A guy comes into your house and kill your wife and childeren for $100 bucks wich he uses to feed his childeren. Is it now unfair to send him to jail because that will hurt his childeren?
Of course my example is extreme. But the fact is that people are often affected by the punishment aimed at someone else. If every time the a lawmaker had to take care that noone but the reciptient of the punishment was hurt by the punishment then their would be no punishment.
Their are plently of respectable ISP's around who do a lot of hard work to ensure that no spammers use their network. Sure they may be more expensive. That is because they spend that extra money guarding their and your intrests.
If a ISP deal sounds to good to be true then it probably is. I myself maintain several servers that are on blacklists. We have chosen to accept the blacklist on email since their rates are much cheaper. We simply pay for an other server from wich we do the email.
Spam is a problem and people have choosen to fight back by blocking mail from certain points.
If you are right then you MUST answer each and every telephone call you receive, after all by not answering the phone you are limiting the otherones right to freely communicate with you.
IBM supports linux, a direct competitor to MS on low-end servers and maybe in the future on the desktop
Sony releases a linux version for the PS2
All the big japanese electronics firms work together on a linux project
IBM puts their mainframe software, a very stready earner on PS.
IBM and sony work together on PS3
IBM delivers the chips for apple
Apple uses BSD
??????
Of course all of this doesn't have to mean a thing, but if you want you can read into this a serious contented to the Wintel domination.
A living room systeem designed by Sony, on IBM hardware with the solidity of AS/400 (mainframes did things in reliabilty and security we can only dream of in our so called modern OSes) and the openess of linux. Perhaps even taken a few UI lessons from Apple? I would buy one that is for sure.
And of course the US goverment was the one who first helped Bill Gates into power anyway supporting him with huge sums of taxpayers money which he used to rob people of their freedoms.
I mean sure under windows you got to install them since none of them make their codecs available seperate from the player.
Mplayer for linux of course comes with all the codecs but windows users gotta install the fucking players with all their spyware and bloat.
But I then imidiatly install someting like Bsplayer (fast opening from linux shares) or Media player classic (good fullscreen controls and no osd crap). I think all of the three mentioned players are worse then crap, the orginal windows media player was okay but lately they all seem to go out of their way to obfuscate the simple playing of video files.
I had hopes for the Helix project from realmedia, hopes that you now could simply get the codecs. This however doesn't seem to have happened.
Am I the only one who finds it slightly odd that these companies attempt to charge money twice? Once to the encoder (content creator) and once more for the player (consumer)? In the real world you only get to charge once for a product. Imagine that Shell said Ford had to have a license to use their fuel. Or that Bridgestone came to youre house for payment for the tires that came with youre car.
Oh well, serves me right for still having my main machine run windows I suppose. (everything else is linux but I love my games to much)
Yeah, I know lawyer speak can be confusing but it is like youre brain surgeon speaking with a southern accent. I just rather not.
A good lawyer, for that matter anyone with a brain would never use swear words (no matter how mild) in a document. Not even on the internet.
I wouldn't put to much trust in this "lawyer" words, if he speaks the same way in a courtroom he will be on charges of contempt before the charges have been read.
Buying stock can be a way of investing into a company you believe in for wich in return if they succeed you will get youre money back plus a little extra.
On the other hand it can also be seen as high stakes gambling and the higher the stakes the higher the payout, however with SCO stock having gone for cents it isn't all that much of a gamble. Hell if you where a smart one you could have made a nice little earner buy buying early then selling to the suckers who wanted to also join in.
A 10+ dollar jump on a penny stock is nothing to be sneezed at. Of course the morons who bought it at 10 dollars are now stuck. Gotta love slow greedy people.
Well since your being factual why do you start with a lie? Windows does not have security rating, Windows 2000 service pack 3 has a rating. As for it already having it for a year is meaningless. Linux has started out as a free OS, meaning that it simply could not buy the testing. Half a million is of course peanuts to MS and for that matter IBM but to the loose group of coders it is a lot of money that would be next to impossible to collect, and why would they want to? What you are saying is that a train leaving the station at 8 in the morning arrives earlier then a train departing at 8 in the evening. Well duh.
This is good news allaround no matter wich OS you fancy. It levels the playing field. For the end consumers competition is always good, the price fighting between airlines means that the ticket prices drop and that more choice is available (super cheap vs service)
Now MS can't simply rely on getting the big contracts hopefully, as we have seen in munich this can force MS to offer huge pricecuts. For goverments the less they spend on software the less taxes you have to pay. Good news no?
ehm slight failure on youre part of understanding how it was tested.
Linux was tested for test "low and moderate" security and passed. It was not tested for anything higher so we don't now if it would have failed those.
The tests costs lots of money and time, so you start at the bottom and work youre way up. It is like say a soccer team passing the semi-finals, you don't then say, oh that means they missed the finals? No that is yet to come.
ehm what do you mean exactly? Are you talking about the look of Linux apps or are you talking about apps on linux for photoshop monkeys? (as a programmer I of course think all those involved in graphical design are the lice in the pelt of the human race)
If it is the look of the apps, what do you consider wrong with it? Myself I find the linux desktop in default config a bit to well BIG. KDE for me looks worse then XP, at least XP is easily tuned down. Oh and if you are talking about transparant windows I think you are the lice on the lice:)
But really this is probably about what I so often say in topics like this. Linux is YOU. You want something to change? Change it. And even if you can't do it youreselve, talk to those who can but remember they are coders. These people like clear simple communication. So explain please what doesn't look good, and how it could be improved. I bet they are willing to listen if you are clear in what you think should change. But for now you are not.
Oh and if you are even a bit techinal, most desktop apps, I presume you don't want to redesign the CLI, are skinnable. If it is purely the look you can go a long way with this.
well duh. I am sorry but that is like saying that there are fewer shops in say Hickcity Alabama dedicated to Bonzai growing then to football.
Most, not all, open source software is written by people who want to use the software themselves. Not because somebody told them to. Hence only programs will be available for wich someone has an intrest and a skill in programming.
Only rarely does someone write code in his own time for someone else (the braille drivers for linux come to mind, at least I presume the coder was not blind, how would he code braille without braille already being available)
So yes you are right, it only takes one person to do it. Now you need to make the next step, that person is you! Get a book on the subject of audio, learn a language and start working.
Linux is as good as you are. If you think something is missing, add it. If you think something needs to be improved, improve it. Else shut the fuck up and go beg a commercial company to please please write the software you want.
The entire reason that OS software is often free (the two have only a coincidental relationship, free software does not need to be open, and open software does not need to be free as in gratis), is that the software was developed for the authors own use. Having found the app working for him, he then decides to make it freely available since he wrote it anyway and other people might find it handy as well.
Re:why the premise of the Matrix is so dumb
on
Powered by Blood
·
· Score: 1
Green babes? Whoohoo, all my trekkie fantasies about to become true:)
Of course I still be a geek but in star trek geeks get the girls.
Sorry to moderators, this is off topic but the guy asked alright?
Very simple. I like the difference between edit and command mode. I don't know why but the first time I used it on an AIX machine it just worked for me. I have tried other editors and all of them feel annoying after vi. In gentoo wich comes with an oddball "simpler" editor I always end up with x, i and a all over the place:)
To be honest I never tried emacs for more then a few seconds. I just can't/don't want to get used to it.
But yes the main reason to like it apart from just familiarity is its small size. I use editors to edit code usually on remote machines. So I want something that is tiny, fast and not to graphical.
Apart from the quibe that 56% of statistics are made up on the spot I have to disagree with you a bit. Sure there is no accounting for taste in liking or disliking the art in a game.
For myself however I would have missed a great game in Planetscape Torment if I had let myself be turned off by the huge boobs. Every female character no matter her age had a rack that would make Dolly Parton go "Ouch my back".
Great games are more then just the artwork. Maybe I am just to old and to used to games where you were glad to be able to tell the difference between youre character and a tree;)
Re:RPGs that combine elements of both JRPG & U
on
RPGs - East Versus West?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think Planetscape Torment might fit that bill. You start out with 1 character wich you do not name, The nameless one, and a sidekick. But how you play that character is up to you and in a way that is even the goal of the game. Since you have a pretty defined and extensive past (you are someone who doesn't passover when you die you just lost youre memory but stayed in the same body) it is now up to you to decide who you really are.
One of the most important parts of the game has someone ask you "What can change the nature of a man" while the answer is open it nonetheless feels very important to answer it correctly.
The game itself made little difference on how you behaved, but it made you feel that the choices you made where nonetheless important. Very well done.
Could be that is what going on is that these games are far greater in complexity then their japanese counterparts? Fallout had a shit load of different endings, and it takes a lot of work to make sure it all balances out in the end. (no super weapons available to soon, no critical characters killed off, not getting trapped into super though missions to early).
Compare that to the far more on rails gameplay of the FF series. Do they even have multiple endings? (sorry but I never finished one as I got bored)
For me some of the FF type games are not true RPG games. Just powering up does not make an RPG you need to develop a character through youre actions and decisions. Not just learn more attacks by fighting battles.
Not yet, I think they want a truly free VIDEO format, not just a codec. All current ones have some kind of baggage on them meaning they where developed by a company that at any time may decide to start charging. Remember what happenend to the royalty free MP3 and gif formats?
I am not really sure why this is a money matter for china, unless they are planning on becoming huge content providers the cost of licensing current formats is peanuts. I think it is more political. A truly free standard would not see chinese money going to other nations who are after all their idiological enemy.
Lets just hope that they make it a truly opensource solution, would mean no DRM since DRM can only work with closed source.
yup, track him during a session, not between sessions. BIG difference. Youre method can be used to keep me logged in while browsing. Cookie can keep me logged in between browsing sessions.
So the difference for the consumer? Either login every time, or make a bookmark with the session id included. But I suppose this gives the user a clear choice.
1. it is not IIS webserver that does this, it is the ASP extension.
2. No other webservers don't do it either. Webserver serve pages, nothing else. They are by far to dumb to know or care about cookies.
So yes PHP when you enable sessions, off by default, also uses cookies (can also work with other methods).
Oh and you can turn it off in ASP. Don't remember the command since I only work with it when the ASP developer is on holiday.
Law should be written to make developers lifes easy? Oh yeah nice thought. Why not rewrite the law to make life easy for companies to make huge profits?
The reason is that if a problem is left unsolved for to long, the extremer the rememedy must become. It has been tried time and time again to get websites to obey the same privacy rules as the normal world. (remember this story is in sweden, not america)
Cookies are often over used anyway. Check youre own cookie cache and check the number that are used to track you vs the number for youre convenience. (like slashdot remembering youre login). For me at least the first category by far outweighs the latter.
Since some people have mentioned the war on drugs I am going to do the same.
When the police do a sting operation with an undercover agent doing a buy, they do not have to prove that any sale was made to a non-police agent. The single sale is enough.
Neither do they care about the purity of drugs. It could be 99% ground glass. The copyinng of copyrighted music is forbidden, nothing said about the quality. Imagine of this held for other crimes. Yes youre honor I stole that car, but it was a piece of shit.
I am afraid that from there on youre arguments go into fantasy land. Courts are not nice places in wich you can ask the judge to play nice. Do they care that a drug dealer uses his earnings to support his family? No. Same with this. Amy arguments about the harms of filesharing must ultimatly made in two places, the supreme courts who would check it against the constitution or with the lawmakers who can change the laws.
BTW I am not at all behind the RIAA, I would like to see them killed by some crazy guntoting yanks but I feel it is important for people to face reality as it is now.
ehm, if you read the article you would know that the charge is that they where sharing these files. IE making them available for download.
So it doesn't matter how they got these files originally (downloaded themselves, bought in digital form or ripped from a legally bought medium). They have made these files available for download and that is apperantly an offence.
Compare it if you like with selling drugs, the law doesn't give a damn how you got the drugs, just that you are now making it available for sale.
What is therefore funny is that those assholes who run kazaa but share nothing are in the clear. Morallity, be a leech and the RIAA can't touch you. I guess kin doesn't eat kin after all.
mmm, but if you lend your car to a friend and he uses it to transport drugs then you are guilty. Well americans are anyway I think. Remember some program about it anyway, very amusing seeing stupid americans go to jail for no good reason.
Girl crying that she didn't know her boyfriend would use her car to smuggle some dope. Judge didn't give a damn as ignorance is rightfully no excuse.
Morality of the story? Make sure you know the laws of the country youre in. Apperantly at the moment you are considered liable for what is on youre computer and what is being done with it. If you run a company better check that employees are not using the office line to swapfiles.
The battle between the RIAA/MPAA and those who wish to see the their system overthown has been going on for a long time and this particular battle has had a lot of reporting, plenty of time for any person not commited to the cause to turn off their filesharing tools and get out of harms way.
Continuee to run it and you better be prepared to fight it out. Shouting about how it isn't fair isn't going to accomplish shit.
People don't like interacting with call systems because they are extremely limited and waste youre time.
ATM machines on the other hand are a god send. No more standing around for ever waiting for moronic clerks to serve braindead cattle ehm consumers. ATM machines are open 24/7 and do not look down on you for only having a tenner left in youre account.
Don't confuse people hating bad systems with a hatred of automation. If it is done right most people will use it. Proof? You don't have to use the ATM, unlike the phone system wich you mention wich you can't really get around.
On the other hand I am skeptical, ATM machines after all are extremely stupid machines wich give an extremely limited amount of service. (it can't even say give me all the money in my account except what is needed for rent)
So far all succesfull automation has been in areas of extremely simple and extremely repetive task with have absolutly no variance in them, if they do then humans are always there as a backup.
Post sorting machines are huge, work great and save a lot of work, but have teams of humans to help it with all the mail it can't process because it is crumpled, badly written, to big, to small, thick heavy etc
ATM machines have bank tellers to back them up for depositing money, getting coins, huge sums, broken atm cards.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course my example is extreme. But the fact is that people are often affected by the punishment aimed at someone else. If every time the a lawmaker had to take care that noone but the reciptient of the punishment was hurt by the punishment then their would be no punishment.
Their are plently of respectable ISP's around who do a lot of hard work to ensure that no spammers use their network. Sure they may be more expensive. That is because they spend that extra money guarding their and your intrests.
If a ISP deal sounds to good to be true then it probably is. I myself maintain several servers that are on blacklists. We have chosen to accept the blacklist on email since their rates are much cheaper. We simply pay for an other server from wich we do the email.
Spam is a problem and people have choosen to fight back by blocking mail from certain points.
If you are right then you MUST answer each and every telephone call you receive, after all by not answering the phone you are limiting the otherones right to freely communicate with you.
A living room systeem designed by Sony, on IBM hardware with the solidity of AS/400 (mainframes did things in reliabilty and security we can only dream of in our so called modern OSes) and the openess of linux. Perhaps even taken a few UI lessons from Apple? I would buy one that is for sure.
Oh well a guy can dream can't he?
Oh boy is this one going to get modded down.
Mplayer for linux of course comes with all the codecs but windows users gotta install the fucking players with all their spyware and bloat.
But I then imidiatly install someting like Bsplayer (fast opening from linux shares) or Media player classic (good fullscreen controls and no osd crap). I think all of the three mentioned players are worse then crap, the orginal windows media player was okay but lately they all seem to go out of their way to obfuscate the simple playing of video files.
I had hopes for the Helix project from realmedia, hopes that you now could simply get the codecs. This however doesn't seem to have happened.
Am I the only one who finds it slightly odd that these companies attempt to charge money twice? Once to the encoder (content creator) and once more for the player (consumer)? In the real world you only get to charge once for a product. Imagine that Shell said Ford had to have a license to use their fuel. Or that Bridgestone came to youre house for payment for the tires that came with youre car.
Oh well, serves me right for still having my main machine run windows I suppose. (everything else is linux but I love my games to much)
A good lawyer, for that matter anyone with a brain would never use swear words (no matter how mild) in a document. Not even on the internet.
I wouldn't put to much trust in this "lawyer" words, if he speaks the same way in a courtroom he will be on charges of contempt before the charges have been read.
On the other hand it can also be seen as high stakes gambling and the higher the stakes the higher the payout, however with SCO stock having gone for cents it isn't all that much of a gamble. Hell if you where a smart one you could have made a nice little earner buy buying early then selling to the suckers who wanted to also join in.
A 10+ dollar jump on a penny stock is nothing to be sneezed at. Of course the morons who bought it at 10 dollars are now stuck. Gotta love slow greedy people.
This is good news allaround no matter wich OS you fancy. It levels the playing field. For the end consumers competition is always good, the price fighting between airlines means that the ticket prices drop and that more choice is available (super cheap vs service)
Now MS can't simply rely on getting the big contracts hopefully, as we have seen in munich this can force MS to offer huge pricecuts. For goverments the less they spend on software the less taxes you have to pay. Good news no?
Linux was tested for test "low and moderate" security and passed. It was not tested for anything higher so we don't now if it would have failed those.
The tests costs lots of money and time, so you start at the bottom and work youre way up. It is like say a soccer team passing the semi-finals, you don't then say, oh that means they missed the finals? No that is yet to come.
If it is the look of the apps, what do you consider wrong with it? Myself I find the linux desktop in default config a bit to well BIG. KDE for me looks worse then XP, at least XP is easily tuned down. Oh and if you are talking about transparant windows I think you are the lice on the lice :)
But really this is probably about what I so often say in topics like this. Linux is YOU. You want something to change? Change it. And even if you can't do it youreselve, talk to those who can but remember they are coders. These people like clear simple communication. So explain please what doesn't look good, and how it could be improved. I bet they are willing to listen if you are clear in what you think should change. But for now you are not.
Oh and if you are even a bit techinal, most desktop apps, I presume you don't want to redesign the CLI, are skinnable. If it is purely the look you can go a long way with this.
Most, not all, open source software is written by people who want to use the software themselves. Not because somebody told them to. Hence only programs will be available for wich someone has an intrest and a skill in programming.
Only rarely does someone write code in his own time for someone else (the braille drivers for linux come to mind, at least I presume the coder was not blind, how would he code braille without braille already being available)
So yes you are right, it only takes one person to do it. Now you need to make the next step, that person is you! Get a book on the subject of audio, learn a language and start working.
Linux is as good as you are. If you think something is missing, add it. If you think something needs to be improved, improve it. Else shut the fuck up and go beg a commercial company to please please write the software you want.
The entire reason that OS software is often free (the two have only a coincidental relationship, free software does not need to be open, and open software does not need to be free as in gratis), is that the software was developed for the authors own use. Having found the app working for him, he then decides to make it freely available since he wrote it anyway and other people might find it handy as well.
Of course I still be a geek but in star trek geeks get the girls.
Very simple. I like the difference between edit and command mode. I don't know why but the first time I used it on an AIX machine it just worked for me. I have tried other editors and all of them feel annoying after vi. In gentoo wich comes with an oddball "simpler" editor I always end up with x, i and a all over the place :)
To be honest I never tried emacs for more then a few seconds. I just can't/don't want to get used to it.
But yes the main reason to like it apart from just familiarity is its small size. I use editors to edit code usually on remote machines. So I want something that is tiny, fast and not to graphical.
For myself however I would have missed a great game in Planetscape Torment if I had let myself be turned off by the huge boobs. Every female character no matter her age had a rack that would make Dolly Parton go "Ouch my back".
Great games are more then just the artwork. Maybe I am just to old and to used to games where you were glad to be able to tell the difference between youre character and a tree ;)
One of the most important parts of the game has someone ask you "What can change the nature of a man" while the answer is open it nonetheless feels very important to answer it correctly.
The game itself made little difference on how you behaved, but it made you feel that the choices you made where nonetheless important. Very well done.
Compare that to the far more on rails gameplay of the FF series. Do they even have multiple endings? (sorry but I never finished one as I got bored)
For me some of the FF type games are not true RPG games. Just powering up does not make an RPG you need to develop a character through youre actions and decisions. Not just learn more attacks by fighting battles.
Guess we have to wait a few more months to find out what type of attack they have.
the one time you do want vibration in youre fan :p
Not yet, I think they want a truly free VIDEO format, not just a codec. All current ones have some kind of baggage on them meaning they where developed by a company that at any time may decide to start charging. Remember what happenend to the royalty free MP3 and gif formats?
I am not really sure why this is a money matter for china, unless they are planning on becoming huge content providers the cost of licensing current formats is peanuts. I think it is more political. A truly free standard would not see chinese money going to other nations who are after all their idiological enemy.
Lets just hope that they make it a truly opensource solution, would mean no DRM since DRM can only work with closed source.
So the difference for the consumer? Either login every time, or make a bookmark with the session id included. But I suppose this gives the user a clear choice.
1. it is not IIS webserver that does this, it is the ASP extension.
2. No other webservers don't do it either. Webserver serve pages, nothing else. They are by far to dumb to know or care about cookies.
So yes PHP when you enable sessions, off by default, also uses cookies (can also work with other methods).
Oh and you can turn it off in ASP. Don't remember the command since I only work with it when the ASP developer is on holiday.
Law should be written to make developers lifes easy? Oh yeah nice thought. Why not rewrite the law to make life easy for companies to make huge profits?
Cookies are often over used anyway. Check youre own cookie cache and check the number that are used to track you vs the number for youre convenience. (like slashdot remembering youre login). For me at least the first category by far outweighs the latter.
When the police do a sting operation with an undercover agent doing a buy, they do not have to prove that any sale was made to a non-police agent. The single sale is enough.
Neither do they care about the purity of drugs. It could be 99% ground glass. The copyinng of copyrighted music is forbidden, nothing said about the quality. Imagine of this held for other crimes. Yes youre honor I stole that car, but it was a piece of shit.
I am afraid that from there on youre arguments go into fantasy land. Courts are not nice places in wich you can ask the judge to play nice. Do they care that a drug dealer uses his earnings to support his family? No. Same with this. Amy arguments about the harms of filesharing must ultimatly made in two places, the supreme courts who would check it against the constitution or with the lawmakers who can change the laws.
BTW I am not at all behind the RIAA, I would like to see them killed by some crazy guntoting yanks but I feel it is important for people to face reality as it is now.
So it doesn't matter how they got these files originally (downloaded themselves, bought in digital form or ripped from a legally bought medium). They have made these files available for download and that is apperantly an offence.
Compare it if you like with selling drugs, the law doesn't give a damn how you got the drugs, just that you are now making it available for sale.
What is therefore funny is that those assholes who run kazaa but share nothing are in the clear. Morallity, be a leech and the RIAA can't touch you. I guess kin doesn't eat kin after all.
Girl crying that she didn't know her boyfriend would use her car to smuggle some dope. Judge didn't give a damn as ignorance is rightfully no excuse.
Morality of the story? Make sure you know the laws of the country youre in. Apperantly at the moment you are considered liable for what is on youre computer and what is being done with it. If you run a company better check that employees are not using the office line to swapfiles.
The battle between the RIAA/MPAA and those who wish to see the their system overthown has been going on for a long time and this particular battle has had a lot of reporting, plenty of time for any person not commited to the cause to turn off their filesharing tools and get out of harms way.
Continuee to run it and you better be prepared to fight it out. Shouting about how it isn't fair isn't going to accomplish shit.
ATM machines on the other hand are a god send. No more standing around for ever waiting for moronic clerks to serve braindead cattle ehm consumers. ATM machines are open 24/7 and do not look down on you for only having a tenner left in youre account.
Don't confuse people hating bad systems with a hatred of automation. If it is done right most people will use it. Proof? You don't have to use the ATM, unlike the phone system wich you mention wich you can't really get around.
On the other hand I am skeptical, ATM machines after all are extremely stupid machines wich give an extremely limited amount of service. (it can't even say give me all the money in my account except what is needed for rent)
So far all succesfull automation has been in areas of extremely simple and extremely repetive task with have absolutly no variance in them, if they do then humans are always there as a backup.
Post sorting machines are huge, work great and save a lot of work, but have teams of humans to help it with all the mail it can't process because it is crumpled, badly written, to big, to small, thick heavy etc
ATM machines have bank tellers to back them up for depositing money, getting coins, huge sums, broken atm cards.