Worldwide notability of US government acronyms seems to be limited to 4 letters. When there's a story about the FBI or FCC or NASA nobody complains that it wasn't explained, but DARPA? how dare you assume people around the world using the internet know what that means!
Law enforcement has figured out that you can get quick results (that make you look like you're doing your job well) with little effort by going after symptoms of the problem and not trying to understand where the problem came from in the first place. Instead of protecting real victims of sexual predators, we create simulated crimes and arrest people on a sick reality show so it looks like we're actually helping society.
Yeah, and Google doesn't *actually* believe in open source end-user applications. Sure they'll make sure everyone knows how much of their success is because of open source server components, and they released a few specs and libraries that the community might turn into complete applications. But all the Google-branded apps that everyone loves to use and emphatically recommend to all their friends are proprietary, and either Windows-only or half-assed Wine-based "ports."
MS settled the trademark infringement lawsuit by agreeing to always refer to it as "Microsoft Excel". Funny how that turned out. Nowadays, nobody has ever heard of the word "spreadsheet;" even if it was made with OOo Calc or Gnumeric, it's an "Excel sheet."
What if you want to access data from multiple similar services using the same interface? I can connect any number of IMAP (or POP for the incompetently configured ones living in the 1970s) email accounts to SeaMonkey and read messages in them side by side if they all use standard protocols. What about platforms that are either not officially supported by the service or that lack the resources for a full web based app? Phones, PDAs, and Emacs won't run Gmail very well, but there are IMAP/POP/IRC/Jabber clients built for them. Good luck screen-scraping the (possibly obfuscated) HTML and javascript of any modern web application. The problem with these things is that interoperability is, at best, an afterthought.
MP3 is the standard (patents be damned and LAME be praised), and I can get a wider range of MP3 devices that are more tailored, versatile, and cheaper.
Somewhat off-topic, but this bullshit argument for no one using anything better than MP3 (outside of Microsoft/Apple vertically-integrated lock-in land) needs to die. Just because everything works with MP3 by default doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. Corded rotary telephones were for decades a "standard" the same way MP3 is now, but when was the last time an electronics retailer said "Why should we waste money stocking touch tone handsets or smartphones? Everyone knows how to use a rotary dial...?" It's not like providing music in multiple formats is so impossible no one has been able to do it yet... Allofmp3/mp3sparks has been doing it for years; there's no reason the less questionably-legal outlets can't do it too. Then the hardware makers might start supporting more formats too (not that its hard to get a Vorbis- or even FLAC-compatible player now...)
Intellectual Property is really just a catch-all legal term that any corporate entity uses when they want to sue someone but "I don't like you" doesn't seem like a good enough reason. A fiasco similar to this has been going on at my school for several months, starting when a student created a website for selling used textbooks directly between students. It was called ritbook.com, for "really inexpensive textbook" and the school threatened to file a trademark infringement suit, even though the site mentioned no connection to the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was pretty clear from the demands they made that they didn't want to just get rid of the supposed trademark infringement, they wanted the site either shut down or moved somewhere so that no one would easily be able to find it.
But if you have to run it from the command line, you probably need to give it command-line arguments. Do truecrypt's typical arguments look like typical vi arguments?
How do you expect a desktop environment to "discover" how quickly someone wants their panel to auto-hide or when the battery meter should change from green to yellow? Do you even know what this discussion is about, or did you just throw a generic Windows vs. Linux user-friendliness reply at it? The difference between Windows and Linux that you've mentioned is wether or not manual configuration of things like hardware is required; the issue here is developers arbitrarily removing the ability to configure software.
What the hell kind of setup do you have at your "home," and what do you use it for? From reading the shopping list you posted, you seem to have four computers, each with dual-head video, two monitors connected to a KVM switch, and two more monitors not doing anything. And you're complaining that buying more video hardware at once than most home users buy in three years isn't cheap.
Re:Hmmm....WMV9 on OS X?
on
VLC 0.8.6 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think it uses the new WMV9 decoder added to ffmpeg for Summer of Code, so it doesn't need windows DLLs or any other platform-specific or legally shady methods.
Actually, it's "free for GPL free software development, pay for proprietary or non-GPL free software." And that's only for Qt 4. Before that, it was "pay even if you're writing GPL software for windows." Compared to the wxWidgets and GTK+, which use the LGPL, it is ridiculous.
My favorite is having that happen upon copying a block of source code into an IM. Especially things like ofuscated perl one-liners, where some of the character sequences used for emoticons are part of normal syntax.
There's aso tha case of sending an IM transcript with timestamps like "(21:42:18)" at the beginning of each line, and "8)" at the end of some timestamps turns into a picture.
going to the store IS a viable alternative/equivalent in my book.
For handicapped people, using an online store is probably much more viable than going to a store. Using a computer doesn't necessarily require moving around, driving, reading signs, talking to cashiers... The only way web pages aren't accessible is when the developers go out of their way to make it "pretty" or something and break accessibility in the process. Those people don't have any business writing e-commerce software. And as another poster pointed out, many retailers are online-only, or have products or promotions that are only available online.
Is Apple try to equate "stealing" with getting something that you paid for to work on the hardware you want it to work on?
The recording industry has certainly been using that as the definition of "stealing" for about half a decade now. Of course Apple has been to, but most of their customers are too stupid or brainwashed to notice what's going on.
You could pipe/dev/mem to strings's stdin. Although strings would still have a file descriptor opened directly to/dev/mem, so it could run ioctls on it or other weird things. I guess the cat method is also safer because you can run the cat with sudo while keeping strings and grep unprivileged. Maybe I've thought about this too much...
You know what needs to be your friend? PROOFREADING! When you copy the HTML source verbatim from wikipedia, the cross references turn into relative links into a/wiki path that doesn't exist on slashdot's domain. And next time, try saying something relevalnt to the discussion, like how Gaim dropped gg from the official builds because it doesn't have a maintainer, but the protocol plugin source is still there if you want to compile it yourself.
Hey, it's not that hard to learn how to use the <p> tag, and with a high uid like yours you shouldn't be complaining about slashdot's porting system. Go write your own crappy PHP forum if you don't like it:P Although sometimes I wish slashdot required a mandatory preview step like Perlmonks does.
As for "you are used to something else," that's one of the huge problems I have with OS X. Everyone had been using windows for at least half a decade, then Apple came along and said "Let's change everything, just because we're fucking weird" and forced everyone to use their way to do everything. And if you don't like it, you can't even configure things to be somewhat like you're used to. The tips you mentioned about command-` and smart folders are incredibly non-obvious on their own, and even more so considering the way every other windowing system operates.
Slashdot Mirror
Worldwide notability of US government acronyms seems to be limited to 4 letters. When there's a story about the FBI or FCC or NASA nobody complains that it wasn't explained, but DARPA? how dare you assume people around the world using the internet know what that means!
The REAL WTF is that it's already past noon on the east coast and there's only one Google story so far. Wait, wrong site...
Law enforcement has figured out that you can get quick results (that make you look like you're doing your job well) with little effort by going after symptoms of the problem and not trying to understand where the problem came from in the first place. Instead of protecting real victims of sexual predators, we create simulated crimes and arrest people on a sick reality show so it looks like we're actually helping society.
Yeah, and Google doesn't *actually* believe in open source end-user applications. Sure they'll make sure everyone knows how much of their success is because of open source server components, and they released a few specs and libraries that the community might turn into complete applications. But all the Google-branded apps that everyone loves to use and emphatically recommend to all their friends are proprietary, and either Windows-only or half-assed Wine-based "ports."
Why? Because anything made by Google is automatically better than any potential competitor?
What if you want to access data from multiple similar services using the same interface? I can connect any number of IMAP (or POP for the incompetently configured ones living in the 1970s) email accounts to SeaMonkey and read messages in them side by side if they all use standard protocols. What about platforms that are either not officially supported by the service or that lack the resources for a full web based app? Phones, PDAs, and Emacs won't run Gmail very well, but there are IMAP/POP/IRC/Jabber clients built for them. Good luck screen-scraping the (possibly obfuscated) HTML and javascript of any modern web application. The problem with these things is that interoperability is, at best, an afterthought.
Somewhat off-topic, but this bullshit argument for no one using anything better than MP3 (outside of Microsoft/Apple vertically-integrated lock-in land) needs to die. Just because everything works with MP3 by default doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. Corded rotary telephones were for decades a "standard" the same way MP3 is now, but when was the last time an electronics retailer said "Why should we waste money stocking touch tone handsets or smartphones? Everyone knows how to use a rotary dial...?" It's not like providing music in multiple formats is so impossible no one has been able to do it yet... Allofmp3/mp3sparks has been doing it for years; there's no reason the less questionably-legal outlets can't do it too. Then the hardware makers might start supporting more formats too (not that its hard to get a Vorbis- or even FLAC-compatible player now...)
Intellectual Property is really just a catch-all legal term that any corporate entity uses when they want to sue someone but "I don't like you" doesn't seem like a good enough reason. A fiasco similar to this has been going on at my school for several months, starting when a student created a website for selling used textbooks directly between students. It was called ritbook.com, for "really inexpensive textbook" and the school threatened to file a trademark infringement suit, even though the site mentioned no connection to the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was pretty clear from the demands they made that they didn't want to just get rid of the supposed trademark infringement, they wanted the site either shut down or moved somewhere so that no one would easily be able to find it.
VHDL on Viagra!
It has to be a hardware language of course
But if you have to run it from the command line, you probably need to give it command-line arguments. Do truecrypt's typical arguments look like typical vi arguments?
How do you expect a desktop environment to "discover" how quickly someone wants their panel to auto-hide or when the battery meter should change from green to yellow? Do you even know what this discussion is about, or did you just throw a generic Windows vs. Linux user-friendliness reply at it? The difference between Windows and Linux that you've mentioned is wether or not manual configuration of things like hardware is required; the issue here is developers arbitrarily removing the ability to configure software.
What the hell kind of setup do you have at your "home," and what do you use it for? From reading the shopping list you posted, you seem to have four computers, each with dual-head video, two monitors connected to a KVM switch, and two more monitors not doing anything. And you're complaining that buying more video hardware at once than most home users buy in three years isn't cheap.
They recharge? I just keep buying new phones.
I think it uses the new WMV9 decoder added to ffmpeg for Summer of Code, so it doesn't need windows DLLs or any other platform-specific or legally shady methods.
Actually, it's "free for GPL free software development, pay for proprietary or non-GPL free software." And that's only for Qt 4. Before that, it was "pay even if you're writing GPL software for windows." Compared to the wxWidgets and GTK+, which use the LGPL, it is ridiculous.
My favorite is having that happen upon copying a block of source code into an IM. Especially things like ofuscated perl one-liners, where some of the character sequences used for emoticons are part of normal syntax.
There's aso tha case of sending an IM transcript with timestamps like "(21:42:18)" at the beginning of each line, and "8)" at the end of some timestamps turns into a picture.
For handicapped people, using an online store is probably much more viable than going to a store. Using a computer doesn't necessarily require moving around, driving, reading signs, talking to cashiers... The only way web pages aren't accessible is when the developers go out of their way to make it "pretty" or something and break accessibility in the process. Those people don't have any business writing e-commerce software. And as another poster pointed out, many retailers are online-only, or have products or promotions that are only available online.
How exactly could they be disabled then? Are they deaf or something?
What do smoke detectors have to do with anything? They use americium, not uranium.
The recording industry has certainly been using that as the definition of "stealing" for about half a decade now. Of course Apple has been to, but most of their customers are too stupid or brainwashed to notice what's going on.
Huh? 14000 machines and they didn't think of using distcc?
You could pipe /dev/mem to strings's stdin. Although strings would still have a file descriptor opened directly to /dev/mem, so it could run ioctls on it or other weird things. I guess the cat method is also safer because you can run the cat with sudo while keeping strings and grep unprivileged. Maybe I've thought about this too much...
You know what needs to be your friend? PROOFREADING! When you copy the HTML source verbatim from wikipedia, the cross references turn into relative links into a /wiki path that doesn't exist on slashdot's domain. And next time, try saying something relevalnt to the discussion, like how Gaim dropped gg from the official builds because it doesn't have a maintainer, but the protocol plugin source is still there if you want to compile it yourself.
Hey, it's not that hard to learn how to use the <p> tag, and with a high uid like yours you shouldn't be complaining about slashdot's porting system. Go write your own crappy PHP forum if you don't like it :P Although sometimes I wish slashdot required a mandatory preview step like Perlmonks does.
As for "you are used to something else," that's one of the huge problems I have with OS X. Everyone had been using windows for at least half a decade, then Apple came along and said "Let's change everything, just because we're fucking weird" and forced everyone to use their way to do everything. And if you don't like it, you can't even configure things to be somewhat like you're used to. The tips you mentioned about command-` and smart folders are incredibly non-obvious on their own, and even more so considering the way every other windowing system operates.