When Microsoft talks "standards" and "interoperability", it generally means...
We'll take an existing standard, make it "better" (bloat, non-standard syntax, non-compliant), market the crap out of it, and then everyone else can adopt it so that your products work happily with ours.
In other words... "make your program work with our software which was coded by pot-smoking-monkeys-on-typewriters (tm), and it will be interoperable."
That linux is unpopular because it doesn't run a lot of windows games, or not well at least. I've got news for you, windows doesn't run windows game well either. I've got a game sitting right here, works on my PC, but on another machine (with specs that well exceed game recommended) it craps out.
Now, tell me the wonders of gaming on an MS platform, because in many cases it is still hit-and-miss as to whether your game will work 100%.
What would be nice, is a game booting off a liveCD. If I can get a full OS+Productivity apps to load off a mini-CD, one would think that booting off a standard disc or perhaps DVD would run a game rather well.
And for savegames? Perhaps a USB memory stick (hell, they're pretty cheap, an 8mb or 4mb wouldn't cost much) and/or the ability to mount off a hard drive. If you can slap a memory card in a PS2 you can figure out a USB stick.
Seems to me that the ability to boot a productive running kernel without an HDD should be a boon that potential game developers should consider. At that point the pre-loaded OS becomes a rather moot point.
How legal would it be to stick up posters near major music retail outlets outlining these cases pressed by the RIAA. Make sure it's obvious that it's the same company selling the CD's. A picture of a 12-year-old filesharer and the poor mother-of-four should do well to grab people's attention?
Could this be setup to be construed as protest, and thus legal?
Realistically, this is true. However, this is a half-truth due to omision, because if you s/P2P/the internet/ the statement still rings true. Hell, you could argue the same against the www protocol, but in the end it's not the fault of the protocol, just a portion of people using the net in general.
So basically, anyone who pays verisign for this service is going to get bombarded with spam not only for their own domain, but for any of related-in-wildcard domains as well. I mean, domain name resolution is independent of the final protocol being used (www, ftp, etc), correct?
So, now, spammers for mydomain.com mydoman.com mydo... etc are all going to end up getting mydomain.com.
Are the spammers going to verify the domain, or perhaps some will just connect to the IP specified and spam away.
In this case, which is better/worse, a few extra customers garnered from mistyped domain-names, or a whole lot more spam? Methinks the spam-bandwidth-usage will exceed the possible profitability of new customers. Nice business model, verisign!!!
Second reaction: How much does it take to power the operation of this thing (fuel, any input juice to get the process going), and how much power output does it generate? It doesn't seem too big, perhaps it might even be able to power a land-based vehicle or something similar? At the very least with a few regulators it should keep my PC's from running up the power bill, and with the existing low radiation a little lead shielding should make it safer than my microwave oven...
If you were on vacation, and had a door lock with a defect that thieves used to break in. Afterwards, the thieves used numbers from your phone rolodex to call and case the surrounding neighbourhood. Would you charge the original house a penalty? I think not!
If several thousand locks are found to be extremely defective countless times over... perhaps you'd charge the lock company...?
If there was a "friends" episode where Joey or Chandler was busted for swapping Mp3's and fined a huge sum. In my minds-eye, it would make a really cool episode, but with the attitude of hollywood towards filesharing (heck, people bootleg friends episodes too) I doubt it would fly.
Not to mention that Microsoft could then tout their "Magic Bullet." Oh, security... well we can't be 100% secure without DRM, it's the only way to really make your system foolproof.
Cable ISP's have been known to cap modems down below advertised rates. Remember, in "up to XMbps or XKbps" - the key word is "up to." There's a capability for such high speeds, but it's limited 99% of the time.
And no, I don't support people who abuse their internet system, but in both events it doesn't warrant unpermitted modification of my hardware. Would you like it if the gov't mandated that the max speed on any road in N. America was to be kph, so next time you park in a mall little gov't gnomes placed a speed limiter on your car whilst you shopped?
The end point is: I have a right to do with my hardware what I please. You don't have a right to change my hardware without my permission. You can ban me from your network (X-box live), or pull my plug (ISP), but not alter my property. End of story.
That's just fine, I won't put it on the open road. But in this case it's more like if I put it on the open road (sans motorbike engine at the time), then the regulating bodies are not allowed to simply walk up to my bike while it's in a parking lot, and stick a big spike by the pedals to prevent me from adding a gas motor.
It's not about whether or not modders should be allowed to use Xbox live, it's about whether MS should be allowed to change their system without permission. And yes, we'll see the future with this when new CD's autopatch your Xbox without you knowing next time you play the newest game (and again, nothing to say you can't play games and use linux... until MS covertly countermods your system).
Actually, in this case I think perhaps it works very nicely. If you bought DSL with an advertised rate/capability of Y, but you are capped down at X, you should be able to modify your own hardware.
Be careful on this one though, a lot of ISP's will "lease" the hardware, especially in the case of cable internet. In this case, unlike purchasing an Xbox, you don't have rights to modify the hardware, and probably not to keep your (their) hardware from being modified.
is made to be used for the purpose of the person who bought it. A bike is meant to take your places, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to take off the wheel and hook it up to a generator (or whatever other creative modification cames up).
Just because other people are more creative than you doesn't give you a right to bash them. Whether or not the end result of this patch was to block linux, it still stands that applying this patch without the owner's permissions is a violation.
How about if somebody covertly "patched" your DSL/cable modem, and suddenly it prevented your from doing slashdot, or something that depending on it it operating in a certain way.
And realistally, if enforced server-side PGP signatures become the norm, then you could watch spammers fall by the wayside anyhow.
After all, it must take a certain percentage of CPU power to encrypt these messages, no? Perhaps it will be fine for your average ISP, with on-demand encryption or perhaps an encryption daemon capable of processing X queued processes/minute, but for a spammer trying to offload several thousand to a million spams? It's going to take awhile to encrypt that spam, at the very least it's going to slow the buggers down.
Trust me, with the time I end up staying late, into breaks, etc etc... a little relaxed slashdot posting time doesn't cost my employer much. Also, where else would I pick up current brainstorms for improving productivity (or nifty casemods for a server... erm... ok forget the casemod idea).
Truely thing, amidst the OT and not-too-useful-for-me stuff that comes on/., there are occasional flashes of brilliance that make my life easier. Not only that, but I'm sure the stuff that isn't useful to me is quite possibly useful to somebody else... with notable exceptions of course.
True with geeks, but with the aim to get Joe-average, or at least Joe-semi-average to switch to linux would this apply? My experience has been that getting such users to switch from anything they're used-to is like trying to pick up a hedgehog from the top (offtopic: although using a sponge can be amusing for this).
Indeed, I've always thought that the best way was to include a portion of the ending, a decent portion of the beginning, and then stick some BS filler in the middle to look like it has full content.
Kazaa user 987 downloads file,maybe checks to see that the movie has an ending: watches, sees that movie looks good, then ends up partway through having the real movie dissappear and "Gone with the wind" play instead.
Might just entice Kazaa user 987 to go see the movie in the theatre (or rent the DVD) to catch the rest.
I still think that it's unfortunately that one would have to resort to movie piracy just to avoid adcrap. Theatres-ads on a $10 ticket really suck (except for funny ads, geeze companies should wise up that they are really preferable), and even DVD's you often have to wade through FBI warnings and previews.
complete menu/extras/etc. Isn't it a given that insiders have something to do with it
Believe it or not, I've seen a few Chinese DVD's with complete menus and everything,but with a few quirks that indicate that they are not commercial grade legal DVD's. Sometimes it is really, really hard to tell - especially since not all real DVD's are printed and some have the same thin sticky-labels as the pirated variety.
Wow, thanks for the dutifully technical, non-flaming response... many would have flamebasted me instead of such a polite correction.
To post an addition question: I suppose that not all radios are made equal, and that some would emit greater RF "noise" than others? If we've got radios that are as small as watches now, how much RF can they dish out do you think?
Has anyone noticed the huge proliferation of "RedHat as Linux" over the linux literary and driver (closed-source drivers, generally) community? The amount of articles that go on about teaching linux, and then teach "Red Hat" are huge. In addition, if you notice hardware that "Supports Linux" you will often find that it supports "Red Hat" (IMHO, the only way to support "Linux" properly is to have an Open-Source driver).
If you search for linux on chapters
you will find a lot of literary material. 8 of 20 results are specially about redhat on the first page...
Searching for "Red Hat" Linux shows that at least 106 books specifically contain the words "Red Hat" in addition to linux.
While I'm all for use-your-own-distro, and I'm sure that RedHat is a good OS for newbies... I get this tingling feeling that there is a whole mentality that "Red Hat" IS linux. I understand that distros like Debian Linux might be more daunting with text-based installs, etc, but I hate to see future admins being taught that the "Red Hat" way is the only way.
Of course, it may be because many of those in the Debian-oriented mentality simply hate to document or make book-like material, whereas many more RedHat newbies have gone on to share their experience with the masses?
Give it a few months, and I'm sure we'll see a few more "Using RedHat 10" books to add to the pile. Version-chasing AHOY!
Although in truth it doesn't always apply to highly paid workers (some are still lazy buggers), but quite often is the truth when dealing with attempts to save money by outsourcing.
Seriously, I doubt that anyone thinks that you can get 100% quality for 60% cost, but I'm sure many companies find the quality/cost ratio they end up with is well below what they expect.
Isn't a radio pretty much an input-only device? In this case - with the exception of emissions from the audio-output portion of the device - would not any AM/FM signals be there regardless of wheter a radio is on or not... or does using said radio suddenly gather more signals to a given area. I'm going for the former, and while they may have *said* that radio emissions were causing the interfering, it was likely something else.
I have seen cops speed up to make a yellow light and then pull into a parking lot and shut off
Cops are human too, and they quite often pull the same stupid stunts. It's also just as illegal for them to do so, in fact, penalties can be worse because of their position of power/trust.
For example, if a cop was found to be speeding without reason and slammed into a civilian vehicle, injuring/killing the individuals inside, they would get reamed nicely in court (of course, the force would likely try to cover them, but they can still go down).
Cops aren't above the law, but many seem to thing they are because they represent a portion of it. Just remember that not all of those represent the majority of police: many of these are fine individuals who would put themselves in harms way for you or many other ordinary citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
These people need to be smacked. A good pimp smack
You're a GTA player aren't you? I sense a lawsuit coming on.
Oh, and yes, the above was not meant to be serious...
When Microsoft talks "standards" and "interoperability", it generally means...
We'll take an existing standard, make it "better" (bloat, non-standard syntax, non-compliant), market the crap out of it, and then everyone else can adopt it so that your products work happily with ours.
In other words... "make your program work with our software which was coded by pot-smoking-monkeys-on-typewriters (tm), and it will be interoperable."
That linux is unpopular because it doesn't run a lot of windows games, or not well at least. I've got news for you, windows doesn't run windows game well either. I've got a game sitting right here, works on my PC, but on another machine (with specs that well exceed game recommended) it craps out.
Now, tell me the wonders of gaming on an MS platform, because in many cases it is still hit-and-miss as to whether your game will work 100%.
What would be nice, is a game booting off a liveCD. If I can get a full OS+Productivity apps to load off a mini-CD, one would think that booting off a standard disc or perhaps DVD would run a game rather well.
And for savegames? Perhaps a USB memory stick (hell, they're pretty cheap, an 8mb or 4mb wouldn't cost much) and/or the ability to mount off a hard drive. If you can slap a memory card in a PS2 you can figure out a USB stick.
Seems to me that the ability to boot a productive running kernel without an HDD should be a boon that potential game developers should consider. At that point the pre-loaded OS becomes a rather moot point.
How legal would it be to stick up posters near major music retail outlets outlining these cases pressed by the RIAA. Make sure it's obvious that it's the same company selling the CD's. A picture of a 12-year-old filesharer and the poor mother-of-four should do well to grab people's attention?
Could this be setup to be construed as protest, and thus legal?
RIAA is claiming that P2P rife with ch*ld porn
Realistically, this is true. However, this is a half-truth due to omision, because if you s/P2P/the internet/ the statement still rings true. Hell, you could argue the same against the www protocol, but in the end it's not the fault of the protocol, just a portion of people using the net in general.
So basically, anyone who pays verisign for this service is going to get bombarded with spam not only for their own domain, but for any of related-in-wildcard domains as well. I mean, domain name resolution is independent of the final protocol being used (www, ftp, etc), correct?
So, now, spammers for mydomain.com mydoman.com mydo... etc are all going to end up getting mydomain.com.
Are the spammers going to verify the domain, or perhaps some will just connect to the IP specified and spam away.
In this case, which is better/worse, a few extra customers garnered from mistyped domain-names, or a whole lot more spam? Methinks the spam-bandwidth-usage will exceed the possible profitability of new customers. Nice business model, verisign!!!
First reaction: Cool. Incredibly frickin' cool
Second reaction: How much does it take to power the operation of this thing (fuel, any input juice to get the process going), and how much power output does it generate? It doesn't seem too big, perhaps it might even be able to power a land-based vehicle or something similar? At the very least with a few regulators it should keep my PC's from running up the power bill, and with the existing low radiation a little lead shielding should make it safer than my microwave oven...
If you were on vacation, and had a door lock with a defect that thieves used to break in. Afterwards, the thieves used numbers from your phone rolodex to call and case the surrounding neighbourhood. Would you charge the original house a penalty? I think not!
If several thousand locks are found to be extremely defective countless times over... perhaps you'd charge the lock company...?
If there was a "friends" episode where Joey or Chandler was busted for swapping Mp3's and fined a huge sum. In my minds-eye, it would make a really cool episode, but with the attitude of hollywood towards filesharing (heck, people bootleg friends episodes too) I doubt it would fly.
Not to mention that Microsoft could then tout their "Magic Bullet." Oh, security... well we can't be 100% secure without DRM, it's the only way to really make your system foolproof.
You know they'd try. Hell, they already are.
Good point. Usually my first place to look when having problems with a given package/app is "man packagename".
Of course, they're not all *good* man-files, but usually something is better than nothing.
Cable ISP's have been known to cap modems down below advertised rates. Remember, in "up to XMbps or XKbps" - the key word is "up to." There's a capability for such high speeds, but it's limited 99% of the time.
And no, I don't support people who abuse their internet system, but in both events it doesn't warrant unpermitted modification of my hardware. Would you like it if the gov't mandated that the max speed on any road in N. America was to be kph, so next time you park in a mall little gov't gnomes placed a speed limiter on your car whilst you shopped?
The end point is: I have a right to do with my hardware what I please. You don't have a right to change my hardware without my permission. You can ban me from your network (X-box live), or pull my plug (ISP), but not alter my property. End of story.
That's just fine, I won't put it on the open road. But in this case it's more like if I put it on the open road (sans motorbike engine at the time), then the regulating bodies are not allowed to simply walk up to my bike while it's in a parking lot, and stick a big spike by the pedals to prevent me from adding a gas motor.
It's not about whether or not modders should be allowed to use Xbox live, it's about whether MS should be allowed to change their system without permission. And yes, we'll see the future with this when new CD's autopatch your Xbox without you knowing next time you play the newest game (and again, nothing to say you can't play games and use linux... until MS covertly countermods your system).
Actually, in this case I think perhaps it works very nicely. If you bought DSL with an advertised rate/capability of Y, but you are capped down at X, you should be able to modify your own hardware.
Be careful on this one though, a lot of ISP's will "lease" the hardware, especially in the case of cable internet. In this case, unlike purchasing an Xbox, you don't have rights to modify the hardware, and probably not to keep your (their) hardware from being modified.
is made to be used for the purpose of the person who bought it. A bike is meant to take your places, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to take off the wheel and hook it up to a generator (or whatever other creative modification cames up).
Just because other people are more creative than you doesn't give you a right to bash them. Whether or not the end result of this patch was to block linux, it still stands that applying this patch without the owner's permissions is a violation.
How about if somebody covertly "patched" your DSL/cable modem, and suddenly it prevented your from doing slashdot, or something that depending on it it operating in a certain way.
And realistally, if enforced server-side PGP signatures become the norm, then you could watch spammers fall by the wayside anyhow.
After all, it must take a certain percentage of CPU power to encrypt these messages, no? Perhaps it will be fine for your average ISP, with on-demand encryption or perhaps an encryption daemon capable of processing X queued processes/minute, but for a spammer trying to offload several thousand to a million spams? It's going to take awhile to encrypt that spam, at the very least it's going to slow the buggers down.
Trust me, with the time I end up staying late, into breaks, etc etc... a little relaxed slashdot posting time doesn't cost my employer much. Also, where else would I pick up current brainstorms for improving productivity (or nifty casemods for a server... erm... ok forget the casemod idea).
/., there are occasional flashes of brilliance that make my life easier. Not only that, but I'm sure the stuff that isn't useful to me is quite possibly useful to somebody else... with notable exceptions of course.
Truely thing, amidst the OT and not-too-useful-for-me stuff that comes on
True with geeks, but with the aim to get Joe-average, or at least Joe-semi-average to switch to linux would this apply? My experience has been that getting such users to switch from anything they're used-to is like trying to pick up a hedgehog from the top (offtopic: although using a sponge can be amusing for this).
Indeed, I've always thought that the best way was to include a portion of the ending, a decent portion of the beginning, and then stick some BS filler in the middle to look like it has full content.
Kazaa user 987 downloads file,maybe checks to see that the movie has an ending: watches, sees that movie looks good, then ends up partway through having the real movie dissappear and "Gone with the wind" play instead.
Might just entice Kazaa user 987 to go see the movie in the theatre (or rent the DVD) to catch the rest.
I still think that it's unfortunately that one would have to resort to movie piracy just to avoid adcrap. Theatres-ads on a $10 ticket really suck (except for funny ads, geeze companies should wise up that they are really preferable), and even DVD's you often have to wade through FBI warnings and previews.
complete menu/extras/etc. Isn't it a given that insiders have something to do with it
Believe it or not, I've seen a few Chinese DVD's with complete menus and everything,but with a few quirks that indicate that they are not commercial grade legal DVD's. Sometimes it is really, really hard to tell - especially since not all real DVD's are printed and some have the same thin sticky-labels as the pirated variety.
Wow, thanks for the dutifully technical, non-flaming response... many would have flamebasted me instead of such a polite correction.
To post an addition question: I suppose that not all radios are made equal, and that some would emit greater RF "noise" than others? If we've got radios that are as small as watches now, how much RF can they dish out do you think?
Has anyone noticed the huge proliferation of "RedHat as Linux" over the linux literary and driver (closed-source drivers, generally) community? The amount of articles that go on about teaching linux, and then teach "Red Hat" are huge. In addition, if you notice hardware that "Supports Linux" you will often find that it supports "Red Hat" (IMHO, the only way to support "Linux" properly is to have an Open-Source driver).
If you search for linux on chapters you will find a lot of literary material. 8 of 20 results are specially about redhat on the first page...
Searching for "Red Hat" Linux shows that at least 106 books specifically contain the words "Red Hat" in addition to linux.
While I'm all for use-your-own-distro, and I'm sure that RedHat is a good OS for newbies... I get this tingling feeling that there is a whole mentality that "Red Hat" IS linux. I understand that distros like Debian Linux might be more daunting with text-based installs, etc, but I hate to see future admins being taught that the "Red Hat" way is the only way.
Of course, it may be because many of those in the Debian-oriented mentality simply hate to document or make book-like material, whereas many more RedHat newbies have gone on to share their experience with the masses?
Give it a few months, and I'm sure we'll see a few more "Using RedHat 10" books to add to the pile. Version-chasing AHOY!
"You get what you pay for"
Although in truth it doesn't always apply to highly paid workers (some are still lazy buggers), but quite often is the truth when dealing with attempts to save money by outsourcing.
Seriously, I doubt that anyone thinks that you can get 100% quality for 60% cost, but I'm sure many companies find the quality/cost ratio they end up with is well below what they expect.
Isn't a radio pretty much an input-only device? In this case - with the exception of emissions from the audio-output portion of the device - would not any AM/FM signals be there regardless of wheter a radio is on or not... or does using said radio suddenly gather more signals to a given area. I'm going for the former, and while they may have *said* that radio emissions were causing the interfering, it was likely something else.
I have seen cops speed up to make a yellow light and then pull into a parking lot and shut off
Cops are human too, and they quite often pull the same stupid stunts. It's also just as illegal for them to do so, in fact, penalties can be worse because of their position of power/trust.
For example, if a cop was found to be speeding without reason and slammed into a civilian vehicle, injuring/killing the individuals inside, they would get reamed nicely in court (of course, the force would likely try to cover them, but they can still go down).
Cops aren't above the law, but many seem to thing they are because they represent a portion of it. Just remember that not all of those represent the majority of police: many of these are fine individuals who would put themselves in harms way for you or many other ordinary citizens.