Boohooohoo American Corporations can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
My guess is that the only reason you find this ok is that you're an American citizen. I'm fairly sure that most people who live in countries other than America aren't too keen to have us push our fucked up legal system onto them. But... In the spirit of being a good American, it appears you only care about yourself, and aren't thinking of how this impacts others.
These sites were CLEARLY offering illegal content.
You're a moron, did you know that? An ignorant moron... These sites were simply indexing what's being offered by others. If one were to go by your variety of logic, eBay should be shut down also since stolen good have been offered on it in the past.
Closing these sites down doesn't remove one bit of content from being offered. For that matter, you can find torrents on Google also. Should we shut them down as well?
Media in 2014, you see the news you want to see I guess. I guess everyone here just wants to here about how evil M$ are, and horrible EA is, and woohooo go Open Source and whatnot.
Question for Slashdot moderators: Why was the guy, further up in this thread, who asked whether this was the start of a one-world government modded down as a troll, yet this goober gets rated to 4 with insightful? He's probably hiding under a bridge right now, as I type this.
While I agree with the sentiment that porting exclusively Linux apps to Windows may lessen the chances of someone switching from a MS platform to a Linux system, I feel that open source licensing, and efforts, do in fact work very well for Windows.
Examples? Sure... Off the top of my head, AutoHotKey is one of the best pieces of software I've found for Windows, and it's entirely open source. It has a thriving user community, it beats its commercial rivals (Automate by Unisyn, for example) in almost every way, and does things that the its competitors can only dream of doing, in a timely and organized manner.
To me, it's proof that open source isn't a bad thing on Windows. Open source is simply a license (in a nutshell), and it should not be used to determine what's released on what platform IMHO. If you truly believe that software should be free, than why is it such a concern when it's ported to a MS OS?
I do agree that porting desktop managers and the like has the potential to decrease the amount of people switching exclusively to Linux, as you can now, for example, reap the benefits of KDE and similar apps (Cygwin anyone), without the need to completely redo your PC setup, but I don't think that open source ports are a bad thing overall.
And really... I think that this whole article is just to stir up the whole anti-MS rage among us Slashdot readers, since none of the debate here will make any difference.
The software's been developed, it's been released as open source, and anyone can port it to whatever platform they want to. No amount of logic, complaining, or rationale can or will change this. Perhaps this discussion should have taken place before the software was released, or the open source licenses were developed, but it wasn't, and so we are where we are.
Now if the discussion were about how to structure future licensing, and or development models, than I think it's a worthwhile endeavor, but why work ourselves up into a frenzy over the license being used as it was intended to be used? The software's free, and anyone can do what they want with it, provided they adhere to its terms, and they make their changes available to anyone who wants them.
Face it... The system's working as it was intended to. Next topic...
The optimistic geek in me says "This is the desktop search engine you've been waiting for. It's been built by the same company that built the Windows operating system it'll be running under, so you know it'll be more optimized and stable than those other '3rd party' search engines".
While the techie part of me is screaming "It's Microsoft Maaaan! Are you fucking nuts considering this!?"
Maybe it's just me, but it sure seems that a lot of the "doom and gloom" virus warnings come out of Kapersky.
Wasn't it just 6 months ago or so that they were warning of a big attack day from the script kiddies out there (Was a... Friday, or a Saturday it was supposed to happen - Can't recall which off-hand). It never happened, but you wouldn't have believed that from their press release.
Don't get me wrong... Kapersky's not the only one who feels that there's greater cooperation between the various virus/spyware/trojan writers out there, but they seem to always be the one using "shock" type campaigns to announce such things.
Perhaps they're hoping that one of these "apocolypse now" stories will someday come true, and then they'll get a bunch of new customers because they'll be the ones who foresaw the problem and tried to warn the world.
Or perhaps they're the ones writing the virus's in order to drive up demand for their anti-virus products... Who really knows at this point, but I don't see the McAffee's or Nortons of the world putting out these types of press releases. It's always Kapersky. Odd...
I work at a large financial company... Lots of money, lots of executives, and a lot of people who can't type a decent email to save their life!
I'm always joking about how these people are represented by their emails. In fact you could modify a bad joke and make it worse:
"You might be a corporate idiot if..."
You type all your emails in the MS Comic Sans font
You sign your emails with a custom signature in some big, illegible font
You don't know how to properly quote the email you're responding to
You type your emails in a needlessly large font
You type your emails in a very loud, needless color (Fucia anyone?!)
You never learn how to spell, and you send out all your emails with 1st grade-level spelling errors
I could go on, but you get the picture. I SO wish that part of our performance appraisals would take into consideration how you present yourself in corporate communications. We have tons of people in executive positions who actually think that combining several of those items I've listed above is the best way to get their point across.
And once you get a poorly worded email, written in Comic Sans font, colored hot pink, you have a lot less respect for the person who authored it, regardless of their role, or the content of the email. It's amazing to me that these peoples bosses don't see this the same way, but often they're equally guilty.
Like he wants to vaguely "threaten" companies & individuals into policing others behavior, so that he and his staff don't have to.
Wasn't it the Nazi's who liked to tell their citizens that it's the duty of every good German to report those who they suspected of questionable behavior and/or ethics?
I think the KGB used to do things similarly: Narc on your neighbor and you're being a good citizen. Question the laws and you're liable to be narc'd on by someone else.
And of course both of those examples turned out wonderfully, didn't they?
Seriously... Why Tenet thinks it's ok to make the USA the policemen of the (global) Internet is beyond me. You'll notice that every person they've put in charge of policing the Internet has quit citing the inability to do such a job. Now evidently Bush is telling his people (and in Tenets case, his "ex" employees, who are now seeding his ideas in corporate America) to make it each citizens, and more specifically, each corporations duty to police the internet in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.
Give me a break... I love America, but this is probably similar to how the aforementioned examples started out too. It's not hard to go from "Well... Just keep a look out for suspicous activity" to "It is your duty to report to us anything that you feel isn't right. Don't worry about the details... Leave that to us."
If Bush and his appointees can't do it (and I think the fact that each appointee that has tried this has resigned within a year, goes a long way towards explaining how difficult, and arguably fruitless this endeavor is), I fail to see how it becomes corporate America's job, or a good citizens job to police his or her neigbors and friends.
Criminal behavior shouldn't be tolerated. But neither should this generic, and largely baseless paranoia that Bush and his cohorts are trying to spread. True, this paranoia does work somewhat (it got ol' whatsisname re-elected!), but it's not a healthy mindset for the average citizen to have, and it does nothing for our collective health to be so stressed out about terrorists around every corner. Being aware does not, or at least should not mean being scared all the time.
To lay out such lofty ideas as "Terrorism's coming to America via the Internet", without any specific examples, much less any proposed solutions other than spying on each other is just stupid and dangerous. We don't elect people to office to scare us with stories about the boogie man, we elect people to office to offer solutions, and to determine the best way to deal with situations.
If the best way to prevent terrorism is to spy on each other, and to have big money corporations policing us, then what the hell are we spending billions of dollars, and countless lifes for halfway around the globe in Iraq? Bring those people back home, throw some Storm Trooper outfits on them, and let's get on with it!
Face it... This endeavor is a last resort for those who we've elected, because their best ideas & efforts haven't panned out. If they can't come up with anything other than vaguely worded threats to be good and keep each other honest, then both we and them have failed (they, for telling us they had a better solution when they didn't, and us for believing their diatribe and electing them).
But really, how hard is it to open up IE and view the page to QA your site? You mentioned that it "would alleviate any need for IE"... but what are you going to do, uninstall IE?
No... My point is that there will no longer be a need to flip between browsers, based on what you're viewing.
As you point out, IE isn't exactly easy to uninstall, and my guess is that components of it may be needed for Netscape to pull this off. But Netscape's method blows Firefoxs out of the water. In Firefox, when you hit an IE only page, what do you currently do?
You have 3 options (IMHO):
Install the 'View in IE' extension, which will then open a new IE browser, and direct it to the URL you're viewing
Open IE, and manually copy and paste the URL from Firefox
Switch the type of browser you're being seen as, and hope that just having your browser viewed as an IE one will allow the page to render (although often the problem is that the webpage needs pieces of IE, not just to think it's talking to an IE browser)
To each their own, but for those of us constantly flipping between browsers, and/or having to test code and functionality on differing browsers, this is a great feature.
Oh! And for the record, I've discovered one problem with the beta: Being that it's Firefox underneath, the new Netscape can handle Firefox extensions, however when trying to download them, the extensions are refusing to install as they don't understand what Netscape is.
Instead, you have to tell it to find extyensions for Firefox v1, and then when installing you get a msg. something to the effect of "Extension Blah will not work with this version of Netscape. You must have Netscape version (null)". Again though, it's a beta, and it seems it should be fairly easy to add a piece which tricks the extension into thinking it's being installed on Firefox".
Who knows... There may be a way to fake this out somewhere in the beta that I haven't found yet.
I'm a Web Developer, and this Netscape release is making me seriously consider it for my main browser (once all the wrinkles are worked out, and sadly, once all the AOL-based crap's inserted into the install).
For a long time now, I've been whining about how no one's released an "IE compatability layer" for Mozilla/firefox, both on this site, and elsewhere.
To me, it's a given that this would alleviate any need for IE, if your Firefox session could suddenly render everything as IE, either on a site-by-site basis, or by a user chosen option (which is how Netscape's handling it).
I've heard lots of replys about how this would slow everything down, and how hard it would be to do this, and so on. To me it was always a "why wouldn't you do this", since the IE rendering engine can be used by 3rd party apps.
And here's Netscape, long written off as an outdated, and slow browser by me, suddenly returning from the dead with just such a feature! So I downloaded it, and installed it (crashed once while setting itself up, but it's an early beta afterall), and the IE mode works perfectly!
I went to some old "IE only" pages here at my company, chose "View as IE" fromt he context menu, and suddenly I was able to browse all these pages without a hitch (for the record, the main problem I've had with IE and our pages is navigation and DHTML. Our company's built several sites and apps around IE specific functionality). The speeds great, and just by right clicking and choosing "View as Netscape", I'm back to browsing with Firefox.
Now I'm torn... I've hated Netscape for years, both for it's quirky rendering and CSS handling, as well as for the bloat that AOL introduced to the install. I'm glad to say that this beta is very impressive, and while i realize it's hopeless to think it'll stay this way, there's no AOL crap, or extra icons as a result of the setup!
I can only hope that some Firefox guru out there sees the writing on the wall and ports a similar IE mode back into Firefox ASAP. I don't want to use Netscape, but being able to switch between rendering engines is a big plus to us Web guys!
Netscape has really impressed me with the direction it's taking with this new release. Let's hope they stick to their guns and release a lean, mean, and extremely versatile browser, which this worth of a beta such as this.
Do you hear me Netscape? Don't f*** this up like you have with past releases, and you might just be back in the 'browser game'! This is pretty impressive considering what Firefox and the Mozilla team have brought to the table (and yes, I realize that it's mainly this same Moz/FF power which is fueling this beta).
Hats off to a helluva beta. The GUI looks like it's shaping up pretty nice too! Love those curved corners guys... Make it themable, and you've got a hit on your hands!
Dude, you know that here in Britain Minis and Beetles are the epitome of cool?
So many responses spring to mind. 8)=
Seriously... I realize that Mini's are big in the UK, and -well... I didn't realize that you Brits were big Herbie fans, but whatever. If nothing else, I find it funny putting the Herbie movies on the same level as the Italian Job.
But Americans, for better or worse, have never taken to such cars. Beetles yes, to a point, although IMHO, the older ones only start to get cool after you rip the fenders off, throw a baja kit on it, and build the engine up way over it's stock 1600cc's.
Us Yanks tend to want our V-8 power, nature destroyin', off-roading, luxury feeling, big old cars! Maybe that's pigeon holing it a bit, but lil' cars like we're talking about have never made a huge dent in US sales.
Maybe with todays gas situation there's hope for such cars here. But I still can't picture cruisin' the strip in such a car. Maybe the ex-hippee's will like it (they can replace their Yugo's finally!)
I would be happy to download "official" torrents that included ads rather than take my chances with dodgy video and lipsync etc.
I completely agree! If I could download official, quality copies of the shows I watch, and still have the ability to chop them up afterwards and save them to DVD (much as I did with a VCR a few years ago), then I wouldn't mind the commercials being inserted.
Now if they go the usual "Hollywood route and try to do it 'bigger and better', hosting off their own pay services, or wrapping the media in DRM, I would quickly revert back to torrents and such.
But if I could get the Simpsons I missed last Sunday (for instance), in full resolution, and with no more commercials than I'd have seen if I'd watched the broadcast, I would quickly switch to the official network feeds.
But the key is that the media must remain free as it currently is. This means (not to repeat myself, but it's big business here, so repeating's neccesary) that if I want to archive the episode and add it to my video collection, I should be free to chop out the commercials after watching it!
I fear that this is the point that most Hollywood types would balk at though: They want to control all the media, including what you do with it after viewing!
It might look "different", and "futuristic", but it by no means looks cool to me. It looks like some bastard offspring of a VW Beetle, and a British Mini.
If you want a car that looks cool, I suggest going here. (just my 2 bits...)
On a whim, I cobbled together a very basic chatroom scanner using Access (for storage), mIRC, and some VB a few years ago.
Basic scanning, and parsing is very easy to do, and then you just need some "ai" in the background to scan the data and report/perform an action when patterns are matched.
I'm sure the feds are looking at a much more serious creation than I was, but I'm sure the concept's similar. The scary thing, to me at least, is that they're probably going at it from a server level, so they could monitor everything, instead of just public channels.
The problem's not that people are pirating the game -It's a problem, don't misunderstand, but the issue of legitimate purchasers being locked out of the game because they chose to circumvent the game's CD requirements.
IMHO, it's perfectly alright to bypass such protection on a legally purchased copy of the game. For instance, I downloaded such a hack to circumvent the protection on Civ III for the PC, which required that a CD be inserted to play, and which I had purchased at Best Buy. BTW, the hack works great!
And Valve has a right to 'lock out' customers stealing the game, but they enter a grey area of legality when they lock out legitimate purchasers who simply want to avoid the annoying CD checks on their legal copy of the game.
I think this is going to be a growing problem as game programmers get wise to the hacks and cracks that are put online almost simultaneously with the game releases. The ideal solution would be one in which the purchaser controls where and how they use the product for which they've paid money, while preventing unauthorized users from doing the same. Valve seems to have nailed a lot of actual piracy with the method they've chosen to use, but they've also impacted some legitimate users as well.
Interestingly enough, gamers on the Mac (Yes, there are a few!) don't have as many problems with this kinda protection since they can have store and mount CD images directly off their hard drive. When I play Civ on the Mac, I simply have to click the CD image of the game, mount it as a disk image, and bang!, the game thinks I've inserted the CD. Too bad PC users don't also have this option. It's also too bad that more games are not released for the Mac. The G5's ready, but the gaming company's still don't see it as a viable game platform. 8(
I can guarantee that if I gave anyone in my family (even the more technically inclined) a live linux cd, based off a free Linux distribution, I'd be greeted with fake "thank you's", and that kind of attitude which says "Thanks - I got you something that you wanted, and which I paid money for, and in return you got me something I didn't want, won't use, and for what it's worth, it's something you downloaded for free, so you didn't really give me anything".
Perhaps it's just me, but I can't picture anyone wanting such a present. Those who would be interested, can typically download and burn an iso easily themselves, and have more than likely done so already.
I saw someone mention "Stuff it with games", at the the top of this thread, and I almost laughed out loud! If you stuff it with Linux only games, you can likely delay the recipients disapointment
until they're at home and discovering the sad state of Linux games (Tux Racer - Whoo!). Conversely, you could stuff it with emulators, and console roms (gameboy, sega, Nintendo, etc), of course if you do this, you're then in kind of a grey area, as far as legality goes.
Not trying to troll, or insult anyone, but if you have a family who would appreciate a live Linux CD, then your family is very different from any family's I know of.
Don't be cheap - Buy, or make them a present (note: "make" does not mean burning an iso file to CD), and make it one that they'd like. Don't make Xmas a political event, or try to turn it into a Linux vs. Windows debate. Xmas is a time for being with family and friends... Save your soapboxing, and your bandwidth, and just get them something they'd like.
And, if you really want to, include your burned live CD's as an added bonus to their real gift.
And don't say "Freenet", as it's a) Slow as a dog. A dead dog at that, and b) Not really suited for p2p type file sharing.
I don't want to get into the whole "But it's still stealing!" arguement here, I'm just rather surprised that no one's created a totally anonymous p2p solution, particularly considering all the lawsuits being thrown out by the big media companies.
(And yes, I realize it must be pretty hard to create such a beast)
Ok, I'm through the article...
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 1
And I just have to say that this guy's a mess of contradictions!
Don't get me wrong... I think he probably believes in what he's doing, and for the reasons he's stating, but he veers around a lot! (He's a lawyer evidently, so this might explain some of his behavior).
One one hand, he's trying to collect all Western Music, to preserve it for after the muslims take down our country (which is pretty apocolyptic, if you ask me!), and then he's going on about how selective he's being in with his downloads.
So once Osama and the other cowards have their followers detonate a few bombs in their name, it appears that all we'll have to listen to will be what this guy deems worth saving (again... If you buy into his rationale). Sorry, but I don't think that a rare, unreleased Mick Jagger song will really make an ounce of difference in anyones life if this guys vision of the future comes true.
It's a noble way of pirating, don't get me wrong... I don't think that anyone's ever taken the "I'm the keeper of the music" defense approach before. But despite all his convictions, in the end he comes across as a very well-off lawyer, who's simply too cheap to spend some of that money to support his music addiction.
This guy can afford to have five G-5 systems, many firewire drives (too many to even have hooked up, so it would seem), in addition to 2 cable hookups and a DSL, a wife and kids, several vehicles, ipods all around, as well as many DVD's and off-site storage for those DVD's, then why the hell can't he just put some of that money towards legitimate purchases?
I'll be totally honest: I have downloaded music, and still do on occassion, but I also buy CD's of my fav' artists when I can, and you want to know something? I live check to check like many of you. I just got paid Friday, and will be for the most part broke until next Friday, but I still can afford to support artists who I feel deserve it (and luckily for me, most of the bands I'm into aren't pimped out on major labels, so at least when I'm paying for their music, much of that money's going directly to them instead of some record exec's overstuffed pockets).
But my point is "If I can afford to pay for music, why can't this greedy bastard, who's obviously much better off then I, manage to do the same?"
It's not like he's paying for some, and then downloading the rest, he's openly proud of what he's doing - Which is basically stealing all his music, and using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to do so.
Sorry... I'm not against all the people out there downloading, but this guy is exactly who the record companies will use as their reason for further legal action: He's well off, he has money, and rather then spend some of that money on legal purchases, he's gone as far as he can to steal everything he owns. This is the kind of guy who's creating the RIAA vs. the world situation that we're in today!
The rest of his rationale doesn't add up either... On one hand, he's going on about how his kids cannot load up their ipods with his music, and how no one can have copies of it, as he's "the historian", and only doing this for society's good, but then he turns around and starts going on about how the new U2's so good, and how he keeps listening to it himself. When the interviewer questions his logic with U2, he quickly switches into "It's not my fault - It's just sooo good. And besides, I -er... already pre-purchased it online!" (yeah... that's the ticket!).
Give me a break!
Your self-righteous, cheap and greasy lawyer-ass is what's showing here: You want us to believe you're a digital Robin Hood, saving our music so that after America is destroyed, all of our kids will know what Mom and Dad listened to. When really, you're just bragging to the world, showing off your cool toys, your cool house, and your cool wife and kids via this article!
If a nuke is ever detonated on US soil by an enemy, I can only hope that it takes this guy, and all the other greedy
Some readers appear to be missing the fact that this only applies to the large jugs of pills that the pharmacists receive. Your individual pill bottle will not have this antenna.
For now at least... I'd imagine that if this is succesful, that consumer bottles will be next on the list, where they'll likely meet the same kind of debate that RFID tags are now dealing with.
What's going on here? I see a lot of opportunity for both pieces of software (and think that both blow most of their competition out of the water!), yet in two days, we've had two of the greatest "independant" (yeah, yeah... AOL, Winamp, and all that) media players become just memorys (or more appropriately, they will no longer be updated any more).
So this leaves us with what? A lot of wannabe's who either don't have the same capabilities, or are not as polished, and a couple of corporate backed players (iTunes, and Windows Media player).
WTF's going on with these guys? Windows Media Player is... annoying for me to work with (best way to put it). It plays things, and has a couple of "Ooh, that's neat" features, but overall it's way more power hungry than Winamp ever was, and it's a lot less capable than Winamp was (Winamp has plugins for almost everything!).
iTunes is a power hungry behemoth, which shows promise, but is currently almost as annoying as Media Player to use, and on the Mac, it's nowhere near as lightweight, or capable as Audion.
Does this mean the end of the individual's right to choose? Perhaps soon we'll only have Windows media files, and Apples AAC, the way it's going. I certainly can't see either of these companys adding all kinds of support for formats that they themselves didn't invent... What about the Oggs and monkey audio users? What about all the other niche formats?
Man... I can't understand why, just as the music industry's realizing that they can't kill digital music (trading, playing, storage, what-have-you), that suddenly all of the pioneers in this field are calling it quits.
Come on guys... If you don't want to (or can't) continue development, and can't find a buyer for your IP, why not open source it. If nothing else, it would give these projects a new lease on linfe (assuming that someone with good programming skills will pick up the torch, of course).
I'm bummed now... Think I'll go shake my iPod around in frustration.
would be "Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, come with no knowledge of what the competition has to offer as he admits not even installing or using"
Seriously... How can you be a succesful product manager if you're not aware of what the competition is doing?
I can't believe this guy is in the position he's in with statements like that, much less keeping that position after such an admission.
Sorry, but you and I strongly disagree on this! Winamp 5 is the best Winamp I've used. I really wish there was an OSX version of it, as a matter of fact!
iTunes is nice, and since getting an ipod, it's more or less a requirement, but it still lacks features that Winamp 5 brings to the table.
You mention that Winamp5 is unstable and slow, and that may be on your hardware, but on mine it flies (On both a 3Ghz P4, and a AMD1600 system), and it resolved all instability that Winamp3 brought to the table. In contrast, itunes is a f'in power hungry beast! On Windows it slows the whole system down at times, something Winamp5 has never done, and even on my dual 2ghz. Mac, it can freeze the whole system at times. Not too cool... If Winamp5 were out for the Mac, and gave me ipod features simuilar to itunes, itunes would never be used again on my systems.
You also bitch (sorry... When you call things a "steaming turd", you're bitching, rather than making a point) about how Winamp 5 was moving away from being free, but only the pro version was. The regular version has more than enough capabilities for 99% of the users out there, and for those who wanted more, they could pay a small fee to upgrade it to the pro version. Not a bad deal IMHO, and it's a helluva lot better than a time-limited trial.
Not to mention the streaming media capabilities that Winamp5 offers: The.nv video format provides freekin' great quality, considering it's rather meager bandwidth requirements. It allows you to do much more than itunes does in this respect, and again... All for free.
As for your comments about people reverting to winamp3... I haven't met anyone who feels that way. In fact the opposite's true, from what I've seen. I know several people who had wrote Winamp off after v3, but came back loving it after v5 hit the streets.
Finally, I have to point out that their library is the best I've seen. It automatically updated and removed dead tracks as they were shuffled around, which is something itunes still doesn't pull off that well, and the way it imports both video and audio files has allowed me to do some very granular sorting by putting the files into named folders.
As an example, I can search for, and find items with such wide-ranging search terms as "Rated-G animation", "Industrial music", "Sheep on Drugs", "The Simpsons", "Rock Music", "Rated-R movies", and "Kids Television", and get very specific, meaningful results. This allows anyone in my house to quickly pull up media without having to know how I've sorted my collection. itunes doesn't even come close to this level of organization.
Summary: I hope this isn't the end of Winamp. They lost me w/Winamp3, but really made up for it with v5. I hope someone either buys the source, or it's open-sourced. This would be a very sad ending for such a great piece of software!
Slashdot Mirror
Boohooohoo American Corporations can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
My guess is that the only reason you find this ok is that you're an American citizen. I'm fairly sure that most people who live in countries other than America aren't too keen to have us push our fucked up legal system onto them. But... In the spirit of being a good American, it appears you only care about yourself, and aren't thinking of how this impacts others.
These sites were CLEARLY offering illegal content.
You're a moron, did you know that? An ignorant moron... These sites were simply indexing what's being offered by others. If one were to go by your variety of logic, eBay should be shut down also since stolen good have been offered on it in the past.
Closing these sites down doesn't remove one bit of content from being offered. For that matter, you can find torrents on Google also. Should we shut them down as well?
Media in 2014, you see the news you want to see I guess. I guess everyone here just wants to here about how evil M$ are, and horrible EA is, and woohooo go Open Source and whatnot.
Question for Slashdot moderators: Why was the guy, further up in this thread, who asked whether this was the start of a one-world government modded down as a troll, yet this goober gets rated to 4 with insightful? He's probably hiding under a bridge right now, as I type this.
The truth hurts.
It might, but you'd never know.
Perl is more fun
You're a sick puppy, do you know that? 8)
While I agree with the sentiment that porting exclusively Linux apps to Windows may lessen the chances of someone switching from a MS platform to a Linux system, I feel that open source licensing, and efforts, do in fact work very well for Windows.
Examples? Sure... Off the top of my head, AutoHotKey is one of the best pieces of software I've found for Windows, and it's entirely open source. It has a thriving user community, it beats its commercial rivals (Automate by Unisyn, for example) in almost every way, and does things that the its competitors can only dream of doing, in a timely and organized manner.
To me, it's proof that open source isn't a bad thing on Windows. Open source is simply a license (in a nutshell), and it should not be used to determine what's released on what platform IMHO. If you truly believe that software should be free, than why is it such a concern when it's ported to a MS OS?
I do agree that porting desktop managers and the like has the potential to decrease the amount of people switching exclusively to Linux, as you can now, for example, reap the benefits of KDE and similar apps (Cygwin anyone), without the need to completely redo your PC setup, but I don't think that open source ports are a bad thing overall.
And really... I think that this whole article is just to stir up the whole anti-MS rage among us Slashdot readers, since none of the debate here will make any difference.
The software's been developed, it's been released as open source, and anyone can port it to whatever platform they want to. No amount of logic, complaining, or rationale can or will change this. Perhaps this discussion should have taken place before the software was released, or the open source licenses were developed, but it wasn't, and so we are where we are.
Now if the discussion were about how to structure future licensing, and or development models, than I think it's a worthwhile endeavor, but why work ourselves up into a frenzy over the license being used as it was intended to be used? The software's free, and anyone can do what they want with it, provided they adhere to its terms, and they make their changes available to anyone who wants them.
Face it... The system's working as it was intended to. Next topic...
The optimistic geek in me says "This is the desktop search engine you've been waiting for. It's been built by the same company that built the Windows operating system it'll be running under, so you know it'll be more optimized and stable than those other '3rd party' search engines".
While the techie part of me is screaming "It's Microsoft Maaaan! Are you fucking nuts considering this!?"
Maybe it's just me, but it sure seems that a lot of the "doom and gloom" virus warnings come out of Kapersky.
Wasn't it just 6 months ago or so that they were warning of a big attack day from the script kiddies out there (Was a... Friday, or a Saturday it was supposed to happen - Can't recall which off-hand). It never happened, but you wouldn't have believed that from their press release.
Don't get me wrong... Kapersky's not the only one who feels that there's greater cooperation between the various virus/spyware/trojan writers out there, but they seem to always be the one using "shock" type campaigns to announce such things.
Perhaps they're hoping that one of these "apocolypse now" stories will someday come true, and then they'll get a bunch of new customers because they'll be the ones who foresaw the problem and tried to warn the world.
Or perhaps they're the ones writing the virus's in order to drive up demand for their anti-virus products... Who really knows at this point, but I don't see the McAffee's or Nortons of the world putting out these types of press releases. It's always Kapersky. Odd...
I'm always joking about how these people are represented by their emails. In fact you could modify a bad joke and make it worse:
"You might be a corporate idiot if..."
- You type all your emails in the MS Comic Sans font
- You sign your emails with a custom signature in some big, illegible font
- You don't know how to properly quote the email you're responding to
- You type your emails in a needlessly large font
- You type your emails in a very loud, needless color (Fucia anyone?!)
- You never learn how to spell, and you send out all your emails with 1st grade-level spelling errors
I could go on, but you get the picture. I SO wish that part of our performance appraisals would take into consideration how you present yourself in corporate communications. We have tons of people in executive positions who actually think that combining several of those items I've listed above is the best way to get their point across.And once you get a poorly worded email, written in Comic Sans font, colored hot pink, you have a lot less respect for the person who authored it, regardless of their role, or the content of the email. It's amazing to me that these peoples bosses don't see this the same way, but often they're equally guilty.
Glad to know we're not alone though!
If it's got a firewire port, and you have a Mac, you can record HDTV directly from it, provided it's an unencrypted signal.
0 426151111599r eadid=386740
Here's a couple o' links for more detail:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?&th
Like he wants to vaguely "threaten" companies & individuals into policing others behavior, so that he and his staff don't have to.
Wasn't it the Nazi's who liked to tell their citizens that it's the duty of every good German to report those who they suspected of questionable behavior and/or ethics?
I think the KGB used to do things similarly: Narc on your neighbor and you're being a good citizen. Question the laws and you're liable to be narc'd on by someone else.
And of course both of those examples turned out wonderfully, didn't they?
Seriously... Why Tenet thinks it's ok to make the USA the policemen of the (global) Internet is beyond me. You'll notice that every person they've put in charge of policing the Internet has quit citing the inability to do such a job. Now evidently Bush is telling his people (and in Tenets case, his "ex" employees, who are now seeding his ideas in corporate America) to make it each citizens, and more specifically, each corporations duty to police the internet in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.
Give me a break... I love America, but this is probably similar to how the aforementioned examples started out too. It's not hard to go from "Well... Just keep a look out for suspicous activity" to "It is your duty to report to us anything that you feel isn't right. Don't worry about the details... Leave that to us."
If Bush and his appointees can't do it (and I think the fact that each appointee that has tried this has resigned within a year, goes a long way towards explaining how difficult, and arguably fruitless this endeavor is), I fail to see how it becomes corporate America's job, or a good citizens job to police his or her neigbors and friends.
Criminal behavior shouldn't be tolerated. But neither should this generic, and largely baseless paranoia that Bush and his cohorts are trying to spread. True, this paranoia does work somewhat (it got ol' whatsisname re-elected!), but it's not a healthy mindset for the average citizen to have, and it does nothing for our collective health to be so stressed out about terrorists around every corner. Being aware does not, or at least should not mean being scared all the time.
To lay out such lofty ideas as "Terrorism's coming to America via the Internet", without any specific examples, much less any proposed solutions other than spying on each other is just stupid and dangerous. We don't elect people to office to scare us with stories about the boogie man, we elect people to office to offer solutions, and to determine the best way to deal with situations.
If the best way to prevent terrorism is to spy on each other, and to have big money corporations policing us, then what the hell are we spending billions of dollars, and countless lifes for halfway around the globe in Iraq? Bring those people back home, throw some Storm Trooper outfits on them, and let's get on with it!
Face it... This endeavor is a last resort for those who we've elected, because their best ideas & efforts haven't panned out. If they can't come up with anything other than vaguely worded threats to be good and keep each other honest, then both we and them have failed (they, for telling us they had a better solution when they didn't, and us for believing their diatribe and electing them).
Sad times indeed.
my question to you now is: How easy is it to flip between renderers?
It's as simple as you indicated the extension is: "Right click / View as IE"
If you want to flip back to 'Netscape' mode (ie, Firefox mode), it's "Right click / view as Netscape"
No... My point is that there will no longer be a need to flip between browsers, based on what you're viewing.
As you point out, IE isn't exactly easy to uninstall, and my guess is that components of it may be needed for Netscape to pull this off. But Netscape's method blows Firefoxs out of the water. In Firefox, when you hit an IE only page, what do you currently do?
You have 3 options (IMHO):
- Install the 'View in IE' extension, which will then open a new IE browser, and direct it to the URL you're viewing
- Open IE, and manually copy and paste the URL from Firefox
- Switch the type of browser you're being seen as, and hope that just having your browser viewed as an IE one will allow the page to render (although often the problem is that the webpage needs pieces of IE, not just to think it's talking to an IE browser)
To each their own, but for those of us constantly flipping between browsers, and/or having to test code and functionality on differing browsers, this is a great feature.Oh! And for the record, I've discovered one problem with the beta: Being that it's Firefox underneath, the new Netscape can handle Firefox extensions, however when trying to download them, the extensions are refusing to install as they don't understand what Netscape is.
Instead, you have to tell it to find extyensions for Firefox v1, and then when installing you get a msg. something to the effect of "Extension Blah will not work with this version of Netscape. You must have Netscape version (null)". Again though, it's a beta, and it seems it should be fairly easy to add a piece which tricks the extension into thinking it's being installed on Firefox".
Who knows... There may be a way to fake this out somewhere in the beta that I haven't found yet.
I'm a Web Developer, and this Netscape release is making me seriously consider it for my main browser (once all the wrinkles are worked out, and sadly, once all the AOL-based crap's inserted into the install).
For a long time now, I've been whining about how no one's released an "IE compatability layer" for Mozilla/firefox, both on this site, and elsewhere.
To me, it's a given that this would alleviate any need for IE, if your Firefox session could suddenly render everything as IE, either on a site-by-site basis, or by a user chosen option (which is how Netscape's handling it).
I've heard lots of replys about how this would slow everything down, and how hard it would be to do this, and so on. To me it was always a "why wouldn't you do this", since the IE rendering engine can be used by 3rd party apps.
And here's Netscape, long written off as an outdated, and slow browser by me, suddenly returning from the dead with just such a feature! So I downloaded it, and installed it (crashed once while setting itself up, but it's an early beta afterall), and the IE mode works perfectly!
I went to some old "IE only" pages here at my company, chose "View as IE" fromt he context menu, and suddenly I was able to browse all these pages without a hitch (for the record, the main problem I've had with IE and our pages is navigation and DHTML. Our company's built several sites and apps around IE specific functionality). The speeds great, and just by right clicking and choosing "View as Netscape", I'm back to browsing with Firefox.
Now I'm torn... I've hated Netscape for years, both for it's quirky rendering and CSS handling, as well as for the bloat that AOL introduced to the install. I'm glad to say that this beta is very impressive, and while i realize it's hopeless to think it'll stay this way, there's no AOL crap, or extra icons as a result of the setup!
I can only hope that some Firefox guru out there sees the writing on the wall and ports a similar IE mode back into Firefox ASAP. I don't want to use Netscape, but being able to switch between rendering engines is a big plus to us Web guys!
Netscape has really impressed me with the direction it's taking with this new release. Let's hope they stick to their guns and release a lean, mean, and extremely versatile browser, which this worth of a beta such as this.
Do you hear me Netscape? Don't f*** this up like you have with past releases, and you might just be back in the 'browser game'! This is pretty impressive considering what Firefox and the Mozilla team have brought to the table (and yes, I realize that it's mainly this same Moz/FF power which is fueling this beta).
Hats off to a helluva beta. The GUI looks like it's shaping up pretty nice too! Love those curved corners guys... Make it themable, and you've got a hit on your hands!
Dude, you know that here in Britain Minis and Beetles are the epitome of cool?
So many responses spring to mind. 8)=
Seriously... I realize that Mini's are big in the UK, and -well... I didn't realize that you Brits were big Herbie fans, but whatever. If nothing else, I find it funny putting the Herbie movies on the same level as the Italian Job.
But Americans, for better or worse, have never taken to such cars. Beetles yes, to a point, although IMHO, the older ones only start to get cool after you rip the fenders off, throw a baja kit on it, and build the engine up way over it's stock 1600cc's.
Us Yanks tend to want our V-8 power, nature destroyin', off-roading, luxury feeling, big old cars! Maybe that's pigeon holing it a bit, but lil' cars like we're talking about have never made a huge dent in US sales.
Maybe with todays gas situation there's hope for such cars here. But I still can't picture cruisin' the strip in such a car. Maybe the ex-hippee's will like it (they can replace their Yugo's finally!)
I would be happy to download "official" torrents that included ads rather than take my chances with dodgy video and lipsync etc.
I completely agree! If I could download official, quality copies of the shows I watch, and still have the ability to chop them up afterwards and save them to DVD (much as I did with a VCR a few years ago), then I wouldn't mind the commercials being inserted.
Now if they go the usual "Hollywood route and try to do it 'bigger and better', hosting off their own pay services, or wrapping the media in DRM, I would quickly revert back to torrents and such.
But if I could get the Simpsons I missed last Sunday (for instance), in full resolution, and with no more commercials than I'd have seen if I'd watched the broadcast, I would quickly switch to the official network feeds.
But the key is that the media must remain free as it currently is. This means (not to repeat myself, but it's big business here, so repeating's neccesary) that if I want to archive the episode and add it to my video collection, I should be free to chop out the commercials after watching it!
I fear that this is the point that most Hollywood types would balk at though: They want to control all the media, including what you do with it after viewing!
Have you seen the images of the car?
It might look "different", and "futuristic", but it by no means looks cool to me. It looks like some bastard offspring of a VW Beetle, and a British Mini.
If you want a car that looks cool, I suggest going here. (just my 2 bits...)
On a whim, I cobbled together a very basic chatroom scanner using Access (for storage), mIRC, and some VB a few years ago.
Basic scanning, and parsing is very easy to do, and then you just need some "ai" in the background to scan the data and report/perform an action when patterns are matched.
I'm sure the feds are looking at a much more serious creation than I was, but I'm sure the concept's similar. The scary thing, to me at least, is that they're probably going at it from a server level, so they could monitor everything, instead of just public channels.
I think that's the only real issue here.
The problem's not that people are pirating the game -It's a problem, don't misunderstand, but the issue of legitimate purchasers being locked out of the game because they chose to circumvent the game's CD requirements.
IMHO, it's perfectly alright to bypass such protection on a legally purchased copy of the game. For instance, I downloaded such a hack to circumvent the protection on Civ III for the PC, which required that a CD be inserted to play, and which I had purchased at Best Buy. BTW, the hack works great!
And Valve has a right to 'lock out' customers stealing the game, but they enter a grey area of legality when they lock out legitimate purchasers who simply want to avoid the annoying CD checks on their legal copy of the game.
I think this is going to be a growing problem as game programmers get wise to the hacks and cracks that are put online almost simultaneously with the game releases. The ideal solution would be one in which the purchaser controls where and how they use the product for which they've paid money, while preventing unauthorized users from doing the same. Valve seems to have nailed a lot of actual piracy with the method they've chosen to use, but they've also impacted some legitimate users as well.
Interestingly enough, gamers on the Mac (Yes, there are a few!) don't have as many problems with this kinda protection since they can have store and mount CD images directly off their hard drive. When I play Civ on the Mac, I simply have to click the CD image of the game, mount it as a disk image, and bang!, the game thinks I've inserted the CD. Too bad PC users don't also have this option. It's also too bad that more games are not released for the Mac. The G5's ready, but the gaming company's still don't see it as a viable game platform. 8(
I can guarantee that if I gave anyone in my family (even the more technically inclined) a live linux cd, based off a free Linux distribution, I'd be greeted with fake "thank you's", and that kind of attitude which says "Thanks - I got you something that you wanted, and which I paid money for, and in return you got me something I didn't want, won't use, and for what it's worth, it's something you downloaded for free, so you didn't really give me anything".
Perhaps it's just me, but I can't picture anyone wanting such a present. Those who would be interested, can typically download and burn an iso easily themselves, and have more than likely done so already.
I saw someone mention "Stuff it with games", at the the top of this thread, and I almost laughed out loud! If you stuff it with Linux only games, you can likely delay the recipients disapointment until they're at home and discovering the sad state of Linux games (Tux Racer - Whoo!). Conversely, you could stuff it with emulators, and console roms (gameboy, sega, Nintendo, etc), of course if you do this, you're then in kind of a grey area, as far as legality goes.
Not trying to troll, or insult anyone, but if you have a family who would appreciate a live Linux CD, then your family is very different from any family's I know of.
Don't be cheap - Buy, or make them a present (note: "make" does not mean burning an iso file to CD), and make it one that they'd like. Don't make Xmas a political event, or try to turn it into a Linux vs. Windows debate. Xmas is a time for being with family and friends... Save your soapboxing, and your bandwidth, and just get them something they'd like.
And, if you really want to, include your burned live CD's as an added bonus to their real gift.
Wine's cool and all, but I'm surprised no one's working on a "Wine" for Mac OSX applications.
To me it would seem easier to port Mac software over to run on Linux thanks to OSX basically being Unix (yeah.. BSD, I know).
Anyone heard of such a project yet?
No... He's just pining for the fiords, he is!
And don't say "Freenet", as it's a) Slow as a dog. A dead dog at that, and b) Not really suited for p2p type file sharing.
I don't want to get into the whole "But it's still stealing!" arguement here, I'm just rather surprised that no one's created a totally anonymous p2p solution, particularly considering all the lawsuits being thrown out by the big media companies.
(And yes, I realize it must be pretty hard to create such a beast)
And I just have to say that this guy's a mess of contradictions!
Don't get me wrong... I think he probably believes in what he's doing, and for the reasons he's stating, but he veers around a lot! (He's a lawyer evidently, so this might explain some of his behavior).
One one hand, he's trying to collect all Western Music, to preserve it for after the muslims take down our country (which is pretty apocolyptic, if you ask me!), and then he's going on about how selective he's being in with his downloads.
So once Osama and the other cowards have their followers detonate a few bombs in their name, it appears that all we'll have to listen to will be what this guy deems worth saving (again... If you buy into his rationale). Sorry, but I don't think that a rare, unreleased Mick Jagger song will really make an ounce of difference in anyones life if this guys vision of the future comes true.
It's a noble way of pirating, don't get me wrong... I don't think that anyone's ever taken the "I'm the keeper of the music" defense approach before. But despite all his convictions, in the end he comes across as a very well-off lawyer, who's simply too cheap to spend some of that money to support his music addiction.
This guy can afford to have five G-5 systems, many firewire drives (too many to even have hooked up, so it would seem), in addition to 2 cable hookups and a DSL, a wife and kids, several vehicles, ipods all around, as well as many DVD's and off-site storage for those DVD's, then why the hell can't he just put some of that money towards legitimate purchases?
I'll be totally honest: I have downloaded music, and still do on occassion, but I also buy CD's of my fav' artists when I can, and you want to know something? I live check to check like many of you. I just got paid Friday, and will be for the most part broke until next Friday, but I still can afford to support artists who I feel deserve it (and luckily for me, most of the bands I'm into aren't pimped out on major labels, so at least when I'm paying for their music, much of that money's going directly to them instead of some record exec's overstuffed pockets).
But my point is "If I can afford to pay for music, why can't this greedy bastard, who's obviously much better off then I, manage to do the same?"
It's not like he's paying for some, and then downloading the rest, he's openly proud of what he's doing - Which is basically stealing all his music, and using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to do so.
Sorry... I'm not against all the people out there downloading, but this guy is exactly who the record companies will use as their reason for further legal action: He's well off, he has money, and rather then spend some of that money on legal purchases, he's gone as far as he can to steal everything he owns. This is the kind of guy who's creating the RIAA vs. the world situation that we're in today!
The rest of his rationale doesn't add up either... On one hand, he's going on about how his kids cannot load up their ipods with his music, and how no one can have copies of it, as he's "the historian", and only doing this for society's good, but then he turns around and starts going on about how the new U2's so good, and how he keeps listening to it himself. When the interviewer questions his logic with U2, he quickly switches into "It's not my fault - It's just sooo good. And besides, I -er... already pre-purchased it online!" (yeah... that's the ticket!).
Give me a break!
Your self-righteous, cheap and greasy lawyer-ass is what's showing here: You want us to believe you're a digital Robin Hood, saving our music so that after America is destroyed, all of our kids will know what Mom and Dad listened to. When really, you're just bragging to the world, showing off your cool toys, your cool house, and your cool wife and kids via this article!
If a nuke is ever detonated on US soil by an enemy, I can only hope that it takes this guy, and all the other greedy
Some readers appear to be missing the fact that this only applies to the large jugs of pills that the pharmacists receive. Your individual pill bottle will not have this antenna.
For now at least... I'd imagine that if this is succesful, that consumer bottles will be next on the list, where they'll likely meet the same kind of debate that RFID tags are now dealing with.
First Winamp, and now Audion???
What's going on here? I see a lot of opportunity for both pieces of software (and think that both blow most of their competition out of the water!), yet in two days, we've had two of the greatest "independant" (yeah, yeah... AOL, Winamp, and all that) media players become just memorys (or more appropriately, they will no longer be updated any more).
So this leaves us with what? A lot of wannabe's who either don't have the same capabilities, or are not as polished, and a couple of corporate backed players (iTunes, and Windows Media player).
WTF's going on with these guys? Windows Media Player is... annoying for me to work with (best way to put it). It plays things, and has a couple of "Ooh, that's neat" features, but overall it's way more power hungry than Winamp ever was, and it's a lot less capable than Winamp was (Winamp has plugins for almost everything!).
iTunes is a power hungry behemoth, which shows promise, but is currently almost as annoying as Media Player to use, and on the Mac, it's nowhere near as lightweight, or capable as Audion.
Does this mean the end of the individual's right to choose? Perhaps soon we'll only have Windows media files, and Apples AAC, the way it's going. I certainly can't see either of these companys adding all kinds of support for formats that they themselves didn't invent... What about the Oggs and monkey audio users? What about all the other niche formats?
Man... I can't understand why, just as the music industry's realizing that they can't kill digital music (trading, playing, storage, what-have-you), that suddenly all of the pioneers in this field are calling it quits.
Come on guys... If you don't want to (or can't) continue development, and can't find a buyer for your IP, why not open source it. If nothing else, it would give these projects a new lease on linfe (assuming that someone with good programming skills will pick up the torch, of course).
I'm bummed now... Think I'll go shake my iPod around in frustration.
would be "Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, come with no knowledge of what the competition has to offer as he admits not even installing or using"
Seriously... How can you be a succesful product manager if you're not aware of what the competition is doing?
I can't believe this guy is in the position he's in with statements like that, much less keeping that position after such an admission.
Sorry, but you and I strongly disagree on this! Winamp 5 is the best Winamp I've used. I really wish there was an OSX version of it, as a matter of fact!
.nv video format provides freekin' great quality, considering it's rather meager bandwidth requirements. It allows you to do much more than itunes does in this respect, and again... All for free.
iTunes is nice, and since getting an ipod, it's more or less a requirement, but it still lacks features that Winamp 5 brings to the table.
You mention that Winamp5 is unstable and slow, and that may be on your hardware, but on mine it flies (On both a 3Ghz P4, and a AMD1600 system), and it resolved all instability that Winamp3 brought to the table. In contrast, itunes is a f'in power hungry beast! On Windows it slows the whole system down at times, something Winamp5 has never done, and even on my dual 2ghz. Mac, it can freeze the whole system at times. Not too cool... If Winamp5 were out for the Mac, and gave me ipod features simuilar to itunes, itunes would never be used again on my systems.
You also bitch (sorry... When you call things a "steaming turd", you're bitching, rather than making a point) about how Winamp 5 was moving away from being free, but only the pro version was. The regular version has more than enough capabilities for 99% of the users out there, and for those who wanted more, they could pay a small fee to upgrade it to the pro version. Not a bad deal IMHO, and it's a helluva lot better than a time-limited trial.
Not to mention the streaming media capabilities that Winamp5 offers: The
As for your comments about people reverting to winamp3... I haven't met anyone who feels that way. In fact the opposite's true, from what I've seen. I know several people who had wrote Winamp off after v3, but came back loving it after v5 hit the streets.
Finally, I have to point out that their library is the best I've seen. It automatically updated and removed dead tracks as they were shuffled around, which is something itunes still doesn't pull off that well, and the way it imports both video and audio files has allowed me to do some very granular sorting by putting the files into named folders.
As an example, I can search for, and find items with such wide-ranging search terms as "Rated-G animation", "Industrial music", "Sheep on Drugs", "The Simpsons", "Rock Music", "Rated-R movies", and "Kids Television", and get very specific, meaningful results. This allows anyone in my house to quickly pull up media without having to know how I've sorted my collection. itunes doesn't even come close to this level of organization.
Summary: I hope this isn't the end of Winamp. They lost me w/Winamp3, but really made up for it with v5. I hope someone either buys the source, or it's open-sourced. This would be a very sad ending for such a great piece of software!