It seems like many people think anything since the TNG series sucks. Why?
Do you even know *why* DS9 was so different from TNG? Because TNG was starting to get boring with all those nice and almost flawless characters and another series like that would be very boring. Instead, DS9 was different. A lot more shades of grey, flawed characters with dark sides and yes, perhaps not always the most positive view of the future.
Gene wouldn't have liked it that way. Well, wake up: we were not exactly getting along with the Klingons and Romulans in TOS, are we? Sure, there was no large war like the Dominion one, but there was conflict. (actually there was plenty of war, just not during the timespan of the series)
I'm glad DS9 explored some new grounds. Not yet another starship, but a station. Many reoccuring characters. True, a soap-like arc, but therefore also bigger story arcs and some continuity I *like* in TV shows.
As for Voyager: again something else. Away from Starfleet. While I would agree that could have played out better at times, the concept was good and it created some nice shows. The whole Hirogen arc was terrific. Seven of Nine is a babe but also gave us room to explore the Borg and I think they did a fine job there most of the time.
Last but not least, Insurrection. Come on, it wasn't that bad. Stop comparing it to First Contact. We all know that one was better. Look at it this way: it was definitely the best odd-numbered movie.
I am sure the new series will have shows that suck. And I am sure some shows will be very interesting and exciting to watch.
And if you really think Star Trek sucks nowadays, just ignore it and watch reruns of the shows you did like or watch other series and movies.
Hate to tell you this, but the Internet goes beyond web browsers. Uniform Resource Identifiers need to be addressed. As the 'idea' here is 'we are gonna do this with browser add-ons', this shows these people are not thinking in terms of the big picture.
If you can write a plug-in for web browsers, you can also patch the gethostbyaddr() call of your OS or write a new function/library which extends its functionality.
The GPL license is just preventing a corporate free lunch.
Exactly. Although the GPL doesn't give as much freedom as the BSDL, it does provide a lot of fairness. Compare it to our neat society: total freedom is not good, I am very glad that we don't give everyone the unlimited freedom to kill each other for example.
There is nothing wrong with restrictions, as long as they are fair. And the GPL captures that spirit and that's what I like about it.
Still, it is a pain to make your pages look good on Netscape 4.x. Their spotty implementation of CSS and other small bugs have always been an irritation to me.
Use @import to import your style sheets into a document. NS4 doesn't support it and if your HTML is structural, the page will still look fine. The lay-out will not be beautiful, but the document is still readable - partial/buggy CSS support often does more harm than dropping it alltogether.
For instance take Oracle Applications, it is nearly impossible to install it on RedHat 7.0 or any glibc 2.2 based distro since the applications were built against 2.1.x. When you install this software it tries to relink itself with the correct libraries and fails miserably. You can however force it to use glibc-compat, but that isn't a solution for a production system.
Oficially, glibc2.1 was not a production release but development. If glibc-compat is not acceptable on a production system, then software linked to a non-production library should not be acceptable either.
.NET has much more potential than Java because it is fully supported by Microsoft. That's a sad truth, but hard to deny.
Microsoft still owns the desktop. Including the desktop of many developers/programmers. And Microsoft has a significant market share of the server market, not so overwhelming as the desktop, but it's definitely not NULL either.
Admitted, the company is losing power and is not so influential as they once have been. Especially in the embedded devices they are not doing as well as they'd like. But still, Microsoft has a lot more influence on the market than Sun. If there is any company with the (marketing) power to have.NET succeed, it's Microsoft.
Will.NET change the world? Not really. It's not *that* special actually. Will it have impact? You betcha.
I'm personally hoping that Zend will release the PHP compiler soon and that PHP will allow stricter OOP such as private and protected members in classes. That might actually be a darn good alternative. (same applies to possible Perl projects heading that way, but I do not use Perl enough to know the situation wrt this)
So Linus' Linux might not be the best kernel every purpose in the world, big deal. The man should get a little more respect: releasing the kernel code under the GPL is exactly the reason why he can *not* kill Linux, because it *can* be forked.
Maybe a fork is indeed necessary. But let's not forget that if such a fork comes alive, it is only because Linus allowed it by using the GPL.
So go ahead big companies, fork it and shut up.
They note Torvalds lacks formal accountability for Linux...
Argh damn, almost a tech article without FUD. Better luck next time.
> So could someone please tell me why people
> really care about distributions?
It's more than a different installation procedure and package management system. While what I am about to say is not true for all distributions, it certainly is true for Slackware: most distro's have their own attitude and philosophy.
Red Hat for example, tries to be user-friendly and bleeding-edge. Mandrake is a nice demonstration of different attitude: it used to be (still is?) based on Red Hat, but with some enhancements to remove some of the shortcomings of Red Hat.
Debian's philosophy includes that every package must be open source. You won't find Netscape there and until recently KDE wasn't in their either due to a possible QPL/GPL license conflict between KDE and Qt. There is a non-free repository, but the main Debian distro will never contain any software not completely open source.
Slackware has another attitude, for which it is hated by some and loved by others including me: "do it yourself". Slackware is very traditional with scripts, not too bleeding-edge for software (and thus stable) and very friendly for users wanting complete control.
Yes, compiling a lot yourself takes longer, but Slackware users have that mentality and to be honest, applications compiled from source simply seem to run more stable - at least for me, on Slackware - possibly because Slackware is - by its philosophy - a great environment for compiling your own stuff.
I guess that's why people care: some distributions have character.
This will not affect junk mail and spam at all. The only thing you're about to accomplish is the end of postage paid envelopes. They will still spam you and others. The only difference is that people actually interested in the product - spammed or not - won't be able to send in anything without any costs.
Microsoft is complaining that they cannot make a client communicating with the AIM/ICQ networks because AOL keeps the protocol proprietary.
Yet there are tons of free/open software clients working flawlessly. If we can figure it out, why can't they? Are they more vulnerable to legal action from AOL regarding reverse engineering?
Will the EU and the USA follow?
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 1
What is the likelyhood that the EU and USA (and other countries/unions) will follow? Because this means very little unless it is agreed upon by most governments:
I doubt they can enforce Norwegian law on a spammer not from Norway, so it's still kind of legal in the rest of the world. And this means nothing has really changed yet, although this might set things in motion. As long as it's legal *somewhere*, it will be a problem. Just look at all the Nazi sites in free speech USA and the high number of child porn sites in Russia.
Because (in Europe) just like Macrovision-free and DVD-region free/switch DVD players, there will be unknown brands selling TV's without the restrictions in no time.
Later, the bigger brands will follow after seeing the customer demand for these friendly players/TV's.
It's incredible there are no such DVD players for sale in the USA. Are they actually prohibited by law or are the manufacturers not willing to make them because of MPAA/DVD-CCA pressure and a possible lack of customer demand since region 1 is the primary region for releases?
I don't expect this will actually be a big problem if you respect consumer rights a bit more: just don't accept it and demand something better.
No market, no goods. That's why you don't have region-free DVD players.
That's one of the reasons, but not the most important one.
Most titles are also available in Europe, albeit a little later every now and then. Although that wasn't the case for Jurassic Park, Gladiator or Virgin Suicides, those titles were available in Europe as soon as or in case of the latter title even sooner than the USA. There are also quite a few European region 2 releases not on region 1. Of course not the big Hollywood releases, but if you're a fan of Dr. Who or current english series such as Cold Feet, you're a lot better of with region 2.
I think the biggest reason is simply the MPAA/DVD-CCA having a much stronger position in Northern America than Europe. While I cannot say I agree with all decision of the European Commity regarding technology issues, it does seem that European consumers have more rights than American ones or at least better ways to protect and use those rights.
At least in Europe, region-free players are quite common, even the popular/class-A brands sell them. The lesser known brands even have players for sale with the Macrovision protection removed.
Furthermore, it's not much hassle to import region 1 titles either, plenty of Internet stores such as ThunderDVD.com and Bigstar.com to send me the goodies.
I haven't bothered to check regioncodes for many months now. And even if regionfree players aren't for sale where you live: there are plenty of websites to tell you your player can be turned into one with a $25 all-in-one remote-control.
Bush: We can assure you the Republican Party has no intellectual property whatsoever.
Gore: But under our administration, this would apply to the majority of US citizens and not just the top 1%!
I'm not a Perl freak, in fact I love PHP, but any review about web scripting languages for Linux which only lists Perl and doesn't include it as one of the main options, well.. sucks.
They make it sound like Perl is dead and only great if you're already using it (right CmdrTaco?) but not an option when starting with a new project.
Does anyone have any details on why Blackstar should feel so endebted to Conway?
Maybe because they are one of the few newconomy websites that truly understand the Internet and e-commerce.
Their websites is focussed on the products, nothing else.
When e-mailing them you get a direct response with an estimated reply time based on their inbox size and present crew - 24hrs a day.
One bloke congratulated me with a victory of my national team during the Euro2000 football (soccer) championships. At 4am.
One of my orders got lost in the mail or something, bottomline, it never arrived. They replaced it free of charge, no questions asked (except to return one of the items in case a second one would ever show up).
I've always felt very comfortable shopping there, because Blackstar seems to care about its customers. It doesn't amaze me that instead of patenting stupid stuff like Amazon, they contribute to cool stuff.
I don't want to turn this into a commercial, so I must admit I am not happy with their plain text login form/handler. Or that some actors/actresses and goods appear in the database multiple times.
I've always felt very comfortable shopping there, because Blackstar seems to care about its customers. It doesn't amaze me that instead of patenting stupid stuff like Amazon, they contribute to cool stuff. Not all companies are stupid or evil and Damian Conway is benefitting from that right now.
How do you suppose the free market system is supposed to work with laws like DMCA and UCITA around?
Can anyone tell me (being a simple minded European), if might-be US president Bush Jr. really wants a free market and not too much government interference with the economy, does that also mean he will fight these laws?
If the person who put together those screenshots is so concerned about displaying "the human form", why aren't there any pics of some guy with his ass hanging out?
Being that person, I think I can answer that one.
That wallpaper simply happened to be one of the wallpapers I was using at the time I compiled the screenshots. That's basically the whole story.
No need to make a big fuzz about it.. I've seen many software screenshots with models/actresses on it. Gail Porter doesn't seem to mind having pictures taken where some off her clothes tend to fall off, so why should we?
This is just objectification of women.
I doubt she reads Slashdot, but shouldn't it really be up to Miss Porter herself whether she objects her pictures being looked at in/on magazines, sites and wallpapers?
I find it unprofessional to have it on the main KDE site.
I'll take this view under consideration when preparing new screenshots. Chances are I will create some new ones showing off 2.0 Final.
Unless they had near unlimited bandwidth and resources, this is impossible.
Sure, they might have mapped a whole lot. But you cannot scan all the new and existing domains and IP addresses (you'll need both, some IP's don't have a domain and other have multiple named based hosts) and check whether there are new services on any of those. Continuously.
Lots of good *and* bad spots are protected in one way or the other and I doubt they circumvented each and every of those protections.
Again, I will believe they mapped a large portion, but a claim to have it *all* is quite arrogant and shows the lack of a solid understanding of the Internet, really.
No doubt, to support his words, Andy will soon announce that ICANN will make a new toplevel domain available, containing the complete deCSS source code!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I really have my doubts whether this information is genuine. Many people at the TrekBSS forum seem to agree - or I agree with them, if you prefer. :-)
Do you even know *why* DS9 was so different from TNG? Because TNG was starting to get boring with all those nice and almost flawless characters and another series like that would be very boring. Instead, DS9 was different. A lot more shades of grey, flawed characters with dark sides and yes, perhaps not always the most positive view of the future.
Gene wouldn't have liked it that way. Well, wake up: we were not exactly getting along with the Klingons and Romulans in TOS, are we? Sure, there was no large war like the Dominion one, but there was conflict. (actually there was plenty of war, just not during the timespan of the series)
I'm glad DS9 explored some new grounds. Not yet another starship, but a station. Many reoccuring characters. True, a soap-like arc, but therefore also bigger story arcs and some continuity I *like* in TV shows.
As for Voyager: again something else. Away from Starfleet. While I would agree that could have played out better at times, the concept was good and it created some nice shows. The whole Hirogen arc was terrific. Seven of Nine is a babe but also gave us room to explore the Borg and I think they did a fine job there most of the time.
Last but not least, Insurrection. Come on, it wasn't that bad. Stop comparing it to First Contact. We all know that one was better. Look at it this way: it was definitely the best odd-numbered movie.
I am sure the new series will have shows that suck. And I am sure some shows will be very interesting and exciting to watch.
And if you really think Star Trek sucks nowadays, just ignore it and watch reruns of the shows you did like or watch other series and movies.
If you can write a plug-in for web browsers, you can also patch the gethostbyaddr() call of your OS or write a new function/library which extends its functionality.
Konqueror runs most if not all Netscape plug-ins. So does Opera. I am assuming Mozilla does too.
You might get the .dot after all, guys.
Exactly. Although the GPL doesn't give as much freedom as the BSDL, it does provide a lot of fairness. Compare it to our neat society: total freedom is not good, I am very glad that we don't give everyone the unlimited freedom to kill each other for example.
There is nothing wrong with restrictions, as long as they are fair. And the GPL captures that spirit and that's what I like about it.
Use @import to import your style sheets into a document. NS4 doesn't support it and if your HTML is structural, the page will still look fine. The lay-out will not be beautiful, but the document is still readable - partial/buggy CSS support often does more harm than dropping it alltogether.
After all, are we sure the MIR decision makers don't read /. ??
Girlfriends birthday and her favourite number. And *no*, I did not just give away my password or PIN. ;-)
Oficially, glibc2.1 was not a production release but development. If glibc-compat is not acceptable on a production system, then software linked to a non-production library should not be acceptable either.
Microsoft still owns the desktop. Including the desktop of many developers/programmers. And Microsoft has a significant market share of the server market, not so overwhelming as the desktop, but it's definitely not NULL either.
Admitted, the company is losing power and is not so influential as they once have been. Especially in the embedded devices they are not doing as well as they'd like. But still, Microsoft has a lot more influence on the market than Sun. If there is any company with the (marketing) power to have .NET succeed, it's Microsoft.
Will .NET change the world? Not really. It's not *that* special actually. Will it have impact? You betcha.
I'm personally hoping that Zend will release the PHP compiler soon and that PHP will allow stricter OOP such as private and protected members in classes. That might actually be a darn good alternative. (same applies to possible Perl projects heading that way, but I do not use Perl enough to know the situation wrt this)
Maybe a fork is indeed necessary. But let's not forget that if such a fork comes alive, it is only because Linus allowed it by using the GPL.
So go ahead big companies, fork it and shut up.
They note Torvalds lacks formal accountability for Linux ...
Argh damn, almost a tech article without FUD. Better luck next time.
It's more than a different installation procedure and package management system. While what I am about to say is not true for all distributions, it certainly is true for Slackware: most distro's have their own attitude and philosophy.
Red Hat for example, tries to be user-friendly and bleeding-edge. Mandrake is a nice demonstration of different attitude: it used to be (still is?) based on Red Hat, but with some enhancements to remove some of the shortcomings of Red Hat.
Debian's philosophy includes that every package must be open source. You won't find Netscape there and until recently KDE wasn't in their either due to a possible QPL/GPL license conflict between KDE and Qt. There is a non-free repository, but the main Debian distro will never contain any software not completely open source.
Slackware has another attitude, for which it is hated by some and loved by others including me: "do it yourself". Slackware is very traditional with scripts, not too bleeding-edge for software (and thus stable) and very friendly for users wanting complete control.
Yes, compiling a lot yourself takes longer, but Slackware users have that mentality and to be honest, applications compiled from source simply seem to run more stable - at least for me, on Slackware - possibly because Slackware is - by its philosophy - a great environment for compiling your own stuff.
I guess that's why people care: some distributions have character.
This will not affect junk mail and spam at all. The only thing you're about to accomplish is the end of postage paid envelopes. They will still spam you and others. The only difference is that people actually interested in the product - spammed or not - won't be able to send in anything without any costs.
Yet there are tons of free/open software clients working flawlessly. If we can figure it out, why can't they? Are they more vulnerable to legal action from AOL regarding reverse engineering?
I doubt they can enforce Norwegian law on a spammer not from Norway, so it's still kind of legal in the rest of the world. And this means nothing has really changed yet, although this might set things in motion. As long as it's legal *somewhere*, it will be a problem. Just look at all the Nazi sites in free speech USA and the high number of child porn sites in Russia.
Later, the bigger brands will follow after seeing the customer demand for these friendly players/TV's.
It's incredible there are no such DVD players for sale in the USA. Are they actually prohibited by law or are the manufacturers not willing to make them because of MPAA/DVD-CCA pressure and a possible lack of customer demand since region 1 is the primary region for releases?
I don't expect this will actually be a big problem if you respect consumer rights a bit more: just don't accept it and demand something better.
That's one of the reasons, but not the most important one.
Most titles are also available in Europe, albeit a little later every now and then. Although that wasn't the case for Jurassic Park, Gladiator or Virgin Suicides, those titles were available in Europe as soon as or in case of the latter title even sooner than the USA. There are also quite a few European region 2 releases not on region 1. Of course not the big Hollywood releases, but if you're a fan of Dr. Who or current english series such as Cold Feet, you're a lot better of with region 2.
I think the biggest reason is simply the MPAA/DVD-CCA having a much stronger position in Northern America than Europe. While I cannot say I agree with all decision of the European Commity regarding technology issues, it does seem that European consumers have more rights than American ones or at least better ways to protect and use those rights.
Furthermore, it's not much hassle to import region 1 titles either, plenty of Internet stores such as ThunderDVD.com and Bigstar.com to send me the goodies.
I haven't bothered to check regioncodes for many months now. And even if regionfree players aren't for sale where you live: there are plenty of websites to tell you your player can be turned into one with a $25 all-in-one remote-control.
Bush: We can assure you the Republican Party has no intellectual property whatsoever. Gore: But under our administration, this would apply to the majority of US citizens and not just the top 1%!
They make it sound like Perl is dead and only great if you're already using it (right CmdrTaco?) but not an option when starting with a new project.
Maybe because they are one of the few newconomy websites that truly understand the Internet and e-commerce.
I've always felt very comfortable shopping there, because Blackstar seems to care about its customers. It doesn't amaze me that instead of patenting stupid stuff like Amazon, they contribute to cool stuff.
I don't want to turn this into a commercial, so I must admit I am not happy with their plain text login form/handler. Or that some actors/actresses and goods appear in the database multiple times.
I've always felt very comfortable shopping there, because Blackstar seems to care about its customers. It doesn't amaze me that instead of patenting stupid stuff like Amazon, they contribute to cool stuff. Not all companies are stupid or evil and Damian Conway is benefitting from that right now.
Can anyone tell me (being a simple minded European), if might-be US president Bush Jr. really wants a free market and not too much government interference with the economy, does that also mean he will fight these laws?
Obviously these laws do have a large impact, no?
Being that person, I think I can answer that one.
That wallpaper simply happened to be one of the wallpapers I was using at the time I compiled the screenshots. That's basically the whole story.
No need to make a big fuzz about it.. I've seen many software screenshots with models/actresses on it. Gail Porter doesn't seem to mind having pictures taken where some off her clothes tend to fall off, so why should we?
This is just objectification of women.
I doubt she reads Slashdot, but shouldn't it really be up to Miss Porter herself whether she objects her pictures being looked at in/on magazines, sites and wallpapers?
I find it unprofessional to have it on the main KDE site.
I'll take this view under consideration when preparing new screenshots. Chances are I will create some new ones showing off 2.0 Final.
Sure, they might have mapped a whole lot. But you cannot scan all the new and existing domains and IP addresses (you'll need both, some IP's don't have a domain and other have multiple named based hosts) and check whether there are new services on any of those. Continuously.
Lots of good *and* bad spots are protected in one way or the other and I doubt they circumvented each and every of those protections.
Again, I will believe they mapped a large portion, but a claim to have it *all* is quite arrogant and shows the lack of a solid understanding of the Internet, really.
No doubt, to support his words, Andy will soon announce that ICANN will make a new toplevel domain available, containing the complete deCSS source code! :-)