable -- is wrong. Is that something you really want to do? I didn't think so...
Hmm, but then later on, everyone would complain about GDE and KNOME having two different feature sets, and we'd have to unify again. GKNOME? KGDE? GDEK?
No, I've got it: GDK.
Wait... Crap.
Ok, so we merge KDE and GNOME into KNOME. What next? Well, why should we choose between the great features of KNOME and Mac OS X? Well, ok, let's merge them too. So now we have MaKNOME X. Well, there's Windows out there too, and it does have a few nice features, so why not do another merge? And thus WinMaKNOME VistaX is born. And a thousand marketing gurus' heads explode.
Seriously, though, why should unification be the ultimate goal? Different people have different ideas about what makes a good, productive, usable desktop environment. Trying to make a one-size-fits-all monstrosity would be just that: a monstrosity.
And remember, we're talking about OSS here. Put up or shut up. If you're a GNOME user and like a certain feature KDE has, bust out some coding skills and write it yourself. If you can't do that for whatever reason, find someone with the ability and pay them to do it. In the end, no one is beholden to you, and there's no such thing as a free lunch.
I would hope it doesn't, actually, at least not by default. The X Composite extension is still buggy as hell, and requires a recent video card with good drivers (pretty much only nvidia, and then only using the binary-only driver, and to some extent ATI), otherwise it's painfully slow. Hopefully that should improve with X.0rg 6.9.0/7.0.0 onwards, but I don't think that'll be timely enough for GNOME 2.12.