... if the OS/2 die hards need Open Source applications ported across to OS/2 then doesn't that kind of negate why you'd want to use OS/2 in the first place? i.e. a lack of modern applications to run on it?
I mean, what's the benefits of running OS/2 over Linux, BSD or Windows, which already have those apps natively in the first place?
I don't claim to be a huge film or TV buff, there's a few movies and TV series I enjoy, I own a mid-range widescreen TV but could give two hoots about the occasional bit of blockiness on the screen or surround sound. If people do want top quality movie and TV entertainment, then good luck to them.
But as a music fan, it's always struck me as really strange how, in the video world, everything is moving to High Definition and Blu-Ray yet in the music world, many people seem to want lower quality compressed music downloads rather than shiny CD disks.
I've spent as much on a reasonably good hifi as a lot of other people spend on video equipment and I *really really* don't get what is the big deal with compressed music - sure, I use MP3s of my collection on a portable player for travelling and the gym but I don't see how someone who buys compressed music can be classified as a music fan when a "movie buff" is never going to be taken seriously unless he/she has got a huge TV, cable, surround sound, etc.
And with all respect, you seem to have this very "black and white" view of the world of gamers.
I speak from 25+ years experience of gaming when I say that a game only needs to be entertaining and immersive, not necessarily realistic. And when it comes to adventure games, then the prime requirement is to have a big wedge of logical puzzle solving along with the gradual revealing of an underlying plot.
The problem with many of the games today is that the focus is *far too much* on pretty graphics without putting equivalent effort into the gameplay itself, plus the attitude of many games developers these days seems to be to sell shorter and shorter games (with additional expansions) with easy-to-solve puzzles because the teenage gamers of today don't have long attention spans.
Wow. You couldn't be more wrong. Any scientist anywhere will tell you that the ocean is a carbon sink - absorbing CO2. Only after the Ocean gets warmer does it release CO2.
If the climate is getting warmer, then the oceans, by your argument, would release more CO2. This is precisely my comment.
The point is that the Ocean wouldn't being emitting CO2 if it wasn't absorbing so much of it from man made sources in the first place. As you mention An Inconvient Truth, its this absorbtion that is wrecking havok among coral reefs and creating huge storms.
I am not denying the effects of the warming of the climate but precisely what man-made CO2 emissions are you talking about? What percentage of those emissions are not absorbed by the fauna of this planet that, in turn, releases O2 into the atmosphere? Presumably you can provide scientific evidence that shows this, rather than the spoutings of a corrupt ex-politician bent only on feathing his own nest.
Al Gore, while he mentioned a number of previous Ice Ages, noted that the CO2 levels directly related to temperature, and that at no time in 650,000 years did CO2 levels ever go higher than 300 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The historical high is 280 ppmv.
Any measurements of C02 in the past 650,000 years can only be estimates, presumably based on deep bore ice/strata samples - in reality, mankind has probably been congniscant of science enough for 100 years or so to actually measure CO2 in the air. The fact that Ice Ages occurred in the first place demonstrates climatic change before mankind.
Even so, those measurements can only "guess" the levels of CO2 and "guess" their causes.
In 1960, there was a concentration of 315 ppmv. Today we sit at 385 ppmv. There is no projection that it will slow down or decrease, but rather increase much more. By 2010 we expect to break 400 ppmv. But who needs words when you have a graph?
Again, you've just described an effect - you have not confirmed the cause.
Where's those facts? I dare you to link them. But you wont, because they don't exist.
The only dispute is over the "average ice density" in the Arctic, but no one disputes the reduction of ice of the caps, or Arctic Shrinkage. The before and after pictures are shocking.
Ah, okay. So in other words, it's acceptable scientific methodology to acknowledge reduction of the polar ice caps but exclude ice density purely because you consider it to be disputed and serving to at least partially discredit your argument?
I personally love this part. A conspiracy theory that portrays Big Business and the Rich as the minds behind global warming. Yes, they are the ones who will profit by stopping the development of third world countries.
Don't be an idiot.
Rich "Western" countries went through phases of industrialisation and mechanisation that ultimately meant large workforces and the creation of unions that allowed for better workers rights, conditions and pay. Precisely the same thing most of the Third World nations have not gone through - therefore they can be exploited for cheaper goods.
Or am I missing something and did all the factories and production centres in the West just disappear down Alice's rabbit hole?
Yes, its not like Big Business would want to maximize their profit margin by cutting out as much environmental regulation as possible and decrease overheads so they exploit countries better. And its not like they have been buying scientists and congressmen trying to lobby against global warming at all by calling it a hoax! No, those were other people...
The core problem is that far too many Windows users run their PCs with access priveliges that are far too high for what they need - this means that it's easier for a rogue program to get downloaded onto a Windows PC and run with a high level of priveliges so that it can get access into the core operating system.
Plus Windows has a security architecture that allows some programs to gain that access level without you even knowing anything about it and Windows has a security architecture that is beyond the understanding of the majority of normal users.
Linux enforces the idea that you can do all of your day-to-day stuff as a normal user, it's only when you need to do administration work that you need to go in as root. No, it does not stop someone running as root user for day-to-day use but distributions like Ubuntu don't allow root access by default which helps considerably.
You also need to bear in mind that whatever version of Windows you run, at certain levels all Windows PCs present the same single architecture which makes it very easy for malware to propogate. To do so the same way on Linux would require finding a single common application amongst enough Linux machines to get the same level of propagation.
Linux *is* more prone to directed buffer overflow attacks against services that are run on the Internet but these, again, only work against very specific versions of those applications.
Agreed. But my point is that if our rich politicians are prepared to fly across the planet telling the Third World not to create factories that burn fossil fuels, would they not be better telling them to become educated about birth control?
And the fact is, globally there are far too many people having far too many children that they cannot afford to themselves feed - in rich countries, this means social handouts & state benefits, in the Third World it means increased poverty with less chance of getting out of it.
I myself am happy to pay the TV license because I get ad-free broadcasting, Dr Who, excellent radio programming and a web site crammed full of language-learning materials (as a student of Spanish).
But I don't see why, as a British license payer, I should have to pay to download archived material that has already been paid for by me and other license payers - if the BBC wants to charge the rest of the world (non-license payers) and leave it free for me as UK citizen, then so be it.
I will admit to being a big fan of classic rock music (anything from the Beatles to Motorhead) and if it means the BBC has to pay the record labels a fee to re-broadcast some of the live or session music they have archived, then I don't mind paying a small fee for that, provided I can download and save it in a non-DRMed format.
The BBC is a public-funded broadcast company. It is *not supposed* to make money, only to cover its operating costs that are at least partly funded by the TV license - any additional money it makes should be thrown straight back into financing the creation of more and better programming.
There is still no actual proof of man-made Global Warming over natural climate change.
There is scientific evidence to suggest that as the climate is (naturally) warming, more CO2 is being released from the seas - if anything, this particular research has been covered up in favour of the politically-motivated idea that man *must* be the cause of Global Warming.
It has already been shown that Al Gore's graphs presented in "An Inconvenient Truth" were "massaged" by about 60 years and it is taken as irrefutable proof that our planet went through (at least) 4 Ice Ages (i.e. global cooling) long before man was ever on the scene.
Politically, there is a strong case for promoting MMGW which would stop the development of the Third World, thus ensuring that Third World imports into rich countries remain cheap, thus keeping the populations of the rich countries fat, dumb & happy. And because the Third World countries remain poor, more people live in poverty and die younger from diseases that are curable. In actuality, MMGW is an *anti-Green* viewpoint.
Oh, and please do not view anyone who is anti-MMGW as being against better recycling or against less reliance on fossil fuels, both of which will help to preserve the planet for future generations. But MMGW strikes me as entirely wasted effort when, in practice, we should be pushing to stabilise the population of our planet by strict birth-control enforcement globally. Do you not find it hypocritical that politicians in rich countries don't push for this? After all, if people who are already in poverty keep having more and more children that they cannot possibly feed, how can they get themselves out of poverty? Or is that what the politicians want because it means the poor can be exploited even more for poor working conditions and poor pay?
Oh, and whenever these articles get opened up for discussion, why is the fact that ice is getting thicker in many areas of the North and South pole conveniently overlooked?
Actually, the ASA are there to protect the general populace from misleading advertising.
If anything, I wish they would censor more advertising than they currently do - far too many corporate lies make it onto TV and cinema screens, and into colour spreads in magazines.
Sorry, but if Apple is selling the concept that the iPhone can give users a similar but portable experience of the web like they get on their PCs, then the ASA is perfectly correct pulling Apple up over those claims.
Just because Apple does it does not make in excusable.
You probably need to go back to "TCP/IP" training school, if you ever went to one in the first place.
FTP, Gopher and the other applications you mentioned have nothing to do with "web services" but are entirely separate daemons/services so I do not see how you can make any comparison with web services.
I also don't understand why you have this attitude problem. Lynx is a great browser for speed and for dumping text on a web page to STDOUT so that you can do some neat stuff with the text in a shell script - but that does not make the needs of anyone else who maybe wants Flash animations and multimedia in web pages any less valid.
As far as I'm concerned, anything goes on the web as long as the context is correct - i.e. I don't expect to see a dancing penguin Flash animation on the Linux kernel web site but I could care less about bandwidth when exploring, say, YouTube.
Sorry, but my view is that if you don't like it then deal with it - there are more than enough advertisement & Flash blockers out there to pretty much customise what you do and don't want to see on the web, you just need to take the time to learn how to use and install that stuff.
Just to follow up on the above, I have noticed a great decrease in nuisance calls since registering with the TPS - and any that do slip through the net, just tell the caller you are on the TPS & demand their company name & telephone number & threaten to report them to OfTel.
Whilst a lot of them do just put the phone down quick, others do apologise & assure you that your details will be removed from their database.
If you're a software manager who doesn't code, then I don't think it's any of your business what an application is coded in.
You're there to ensure that the resulting application meets the criteria set for it - namely stability, portability, usability & good documentation. And there to make sure the programming team meet deadlines for testing and release.
Scientist To Do List - Thursday 21st August
on
Magpies Are Self-Aware
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
The media companies are not content with the amount of profits they are making and even if they could stop piracy, it would cost them a huge amount of money to do so. Consequently, an easier way of making more profits is to make the honest buyers pay more, and a good way of making them pay more is to enforce a rental model on them.
So they go to the software companies to create the mechanisms that allow the creation of DRM (="Media with a built in time bomb) delivery mechanisms and of course it's great for Adobe and others to be able to put their logos up alongside Disney's or Paramount's.
But because no software is perfect, the DRM gets cracked & it's back to the drawing board.
As long as DRM is around, this cycle will just keep repeating itself because this is no longer about corporations giving consumers what they want but waging war on them. So DRM will fail.
All I'm waiting for now are for Apple to find the guts to drop DRM completely in iTunes (if they really are the "nice" company all the people on here say they are) and I think that will be the final death knoll for DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
...wasn't that the idea why signed drivers were introduced in Windows XP? Namely to reduce the risk of buggy drivers crashing Windows?
Does that mean that Vista is therefore a step backwards? Or do Microsoft finally admit that they rushed a beta product to release?
...then how about just putting "T'Pol & 7 of 9 in naked shaving foam waterbed romp inside" in black ink on the cover.
... if the OS/2 die hards need Open Source applications ported across to OS/2 then doesn't that kind of negate why you'd want to use OS/2 in the first place? i.e. a lack of modern applications to run on it?
I mean, what's the benefits of running OS/2 over Linux, BSD or Windows, which already have those apps natively in the first place?
I don't claim to be a huge film or TV buff, there's a few movies and TV series I enjoy, I own a mid-range widescreen TV but could give two hoots about the occasional bit of blockiness on the screen or surround sound. If people do want top quality movie and TV entertainment, then good luck to them.
But as a music fan, it's always struck me as really strange how, in the video world, everything is moving to High Definition and Blu-Ray yet in the music world, many people seem to want lower quality compressed music downloads rather than shiny CD disks.
I've spent as much on a reasonably good hifi as a lot of other people spend on video equipment and I *really really* don't get what is the big deal with compressed music - sure, I use MP3s of my collection on a portable player for travelling and the gym but I don't see how someone who buys compressed music can be classified as a music fan when a "movie buff" is never going to be taken seriously unless he/she has got a huge TV, cable, surround sound, etc.
...downgrade to standard definition retinas and just stick with DVD.
How about making the aluminium foil into a hat shape before putting the mobile phone in it? It works for me.
They're none too happy if you wipe it on the curtains after it's blown up either.
...take off all those illegal Sony Music MP3s you've downloaded before you return it.
And with all respect, you seem to have this very "black and white" view of the world of gamers.
I speak from 25+ years experience of gaming when I say that a game only needs to be entertaining and immersive, not necessarily realistic. And when it comes to adventure games, then the prime requirement is to have a big wedge of logical puzzle solving along with the gradual revealing of an underlying plot.
The problem with many of the games today is that the focus is *far too much* on pretty graphics without putting equivalent effort into the gameplay itself, plus the attitude of many games developers these days seems to be to sell shorter and shorter games (with additional expansions) with easy-to-solve puzzles because the teenage gamers of today don't have long attention spans.
Wow. You couldn't be more wrong. Any scientist anywhere will tell you that the ocean is a carbon sink - absorbing CO2. Only after the Ocean gets warmer does it release CO2.
If the climate is getting warmer, then the oceans, by your argument, would release more CO2. This is precisely my comment.
The point is that the Ocean wouldn't being emitting CO2 if it wasn't absorbing so much of it from man made sources in the first place. As you mention An Inconvient Truth, its this absorbtion that is wrecking havok among coral reefs and creating huge storms.
I am not denying the effects of the warming of the climate but precisely what man-made CO2 emissions are you talking about? What percentage of those emissions are not absorbed by the fauna of this planet that, in turn, releases O2 into the atmosphere? Presumably you can provide scientific evidence that shows this, rather than the spoutings of a corrupt ex-politician bent only on feathing his own nest.
Al Gore, while he mentioned a number of previous Ice Ages, noted that the CO2 levels directly related to temperature, and that at no time in 650,000 years did CO2 levels ever go higher than 300 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The historical high is 280 ppmv.
Any measurements of C02 in the past 650,000 years can only be estimates, presumably based on deep bore ice/strata samples - in reality, mankind has probably been congniscant of science enough for 100 years or so to actually measure CO2 in the air. The fact that Ice Ages occurred in the first place demonstrates climatic change before mankind.
Even so, those measurements can only "guess" the levels of CO2 and "guess" their causes.
In 1960, there was a concentration of 315 ppmv. Today we sit at 385 ppmv. There is no projection that it will slow down or decrease, but rather increase much more. By 2010 we expect to break 400 ppmv. But who needs words when you have a graph?
Again, you've just described an effect - you have not confirmed the cause.
Where's those facts? I dare you to link them. But you wont, because they don't exist.
Here's one. Let me know if you need more.
The only dispute is over the "average ice density" in the Arctic, but no one disputes the reduction of ice of the caps, or Arctic Shrinkage. The before and after pictures are shocking.
Ah, okay. So in other words, it's acceptable scientific methodology to acknowledge reduction of the polar ice caps but exclude ice density purely because you consider it to be disputed and serving to at least partially discredit your argument?
I personally love this part. A conspiracy theory that portrays Big Business and the Rich as the minds behind global warming. Yes, they are the ones who will profit by stopping the development of third world countries.
Don't be an idiot.
Rich "Western" countries went through phases of industrialisation and mechanisation that ultimately meant large workforces and the creation of unions that allowed for better workers rights, conditions and pay. Precisely the same thing most of the Third World nations have not gone through - therefore they can be exploited for cheaper goods.
Or am I missing something and did all the factories and production centres in the West just disappear down Alice's rabbit hole?
Yes, its not like Big Business would want to maximize their profit margin by cutting out as much environmental regulation as possible and decrease overheads so they exploit countries better. And its not like they have been buying scientists and congressmen trying to lobby against global warming at all by calling it a hoax! No, those were other people...
Now you're just playing a (pretty sim
The core problem is that far too many Windows users run their PCs with access priveliges that are far too high for what they need - this means that it's easier for a rogue program to get downloaded onto a Windows PC and run with a high level of priveliges so that it can get access into the core operating system.
Plus Windows has a security architecture that allows some programs to gain that access level without you even knowing anything about it and Windows has a security architecture that is beyond the understanding of the majority of normal users.
Linux enforces the idea that you can do all of your day-to-day stuff as a normal user, it's only when you need to do administration work that you need to go in as root. No, it does not stop someone running as root user for day-to-day use but distributions like Ubuntu don't allow root access by default which helps considerably.
You also need to bear in mind that whatever version of Windows you run, at certain levels all Windows PCs present the same single architecture which makes it very easy for malware to propogate. To do so the same way on Linux would require finding a single common application amongst enough Linux machines to get the same level of propagation.
Linux *is* more prone to directed buffer overflow attacks against services that are run on the Internet but these, again, only work against very specific versions of those applications.
Okay, so I need a maths lesson - it was actually 102 years ago.
The opening of the Northwest Passage is so last year.
Actually, it's so 92 years ago - because that's when this man successfully traversed it (in 1906).
Some of you MMGW loonies need to go get some history lessons.
Agreed. But my point is that if our rich politicians are prepared to fly across the planet telling the Third World not to create factories that burn fossil fuels, would they not be better telling them to become educated about birth control?
And the fact is, globally there are far too many people having far too many children that they cannot afford to themselves feed - in rich countries, this means social handouts & state benefits, in the Third World it means increased poverty with less chance of getting out of it.
...is whether or not PNY's USB key with Ghostbusters loaded on it is cheaper or faster than any other USB key.
DRM content has zero value - therefore the fact that a key has a DRM movie on it is irrelevant to any decision about buying a PNY key.
I shouldn't have to go through questionable means to get content I have already paid for (through the TV license).
I think you missed the OP's point entirely.
I myself am happy to pay the TV license because I get ad-free broadcasting, Dr Who, excellent radio programming and a web site crammed full of language-learning materials (as a student of Spanish).
But I don't see why, as a British license payer, I should have to pay to download archived material that has already been paid for by me and other license payers - if the BBC wants to charge the rest of the world (non-license payers) and leave it free for me as UK citizen, then so be it.
I will admit to being a big fan of classic rock music (anything from the Beatles to Motorhead) and if it means the BBC has to pay the record labels a fee to re-broadcast some of the live or session music they have archived, then I don't mind paying a small fee for that, provided I can download and save it in a non-DRMed format.
The BBC is a public-funded broadcast company. It is *not supposed* to make money, only to cover its operating costs that are at least partly funded by the TV license - any additional money it makes should be thrown straight back into financing the creation of more and better programming.
There is still no actual proof of man-made Global Warming over natural climate change.
There is scientific evidence to suggest that as the climate is (naturally) warming, more CO2 is being released from the seas - if anything, this particular research has been covered up in favour of the politically-motivated idea that man *must* be the cause of Global Warming.
It has already been shown that Al Gore's graphs presented in "An Inconvenient Truth" were "massaged" by about 60 years and it is taken as irrefutable proof that our planet went through (at least) 4 Ice Ages (i.e. global cooling) long before man was ever on the scene.
Politically, there is a strong case for promoting MMGW which would stop the development of the Third World, thus ensuring that Third World imports into rich countries remain cheap, thus keeping the populations of the rich countries fat, dumb & happy. And because the Third World countries remain poor, more people live in poverty and die younger from diseases that are curable. In actuality, MMGW is an *anti-Green* viewpoint.
Oh, and please do not view anyone who is anti-MMGW as being against better recycling or against less reliance on fossil fuels, both of which will help to preserve the planet for future generations. But MMGW strikes me as entirely wasted effort when, in practice, we should be pushing to stabilise the population of our planet by strict birth-control enforcement globally. Do you not find it hypocritical that politicians in rich countries don't push for this? After all, if people who are already in poverty keep having more and more children that they cannot possibly feed, how can they get themselves out of poverty? Or is that what the politicians want because it means the poor can be exploited even more for poor working conditions and poor pay?
Oh, and whenever these articles get opened up for discussion, why is the fact that ice is getting thicker in many areas of the North and South pole conveniently overlooked?
Yes - because the iPhone is so locked down with proprietary controls, it's not easy to port these applications across.
I'm no fan of Windows Mobile but at least on my phone, I can install Open Source applications to talk to the stuff I need it to talk to.
Actually, the ASA are there to protect the general populace from misleading advertising.
If anything, I wish they would censor more advertising than they currently do - far too many corporate lies make it onto TV and cinema screens, and into colour spreads in magazines.
Sorry, but if Apple is selling the concept that the iPhone can give users a similar but portable experience of the web like they get on their PCs, then the ASA is perfectly correct pulling Apple up over those claims.
Just because Apple does it does not make in excusable.
You probably need to go back to "TCP/IP" training school, if you ever went to one in the first place.
FTP, Gopher and the other applications you mentioned have nothing to do with "web services" but are entirely separate daemons/services so I do not see how you can make any comparison with web services.
I also don't understand why you have this attitude problem. Lynx is a great browser for speed and for dumping text on a web page to STDOUT so that you can do some neat stuff with the text in a shell script - but that does not make the needs of anyone else who maybe wants Flash animations and multimedia in web pages any less valid.
As far as I'm concerned, anything goes on the web as long as the context is correct - i.e. I don't expect to see a dancing penguin Flash animation on the Linux kernel web site but I could care less about bandwidth when exploring, say, YouTube.
Sorry, but my view is that if you don't like it then deal with it - there are more than enough advertisement & Flash blockers out there to pretty much customise what you do and don't want to see on the web, you just need to take the time to learn how to use and install that stuff.
Just to follow up on the above, I have noticed a great decrease in nuisance calls since registering with the TPS - and any that do slip through the net, just tell the caller you are on the TPS & demand their company name & telephone number & threaten to report them to OfTel.
Whilst a lot of them do just put the phone down quick, others do apologise & assure you that your details will be removed from their database.
If you're a software manager who doesn't code, then I don't think it's any of your business what an application is coded in.
You're there to ensure that the resulting application meets the criteria set for it - namely stability, portability, usability & good documentation. And there to make sure the programming team meet deadlines for testing and release.
|_| Get showered
|_| Have breakfast
|_| Pack briefcase
|_| Get girlfriend
The media companies are not content with the amount of profits they are making and even if they could stop piracy, it would cost them a huge amount of money to do so. Consequently, an easier way of making more profits is to make the honest buyers pay more, and a good way of making them pay more is to enforce a rental model on them.
So they go to the software companies to create the mechanisms that allow the creation of DRM (="Media with a built in time bomb) delivery mechanisms and of course it's great for Adobe and others to be able to put their logos up alongside Disney's or Paramount's.
But because no software is perfect, the DRM gets cracked & it's back to the drawing board.
As long as DRM is around, this cycle will just keep repeating itself because this is no longer about corporations giving consumers what they want but waging war on them. So DRM will fail.
All I'm waiting for now are for Apple to find the guts to drop DRM completely in iTunes (if they really are the "nice" company all the people on here say they are) and I think that will be the final death knoll for DRM.