Yes, write your representative, tell him he's lost a vote.
Write your own words, without resorting to name calling or cursing, or any other immature stuff that would get your letter summarily tossed into the trash can.
Don't send a boilerplate letter, partake in a mass-mailing, and don't waste time signing some online petition, those go straight to the trash can too (and for good reason, since they all reek of an agenda).
Believe it or not, when politicians start to see a growing number of real registered voters are turning against them, they actually do take heed.
I'm sure theres some sort of kernel parameter to make the keypad work correctly.
I'm sure theres some patch somewhere to support the touchpad.
Then, of course, there's the whole issue with the various PCMCIA cards I have, who knows if they'll work or not? On the road I regularly use a USB 2.0 expansion card to hook up a 160 gig external drive. Will that work? Probably not. What about my wireless card?
When I'm sitting at home, I have tons of time to dink around with linux, and actually like tinkering until everything works right. Last night I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my linux based router spontaneously stopped handling DNS queries for me.
I use my laptop primarily on the road, and I when I'm stuck in some shithole village that time forgot, for instance, anywhere in northwest Arkansas, every second counts, because I want to get out of there as fast as I can. I just don't have time to mess with it.
That is to say, I can put up with a little bullshit on my desktop or server installs, but it's just too important to me that my laptop works.
As it is, XP has no problems on my laptop. If and when linux works as well, I'll switch.
I'm actually downloading Whorey-Hog (they have lots of those in Arkansas) right now to see how it works. I'm not getting my hopes up, though.
Linux ignores the BIOS and uses it's own calls to talk to the hardware.
It's a linux issue/shortcoming. Blame the BIOS people all you want, but linux pretty much ignores the BIOS once it's bootstrapped, except in some cases if you specifically configure it to use BIOS calls to, say, get HDD geometry.
Linux development is still primarily driven towards the server set, which, not unlike Samara, they never sleep.
Suspend/sleeping even on "well supported" desktop hardware doesn't work right. Hibernation under linux is still way alpha and unstable on most rigs.
The exact same article will be written. And again in 2007, and again in 2008..
Unless something dramatic happens, I don't see linux ever having anything close to universal wireless support, or support for the umpteen million other specialty hardwares in a laptop.
I tried linux on this gateway laptop about six months ago. I couldn't get the touchpad working, it wouldn't recognize the lid switch to put it into hibernate mode (or even force a shutdown), I couldn't get the RCA-out to work (I like to use it as a portable DVD player on the road). I had trouble getting sound to work, but that's about par for the course with ALSA. It can be a real PITA to get something as common as an SBLive to work. The Radeon Mobility wouldnt work right with ATI's drivers, so I was stuck with the SVGA driver.
It's a problem the manufacturers have to solve, the stuff is all proprietary, and they aren't about to open all the hardware to let kernel hackers at it - especially not WRT to the wireless chipsets. There's just not enough benefit (ie; customers) to warrant the cost of a dedicated linux support staff.
Refer to the article on slashdot the other day about MSFT..
Bill Gates has pledged 90+% of his net worth, and has stated it is his personal mission to stop AIDS./. writes it up with some smarmy "I guess Bill is too busy helping those brown people" quip. I read that as a paraphrase of "Bill Gates is a dirty nigger lover".
They're too fucking retarded to mentally seperate a man from a corporation, and too immature to discuss any sort of issue without lame ass ad-hominem attacks.
I mean, I think the linux community is full of dipshits and arrogant assholes. Yet, I don't run around posting "Linus Trovalds is a nigger lover"
What, exactly, have you done to help your fellow man, Taco? Not a fucking thing.
Then of course, there's the blatant racism against Indians. I guess they have to blame someone for being unemployed, rather than looking in a mirror and realizing they have no jobs because we have no tangible computer skills.
I've pretty much abandoned the "geek community". Nobody discusses technology here anymore. Slashdot is nothing but lame ass "We hate Bush, we hate Gates, we hate Blah blah blah" rants.
Frankly, I'd love to see a discussion of how this software works, what it's shortcomings are, what it's strengths are. I won't get that here. Once upon a time I did. I keep coming back hoping it'll once again be a "news for nerds" site.
The community here can't discuss anything computer-related on a technical level. The average slashdotter is not a programmer, the average slashdotter is an "IT guy" who reboots your computer, or crawls under your desk to plug in the Cat 5, or he's on the other end of the phone reading through some scripted troubleshooting measures, and that's where his skills end.
It wasn't Clapton's album, it was Derek and the Dominos, a new band that contained both Allman and Clapton. They formed the "band" because neither wanted to insult the other by making them look like a "special guest".
In Claptons own words, he and Allman were "instant soul-mates" from the time they met.
The song Layla was about Linda McCartney, whom Clapton was madly in love with at the time (she wasn't married to Paul yet), as long as we're talking 70's guitar-rock trivia.
I guess thats a sign of things to come: endless PSP slashvertisements.
Is there anything in this article that hasn't been posted 3 or 4 times here already?
Re:Live Concerts are owned by Label
on
EZTree Shuts Down
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· Score: 1
The Dave Matthews Band has stated that they do not support digital sharing of their live shows, rather they would like to see the community continue sharing CD's
Does Dave know that CDs are digital?
It's not that complicated. They set out the terms. If they say, it's OK to record and trade, but not OK to publish on the internet, then you have to either take it or leave it.
It's OK to eat popcorn and drink soda in the movie theatre, but it's not OK to bring your own. That's life, sparky. You simply don't get to make all the rules.
Re:Shutting down Bittorrent one site at a time
on
EZTree Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
But they have broken the law.
The key word in the summary is "usually", referring to the content being copyright free bootlegs.
If they hosted even one copyrighted work, they broke copyright law.
Imagine a Rite-Aid that "usually" sells only legal drugs. It doesn't work that way. Sell one joint, do 10 years for trafficking.
Or Michael Jackson getting off because he "usually" doesn't jack off the kids who sleep over.
You should bitch at whatever asshole upped Metallica's Binge and Purge boxed set, or NOFX' "I Heard They Suck Live" CD. They poisoned the site.
torrents on EasyTree were usually unreleased live musical performances
The key word in that sentence is USUALLY.
If the site was hosting 9999 copyright free Grateful Dead concerts, and only 1 warezed copy of Halo 2, guess what? They're in violation.
They could have simply gone through their offerings and only removed the illegal stuff.
Lots of those live performances ARE commercial stuff too. Go look at the CD aisle at Best Buy, and imagine that, there are plenty of professionally produced live concerts.
Even Metallica has no problem with fans trading bootlegs of concerts. The thing is, those bootlegs sound like dogshit, and people would rather trade a CD-rip of the "Binge and Purge" boxed set.
Why do you let users use the Windows AutoUpdate feature in the first place?
Similarly, if you don't want users updating their Gentoo boxes, because you have a specific version of some library installed, and an emerge -u world will screw everything up, don't put the users in the Portage group./. makes another mountain out of an MSFT molehill. There are dozens of ways to block SP2 if you really need to.
Subversion, of course. What else is there? RCS? CVS?
OSS communities tend to settle on one project, and nothing or noone ever seriously competes with it. Ie; the linux kernel, SAMBA, OO.o, Mozilla, GIMP, eventually either KDE or Gnome (heck, used to be lots of desktops), etc..
In the source control realm, it seems to be all about subversion. It seems to have the mindshare and community behind it.
You could hit google and read what REALLY happened, instead of just making shit up based on the "facts" you read on slashdot.
Mike Rowe Soft.com -- chalk one up for the little guy
Microsoft has admitted that "perhaps it had taken its trademark rights 'a little too seriously'" when it sued 17 year old Mike Rowe over his domain name, MikeRoweSoft.com. This week the case was settled, with Microsoft agreeing to trade Rowe the domain for "a free Microsoft Xbox video-game console and a free trip to the company's Redmond campus for the Microsoft Research Tech Fest" as well as Microsoft paying for him to pursue Microsoft certification and any costs involved in moving his web design business to a new domain. Microsoft will also direct mikerowesoft.com's traffic to the new domain.
Real journalism doesn't contain stupid shit like this: "Maybe Chairman Bill doesn't "get" it because he's too busy answering press calls about his generosity in donating his billions to them poor brown people over there."
There you go, simultaneously racist, stupid, and ignorant.
I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish.
The OSS "community" has a bad reputation precisely because of ignorant stupid bullshit statements like that one.
...and by 2008 Americans who crossed freely into Canada will be unable to return to the United States without a passport
This is CBC fear mongering, this is ridiculous. So long as you can prove citizenship (have ID, birth certificate, voter registration card, etc), they can't deny you entry into your own country.
As for Canadians, even though it wasnt always required, it's always been wise to take a passport to the US, and have it stamped at the border.
For instance: if you get in a fender bender in the states, and can't prove to your insurance co when you arrived there, and when you left, you may find that they simply walk away from you, because you can't prove that you (the insured driver) were in the states when the accident occurred.
Or, if you run afoul of the law, you can prove to some a-hole cop that, indeed, you haven't been in the country more than a month (which requires something more than the defacto "vacation" visa waiver).
US Immigration law assumes your guilty until you prove yourself innocent. I'm a Canadian living in the US with a Green Card, and went through all their bullshit marraige fraud act stuff (in the US, every marraige to a non-US citizen is fraudulent until you prove otherwise).
Slashdot Mirror
Call a state Senator? Write him?
Yes, write your representative, tell him he's lost a vote.
Write your own words, without resorting to name calling or cursing, or any other immature stuff that would get your letter summarily tossed into the trash can.
Don't send a boilerplate letter, partake in a mass-mailing, and don't waste time signing some online petition, those go straight to the trash can too (and for good reason, since they all reek of an agenda).
Believe it or not, when politicians start to see a growing number of real registered voters are turning against them, they actually do take heed.
There were still too many other issues.
I'm sure I could try DRI with the video card.
I'm sure theres some sort of kernel parameter to make the keypad work correctly.
I'm sure theres some patch somewhere to support the touchpad.
Then, of course, there's the whole issue with the various PCMCIA cards I have, who knows if they'll work or not? On the road I regularly use a USB 2.0 expansion card to hook up a 160 gig external drive. Will that work? Probably not. What about my wireless card?
When I'm sitting at home, I have tons of time to dink around with linux, and actually like tinkering until everything works right. Last night I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my linux based router spontaneously stopped handling DNS queries for me.
I use my laptop primarily on the road, and I when I'm stuck in some shithole village that time forgot, for instance, anywhere in northwest Arkansas, every second counts, because I want to get out of there as fast as I can. I just don't have time to mess with it.
That is to say, I can put up with a little bullshit on my desktop or server installs, but it's just too important to me that my laptop works.
As it is, XP has no problems on my laptop. If and when linux works as well, I'll switch.
I'm actually downloading Whorey-Hog (they have lots of those in Arkansas) right now to see how it works. I'm not getting my hopes up, though.
Linux ignores the BIOS and uses it's own calls to talk to the hardware.
It's a linux issue/shortcoming. Blame the BIOS people all you want, but linux pretty much ignores the BIOS once it's bootstrapped, except in some cases if you specifically configure it to use BIOS calls to, say, get HDD geometry.
Linux development is still primarily driven towards the server set, which, not unlike Samara, they never sleep.
Suspend/sleeping even on "well supported" desktop hardware doesn't work right. Hibernation under linux is still way alpha and unstable on most rigs.
The exact same article will be written. And again in 2007, and again in 2008..
Unless something dramatic happens, I don't see linux ever having anything close to universal wireless support, or support for the umpteen million other specialty hardwares in a laptop.
I tried linux on this gateway laptop about six months ago. I couldn't get the touchpad working, it wouldn't recognize the lid switch to put it into hibernate mode (or even force a shutdown), I couldn't get the RCA-out to work (I like to use it as a portable DVD player on the road). I had trouble getting sound to work, but that's about par for the course with ALSA. It can be a real PITA to get something as common as an SBLive to work. The Radeon Mobility wouldnt work right with ATI's drivers, so I was stuck with the SVGA driver.
It's a problem the manufacturers have to solve, the stuff is all proprietary, and they aren't about to open all the hardware to let kernel hackers at it - especially not WRT to the wireless chipsets. There's just not enough benefit (ie; customers) to warrant the cost of a dedicated linux support staff.
Sad but true...
Refer to the article on slashdot the other day about MSFT..
/. writes it up with some smarmy "I guess Bill is too busy helping those brown people" quip. I read that as a paraphrase of "Bill Gates is a dirty nigger lover".
Bill Gates has pledged 90+% of his net worth, and has stated it is his personal mission to stop AIDS.
They're too fucking retarded to mentally seperate a man from a corporation, and too immature to discuss any sort of issue without lame ass ad-hominem attacks.
I mean, I think the linux community is full of dipshits and arrogant assholes. Yet, I don't run around posting "Linus Trovalds is a nigger lover"
What, exactly, have you done to help your fellow man, Taco? Not a fucking thing.
Then of course, there's the blatant racism against Indians. I guess they have to blame someone for being unemployed, rather than looking in a mirror and realizing they have no jobs because we have no tangible computer skills.
I've pretty much abandoned the "geek community". Nobody discusses technology here anymore. Slashdot is nothing but lame ass "We hate Bush, we hate Gates, we hate Blah blah blah" rants.
Frankly, I'd love to see a discussion of how this software works, what it's shortcomings are, what it's strengths are. I won't get that here. Once upon a time I did. I keep coming back hoping it'll once again be a "news for nerds" site.
The community here can't discuss anything computer-related on a technical level. The average slashdotter is not a programmer, the average slashdotter is an "IT guy" who reboots your computer, or crawls under your desk to plug in the Cat 5, or he's on the other end of the phone reading through some scripted troubleshooting measures, and that's where his skills end.
Anyhow, waste some more mod points on me.
I just happened to be playing through Conker's Bad Fur Day, so I typed in "Who is Conker?" just for the hell of it..
I got this:
is the name used in Britain, Ireland and some former British colonies for the nuts of the Horse
When I read the wiki link, it's actually discussing the Horse-Chestnut tree, Conker's being a colloquialism for it's nuts.
Oh Google, and your wacky truncations!
Will make your whites whiter and your brights brighter.
Just watch how it cuts through this stubborn blood stain.
You'd rather piss away another 10,000 barrels of oil a day because fixing a bunch of software would be a pain in the ass?
Don't you want jobs?
Well, most slashdotters don't have any computer skills, let alone as programmers, but still?
Or is this just a case of "it behooves us to whine about everything the government does"?
It wasn't Clapton's album, it was Derek and the Dominos, a new band that contained both Allman and Clapton. They formed the "band" because neither wanted to insult the other by making them look like a "special guest".
In Claptons own words, he and Allman were "instant soul-mates" from the time they met.
The song Layla was about Linda McCartney, whom Clapton was madly in love with at the time (she wasn't married to Paul yet), as long as we're talking 70's guitar-rock trivia.
I guess thats a sign of things to come: endless PSP slashvertisements.
Is there anything in this article that hasn't been posted 3 or 4 times here already?
The Dave Matthews Band has stated that they do not support digital sharing of their live shows, rather they would like to see the community continue sharing CD's
Does Dave know that CDs are digital?
It's not that complicated. They set out the terms. If they say, it's OK to record and trade, but not OK to publish on the internet, then you have to either take it or leave it.
It's OK to eat popcorn and drink soda in the movie theatre, but it's not OK to bring your own. That's life, sparky. You simply don't get to make all the rules.
But they have broken the law.
The key word in the summary is "usually", referring to the content being copyright free bootlegs.
If they hosted even one copyrighted work, they broke copyright law.
Imagine a Rite-Aid that "usually" sells only legal drugs. It doesn't work that way. Sell one joint, do 10 years for trafficking.
Or Michael Jackson getting off because he "usually" doesn't jack off the kids who sleep over.
You should bitch at whatever asshole upped Metallica's Binge and Purge boxed set, or NOFX' "I Heard They Suck Live" CD. They poisoned the site.
torrents on EasyTree were usually unreleased live musical performances
The key word in that sentence is USUALLY.
If the site was hosting 9999 copyright free Grateful Dead concerts, and only 1 warezed copy of Halo 2, guess what? They're in violation.
They could have simply gone through their offerings and only removed the illegal stuff.
Lots of those live performances ARE commercial stuff too. Go look at the CD aisle at Best Buy, and imagine that, there are plenty of professionally produced live concerts.
Even Metallica has no problem with fans trading bootlegs of concerts. The thing is, those bootlegs sound like dogshit, and people would rather trade a CD-rip of the "Binge and Purge" boxed set.
How about not modding it at all, and perhaps replying with correct information? You know, dialogue, the exchange of ideas and information.
I know you get a smug sense of self-satisfaction by just stamping "WRONG!" and wiping your hands of it, but that doesn't help anyone.
You don't have to use your points on the first posts you see.
Why do you let users use the Windows AutoUpdate feature in the first place?
/. makes another mountain out of an MSFT molehill. There are dozens of ways to block SP2 if you really need to.
Similarly, if you don't want users updating their Gentoo boxes, because you have a specific version of some library installed, and an emerge -u world will screw everything up, don't put the users in the Portage group.
Subversion, of course. What else is there? RCS? CVS?
OSS communities tend to settle on one project, and nothing or noone ever seriously competes with it. Ie; the linux kernel, SAMBA, OO.o, Mozilla, GIMP, eventually either KDE or Gnome (heck, used to be lots of desktops), etc..
In the source control realm, it seems to be all about subversion. It seems to have the mindshare and community behind it.
Who cares about Moore's law?
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-body!
Where can I download the source for my Series 2 Tivo, and how can I compile and use it?
Aww shoot, I can't.
CherryOS just needs to encrypt their binaries, and the source is absofuckinglutely useless.
You could hit google and read what REALLY happened, instead of just making shit up based on the "facts" you read on slashdot.
Mike Rowe Soft.com -- chalk one up for the little guy
Microsoft has admitted that "perhaps it had taken its trademark rights 'a little too seriously'" when it sued 17 year old Mike Rowe over his domain name, MikeRoweSoft.com. This week the case was settled, with Microsoft agreeing to trade Rowe the domain for "a free Microsoft Xbox video-game console and a free trip to the company's Redmond campus for the Microsoft Research Tech Fest" as well as Microsoft paying for him to pursue Microsoft certification and any costs involved in moving his web design business to a new domain. Microsoft will also direct mikerowesoft.com's traffic to the new domain.
Run the upgrade wizard in VStudio.Net to get your VB.Net project: compile under mono.
The problem is, mono isn't close to supporting winforms. So you're rewriting your entire GUI no matter how you slice it.
Real journalism doesn't contain stupid shit like this: "Maybe Chairman Bill doesn't "get" it because he's too busy answering press calls about his generosity in donating his billions to them poor brown people over there."
There you go, simultaneously racist, stupid, and ignorant.
I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish.
The OSS "community" has a bad reputation precisely because of ignorant stupid bullshit statements like that one.
...and by 2008 Americans who crossed freely into Canada will be unable to return to the United States without a passport
This is CBC fear mongering, this is ridiculous. So long as you can prove citizenship (have ID, birth certificate, voter registration card, etc), they can't deny you entry into your own country.
As for Canadians, even though it wasnt always required, it's always been wise to take a passport to the US, and have it stamped at the border.
For instance: if you get in a fender bender in the states, and can't prove to your insurance co when you arrived there, and when you left, you may find that they simply walk away from you, because you can't prove that you (the insured driver) were in the states when the accident occurred.
Or, if you run afoul of the law, you can prove to some a-hole cop that, indeed, you haven't been in the country more than a month (which requires something more than the defacto "vacation" visa waiver).
US Immigration law assumes your guilty until you prove yourself innocent. I'm a Canadian living in the US with a Green Card, and went through all their bullshit marraige fraud act stuff (in the US, every marraige to a non-US citizen is fraudulent until you prove otherwise).
Microsoft has accepted 20 out of the EU's 26 demands and says that it will work as quickly as possible to settle the remaining six.
It's in the first paragraph of the article.
Why don't you and all the other asshats shut the fuck up for once, and read about the great outrages you're always spewing off about?
They want more discussion about it. That's all.
It's like someone sentenced to community service wanting a discussion with their probation officer as to what counts and what doesnt.
They don't give a rats ass about freedom or your rights online or busting up the evil monopoly.
They just want money.
I envision pages upon pages of ballsacks and fruitbones.