Seriously, The guy looks like a lightbulb with a wig on. 8)=
As for the harsh sentences... 9 years is a little high, but oh well. This guy continued abusing the system after the government announced its intentions.
If thousands of pissed off customers didn't change their mind, and the threat of government action didn't make them stop, what would a light sentence have done? Stopped them for the duration of it probably, but then the guy would have been back out there spamming again soon thereafter.
Perhaps such a heavy sentence will deter other would-be spammers. I know my daily load of Spam hasn't dropped at all, so I wouldn't mind seeing a few more equally heavy sentences handed down. Maybe other nations should follow (I'm looking at you China!).
So a buddy of mine comes into town yesterday, and we're going to see Team America... We knew of the Incredibles, but we've both been wanting to catch Team America, and this was the 1st opportunity we'd hade to get together in awhile, so Team America it is.
We get to the theatre for the 3:05 show, and I'm 1st in line, so I say "One for the 3:05 Team America show", and the ticket girl responds "Oh! That started at 3:00" (the time it currently was). "But", she says,"The previews run till like 3:04, so you've got time to get to the theatre".
"Ok". I think. "Kinda odd for the website to be off 5 minutes, as far as movie times to go, but whatever. We're here in time anyway", and we run down to the theatre she tells us (#17), and walk into the darkness of the theatre.
This thing was packed! Tons of kids and parents, and barely a seat to sit in. As we walk in, the only ones laughing really are the kids, and they're laughing at this animated pink "goat", or something, who's lampooning it up with some Monsters Inc. looking wooly thing.
We finally find some seats, and sit down, and so we're watching this animated pink thing, and it's not ending. We thought we'd walked into some previews, and this preview just keeps going, and granted, we weren't paying real close attention, as we thought these were just previews to the Team America movie, but after about 5 minutes or so, we're seriously wondering what it is we're watching, and whether we're in the right theatre.
Finally we made a decision to step back outta the theatre and re-assess the ricket/movie situation, only to find out that the girl had sold us tickets to the Incredibles, not Team America. Rather than go argue it out with the ticket girl, we just found the Team America theatre and wandered in just as the movie was starting (phew!).
So the new movie's evidently so popular that theatres are just assuming that's what you're there to see! 8)
Outta curiosity, for those of you that did go see the Incredibles, what the hell was that stuff that I saw? A preview for something else, or the beginning of the Incredibles? Any idea from my desription?
I really hope it was just previews, as it did not impress me whatsoever. Like I said, it was mainly little kids laughing at this pink thing, unlike in the Team America theatre, which was primarily adults anyway.
And Team America? It was a great movie! Perhaps not as good as the South Park movie IMHO, but it was pretty damn good nonetheless (even with some of the dialogue being taken almost verbatim from various South Park episodes!).
"Cause I'm a dick! And dicks fuck pussys. But some people aren't pussys or dicks, they're just assholes. But you know... Sometimes dicks fuck assholes too! And sometimes pussys get so fulla shit that they become assholes themselves!"
Bahahaha... Some classic lines in that movie, there are! 8)
I think what bothers me most about people like you is that you appear to be looking for a every little chance to hail the War efforts, insult others, and validate what our political process has become.
The sad thing is that I'm sure you and others truly believe that all of us who question the status quo are un-American, and that the holyer-than-thou's, such as yourself, are the only hope for this country . Not that your sarcastic response deserves a rebuttal (I know... Don't feed the trolls), but...
You said "avoid Iraq and we can all bow down to our Islama-Fascist masters in the future"
I never said avoid Iraq. I pointed out the costs of the war by using Bush's already announced spending plan. So don't try and turn this into a "You don't want war maaaaan? You Osama-lovin so-and-so" speel. The war's a given at this point. I'm, questioning the amount we're going to continue to pump into it, in comparison to all the good it would do here at home where we have our own radicals, starving people, and problems to deal with, on top of the problems the war itself is causing.
You also indirectly called me, or rather people who think like me, a bunch of drug users. And I quote "But we will all be too stoned to know or care".
Nice way to make your point there... Putting words in others mouths! You'll notice that I didn't point out that your reply makes me assume that you slept with your mother, and are probably an overweight homophobic white guy who panics when he sees a black person, even though that's the impression you've left me with, did I?
You also say such wonderful things as "If you think drugs are ok, go shoot up some heroin some time.". Again... What in my original post led you to believe I was promoting drug use? True, I did make a comment regarding our current methods, and how ridiculous they are, but that by no means is a pro-drug statement. But whatever... Paranoid people tend to jump to conclusions, I understand.
Finally, your "When you wake up, sick, broke and without any friends or family, you will then realize how bad some of this stuff can be. Some (not all) people react to Cocaine that way." comment makes me wonder if you're on crack yourself!
I know how people react to it. I've had a couple of friends who became regular abusers, and thank god, they've gotten off of it and straightened their lives out. But again, what does this have to do with my comments?
Perhaps you've had a bad experience yourself, or others close to you have, but again... this has nothing to do with my comments. Take your self-righteous opinions elsewhere, and stop putting words in my mouth.
Is more of our tax dollars going towards killing people, plants, and animals in a country that doesn't want us there, as opposed to reinvesting that money into us, the country, and anti-drug efforts in the homeland.
And I expect that in another 10-15 years, we'll see another story about how now coca have been resistant to whatever our new chemical of choice is going to be.
Not to turn this into a "war on drugs" tirade, but the current administration, and it's directives, are so far off target, it's not funny.
By the way... While you're thinking about how much money has already been sunk into this, how many lives have been lost, and how many people in columbia we've hurt (or at least hurt their livelihoods, whether they were coca farmers or not), consider the $75 billion dollar proposal that Bush will submit in January to further the war in Iraq.
Now think about the positive changes that could be made here in the USA, which is where all of us funding these fiascos live, if we used the combined monies for these wars to improve our homeland.
If you can picture it (I can!), then you surely are not a politician, I'm guessing.
On a hunch, I popped open a copy of eMule and typed "Necromania" in a search (actually, I'm lazy... I copied & pasted it from the story using my mouse, but I digress...)
The results were for 100+ sources for "Necromania (E D Wood Jr 1971) VHS-Rip by Davide-466.avi".
I'm not saying anyone's lying, or that the copy on emule is even the same thing (we all know it probably is, but whatever...), but the story seems to indicate that this guy went through a lot of time and effort to locate "the" copy. And I quote...
Rudolph Grey, author of a biography of the director, and a fellow Ed Wood enthusiast, movie distributor Alexander Kogan, unearthed "Necromania" in a warehouse in Los Angeles after more than 15 years of detective work.
I'm guessing the guy coulda saved a lotta time if he'd just looked on a p2p service. While it's probably not as nice as the master he found hopfully is, it doesn't appear that this movie was ever truly lost, as the article leads you to believe.
I made a PVR system about 3 years ago and haven't regretted it since. Mine isn't as complex or capable as MythTV (primarily because MythTV doesn't support my ATI 8500DV), nor is it as simple as a Tivo, but it can fit a 2 hr. movie onto DVD at full DVD resolution with no problems.
And since I'm using ATI's latest & greatest software, I'm able to record natively at this resolution in DVD-ready mpeg2 format.
Other solutions, such as ShowShifter, offer a prettier front end, but they're unable to take advantage of ATI's built in codecs, so mpeg recording is a 2 part process, in that you record in full DV, and then re-compress the video to mpeg, or whatever I want.
It's nice to know that while I'm archiving my girlfriends HBO series, that I don't need to worry about the manufacturer of my equipment suddenly changing what my equipment will, or will not do.
Thanks again Tivo! It's moves like this that really make me think I made the right choice by building instead of purchasing your product.
Buy 2 hypo-allergenic cats for a total of $7000.00
Let them screw like bunnys
Sell my own hypo-allergenic kitties for $2500.00 apiece
After the 3rd sale, I'm in profit city baby!
Underwear Gnomes, eat yer' heart out.
Now there is, of course, the initial investment of $7000.00 (he says while scanning the crowd). So who'd like to be among the first to invest in "Kittys4Less".
People don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems
Sounds like the same reasons that Apple always provides for why they don't want to get back into the PDA game (much to the chagrin of the Newton crowd, I might add)
The GPL doesn't somehow nullify copyright law.. taking someone elses work and passing it as your own is fraud. It's also copyright violation, and other things, depending on how things are done.
Well obviously. My point wasn't so much "Is this illegal" - It obviously is, but how common is it? If it's common, how often are people sued for the violation? How many people have succesfully been sued? Has jail time ever been given for an offense??
The novel idea doesn't work for me: If you write a novel, you're sending it to some publishers to be published, and then they and you are legally & financially in trouble if and when the lifted work's discovered. And they have teams of people at most publishers to both look out for, and address plagarism such as your example. Plus, readers of one style/author, are likely to recognize the style of the author. Would the average PC user ever think "Hey - This program I paid $50 for acts a lot like this one I downloaded for free! I wonder if the code's been stolen"? Probably not, I'm guessin'
In the computer business, 99% of the users out there have no idea how to write, read, or lift source code. I doubt that "Bob and Sue small business owner" have never heard of the GPL. They won't know that the software they're buying is lifted code. But in the same sense, would a GE, or a GM realize it if they purchased a six figure-costing CAD program that turned out to be hacked Blender code? I would hope so, but I don't know. Hence my question(s) about what happens in these cases.
Most of the responses so far seem to indicate "Not much of anything is done, but it should be!". Is this really what most GPL licensees & contributors can expect for their endeavors? Obviously the IBM's and other big business's contributing open source code have the financial clout to fight someone who they think's going after their code illegally, but there's a lot of independant OSS enthusiasts - What's being done for these people, and their contributions to the OSS world? What has been done? That's more the questions I was posing.
And I'm not a die-hard "Everything must be by the book!" type-a guy, but what's to prevent some a-hole, which this Arben does appear to be shaping up as, from abusing the hell outta the GPL by copying, stealing, and selling the source of a GPL project as their own?
Yes, we do have the world-renowned "Slashdot Effect", which may cost him or her a little with their hosting company, but what other ramifications does the average GPLer hope for in cases such as this (profiting from GPL'd code without giving credit or $$ to the actual creators)?
I suppose that if the problem were big enough, one might hope for some support from the EFF, and perhaps there's some other well-intending lawyers for the bigger GPL cases, but I see little to actually deal with some of guys like this. If I call up his local police, they'll be laughing at me all the way to the donut shop, not running over to arrest him and charge him with violating the GPL.
And the worst part of this, in my view, is that the average consumer isn't a geek, and so losers like this can still make money off them since they aren't privy to this "elite geek knowledge", as we obviously are. You and me can laugh tomorrow about how CherryOS is appearing to be every bit the fake that we all thought it was last week when it hit the boards, but the average guy who just wants to run that cool OSX on his $300 PC isn't going to be privy to this kinda news. So ol' Arben's still likely to make a nice bit of money off these people before disapearing with some easy cash (potentially, of course - There's no smoking gun showing that CherryOS is a fake yet to my knowledge).
So other than losing a few potential sales to us geeks, and getting a bad rap in the nerd pools around the world, is that all this guy can expect? Certainly the average GPL code writer's not going to have the knowhow or money to go after an anonymous name who could be anywhere in the world.
Does this kinda thing happen a lot? I can see where someone could likely get away with this and make some nice cash if they were to avoid very visible, and geeky products such as this. I mean... If I'm writing closed-source IVR software in Russia, and I just repackage a bunch of open source code as my own, what's the odds that anyone would notice? Now... Stealing a product as new, and with as big of "WOW" factor as PearPC takes some big balls, or a lot of stupidity, but for a lot of smaller, or less public projects, it wouldn't surprise me to find this was happening more often than people want to know about.
And for that matter, what's to prevent all the entepreneurs(sp?) out there reading this story from doing this? I can see at least one Slashdot reader going "It's just the GPL, and it looks like it's easy money! I'll just register me a fake domain, erase some copyrights and come up with a logo, and voila! I'm ready to start selling me my new Internet browser "FireWolf" for a nice profit"?
Sorry if this is a well known thing... I tend to avoid philosophic discussions on the GPL as often it's a lot of flaming, and little real knowledge, but this is a question I've always wondered, yet have never seen definatively answered.
I don't mind Walmart discounting albums or anything, but keep in mind that Walmart only sells you what they see fit.
Here's a few links to keep you busy as you praise Walmart for "puttin' it to the RIAA". Keep in mind that this is also the biggest company (Well... next to the military) to mandate RFID tags on everything.
So not only do you get to choose from a limited selection of CD's (those deemed acceptable by Walmarts censors), but soon you'll potentially be able to have Walmart scan you as you shop to see what other items someone in your demographic is purchasing. Or in Walmart terms, "Shoppers who purchase band XXX from our censored music selection, are also likely to purchase items YY and ZZ".
Ain't it great to be a number with big brother determining what you can have!
There were Mac clones in the 90s, and for me the experience was no different than an Apple Mac. I actually liked my clone better than any Apple desktop I've ever owned.
But those were clones. They were all based off the same hardware/architecture.
A move to an x86-based system is an entirely different beast. Different CPU, hardware, configuration(s), behavior, and so on.
The variables are increased much more than a cloned box would be. A cloned G5 would still be a G5, or some similar PPC-based system, for example.
That's like asking someone who's never driven a Jeep if they'd consider switching to one if the price was right. How can they say if it'd be a good replacement for their current vehicle after simply seeing one in a commercial?
For someone to truly consider switching, they have to interact with the OS. Since OSX isn't available on x86, there's no way for someone to make a reasonable decision.
What if it didn't perform as well on x86 as on the PPC architecture? What if tons of hardware was incompatible? What if the x86 requirements were such they they required a minimum og 2GB of memory?
There's just too many variables for someone to make a decision like this, sight unseen. And after buying a Mac last Spring, I can honestly say that while an x86 OSX would be nice, the experience still won't be that of OSX on an Apple built machine. It might be close, but I can't picture it being the same as an Apple-based experience.
The reason for that is the silly mpeg2 royalties. If Windows supports mpeg2 out of the box, that just means the licensing cost is hidden in the cost of Windows itself.
BUZZ! Wrong Answer. That answer doesn't make any sense to me!
Whether Windows does or not is irrelevent(sp?) to the arguement! You're saying that this platform, which is known to be on the pricier side of the computer experience, is unwilling to pay for mpeg licensing? Doubtful, and if it's true, then it raises the issue of the Macs price/value even further. Pay more, and get less? I don't like the idea of that (although I'm sure the "Macs are overpriced crowd would love to add it to their collection").
Then, let us also consider that many of the included applications can output mpeg video. How could they avoid licensing fees for editing the but not be forced to pay for creating and outputting the format?
It also raises the question of why no 3rd party's stepped forward to offer the codec as an addon for OS X. If the issue were simply licensing, it's a given that someone would be filling this gap and selling an addon to allow this.
Finally, all of OS X's competition offers mpeg2 output for nothing. Windows, Linux, BeOS even did, if I recall. To me this could be considered "low hanging fruit" to Apple, yet there's no way to do this currently.
So, not to disagree, but I'm disagreeing with your take on the issue
I too am a recent switcher (in fact I just typed up a long-winded, pro-mac thing on Eugenias propaganda machi- Er... OSNews), and love my Mac.
However there is one area that my Mac's a letdown: You cannot watch mpeg2 video in Quicktime without buying an addon. And then you still cannot edit an mpeg in any Quicktimes-based app (idvd, imovie, and so on).
It's just ridiculous that this "Media Machine" cannot perform even simple edits on one of the most common video formats around! Don't think that a Mac doesn't understand the mpeg format at all: Even those aforementioned iapps can output mpeg2. They have the ability to output mpeg2 for burning DVD's. But if you want to re-encode those videos, or simply chop off a commercial or something, you have to re-encode it as an avi or quicktime file. Or use some stopgap shareware solution (A seperate app that keeps numerical track of where I'm editing, and then I paste those numbers into Quicktime. What a pain in the ass!)
Again, I love my Mac, but I think it's so stupid that to chop up an mpeg file that I recorded, I have to switch over to my Pentium box to do so.
Stupid, stupid, stupid....
Since you work at Apple, maybe you can let them know why this particular switcher, and probably countless more amateur video editors, are unable to completely switch over from the PC platform.
Does this mean that I can store videos (avi, qm, mpg), and have it played on my TV also?
Now that would make me buy it if I could not only have my music and images, but also a few movies that I can play via my hotel rooms TV when I'm on the road!
The Doctor Demento comment got me all nostalgic as Mr. Demento's no longer broadcast in my area.
So my 1st thought was "Maybe there's a netcaster for his show", but when I checked out the manufacturer's site, there's no mention of Net broadcast capabilities.
Does anyone know if it supports such things?
For that matter, I couldn't see whether it supports coax hookups or not. $70.00 is pretty expensive for an antenna-only device, particularly when a large portion of their target audience can probably get better reception over their cable line than via a stand alone antenna.
Now if I could record off my broadband, and via an analogue/coax input, the price might be justified... But I'm not going to pay that much to just record a radio station when I'm not home. I can already do that via a simple line out from my stereo into the Mac, and a scheduled audio recording job.
In todays world, it seems that the individual has virtually no rights, whereas big money corporations are now dictating the laws which keeps them 'in the money', while stripping more and more constitutional rights away from the individual.
For example, we have the DMCA, which companies can wield against tomorrows innovators. If this would have existed during the late 19th century, we would not have many of the inventions and innovations that have brought the country to where it stands today.
We also have people like Senator Orwin Hatch who it's been proven is accepting payments from the RIAA in return for submitting more and more legislature designed to remove consumer rights. I'm not referring to pirating or sharing music, but simple, formerly proven concepts like backing up our purchased media, and being able to record television shows for later viewing.
So why is money allowed to sway votes and legislation like this? Isn't this the very thing that existing laws are made to prevent? What's happened to our consitutional rights, and why as todays premier politicians, have you not done anything to stop this abuse?
Aopen released a hybrid tube audio-based motherboard back in... 2002? Perhaps it was 2001 even... My analog brain seems to have problems with old, non-important dates.
Also, it's worth pointing out that for most musicians, particularly guitarists, tube technology has never gone away. It may have gotten a little more scarce in the consumer world, but musicians have long known that tubes offer an element that while perceptive, often enhances any sound, digital, or analog-based.
It's also worth pointing out that many companies are now emulating tube sounds. For example, I sold my old Marshall stack a long time ago, and moved to an Line6 AX2 tube-modelling amp. It's very impressive, and allows me to achieve many natural sounding tones, without requiring multiple amps, or annual tube replacements.
T-Racks is a notable piece of software which can do wonders to your music tracks. Many of its functions are designed to emulate tube-based equipment.
So while it's nice to see that more people are re-discovering the magic of analog equipment, it's not like it's ever gone away.
Gentoo is a source-based distro, so you have to keep that in mind. When you upgrade Gentoo, you're really downloading the source and recompiling everything.
Since Yoper is a "pre-compiled" distribution, you're downloading pre-built components, and replacing the old components with the new. So the process is totally different.
I think a lot of people are confusing the comparisons with Gentoo with how the Yoper system is built, which is more along the lines of a Suse, or Mandrake, or Fedora. Only in this case everythings hyper optimized for this particular architecture.
But to answer your question, upgrades for me have been effortless. You open Synaptic, update it's information, and then choose "upgrade". Simple stuff!
Yoper really is the next best thing to Gentoo for me, as far as Linux goes.
It's more optimized than its comptetion (all the other non-enterprise, modern, cutting-edge desktop distros... Ark, JAMD, PCLinuxOS, etc.))
It's using some of the best packages avail at the moment, in their latest incarnations
It's setup in such a way that it could immediately be used as an office PC (aka as a Windows replacement), it's equally able to handle more "power-user" type people straight out of the box, with additional software available via a point and click GUI (Synaptic)
While it's 'dumbed down' to the point that your average PC-based web surfer/emailer/im'er can start out right at home, it's just so fuckin' fast and optimized right out of the box that it'll impress even the most jaded Linux user.
It's picking up momentum fast, so more and more of the popular packages (and in my opinion some really obscure ones - There's a lotta stuff 'ported for it' that I'd never expect -or use) are being put out. I'm really just talking compile optimizations and such, but they're all setup for the Yoper structure
The hardware support is very nice. In fact, to me, the biggest "ooh!" about the most recent release is that it's the first Linux distribution that correctly identified and setup my Radeon 9600 card, with dual monitors. EVERY other distribution made me hand-edit the config files to make this work, and in some this cases never worked at all
It really is a slick system, and very deserving of the accolades it's starting to receive. To me, it's the distribution to judge others by (With the obvious exception of Gentoo, and other source-based distros).
If they can continue the momentum and build their software catalog (meaning compiled, optimized packages for Yoper), I can see Yoper easily winning the Desktop Linux race.
Oh, and for the record, if you've heard of any problems with their support, or OSS issues, it appears that this is very much a thing of the past. I was there for the beta testing, and I was one of the those who didn't like what happened after the release of v 1.0, and I can safely say that it appears that Yopers seen the light, and has remedied any problems they may have had. The Yoper community is also very good.
Check it out! You know you've installed dozens of Linux distributions already... What's one more going to hurt? It could change your usage of Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Forehead!
Seriously, The guy looks like a lightbulb with a wig on. 8)=
As for the harsh sentences... 9 years is a little high, but oh well. This guy continued abusing the system after the government announced its intentions.
If thousands of pissed off customers didn't change their mind, and the threat of government action didn't make them stop, what would a light sentence have done? Stopped them for the duration of it probably, but then the guy would have been back out there spamming again soon thereafter.
Perhaps such a heavy sentence will deter other would-be spammers. I know my daily load of Spam hasn't dropped at all, so I wouldn't mind seeing a few more equally heavy sentences handed down. Maybe other nations should follow (I'm looking at you China!).
So a buddy of mine comes into town yesterday, and we're going to see Team America... We knew of the Incredibles, but we've both been wanting to catch Team America, and this was the 1st opportunity we'd hade to get together in awhile, so Team America it is.
We get to the theatre for the 3:05 show, and I'm 1st in line, so I say "One for the 3:05 Team America show", and the ticket girl responds "Oh! That started at 3:00" (the time it currently was). "But", she says,"The previews run till like 3:04, so you've got time to get to the theatre".
"Ok". I think. "Kinda odd for the website to be off 5 minutes, as far as movie times to go, but whatever. We're here in time anyway", and we run down to the theatre she tells us (#17), and walk into the darkness of the theatre.
This thing was packed! Tons of kids and parents, and barely a seat to sit in. As we walk in, the only ones laughing really are the kids, and they're laughing at this animated pink "goat", or something, who's lampooning it up with some Monsters Inc. looking wooly thing.
We finally find some seats, and sit down, and so we're watching this animated pink thing, and it's not ending. We thought we'd walked into some previews, and this preview just keeps going, and granted, we weren't paying real close attention, as we thought these were just previews to the Team America movie, but after about 5 minutes or so, we're seriously wondering what it is we're watching, and whether we're in the right theatre.
Finally we made a decision to step back outta the theatre and re-assess the ricket/movie situation, only to find out that the girl had sold us tickets to the Incredibles, not Team America. Rather than go argue it out with the ticket girl, we just found the Team America theatre and wandered in just as the movie was starting (phew!).
So the new movie's evidently so popular that theatres are just assuming that's what you're there to see! 8)
Outta curiosity, for those of you that did go see the Incredibles, what the hell was that stuff that I saw? A preview for something else, or the beginning of the Incredibles? Any idea from my desription?
I really hope it was just previews, as it did not impress me whatsoever. Like I said, it was mainly little kids laughing at this pink thing, unlike in the Team America theatre, which was primarily adults anyway.
And Team America? It was a great movie! Perhaps not as good as the South Park movie IMHO, but it was pretty damn good nonetheless (even with some of the dialogue being taken almost verbatim from various South Park episodes!).
"Cause I'm a dick! And dicks fuck pussys. But some people aren't pussys or dicks, they're just assholes. But you know... Sometimes dicks fuck assholes too! And sometimes pussys get so fulla shit that they become assholes themselves!"
Bahahaha... Some classic lines in that movie, there are! 8)
I think what bothers me most about people like you is that you appear to be looking for a every little chance to hail the War efforts, insult others, and validate what our political process has become.
The sad thing is that I'm sure you and others truly believe that all of us who question the status quo are un-American, and that the holyer-than-thou's, such as yourself, are the only hope for this country . Not that your sarcastic response deserves a rebuttal (I know... Don't feed the trolls), but...
You said "avoid Iraq and we can all bow down to our Islama-Fascist masters in the future"
I never said avoid Iraq. I pointed out the costs of the war by using Bush's already announced spending plan. So don't try and turn this into a "You don't want war maaaaan? You Osama-lovin so-and-so" speel. The war's a given at this point. I'm, questioning the amount we're going to continue to pump into it, in comparison to all the good it would do here at home where we have our own radicals, starving people, and problems to deal with, on top of the problems the war itself is causing.
You also indirectly called me, or rather people who think like me, a bunch of drug users. And I quote "But we will all be too stoned to know or care".
Nice way to make your point there... Putting words in others mouths! You'll notice that I didn't point out that your reply makes me assume that you slept with your mother, and are probably an overweight homophobic white guy who panics when he sees a black person, even though that's the impression you've left me with, did I?
You also say such wonderful things as "If you think drugs are ok, go shoot up some heroin some time.". Again... What in my original post led you to believe I was promoting drug use? True, I did make a comment regarding our current methods, and how ridiculous they are, but that by no means is a pro-drug statement. But whatever... Paranoid people tend to jump to conclusions, I understand.
Finally, your "When you wake up, sick, broke and without any friends or family, you will then realize how bad some of this stuff can be. Some (not all) people react to Cocaine that way." comment makes me wonder if you're on crack yourself!
I know how people react to it. I've had a couple of friends who became regular abusers, and thank god, they've gotten off of it and straightened their lives out. But again, what does this have to do with my comments?
Perhaps you've had a bad experience yourself, or others close to you have, but again... this has nothing to do with my comments. Take your self-righteous opinions elsewhere, and stop putting words in my mouth.
Is more of our tax dollars going towards killing people, plants, and animals in a country that doesn't want us there, as opposed to reinvesting that money into us, the country, and anti-drug efforts in the homeland.
And I expect that in another 10-15 years, we'll see another story about how now coca have been resistant to whatever our new chemical of choice is going to be.
Not to turn this into a "war on drugs" tirade, but the current administration, and it's directives, are so far off target, it's not funny.
By the way... While you're thinking about how much money has already been sunk into this, how many lives have been lost, and how many people in columbia we've hurt (or at least hurt their livelihoods, whether they were coca farmers or not), consider the $75 billion dollar proposal that Bush will submit in January to further the war in Iraq.
Now think about the positive changes that could be made here in the USA, which is where all of us funding these fiascos live, if we used the combined monies for these wars to improve our homeland.
If you can picture it (I can!), then you surely are not a politician, I'm guessing.
On a hunch, I popped open a copy of eMule and typed "Necromania" in a search (actually, I'm lazy... I copied & pasted it from the story using my mouse, but I digress...)
The results were for 100+ sources for "Necromania (E D Wood Jr 1971) VHS-Rip by Davide-466.avi". I'm not saying anyone's lying, or that the copy on emule is even the same thing (we all know it probably is, but whatever...), but the story seems to indicate that this guy went through a lot of time and effort to locate "the" copy. And I quote...
Rudolph Grey, author of a biography of the director, and a fellow Ed Wood enthusiast, movie distributor Alexander Kogan, unearthed "Necromania" in a warehouse in Los Angeles after more than 15 years of detective work.
I'm guessing the guy coulda saved a lotta time if he'd just looked on a p2p service. While it's probably not as nice as the master he found hopfully is, it doesn't appear that this movie was ever truly lost, as the article leads you to believe.
I made a PVR system about 3 years ago and haven't regretted it since. Mine isn't as complex or capable as MythTV (primarily because MythTV doesn't support my ATI 8500DV), nor is it as simple as a Tivo, but it can fit a 2 hr. movie onto DVD at full DVD resolution with no problems.
And since I'm using ATI's latest & greatest software, I'm able to record natively at this resolution in DVD-ready mpeg2 format.
Other solutions, such as ShowShifter, offer a prettier front end, but they're unable to take advantage of ATI's built in codecs, so mpeg recording is a 2 part process, in that you record in full DV, and then re-compress the video to mpeg, or whatever I want.
It's nice to know that while I'm archiving my girlfriends HBO series, that I don't need to worry about the manufacturer of my equipment suddenly changing what my equipment will, or will not do.
Thanks again Tivo! It's moves like this that really make me think I made the right choice by building instead of purchasing your product.
Here's what I'm thinkin':
- Buy 2 hypo-allergenic cats for a total of $7000.00
- Let them screw like bunnys
- Sell my own hypo-allergenic kitties for $2500.00 apiece
- After the 3rd sale, I'm in profit city baby!
Underwear Gnomes, eat yer' heart out.Now there is, of course, the initial investment of $7000.00 (he says while scanning the crowd). So who'd like to be among the first to invest in "Kittys4Less".
People don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems
Sounds like the same reasons that Apple always provides for why they don't want to get back into the PDA game (much to the chagrin of the Newton crowd, I might add)
The GPL doesn't somehow nullify copyright law.. taking someone elses work and passing it as your own is fraud. It's also copyright violation, and other things, depending on how things are done.
Well obviously. My point wasn't so much "Is this illegal" - It obviously is, but how common is it? If it's common, how often are people sued for the violation? How many people have succesfully been sued? Has jail time ever been given for an offense??
The novel idea doesn't work for me: If you write a novel, you're sending it to some publishers to be published, and then they and you are legally & financially in trouble if and when the lifted work's discovered. And they have teams of people at most publishers to both look out for, and address plagarism such as your example. Plus, readers of one style/author, are likely to recognize the style of the author. Would the average PC user ever think "Hey - This program I paid $50 for acts a lot like this one I downloaded for free! I wonder if the code's been stolen"? Probably not, I'm guessin'
In the computer business, 99% of the users out there have no idea how to write, read, or lift source code. I doubt that "Bob and Sue small business owner" have never heard of the GPL. They won't know that the software they're buying is lifted code. But in the same sense, would a GE, or a GM realize it if they purchased a six figure-costing CAD program that turned out to be hacked Blender code? I would hope so, but I don't know. Hence my question(s) about what happens in these cases.
Most of the responses so far seem to indicate "Not much of anything is done, but it should be!". Is this really what most GPL licensees & contributors can expect for their endeavors? Obviously the IBM's and other big business's contributing open source code have the financial clout to fight someone who they think's going after their code illegally, but there's a lot of independant OSS enthusiasts - What's being done for these people, and their contributions to the OSS world? What has been done? That's more the questions I was posing.
And I'm not a die-hard "Everything must be by the book!" type-a guy, but what's to prevent some a-hole, which this Arben does appear to be shaping up as, from abusing the hell outta the GPL by copying, stealing, and selling the source of a GPL project as their own?
Yes, we do have the world-renowned "Slashdot Effect", which may cost him or her a little with their hosting company, but what other ramifications does the average GPLer hope for in cases such as this (profiting from GPL'd code without giving credit or $$ to the actual creators)?
I suppose that if the problem were big enough, one might hope for some support from the EFF, and perhaps there's some other well-intending lawyers for the bigger GPL cases, but I see little to actually deal with some of guys like this. If I call up his local police, they'll be laughing at me all the way to the donut shop, not running over to arrest him and charge him with violating the GPL.
And the worst part of this, in my view, is that the average consumer isn't a geek, and so losers like this can still make money off them since they aren't privy to this "elite geek knowledge", as we obviously are. You and me can laugh tomorrow about how CherryOS is appearing to be every bit the fake that we all thought it was last week when it hit the boards, but the average guy who just wants to run that cool OSX on his $300 PC isn't going to be privy to this kinda news. So ol' Arben's still likely to make a nice bit of money off these people before disapearing with some easy cash (potentially, of course - There's no smoking gun showing that CherryOS is a fake yet to my knowledge).
So other than losing a few potential sales to us geeks, and getting a bad rap in the nerd pools around the world, is that all this guy can expect? Certainly the average GPL code writer's not going to have the knowhow or money to go after an anonymous name who could be anywhere in the world.
Does this kinda thing happen a lot? I can see where someone could likely get away with this and make some nice cash if they were to avoid very visible, and geeky products such as this. I mean... If I'm writing closed-source IVR software in Russia, and I just repackage a bunch of open source code as my own, what's the odds that anyone would notice? Now... Stealing a product as new, and with as big of "WOW" factor as PearPC takes some big balls, or a lot of stupidity, but for a lot of smaller, or less public projects, it wouldn't surprise me to find this was happening more often than people want to know about.
And for that matter, what's to prevent all the entepreneurs(sp?) out there reading this story from doing this? I can see at least one Slashdot reader going "It's just the GPL, and it looks like it's easy money! I'll just register me a fake domain, erase some copyrights and come up with a logo, and voila! I'm ready to start selling me my new Internet browser "FireWolf" for a nice profit"?
Sorry if this is a well known thing... I tend to avoid philosophic discussions on the GPL as often it's a lot of flaming, and little real knowledge, but this is a question I've always wondered, yet have never seen definatively answered.
if you do not sell your CD in walmart, you can not top the billboard charts
Dammit! You're telling me that I'll never be among the Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlakes if I don't sell my music through Walmart??
Phew! I've been trying to figure out how to be taken as a serious musician. Thanks for showing me the light!
I don't mind Walmart discounting albums or anything, but keep in mind that Walmart only sells you what they see fit.
Here's a few links to keep you busy as you praise Walmart for "puttin' it to the RIAA". Keep in mind that this is also the biggest company (Well... next to the military) to mandate RFID tags on everything.
So not only do you get to choose from a limited selection of CD's (those deemed acceptable by Walmarts censors), but soon you'll potentially be able to have Walmart scan you as you shop to see what other items someone in your demographic is purchasing. Or in Walmart terms, "Shoppers who purchase band XXX from our censored music selection, are also likely to purchase items YY and ZZ".
Ain't it great to be a number with big brother determining what you can have!
Walmart CD Censorship
Market censors and market mechanisms
Censored magazines, banned music and pseudo-Christian fun at America's scariest retailer
"All your Interne- er... Wallabies are belong to us"
There'll be dancing, Dancing in the streets...
There were Mac clones in the 90s, and for me the experience was no different than an Apple Mac. I actually liked my clone better than any Apple desktop I've ever owned.
But those were clones. They were all based off the same hardware/architecture.
A move to an x86-based system is an entirely different beast. Different CPU, hardware, configuration(s), behavior, and so on.
The variables are increased much more than a cloned box would be. A cloned G5 would still be a G5, or some similar PPC-based system, for example.
That's like asking someone who's never driven a Jeep if they'd consider switching to one if the price was right. How can they say if it'd be a good replacement for their current vehicle after simply seeing one in a commercial?
For someone to truly consider switching, they have to interact with the OS. Since OSX isn't available on x86, there's no way for someone to make a reasonable decision.
What if it didn't perform as well on x86 as on the PPC architecture? What if tons of hardware was incompatible? What if the x86 requirements were such they they required a minimum og 2GB of memory?
There's just too many variables for someone to make a decision like this, sight unseen. And after buying a Mac last Spring, I can honestly say that while an x86 OSX would be nice, the experience still won't be that of OSX on an Apple built machine. It might be close, but I can't picture it being the same as an Apple-based experience.
The reason for that is the silly mpeg2 royalties. If Windows supports mpeg2 out of the box, that just means the licensing cost is hidden in the cost of Windows itself.
BUZZ! Wrong Answer. That answer doesn't make any sense to me!
Whether Windows does or not is irrelevent(sp?) to the arguement! You're saying that this platform, which is known to be on the pricier side of the computer experience, is unwilling to pay for mpeg licensing? Doubtful, and if it's true, then it raises the issue of the Macs price/value even further. Pay more, and get less? I don't like the idea of that (although I'm sure the "Macs are overpriced crowd would love to add it to their collection").
Then, let us also consider that many of the included applications can output mpeg video. How could they avoid licensing fees for editing the but not be forced to pay for creating and outputting the format?
It also raises the question of why no 3rd party's stepped forward to offer the codec as an addon for OS X. If the issue were simply licensing, it's a given that someone would be filling this gap and selling an addon to allow this.
Finally, all of OS X's competition offers mpeg2 output for nothing. Windows, Linux, BeOS even did, if I recall. To me this could be considered "low hanging fruit" to Apple, yet there's no way to do this currently.
So, not to disagree, but I'm disagreeing with your take on the issue
I too am a recent switcher (in fact I just typed up a long-winded, pro-mac thing on Eugenias propaganda machi- Er... OSNews), and love my Mac.
However there is one area that my Mac's a letdown: You cannot watch mpeg2 video in Quicktime without buying an addon. And then you still cannot edit an mpeg in any Quicktimes-based app (idvd, imovie, and so on).
It's just ridiculous that this "Media Machine" cannot perform even simple edits on one of the most common video formats around! Don't think that a Mac doesn't understand the mpeg format at all: Even those aforementioned iapps can output mpeg2. They have the ability to output mpeg2 for burning DVD's. But if you want to re-encode those videos, or simply chop off a commercial or something, you have to re-encode it as an avi or quicktime file. Or use some stopgap shareware solution (A seperate app that keeps numerical track of where I'm editing, and then I paste those numbers into Quicktime. What a pain in the ass!)
Again, I love my Mac, but I think it's so stupid that to chop up an mpeg file that I recorded, I have to switch over to my Pentium box to do so.
Stupid, stupid, stupid....
Since you work at Apple, maybe you can let them know why this particular switcher, and probably countless more amateur video editors, are unable to completely switch over from the PC platform.
Does this mean that I can store videos (avi, qm, mpg), and have it played on my TV also?
Now that would make me buy it if I could not only have my music and images, but also a few movies that I can play via my hotel rooms TV when I'm on the road!
The Doctor Demento comment got me all nostalgic as Mr. Demento's no longer broadcast in my area.
So my 1st thought was "Maybe there's a netcaster for his show", but when I checked out the manufacturer's site, there's no mention of Net broadcast capabilities.
Does anyone know if it supports such things?
For that matter, I couldn't see whether it supports coax hookups or not. $70.00 is pretty expensive for an antenna-only device, particularly when a large portion of their target audience can probably get better reception over their cable line than via a stand alone antenna.
Now if I could record off my broadband, and via an analogue/coax input, the price might be justified... But I'm not going to pay that much to just record a radio station when I'm not home. I can already do that via a simple line out from my stereo into the Mac, and a scheduled audio recording job.
My question:
In todays world, it seems that the individual has virtually no rights, whereas big money corporations are now dictating the laws which keeps them 'in the money', while stripping more and more constitutional rights away from the individual.
For example, we have the DMCA, which companies can wield against tomorrows innovators. If this would have existed during the late 19th century, we would not have many of the inventions and innovations that have brought the country to where it stands today.
We also have people like Senator Orwin Hatch who it's been proven is accepting payments from the RIAA in return for submitting more and more legislature designed to remove consumer rights. I'm not referring to pirating or sharing music, but simple, formerly proven concepts like backing up our purchased media, and being able to record television shows for later viewing.
So why is money allowed to sway votes and legislation like this? Isn't this the very thing that existing laws are made to prevent? What's happened to our consitutional rights, and why as todays premier politicians, have you not done anything to stop this abuse?
I've got two questions I want to ask, and will post them as seperate posts to save moderators the hassle.
My first question is this:
How would you like to be remembered 100 years from now by your country, and how do you think your country will actually remember you in 100 years?
Aopen released a hybrid tube audio-based motherboard back in... 2002? Perhaps it was 2001 even... My analog brain seems to have problems with old, non-important dates.
Also, it's worth pointing out that for most musicians, particularly guitarists, tube technology has never gone away. It may have gotten a little more scarce in the consumer world, but musicians have long known that tubes offer an element that while perceptive, often enhances any sound, digital, or analog-based.
It's also worth pointing out that many companies are now emulating tube sounds. For example, I sold my old Marshall stack a long time ago, and moved to an Line6 AX2 tube-modelling amp. It's very impressive, and allows me to achieve many natural sounding tones, without requiring multiple amps, or annual tube replacements.
T-Racks is a notable piece of software which can do wonders to your music tracks. Many of its functions are designed to emulate tube-based equipment.
So while it's nice to see that more people are re-discovering the magic of analog equipment, it's not like it's ever gone away.
Gentoo is a source-based distro, so you have to keep that in mind. When you upgrade Gentoo, you're really downloading the source and recompiling everything.
Since Yoper is a "pre-compiled" distribution, you're downloading pre-built components, and replacing the old components with the new. So the process is totally different.
I think a lot of people are confusing the comparisons with Gentoo with how the Yoper system is built, which is more along the lines of a Suse, or Mandrake, or Fedora. Only in this case everythings hyper optimized for this particular architecture.
But to answer your question, upgrades for me have been effortless. You open Synaptic, update it's information, and then choose "upgrade". Simple stuff!
Yoper really is the next best thing to Gentoo for me, as far as Linux goes.
It really is a slick system, and very deserving of the accolades it's starting to receive. To me, it's the distribution to judge others by (With the obvious exception of Gentoo, and other source-based distros).
If they can continue the momentum and build their software catalog (meaning compiled, optimized packages for Yoper), I can see Yoper easily winning the Desktop Linux race.
Oh, and for the record, if you've heard of any problems with their support, or OSS issues, it appears that this is very much a thing of the past. I was there for the beta testing, and I was one of the those who didn't like what happened after the release of v 1.0, and I can safely say that it appears that Yopers seen the light, and has remedied any problems they may have had. The Yoper community is also very good.
Check it out! You know you've installed dozens of Linux distributions already... What's one more going to hurt? It could change your usage of Linux.