The cost of hardware and software have nothing to do with it. If there's a way to get a "free copy", some people will always go that route.
There is also free-as-in-beer Free and Open Source Software available, yet people still choose to "pirate" commercial software, even when it is technically inferior and could land them a fine or a jail term.
There's nowt as queer as folk, as the Bard once said, or something.
...Elvis said he'd also been working on recording a new album with his buddies Roy Orbison and John Lennon in between submitting enhancements for the new Amiga OS. Long time friend and record producer Jesus Christ is supervising the recording. "We're looking for an ethereal yet illuminating and peaceful sound," said Christ. "Unfortunately, our first choice of lead gutarist, George Harrison, is unavailable since he has been reincarnated as a slug. John is happy to take that role now. He hopes friend and bassist Paul McCartny will die soon in time to participate in this work as well. Ringo would be an added bonus."
When asked whether he thought this project would be a success, Elvis merely relpied, "Uh huh," and went back into his trailer with a super-bacon-double cheeseburger and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
15 bucks is a lot anywhere for a cd! personally, i don't think it's justified to spend that much on a cd that maybe has 1 or 2 songs worth listening too.
That's why I don't buy crap CDs by the likes of Boyz'R'Us, Madogga and Britney Spires. I buy good CDs of albums of proper music by musicians from independent record shops that sell stuff at a fair price.
Despite what people say here, there are ways of legitimately obtaining good music at fair prices in ways in which the artists, publisherss and retailers get paid a bit for their efforts.
You will not find this music advertised^Wplayed on commercial radio.
Many years ago when I was at university studying physics, many of us chose computing projects in the final year. For various reasons, some of us were instructed to write in pure FORTRAN-77 despite our protestations.
I ended up having to implement various data structures within statically-allocated 128MB arrays (our biggest machine had 256MB RAM). Copious comments were required to make the code even semi-understandable.
There was one particularly clever chap on the course, a mature student. He did one such project. One day he looked at my program, which was over 2000 lines, including comments (actually, it was 50% comments). "I see you've used subroutines," he noted. "I didn't bother with those," he continued. I looked at his program. It was 600 lines of FORTRAN-77, no comments, no subroutines, just GOTOs.
Do not, under any circumstances, code under the influence of alcohol.
I find that usually the only way I can slow my brain down enough to write code is to consume alcohol.
My best code is written under the influence of moderate amounts of red wine (usually Merlot). By moderate I mean between 30-50% of a 0.75 litre bottle, sustained over 2 hours. Any more and I become too tired. Beer is no use. It makes me too lethargic and happy. I listen to heavy metal instead.
I seem to remember articles in computer magazines at the time about how new versions of Windows (3.1/3.11?) wouldn't work in DR DOS for less than technical reasons.
Time is long and memories are short. Mine isn't what it used to be. People interpret the facts and "remember" things based upon what they percieved.
Revisionist historians try all kinds of dirty tricks.
Over the years I've seen many ruthless business moves from many companies, Microsoft included, and once superior products with great futures curtailed for pointy-haired reasons.
The long and short of it is, the market has consolidated around a monopoly, and all that's left are the inventors and innovators on the fringe, savoured by the conoissieurs (sp?) and cognoscenti (sp?) while the rest of the world trudges on, oblivious in its fools paradise.
The edifice of the monopoly has been crumbling for several years now. Great empires, however acquired, are never permanent, and neither is this one.
Leave them to their destiny. We must continue to push the frontiers, for we shall be their leaders when the Empire crumbles.
Time for my medication. Where did I leave the purple ones?
Too bad DOS and MS won out, CP/M was the cat's meow at the time.
My mother is a business studies teacher. Back in the 80's they used to have Amstrad PCW word processors in the classrooms for teaching word processing and spreadsheets. They were 4MHz Z80 machines with a single 3" floppy (180k) disk, 256k RAM and a proprietary cheap and nasty dot-matrix printer. They had monochrome bitmapped green screens. They ran CP/M 2.2 (IIRC) and came with Locomotive BASIC. One Saturday afternoon I hacked up a little Z80 disassembler in BASIC which followed jumps and calls/returns. Great fun. The teacher got a 512k model with dual disk drives:-)
And are all kernel modules guaranteed to maintain strict binary compatibility across all 2.4 releases, or alternatively across all 2.6 releases? Or is it source compatibility only? Or, is it even that?
No. Even different compiles of the same kernel can be incompatible as far as modules are concerned. It depends on the compiler (and version) you use, the kernel and patches and the configure options. When you compile yourself a new kernel, you should rebuild and reinstall all your modules. You will also have to "recompile" closed-source binary drivers. There come with an open-source "shim" layer to interface with the kernel c.f. nVidia drivers. You then need to go into/etc and frob with the scripts that load the modules at boot time.
The rationale for this design decision was to force vendors to either provide GPL'd drivers for their hardware or at least to open the specs. so that volunteers could implement them themsleves. This has been largely successful, but there are a number of significant instances where this has been a problem, for example accelerated 3D graphics drivers. nVidia has been providing binary modules with a shim for years now, and recently ATI has started doing the same. There are various reasons why in the "real world" drivers can not be open-sourced and specs. can not be divulged. Sadly, we do not live in a GNU utopia.
So, for idealogical reasons, we have this dreadful system of driver modules in Linux.
Please note, I'm actually quite a Linux fan. I've been using it exxclusively at home since 1996 (Slackware all the way). I just think it's maybe time for Linux to grow up and take a leaf out of Solaris' book, for example, and to provide a _stable_ (i.e. unchanging between kernel minor versions at least) binary interface for device drivers and other kernel modules. This would make my life a lot easier and cut down on the recompiles.
Sadly, I fear the ideology might get in the way...
You do realize, my good sir, that Beethoven himself was considered a pretentious cacophony in his own time?
And I still consider it so. I'm more of a Mozart man myself, but really, I prefer the pre-Classical stuff. I'm more of a Counterpoint and Harmony man...and Slayer.
And to think ive just bought a cd that wont even rip onto my mp3 player thats sick. I'll probably have to download the same cd in mp3 format and get sued for something i have bought.
You're perfectly free to download it from one of the official pay-to-download services:-):-):-)
What will my former employer do? It's against company policy to use FOSS "because it's shareware and shareware has viruses."
My former colleagues paid $1000 for a closed-source Rexx (which they use for doing numerical calculations on a UNIX workstation - go figure) despite the fact that I sent them a copy of Regina Rexx.
Now that IBM Rexx is Open Source they're knackered. Maybe they'll port to Visual BASIC on NT4, which is the current company standard?
As recent surveys have shown, 80% of internet traffic nowadays is copyrighted stuff.
Everything is implicitly "copyrighted" by the author unless explicity put into the Public Domain.
In other news, I have made "copyrighted" stuff available for download on the Internet. It's stuff that I personally authored. Yes, that's right children, I made it myself! You too can make your own stuff but you'll have to stop spending all your life mindlessly absorbing junk culture from the mass-media (TeeVee and BBC Radio 1) and get up off your fat backsides and take part in this wonderful free-for-all we call Life.
You see, the stuff to which I own the Copyright is licenses under the LGPL which explicity permits copying and redistribution. This is legal.
Don't let the bas**rds brainwash you with double-speak and the misuse of the language.
So you flood them with garbage, annoy the BPI and get them to waste their money and the courts' time. Assuming you're vaguely honest, you support the musicians who really deserve it by paying for their stuff and the BPI, RIAA et. al. get the message that people don't want Britney and Boyz R Us and that trying to force us to pay for it, and filling up the radio and TV with it is futile.
The people who download the sort of dross that the record cartels peddle are usually 12 years old and younger and have no money to spend anyway.
It really annoys me that radio and TV (including the public-funded BBC in the UK) have to pay to what amounts to advertising this rubbish on the airwaves. Not only does the BPI get paid when the "music" is played, but it wants people to buy it.
Perhaps if it was the other way around, perhaps if music companies had to pay to get their stuff on the air, or if they allowed it to be broadcast for free (or downloaded for free at lowish qaulity) people would only buy the better stuff, and the good old Free Market would do its job.
Well, the American RIAA seems to be doing a very poor job of identifying suspects. How many false positives does their brain-dead software flag up?
Why doesn't everyone put up files named Madonna_Like_a_Virgin.mp3 or Britney_Spears_Takes_it_Reel_Good.mp3 filled with random data? A few hundred thousand of those on the peers should give the BPI a headache.
Wouldn't harvesting stem cells from aborted fetuses (fetie?) for the purpose of selling the stem cells allow abortion clinics to avoid federal funding? Maybe even make abortion for the poor a self-supporting and profitable industry?
My point is that as long as we keep the clones somewhat small - say less than 1024 cells, I have no moral problem with disposing them - that I'm not killing anything. Yes this has a HUGE grey area, but I think that a reasonable compromise can be reached.
From what I've read, I gather that very often fertilised eggs fail to become implanted in a woman's uterus and are expelled as a result of menstruation or some other process (I am not a biologist). This happens a lot more frequently than most people think, in fact I think most fertilised eggs (embryos) end up like this.
So why is using an embryo for stem cell research any worse than this? What is immoral about it?
As for "causing suffering" the embryo has no nervous system and no brain and therefore is not sentient. How can there be any pain involved at all?
Why is stem cell research using embryos any worse than Nature allowing one to be flushed down the toilet or thrown away in a sanitary disposal bag?
In my day, these things were going to be the next big thing. They were so ahead of their time, that French car maker Citroen saw fit to name one of their newer models after it.
Here in the UK, it is actually illegal to attempt to pay for something over a certain price with pennies. In other words, the person you're trying to pay can refuse to accept payment in that method and demand larger denominations. IIRC the amount is actually very small, about GBP 0.30 or 30 pence (pennies).
Good luck with that, by the way. Typically, people like you get so far, and then kablooie... the hammer drops, and you get a good dose of reality shock. I hope you're able to pick up the pieces of your fragile ego when that happens.
When I have taken over the world, I will hunt you down and KICK YOUR ASS for taking slashdot way too seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also free-as-in-beer Free and Open Source Software available, yet people still choose to "pirate" commercial software, even when it is technically inferior and could land them a fine or a jail term.
There's nowt as queer as folk, as the Bard once said, or something.
When asked whether he thought this project would be a success, Elvis merely relpied, "Uh huh," and went back into his trailer with a super-bacon-double cheeseburger and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
That's why I don't buy crap CDs by the likes of Boyz'R'Us, Madogga and Britney Spires. I buy good CDs of albums of proper music by musicians from independent record shops that sell stuff at a fair price.
Despite what people say here, there are ways of legitimately obtaining good music at fair prices in ways in which the artists, publisherss and retailers get paid a bit for their efforts.
You will not find this music advertised^Wplayed on commercial radio.
I ended up having to implement various data structures within statically-allocated 128MB arrays (our biggest machine had 256MB RAM). Copious comments were required to make the code even semi-understandable.
There was one particularly clever chap on the course, a mature student. He did one such project. One day he looked at my program, which was over 2000 lines, including comments (actually, it was 50% comments). "I see you've used subroutines," he noted. "I didn't bother with those," he continued. I looked at his program. It was 600 lines of FORTRAN-77, no comments, no subroutines, just GOTOs.
My program worked and his didn't.
I find that usually the only way I can slow my brain down enough to write code is to consume alcohol.
My best code is written under the influence of moderate amounts of red wine (usually Merlot). By moderate I mean between 30-50% of a 0.75 litre bottle, sustained over 2 hours. Any more and I become too tired. Beer is no use. It makes me too lethargic and happy. I listen to heavy metal instead.
Time is long and memories are short. Mine isn't what it used to be. People interpret the facts and "remember" things based upon what they percieved.
Revisionist historians try all kinds of dirty tricks.
Over the years I've seen many ruthless business moves from many companies, Microsoft included, and once superior products with great futures curtailed for pointy-haired reasons.
The long and short of it is, the market has consolidated around a monopoly, and all that's left are the inventors and innovators on the fringe, savoured by the conoissieurs (sp?) and cognoscenti (sp?) while the rest of the world trudges on, oblivious in its fools paradise.
The edifice of the monopoly has been crumbling for several years now. Great empires, however acquired, are never permanent, and neither is this one.
Leave them to their destiny. We must continue to push the frontiers, for we shall be their leaders when the Empire crumbles.
Time for my medication. Where did I leave the purple ones?
My mother is a business studies teacher. Back in the 80's they used to have Amstrad PCW word processors in the classrooms for teaching word processing and spreadsheets. They were 4MHz Z80 machines with a single 3" floppy (180k) disk, 256k RAM and a proprietary cheap and nasty dot-matrix printer. They had monochrome bitmapped green screens. They ran CP/M 2.2 (IIRC) and came with Locomotive BASIC. One Saturday afternoon I hacked up a little Z80 disassembler in BASIC which followed jumps and calls/returns. Great fun. The teacher got a 512k model with dual disk drives :-)
No. Even different compiles of the same kernel can be incompatible as far as modules are concerned. It depends on the compiler (and version) you use, the kernel and patches and the configure options. When you compile yourself a new kernel, you should rebuild and reinstall all your modules. You will also have to "recompile" closed-source binary drivers. There come with an open-source "shim" layer to interface with the kernel c.f. nVidia drivers. You then need to go into /etc and frob with the scripts that load the modules at boot time.
The rationale for this design decision was to force vendors to either provide GPL'd drivers for their hardware or at least to open the specs. so that volunteers could implement them themsleves. This has been largely successful, but there are a number of significant instances where this has been a problem, for example accelerated 3D graphics drivers. nVidia has been providing binary modules with a shim for years now, and recently ATI has started doing the same. There are various reasons why in the "real world" drivers can not be open-sourced and specs. can not be divulged. Sadly, we do not live in a GNU utopia.
So, for idealogical reasons, we have this dreadful system of driver modules in Linux.
Please note, I'm actually quite a Linux fan. I've been using it exxclusively at home since 1996 (Slackware all the way). I just think it's maybe time for Linux to grow up and take a leaf out of Solaris' book, for example, and to provide a _stable_ (i.e. unchanging between kernel minor versions at least) binary interface for device drivers and other kernel modules. This would make my life a lot easier and cut down on the recompiles.
Sadly, I fear the ideology might get in the way...
I don't think Windows comes with a grep, at least 3.11 didn't. I gather Borland ships ones with its dev tools, though.
And I still consider it so. I'm more of a Mozart man myself, but really, I prefer the pre-Classical stuff. I'm more of a Counterpoint and Harmony man...and Slayer.
Just think if the RIAA and BPI had access to this system!
You're perfectly free to download it from one of the official pay-to-download services :-) :-) :-)
Sorry, that was cruel.
My former colleagues paid $1000 for a closed-source Rexx (which they use for doing numerical calculations on a UNIX workstation - go figure) despite the fact that I sent them a copy of Regina Rexx.
Now that IBM Rexx is Open Source they're knackered. Maybe they'll port to Visual BASIC on NT4, which is the current company standard?
Everything is implicitly "copyrighted" by the author unless explicity put into the Public Domain.
In other news, I have made "copyrighted" stuff available for download on the Internet. It's stuff that I personally authored. Yes, that's right children, I made it myself! You too can make your own stuff but you'll have to stop spending all your life mindlessly absorbing junk culture from the mass-media (TeeVee and BBC Radio 1) and get up off your fat backsides and take part in this wonderful free-for-all we call Life.
You see, the stuff to which I own the Copyright is licenses under the LGPL which explicity permits copying and redistribution. This is legal.
Don't let the bas**rds brainwash you with double-speak and the misuse of the language.
Danger: fruitbreak imminent. Must take pills....
What about VIA or Transmeta?
The people who download the sort of dross that the record cartels peddle are usually 12 years old and younger and have no money to spend anyway.
It really annoys me that radio and TV (including the public-funded BBC in the UK) have to pay to what amounts to advertising this rubbish on the airwaves. Not only does the BPI get paid when the "music" is played, but it wants people to buy it.
Perhaps if it was the other way around, perhaps if music companies had to pay to get their stuff on the air, or if they allowed it to be broadcast for free (or downloaded for free at lowish qaulity) people would only buy the better stuff, and the good old Free Market would do its job.
However, I am a lunatic.
Why doesn't everyone put up files named Madonna_Like_a_Virgin.mp3 or Britney_Spears_Takes_it_Reel_Good.mp3 filled with random data? A few hundred thousand of those on the peers should give the BPI a headache.
You could plead you innocence quite legitimately.
They would then have to copyright file names....
How about a free-at-the-point-of-use universal health care system funded through taxation?
NHS, we love you!
From what I've read, I gather that very often fertilised eggs fail to become implanted in a woman's uterus and are expelled as a result of menstruation or some other process (I am not a biologist). This happens a lot more frequently than most people think, in fact I think most fertilised eggs (embryos) end up like this.
So why is using an embryo for stem cell research any worse than this? What is immoral about it?
As for "causing suffering" the embryo has no nervous system and no brain and therefore is not sentient. How can there be any pain involved at all?
Why is stem cell research using embryos any worse than Nature allowing one to be flushed down the toilet or thrown away in a sanitary disposal bag?
I think you're thinking of the beer scooter.
In my day, these things were going to be the next big thing. They were so ahead of their time, that French car maker Citroen saw fit to name one of their newer models after it.
Here in the UK, it is actually illegal to attempt to pay for something over a certain price with pennies. In other words, the person you're trying to pay can refuse to accept payment in that method and demand larger denominations. IIRC the amount is actually very small, about GBP 0.30 or 30 pence (pennies).
Henry VIII used to employ a man to wipe his bottom. He was called th Groom of the Stool
You have a point, and one which occured to me much later after I had sobered up :-)
When I have taken over the world, I will hunt you down and KICK YOUR ASS for taking slashdot way too seriously.