Nobody's using IA-64, though - it's already dead. Those who actually need 64 bit processors (and let's face it, they're still few and far between) are more likely to use AMD's x86_64.
And outside of that, well... just open your eyes and look at the world. Pretty much everyone's using x86 chips (with some Ultrasparcs thrown in for bigger iron), with the only real exception being embedded systems, where ARM reigns supreme.
Given that, I'm not really sure how you can find even the smallest grain of truth in the statement "x86 is dead, and in the future, everyone will use RISC chips that emulate it in software". It's simply not true - it wasn't 15 years ago, and it isn't now.
Or, for that matter, a Jack Valenti (how come that all these people are called "Jack", BTW? We know that there's an Eric conspiracy - could there also be a Jack conspiracy?)
Speaking of spam, it's funny that he mentions spam at all, as the spam filter is definitely one of the weaker points of Gmail IMO. I typically get between 10 and 30 false negatives and about 1 or 2 false positives a day, out of a total spam volume of typically about 350 to 450 a day.
Not exactly great, and certainly much, much worse than my previous, shell-based email solution (which used bogofilter for spam filtering). Gmail's still good for other reasons, of course, but spam filtering is something that definitely will have to be improved, so it's quite surprising that he's talking about it as one of the things he wanted to improve - and, one assumes, thinks he has improved.
Acting may be a hard job, yes... but so are other things. If I slave away coding for 12 hours a day and seven days a week to meet the deadline for a project, do I get paid millions by my employer? Of course not. Yet my employer still expects me to do this in case it is necessary. Why does a famous movie actor makes hundreds of times as much money as I do? Because the job's hundreds of times as hard? Get serious.
As for the "20 hours a day" figure, I hope you'll understand that I won't accept that as a fact until you come with some references - that's exaggerated a bit *too* much to still pass the "could be true" common sense test.
And with regard to actors making millions because movies make millions... why is it just the actors (and maybe the director), then? Why not - for example - camera operators, gaffers, sound engineers, animators, computer system administrators, animal handlers, and whoever else you need for a movie? Certainly the movie wouldn't be possible without *these* people, either. Yet they don't make millions - not even close.
Yes, if people continue to download movies and the like without paying for them. However, what would happen if they paid a few bucks for it instead? Maybe the so-called superstars wouldn't be able to charge 20 million bucks for appearing in the latest blockbuster anymore, but I don't think it would mean the end of Hollywood. As long as there's money to be made with them, movies will continue to be made.
Well, here's a question, though... what's wrong with masturbation? It works to relieve the sexual tension, and it obviously won't cause any crew conflicts if done discreetly. Even more, I'd expect that these things be discussed with the astronauts in advance, too, so they'd probably know that the others are masturbating to relieve their tension, which would make it even more of a non-event - you're not offended because the others are eating and breathing, either.
That being said, I'm not sure that rotating partners is a good idea. It sounds good in theory, admittedly, but not everyone's wired to be able to do that without eventually becoming attached to one of the others and being jealous when the rest of the crew's doing him/her, too. And what's worse, how do you find out whether someone's able to handle that beforehand? Sure, you could do a dry run, so to speak, but somehow I don't think NASA would get funding for that...
No, I definitely think masturbation is the way to go.
None. I don't think I've *ever* seen anyone posting a justification of sailing the seven seas, bringing up ships, killing the crew and stealing the cargo - neither on Slashdot nor elsewhere.
Re:Still working on it? Yup, and a long way to go.
on
Napster's Learning Curve
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You forgot:
3b) Order a CD online. If you look around for a bit, you'll probably get it for less than what you'd pay in a store (although that may be offset by shipping costs); you don't have to get up from your comfy chair to buy it, and if you buy it used on eBay or so, chances are that it'll be even cheaper - and also, the RIAA won't get a share of this particular sale (they already did when the original owner bought it), so you also can feel comfortable that you're not supporting them financially.
Also, with regard to 7), whether it's morally questionable or not depends on where you're from. In many places, you pay extra fees whenever you buy a disc or a blank CD-R, supposed to compensate copyright holders for the losses from private copying, but in those cases, it's not morally questionable anymore - they are getting compensated, and that fact actually gives you a (moral, if not legal) right to copy CDs from your friends, too. So, if you know someone in Canada, for example, why not ask them to mail copies of their CDs to you? They already paid for the right to do that, so it should be safe both legally and morally.
Oh, and to the idiot who modded this redundant, if you compare the comment ids, you'll notice that I was actually the first to point this out. Sheesh, if you have to mod down at all, at least mod down the *later* posts, idiot.
I've got to second that. I highly doubt that the average bloke who works ten hours a day to feed his family has the time, energy and money to go to an internet café each day to send out scam emails - the people doing that already are comparatively well-off. And while it's true that their living conditions are far from being as good as ours, and while it's understandable that they want to improve them, well, that still doesn't justify scamming others.
What's wrong with/etc/X11? That's exactly doing what you're talking about — putting similar files in similar places. Configuration files go to/etc/; X11 configuration files in particular go to/etc/X11.
The difference here is that ThePirateBay does not actually host any material copyrighted to third parties, and neither do they transfer such material themselves. They merely provide a service that allows others to coordinate their efforts to commit copyright infringement.
It's understandable that the industry doesn't like this, but it's also understandable that this isn't (yet?) illegal under Swedish law. Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, so aiding and abetting (which is all they're doing) isn't illegal.
As such, it's understandable that they're ignoring the complaints they get - especially those that claim that what they're doing is illegal under the DMCA etc. (do those who send those letters honestly believe that US law applies in Sweden?).
That seems like exactly the right thing to do to me, actually. Not that I think that copyright infringement is something that necessarily should be allowed, mind you, but if somebody's done something wrong, then it's the job of the police to investigate - not private companies'. And the fact that Antipiratbyrån seems to have planted evidence in the past (search for it, I'm too lazy to look up the story; Slashdot covered it) just shows again why this is important.
What's more, it's not immediately clear to me why it would even be legal for an ISP to give out data about customers to a private company that asks for it, without (I presume) the customer's knowledge or consent. Not that I know a thing about Swedish law, of course, but that sounds like exactly the kind of thing that could result in class action lawsuits and the like, so if I was an ISP, I'd definitely err on the safe side here and only hand over customer data to the police, not private companies, and only when ordered to do so by a court of law.
As Winston Churchill said - "a fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". Jack Thompson sure seems to qualify, so there probably isn't much hope that he'll realise he's not the knight in shining armour he seems to see himself as.
Which is not that big a deal, considering it wasn't him who broke DVD encryption, anyway - remember, he was just the "spokesperson" for a group that otherwise remained anonymous.
Mmm, that's a joke I always heard with viola players in it rather than oboe players. Here's another one, though: what's the difference between two viola players?
One quarter tone.
(On a side note, it's amazing how many viola jokes are out there...)
There is a branch of gaim (dubbed "gaim-vv") that does voice and video chat. It has existed as a separate project for a long time, but is supposed to be merged back into the trunk for the upcoming gaim 2.0.
I never tried it, so I can't say whether it's good or not, but it's something to look forward to, still.:)
Actually, I'm pretty sure that there were people that noticed it - don't underestimate the laziness of the average user.;) Coupled with fact that editable web pages are not exactly standard, I think it's understandable - if unfortunate - that most people don't fix these things when they notice them.
Slashdot, of course, turns the headline into "Wikipedia founder sees serious quality problems", as if Zonk didn't RTFA.
What do you mean, "as if"?:)
That being said, I certainly agree with you. The article is surprisingly vitriolic, and it matches neither my own experiences (disclaimer: I am a relatively prolific Wikipedian, or at least have been in the past - these days, I edit less), nor those of my family and friends that I know off. (My sister uses Wikipedia as a reference site a lot from what I know, my parents occasionally glimpse at it and are always impressed, and I managed to get a couple of friends hooked, too).
Of course there are problems, and it's not as if they're rare, either - there's tons of them, all the time. But so far, I've encountered very few problems that couldn't be worked out in the end; in fact, there has only been one that went all the way up to the arbitration committee, and while that one was rather nasty, it was just one case in more than three years I've been using the site now.
But then, Bruce Schneier has taught us (as most likely did countless others before him) that everyone has an agenda, and considering that Wikinews is direct competition for the Register, who knows whether they're trying to discredit the project without just cause? I don't want to accuse them of wanting to do only that, of course, but if the journalist who wrote this article has a dislike of Wikipedia already for this reason or another, I wouldn't be surprised if it caused the scales to tip just a bit more in that direction. It's like how TV, newspapers, magazines etc. are constantly reporting on the dangers of violent video games - they may honestly believe that they're doing good reporting, but once you realise that video games are in direction competition with TV etc. for people's attention, you can't help but start to wonder whether they're really completely objective.
And just to repeat it, the article *is* overly vitriolic. Quotes that describe articles as "garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts" are certainly over the top (I just checked both the Bill Gates and Jane Fonda articles, and they certainly don't seem to be *that* bad) are simply flamebait and/or FUD, and while they're not coming from the Register itself, they seem to sum up the tenor of the article quite well.
Then it must've been some time since you last checked... check out this rather glowing Ubuntu review in the Inquirer, for example. Yeah, I know, not exactly the greatest news outlet in the world, but they're probably as non-geeky as you get, so the fact that they found Ubuntu so easy and comfortable to use says a lot, IMO.:)
I don't think they would have a case even if I made money off of it - the key point would be whether I would be using the trademark to make money, or whether I was just using the trademark and *also* making money, with the activities not being related.
And also, no, you can't dictate anything you want through licensing agreements - certain rights are inalienable. Which these are exactly depends on where you are, of course, but I'd be surprised if you could sign away fair use rights, for example, even in the US (I know for a fact that you can't in Europe). Similar things probably apply to trademarks, as well.
Also, license agreements don't even necessarily exist in all cases. Suppose I compiled a version of GCC on my Linux box that cross-compiles for win32 - I could probably use that to create programs that run on windows, without ever running windows or any Microsoft product at all. Which license agreement would I be bound by then?
And finally, yes, I *think* that the fact that Microsoft published the APIs that windows programs can use does indicate that they intended for these APIs to be freely usable without restrictions. IANAL, of course, but I'd be surprised if this didn't count as an implied permission to make use of these APIs.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody's using IA-64, though - it's already dead. Those who actually need 64 bit processors (and let's face it, they're still few and far between) are more likely to use AMD's x86_64.
And outside of that, well... just open your eyes and look at the world. Pretty much everyone's using x86 chips (with some Ultrasparcs thrown in for bigger iron), with the only real exception being embedded systems, where ARM reigns supreme.
Given that, I'm not really sure how you can find even the smallest grain of truth in the statement "x86 is dead, and in the future, everyone will use RISC chips that emulate it in software". It's simply not true - it wasn't 15 years ago, and it isn't now.
Actually... to be honest, TSR wasn't *that* much better in the old (pre-WOTC) days, either.
Or, for that matter, a Jack Valenti (how come that all these people are called "Jack", BTW? We know that there's an Eric conspiracy - could there also be a Jack conspiracy?)
Speaking of spam, it's funny that he mentions spam at all, as the spam filter is definitely one of the weaker points of Gmail IMO. I typically get between 10 and 30 false negatives and about 1 or 2 false positives a day, out of a total spam volume of typically about 350 to 450 a day.
Not exactly great, and certainly much, much worse than my previous, shell-based email solution (which used bogofilter for spam filtering). Gmail's still good for other reasons, of course, but spam filtering is something that definitely will have to be improved, so it's quite surprising that he's talking about it as one of the things he wanted to improve - and, one assumes, thinks he has improved.
Acting may be a hard job, yes... but so are other things. If I slave away coding for 12 hours a day and seven days a week to meet the deadline for a project, do I get paid millions by my employer? Of course not. Yet my employer still expects me to do this in case it is necessary. Why does a famous movie actor makes hundreds of times as much money as I do? Because the job's hundreds of times as hard? Get serious.
As for the "20 hours a day" figure, I hope you'll understand that I won't accept that as a fact until you come with some references - that's exaggerated a bit *too* much to still pass the "could be true" common sense test.
And with regard to actors making millions because movies make millions... why is it just the actors (and maybe the director), then? Why not - for example - camera operators, gaffers, sound engineers, animators, computer system administrators, animal handlers, and whoever else you need for a movie? Certainly the movie wouldn't be possible without *these* people, either. Yet they don't make millions - not even close.
So there.
Yes, if people continue to download movies and the like without paying for them. However, what would happen if they paid a few bucks for it instead? Maybe the so-called superstars wouldn't be able to charge 20 million bucks for appearing in the latest blockbuster anymore, but I don't think it would mean the end of Hollywood. As long as there's money to be made with them, movies will continue to be made.
Well, here's a question, though... what's wrong with masturbation? It works to relieve the sexual tension, and it obviously won't cause any crew conflicts if done discreetly. Even more, I'd expect that these things be discussed with the astronauts in advance, too, so they'd probably know that the others are masturbating to relieve their tension, which would make it even more of a non-event - you're not offended because the others are eating and breathing, either.
That being said, I'm not sure that rotating partners is a good idea. It sounds good in theory, admittedly, but not everyone's wired to be able to do that without eventually becoming attached to one of the others and being jealous when the rest of the crew's doing him/her, too. And what's worse, how do you find out whether someone's able to handle that beforehand? Sure, you could do a dry run, so to speak, but somehow I don't think NASA would get funding for that...
No, I definitely think masturbation is the way to go.
None. I don't think I've *ever* seen anyone posting a justification of sailing the seven seas, bringing up ships, killing the crew and stealing the cargo - neither on Slashdot nor elsewhere.
You forgot:
3b) Order a CD online. If you look around for a bit, you'll probably get it for less than what you'd pay in a store (although that may be offset by shipping costs); you don't have to get up from your comfy chair to buy it, and if you buy it used on eBay or so, chances are that it'll be even cheaper - and also, the RIAA won't get a share of this particular sale (they already did when the original owner bought it), so you also can feel comfortable that you're not supporting them financially.
Also, with regard to 7), whether it's morally questionable or not depends on where you're from. In many places, you pay extra fees whenever you buy a disc or a blank CD-R, supposed to compensate copyright holders for the losses from private copying, but in those cases, it's not morally questionable anymore - they are getting compensated, and that fact actually gives you a (moral, if not legal) right to copy CDs from your friends, too. So, if you know someone in Canada, for example, why not ask them to mail copies of their CDs to you? They already paid for the right to do that, so it should be safe both legally and morally.
Oh, and to the idiot who modded this redundant, if you compare the comment ids, you'll notice that I was actually the first to point this out. Sheesh, if you have to mod down at all, at least mod down the *later* posts, idiot.
But XML is essentially just a stricter version of SGML, which was developed in the 1960s already. Certainly that is prior art?
I've got to second that. I highly doubt that the average bloke who works ten hours a day to feed his family has the time, energy and money to go to an internet café each day to send out scam emails - the people doing that already are comparatively well-off. And while it's true that their living conditions are far from being as good as ours, and while it's understandable that they want to improve them, well, that still doesn't justify scamming others.
Use your distro's package manager to uninstall the program. :)
That's... highly bizarre, to say the least.
What's wrong with /etc/X11? That's exactly doing what you're talking about — putting similar files in similar places. Configuration files go to /etc/; X11 configuration files in particular go to /etc/X11.
So, what's wrong with that?
The difference here is that ThePirateBay does not actually host any material copyrighted to third parties, and neither do they transfer such material themselves. They merely provide a service that allows others to coordinate their efforts to commit copyright infringement.
It's understandable that the industry doesn't like this, but it's also understandable that this isn't (yet?) illegal under Swedish law. Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, so aiding and abetting (which is all they're doing) isn't illegal.
As such, it's understandable that they're ignoring the complaints they get - especially those that claim that what they're doing is illegal under the DMCA etc. (do those who send those letters honestly believe that US law applies in Sweden?).
That seems like exactly the right thing to do to me, actually. Not that I think that copyright infringement is something that necessarily should be allowed, mind you, but if somebody's done something wrong, then it's the job of the police to investigate - not private companies'. And the fact that Antipiratbyrån seems to have planted evidence in the past (search for it, I'm too lazy to look up the story; Slashdot covered it) just shows again why this is important.
What's more, it's not immediately clear to me why it would even be legal for an ISP to give out data about customers to a private company that asks for it, without (I presume) the customer's knowledge or consent. Not that I know a thing about Swedish law, of course, but that sounds like exactly the kind of thing that could result in class action lawsuits and the like, so if I was an ISP, I'd definitely err on the safe side here and only hand over customer data to the police, not private companies, and only when ordered to do so by a court of law.
As Winston Churchill said - "a fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". Jack Thompson sure seems to qualify, so there probably isn't much hope that he'll realise he's not the knight in shining armour he seems to see himself as.
Unfortunately.
Which is not that big a deal, considering it wasn't him who broke DVD encryption, anyway - remember, he was just the "spokesperson" for a group that otherwise remained anonymous.
Mmm, that's a joke I always heard with viola players in it rather than oboe players. Here's another one, though: what's the difference between two viola players?
One quarter tone.
(On a side note, it's amazing how many viola jokes are out there...)
There is a branch of gaim (dubbed "gaim-vv") that does voice and video chat. It has existed as a separate project for a long time, but is supposed to be merged back into the trunk for the upcoming gaim 2.0.
:)
I never tried it, so I can't say whether it's good or not, but it's something to look forward to, still.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that there were people that noticed it - don't underestimate the laziness of the average user. ;) Coupled with fact that editable web pages are not exactly standard, I think it's understandable - if unfortunate - that most people don't fix these things when they notice them.
What do you mean, "as if"? :)
That being said, I certainly agree with you. The article is surprisingly vitriolic, and it matches neither my own experiences (disclaimer: I am a relatively prolific Wikipedian, or at least have been in the past - these days, I edit less), nor those of my family and friends that I know off. (My sister uses Wikipedia as a reference site a lot from what I know, my parents occasionally glimpse at it and are always impressed, and I managed to get a couple of friends hooked, too).
Of course there are problems, and it's not as if they're rare, either - there's tons of them, all the time. But so far, I've encountered very few problems that couldn't be worked out in the end; in fact, there has only been one that went all the way up to the arbitration committee, and while that one was rather nasty, it was just one case in more than three years I've been using the site now.
But then, Bruce Schneier has taught us (as most likely did countless others before him) that everyone has an agenda, and considering that Wikinews is direct competition for the Register, who knows whether they're trying to discredit the project without just cause? I don't want to accuse them of wanting to do only that, of course, but if the journalist who wrote this article has a dislike of Wikipedia already for this reason or another, I wouldn't be surprised if it caused the scales to tip just a bit more in that direction. It's like how TV, newspapers, magazines etc. are constantly reporting on the dangers of violent video games - they may honestly believe that they're doing good reporting, but once you realise that video games are in direction competition with TV etc. for people's attention, you can't help but start to wonder whether they're really completely objective.
And just to repeat it, the article *is* overly vitriolic. Quotes that describe articles as "garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts" are certainly over the top (I just checked both the Bill Gates and Jane Fonda articles, and they certainly don't seem to be *that* bad) are simply flamebait and/or FUD, and while they're not coming from the Register itself, they seem to sum up the tenor of the article quite well.
Then it must've been some time since you last checked... check out this rather glowing Ubuntu review in the Inquirer, for example. Yeah, I know, not exactly the greatest news outlet in the world, but they're probably as non-geeky as you get, so the fact that they found Ubuntu so easy and comfortable to use says a lot, IMO. :)
I don't think they would have a case even if I made money off of it - the key point would be whether I would be using the trademark to make money, or whether I was just using the trademark and *also* making money, with the activities not being related.
And also, no, you can't dictate anything you want through licensing agreements - certain rights are inalienable. Which these are exactly depends on where you are, of course, but I'd be surprised if you could sign away fair use rights, for example, even in the US (I know for a fact that you can't in Europe). Similar things probably apply to trademarks, as well.
Also, license agreements don't even necessarily exist in all cases. Suppose I compiled a version of GCC on my Linux box that cross-compiles for win32 - I could probably use that to create programs that run on windows, without ever running windows or any Microsoft product at all. Which license agreement would I be bound by then?
And finally, yes, I *think* that the fact that Microsoft published the APIs that windows programs can use does indicate that they intended for these APIs to be freely usable without restrictions. IANAL, of course, but I'd be surprised if this didn't count as an implied permission to make use of these APIs.