b) The eMac was the "cheap, low-power" Apple computer. It used cheaper, lower-end parts, often already outdated (it used G4 chips until the end, while iMacs made the jump to G5 two years earlier). I can totally believe that they're unable to run Illustrator. Even current versions of Firefox might be a bit of a stretch, since I doubt the PPC builds are as heavily optimized as the x86 ones.
> Even current versions of Firefox might be a bit of a stretch, since I doubt the PPC builds are as heavily optimized as the x86 ones.
I was just trying to load up my G4 Mac Mini a few days ago, which was still running Leopard, only option on a PPC mac...
There are no current Firefox builds for G4/Leopard OS. At the time I was last running on this machine, Firefox for Mac available was at 2.0.0.x, and today, you can't even download a recent Firefox 3.6.x, let alone a build of the newer Firefox 4-10 series.
Since Gmail nags me when I visit with a version as recent as Firefox/Iceweasel from Debian Lenny, or anything older than the most recent 3.x firefoxes, to "upgrade to a modern browser" (which is just not available in Debian Lenny)
These macs would be suffering from all the same issues.
Every company is trying to grab more money. Why don't you mail a check if you're not happy paying $2?
Citizens Bank actually charges $2/mo to get a paper statement, per account. I have multiple accounts with them. Net result? I pay $2 to have a statement mailed for _one_ of my accounts, and they dramatically reduce their paper consumption.
This is not the same thing, but how you gonna try and tell me that it's less expensive to employ Phone Drones to take your call (wait, they can take payments with a robot...) or enough programmers to keep the website functioning (a programmer isn't cheaper than a phone operator, are we?...at least I hope not)
I am sure that this is not an example of Verizon trying to give extra business to the postal service, this is just another way that they can get you used to coming in to their store once a month to buy their overpriced accessories and make sure you get a chance to look at the latest over-sized tin can and string that they have to offer.
Assume I had the common sense to only use the printer for counterfeiting.
Stop right there... this is the flaw in your argument. Common sense is in fact a fallacy, there is no such thing.
Actually, most of the protection technology that the government mandates for consumer devices is not for catching hardcore criminals. It really is there to keep us mere plebes in check -- if John Q Public blows $500 of his wife's hard earned money at the strip club, he might try to hide it by printing out a sheet of $20 bills and passing them for groceries once or twice. When the cops inevitably show up, he's going to keep his mouth shut, and he might get away with it if not for the tracking tech. He didn't buy his printer to make a career out of counterfeiting money, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't try it once.
The real bad-guys are not going to print money with a $99 inkjet they bought at Office Max. Uncle Benny has a warehouse full of highly researched and controlled technology. He's going to smuggle the Hong family straight in from China to slave over the printing presses. He knows about all of the protection technology built into the currency, and he wants the bills to be just right, so the money has a fighting chance of slipping past the eye of a secret service agent.
What does this mean for you and I? Hard to say. Does the government have evil intentions? Do they intend to track political dissenters? There's no telling for sure, but the possibility exists that they could. All I know for sure is that I will be pasting magazine clippings together to announce the next few Weekly Jihad Society meetings.
OK, so the brain activates in similar patterns when thoughts are about similar things. There has been plenty of study on this for (hundreds?) of years, but this doesn't mean you can extract any meaningful information from the fact that "the centers in the brain for sex and violence overlap," and barring any new evidence of real meaning in this information, don't use it to make any bets at the horse races.
Bzzzt... There is actually an addressing protocol built into IPv6 known as "Mobile IPv6" which allows a machine on the home network, listening for packets addressed to one of your "mobile IP's" will respond with a packet that tells the sender where to find that computer right now, a "care-of address."
This all requires the mobile computer to report back periodically with status updates on its current "care-of IP", and that's all. This is not a tunnel, it's real mobile IP, built into the protocol. I believe this feature is also available for IPv4 through use of some extension to the protocol.
Also, such an appeal to nihilism is pretty useless as a support for keeping creationism in the ring. How do you know the bible really exists, or if it does, how do you know it says what the letters on the page look like they say?
Your argument depends on an assumption that there is some fundamental difference between belief and observation. Observation depends on the belief that your senses are reliable.
To the contrary, I can believe in God without knowing that the bible exists (based on observation.) In fact, Occam's Razor indicates that beliefs based on Observation are no more or less likely than beliefs based on God.
Of course, you can copy music (I won't call it 'theft' because I don't want to call down the semantics people). I can also rob people on the street, commit fraud, etc. Morality aside, all of these are breaking the 'rules' of society.
The 'rules' of society are the rules that a majority of society follows. If a majority of society is breaking a rule, then it's not a rule of society anymore. If a majority of some subset of society is breaking a rule, and if a majority of society accepts this subset's right to exist, then there is an inequity in the system. It is possible for laws and socially acceptable rules to differ, just like it is possible for laws and morals to differ.
I still agree with your overall conclusion. If the rules are wrong, the rules need to be changed. When some people play by the rules, and some others don't, that is also inequity in the system.
And I paid them money, so I could have a copy. The government has decided that because I have a copy, it is my right to do certain things with that copy. (Fair use rights.) If I bought it, I may not "own" the copyright, but I certainly own the content to the extent that I should be able to use it however I like.
Your view of intellectual property is flawed. Physical objects can be created or destroyed. They are composed of natural resources. Ideas are natural resources, just like anything else. Creative content is created from ideas, just like physical property is constructed from other resources.
Physical property can be transferred from one person to another. If I give you something physical, I do not have it anymore. If I give you some creative work or idea, I can still give it to others, and I have not lost anything. The idea of "property" does not transfer completely from physical objects to ideas. After understanding these differences, we can now discuss the current legal and economic situation of physical security versus security of intellectual property.
It is my right to protect my physical property through physical security. There are laws which punish those who would violate my physical security, because they will be depriving me of my right to my own property.
Bring this over to intellectual property, and you see that the model no longer fits. It is my right to protect my intellectual property through technical or other security. There are laws which punish those who would violate security on intellectual property, because (???) why? The owner hasn't lost anything but some "right to profit" which is not codified anywhere.
I do not have the right to profit from a flawed business model. The owner of some content wishes to prevent me from doing something which I could do legally, if his security was not in place. When I break his security, the only law I have broken is the "no breaking security" law. This is not equivalent to trespassing or theft, because no crime is being committed, besides "breaking the DMCA."
In the world of physical security, it is illegal to pick the lock on someone else's door without permission, because it serves no legal purpose. Whether you are going to steal from their house or not is immaterial, because there is no other valid reason to pick their lock. In the world of intellectual property, it is now illegal to "pick the lock" on a "protected" file, IN SPITE OF the fact that there are many legal uses, including exercise of my fair use rights.
Copyright in this country was fought bitterly until the idea of fair use rights were created as well. Many years later, the companies with their found copyright powers want to remove our fair use rights through technical security, and expect laws to prevent us from "picking the locks." Do you see my point?
The only loss to the author is the ability to charge me extra for something which I should be allowed to do anyway.
So you'd rather buy the DRM games and support the companies that want to use DRM? These aren't all mammoth Sony and Apple companies that we're talking about boycotting. Video game makers are not nearly as resiliant against games selling poorly. If just one game sells poorly enough it could probably put a developing company out of business. (That's not to say that this is the goal either.)
Your point of view is the problem, not the law. You still see businesses that use spam as "legitimate businesses." I don't.
The people using these illegal types of ads are clearly not legitimate businesses. Therefore another activity which sounds illegal (exploiting bugs in programs to get your ads displayed) has been determined by a judge to in fact be illegal. That sounds like a victory against spam to me.
Say what you will about Dells, but I once spilled an entire glass of water into the keyboard of my dell laptop and I'm posting from it now. It was out of commission for about a day or two until it worked fine again. I haven't opened it up to see the damage, but it can't be that bad, it's worked as well as it ever has!
If the worst case scenario is that the system doesnt meet it's goals ("you end up going through the same security rundown...") why would you build the system? A system which improves a majority of scenarios without affecting the worst-case scenario is whats known as an 'Upgrade.' Also, if we can get most passengers through security faster, that leaves more time to investigate the 'questionable' people. In this regard, the worst case scenario for the overall system isn't really the same, it's improved: some passengers are funneled through security faster, and the ones that aren't can be investigated more thoroughly.
That is correct. This means that colleges cannot prevent students from setting up their own wireless networks. It doesn't have anything to say about whether students are allowed to connect said wireless network to the college network. Most colleges (any that care whether you set up a wireless network) should have something in their AUP which outlines what you are and are not allowed to plug into their network jacks. If they say "You can only plug individual computers into our network," and you plug in a wireless router, they have every right to suspend your network access privileges.
You are assuming that SCO cares about their operating system at all, or even selling any products. Most of their litigation tactics make it fairly obvious that they don't really care about that at all. Charging $699 per license for Linux? "This price will be going up at an undisclosed date in the future"???
Things like these convince me that SCO is concerned with one thing only: scaring people away from Linux.
I don't know what kind of hick area you're living in *chuckles*, but out here in the middle of nowhere, Time Warner cable has had VOD for a while now. I've got HBO On Demand, pay something like $7/mo as a flat rate, and I get all of the stuff they've got on there.
Yeah, if you're wondering where the middle of nowhere is... Warsaw, NY, pop ~4000. It's between Buffalo and Rochester, it's about an hour from any city with >20000 people. The middle of nowhere.
Holy shit, turn up the battery on your sarcasm detector. Something is seriously wrong!
Re:MythTV has gotten that good?
on
TiVo Basic
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· Score: 1
If you used it 4-5 months ago, it might be helpful to realize that it's only been around for less than a year (PR2 was released in July of last year, and that was an extremely early beta.)
The frontend and backend have since been separated (one of your biggest gripes, it seems). They can be run on separate machines, and video streamed over the network, if you desire. You can have multiple frontends connecting to one (or more) backends... etc.
The UI is nice now, I don't know how much it has improved, but it's much friendlier. One thing to keep in mind is that it was meant to be used with a remote control, on a TV. It will work fine on a computer, but the interface is not meant to be used with a mouse--only a keyboard, or remote control (with lirc and irxevent).
Bitrate and quality settings all work perfectly, in fact you have the option of recording to NuppelVideo or MPEG4 (or mpeg2 if you have a PVR-250 or PVR-350). My recordings generally take about 600M/hr. Yes, this is a drastic improvement--I remember having massive 2gb/hr recordings as well. It's not like that anymore.
If you tried MythTV 5 months ago and hated it, you should definitely try it again now. It has improved significantly, in just about every way. (Oh, did I mention stability, too... it's pretty damned stable in 0.8 and current cvs, on my machine.)
Sorry, that was a misstatement. I meant to say that MythTV has the same functionality as a Tivo subscription. I was going from one thought to another a bit too quickly.
Someone really needs to start building Mini-ITX machines with Debian and MythTV preloaded en masse. I've been using my desktop as a MythTV machine since the early days, and it's just about surpassed Tivo anyway. Not to mention, no subscription fee.
A stripped down Tivo without season passes removes almost all of the usefulness of the device. MythTV has the same functionality, but it doesn't cost you anything but the hardware. I can't speak for the quality of the software versus Tivo, as I've never used a tivo, but I do find myself spouting the same "Changed the way I think about TV" rhetoric as every tivo user.
Either way, one thing I know MythTV has which Tivo does not have is automatic commercial detection. That's right. Download 0.8, play with it.
Slashdot Mirror
b) The eMac was the "cheap, low-power" Apple computer. It used cheaper, lower-end parts, often already outdated (it used G4 chips until the end, while iMacs made the jump to G5 two years earlier). I can totally believe that they're unable to run Illustrator. Even current versions of Firefox might be a bit of a stretch, since I doubt the PPC builds are as heavily optimized as the x86 ones.
> Even current versions of Firefox might be a bit of a stretch, since I doubt the PPC builds are as heavily optimized as the x86 ones.
I was just trying to load up my G4 Mac Mini a few days ago, which was still running Leopard, only option on a PPC mac...
There are no current Firefox builds for G4/Leopard OS. At the time I was last running on this machine, Firefox for Mac available was at 2.0.0.x, and today, you can't even download a recent Firefox 3.6.x, let alone a build of the newer Firefox 4-10 series.
Since Gmail nags me when I visit with a version as recent as Firefox/Iceweasel from Debian Lenny, or anything older than the most recent 3.x firefoxes, to "upgrade to a modern browser" (which is just not available in Debian Lenny)
These macs would be suffering from all the same issues.
My response: So what?
Every company is trying to grab more money. Why don't you mail a check if you're not happy paying $2?
Citizens Bank actually charges $2/mo to get a paper statement, per account. I have multiple accounts with them. Net result? I pay $2 to have a statement mailed for _one_ of my accounts, and they dramatically reduce their paper consumption.
This is not the same thing, but how you gonna try and tell me that it's less expensive to employ Phone Drones to take your call (wait, they can take payments with a robot...) or enough programmers to keep the website functioning (a programmer isn't cheaper than a phone operator, are we? ...at least I hope not)
I am sure that this is not an example of Verizon trying to give extra business to the postal service, this is just another way that they can get you used to coming in to their store once a month to buy their overpriced accessories and make sure you get a chance to look at the latest over-sized tin can and string that they have to offer.
Assume I had the common sense to only use the printer for counterfeiting.
Stop right there... this is the flaw in your argument. Common sense is in fact a fallacy, there is no such thing.
Actually, most of the protection technology that the government mandates for consumer devices is not for catching hardcore criminals. It really is there to keep us mere plebes in check -- if John Q Public blows $500 of his wife's hard earned money at the strip club, he might try to hide it by printing out a sheet of $20 bills and passing them for groceries once or twice. When the cops inevitably show up, he's going to keep his mouth shut, and he might get away with it if not for the tracking tech. He didn't buy his printer to make a career out of counterfeiting money, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't try it once.
The real bad-guys are not going to print money with a $99 inkjet they bought at Office Max. Uncle Benny has a warehouse full of highly researched and controlled technology. He's going to smuggle the Hong family straight in from China to slave over the printing presses. He knows about all of the protection technology built into the currency, and he wants the bills to be just right, so the money has a fighting chance of slipping past the eye of a secret service agent.
What does this mean for you and I? Hard to say. Does the government have evil intentions? Do they intend to track political dissenters? There's no telling for sure, but the possibility exists that they could. All I know for sure is that I will be pasting magazine clippings together to announce the next few Weekly Jihad Society meetings.
It's "Thieves" now.
Actually it's only "Thought Thieves" because "Thought Pirates" is only one and a half phonemes away from "Butt Pirates."
OK, so the brain activates in similar patterns when thoughts are about similar things. There has been plenty of study on this for (hundreds?) of years, but this doesn't mean you can extract any meaningful information from the fact that "the centers in the brain for sex and violence overlap," and barring any new evidence of real meaning in this information, don't use it to make any bets at the horse races.
Bzzzt... There is actually an addressing protocol built into IPv6 known as "Mobile IPv6" which allows a machine on the home network, listening for packets addressed to one of your "mobile IP's" will respond with a packet that tells the sender where to find that computer right now, a "care-of address."
This all requires the mobile computer to report back periodically with status updates on its current "care-of IP", and that's all. This is not a tunnel, it's real mobile IP, built into the protocol. I believe this feature is also available for IPv4 through use of some extension to the protocol.
Also, such an appeal to nihilism is pretty useless as a support for keeping creationism in the ring. How do you know the bible really exists, or if it does, how do you know it says what the letters on the page look like they say?
Your argument depends on an assumption that there is some fundamental difference between belief and observation. Observation depends on the belief that your senses are reliable.
To the contrary, I can believe in God without knowing that the bible exists (based on observation.) In fact, Occam's Razor indicates that beliefs based on Observation are no more or less likely than beliefs based on God.
Of course, you can copy music (I won't call it 'theft' because I don't want to call down the semantics people). I can also rob people on the street, commit fraud, etc. Morality aside, all of these are breaking the 'rules' of society.
The 'rules' of society are the rules that a majority of society follows. If a majority of society is breaking a rule, then it's not a rule of society anymore. If a majority of some subset of society is breaking a rule, and if a majority of society accepts this subset's right to exist, then there is an inequity in the system. It is possible for laws and socially acceptable rules to differ, just like it is possible for laws and morals to differ.
I still agree with your overall conclusion. If the rules are wrong, the rules need to be changed. When some people play by the rules, and some others don't, that is also inequity in the system.
And I paid them money, so I could have a copy. The government has decided that because I have a copy, it is my right to do certain things with that copy. (Fair use rights.) If I bought it, I may not "own" the copyright, but I certainly own the content to the extent that I should be able to use it however I like.
Your view of intellectual property is flawed. Physical objects can be created or destroyed. They are composed of natural resources. Ideas are natural resources, just like anything else. Creative content is created from ideas, just like physical property is constructed from other resources.
Physical property can be transferred from one person to another. If I give you something physical, I do not have it anymore. If I give you some creative work or idea, I can still give it to others, and I have not lost anything. The idea of "property" does not transfer completely from physical objects to ideas. After understanding these differences, we can now discuss the current legal and economic situation of physical security versus security of intellectual property.
It is my right to protect my physical property through physical security. There are laws which punish those who would violate my physical security, because they will be depriving me of my right to my own property.
Bring this over to intellectual property, and you see that the model no longer fits. It is my right to protect my intellectual property through technical or other security. There are laws which punish those who would violate security on intellectual property, because (???) why? The owner hasn't lost anything but some "right to profit" which is not codified anywhere.
I do not have the right to profit from a flawed business model. The owner of some content wishes to prevent me from doing something which I could do legally, if his security was not in place. When I break his security, the only law I have broken is the "no breaking security" law. This is not equivalent to trespassing or theft, because no crime is being committed, besides "breaking the DMCA."
In the world of physical security, it is illegal to pick the lock on someone else's door without permission, because it serves no legal purpose. Whether you are going to steal from their house or not is immaterial, because there is no other valid reason to pick their lock. In the world of intellectual property, it is now illegal to "pick the lock" on a "protected" file, IN SPITE OF the fact that there are many legal uses, including exercise of my fair use rights.
Copyright in this country was fought bitterly until the idea of fair use rights were created as well. Many years later, the companies with their found copyright powers want to remove our fair use rights through technical security, and expect laws to prevent us from "picking the locks." Do you see my point?
The only loss to the author is the ability to charge me extra for something which I should be allowed to do anyway.
So you'd rather buy the DRM games and support the companies that want to use DRM? These aren't all mammoth Sony and Apple companies that we're talking about boycotting. Video game makers are not nearly as resiliant against games selling poorly. If just one game sells poorly enough it could probably put a developing company out of business. (That's not to say that this is the goal either.)
Your point of view is the problem, not the law. You still see businesses that use spam as "legitimate businesses." I don't.
The people using these illegal types of ads are clearly not legitimate businesses. Therefore another activity which sounds illegal (exploiting bugs in programs to get your ads displayed) has been determined by a judge to in fact be illegal. That sounds like a victory against spam to me.
Say what you will about Dells, but I once spilled an entire glass of water into the keyboard of my dell laptop and I'm posting from it now. It was out of commission for about a day or two until it worked fine again. I haven't opened it up to see the damage, but it can't be that bad, it's worked as well as it ever has!
If the worst case scenario is that the system doesnt meet it's goals ("you end up going through the same security rundown...") why would you build the system?
A system which improves a majority of scenarios without affecting the worst-case scenario is whats known as an 'Upgrade.' Also, if we can get most passengers through security faster, that leaves more time to investigate the 'questionable' people. In this regard, the worst case scenario for the overall system isn't really the same, it's improved: some passengers are funneled through security faster, and the ones that aren't can be investigated more thoroughly.
That is correct. This means that colleges cannot prevent students from setting up their own wireless networks. It doesn't have anything to say about whether students are allowed to connect said wireless network to the college network. Most colleges (any that care whether you set up a wireless network) should have something in their AUP which outlines what you are and are not allowed to plug into their network jacks. If they say "You can only plug individual computers into our network," and you plug in a wireless router, they have every right to suspend your network access privileges.
You are assuming that SCO cares about their operating system at all, or even selling any products. Most of their litigation tactics make it fairly obvious that they don't really care about that at all. Charging $699 per license for Linux? "This price will be going up at an undisclosed date in the future"???
Things like these convince me that SCO is concerned with one thing only: scaring people away from Linux.
SCO expects all of their employees to be inbred! What they became is the tech equvalent of Deliverance!
Haven't you met Darl, his brother Darl, his brother Darl, and his other brother Darl?
Looks like the flight simulator isn't the only thing running on fairly modest hardware... slashdotted already :)
What are you on, and can I get a gram of it?
I don't know what kind of hick area you're living in *chuckles*, but out here in the middle of nowhere, Time Warner cable has had VOD for a while now. I've got HBO On Demand, pay something like $7/mo as a flat rate, and I get all of the stuff they've got on there.
Yeah, if you're wondering where the middle of nowhere is... Warsaw, NY, pop ~4000. It's between Buffalo and Rochester, it's about an hour from any city with >20000 people. The middle of nowhere.
Holy shit, turn up the battery on your sarcasm detector. Something is seriously wrong!
If you used it 4-5 months ago, it might be helpful to realize that it's only been around for less than a year (PR2 was released in July of last year, and that was an extremely early beta.)
The frontend and backend have since been separated (one of your biggest gripes, it seems). They can be run on separate machines, and video streamed over the network, if you desire. You can have multiple frontends connecting to one (or more) backends... etc.
The UI is nice now, I don't know how much it has improved, but it's much friendlier. One thing to keep in mind is that it was meant to be used with a remote control, on a TV. It will work fine on a computer, but the interface is not meant to be used with a mouse--only a keyboard, or remote control (with lirc and irxevent).
Bitrate and quality settings all work perfectly, in fact you have the option of recording to NuppelVideo or MPEG4 (or mpeg2 if you have a PVR-250 or PVR-350). My recordings generally take about 600M/hr. Yes, this is a drastic improvement--I remember having massive 2gb/hr recordings as well. It's not like that anymore.
If you tried MythTV 5 months ago and hated it, you should definitely try it again now. It has improved significantly, in just about every way. (Oh, did I mention stability, too... it's pretty damned stable in 0.8 and current cvs, on my machine.)
Sorry, that was a misstatement. I meant to say that MythTV has the same functionality as a Tivo subscription. I was going from one thought to another a bit too quickly.
Someone really needs to start building Mini-ITX machines with Debian and MythTV preloaded en masse. I've been using my desktop as a MythTV machine since the early days, and it's just about surpassed Tivo anyway. Not to mention, no subscription fee.
A stripped down Tivo without season passes removes almost all of the usefulness of the device. MythTV has the same functionality, but it doesn't cost you anything but the hardware. I can't speak for the quality of the software versus Tivo, as I've never used a tivo, but I do find myself spouting the same "Changed the way I think about TV" rhetoric as every tivo user.
Either way, one thing I know MythTV has which Tivo does not have is automatic commercial detection. That's right. Download 0.8, play with it.
I can't be the only dyslexic stoner that read the headline as "High-tech Killer Weed"... I got a bit excited for a bit, HEH.