Plastic.com?!?!?!? Please spare us. Plastic.com, apart from being fugly, is a lame imitation of metafilter, kuro5hin, half-empty, and a host of other similar but better sites that pre-date it.
This is nice, but it seems like federal courts would have to be the last say on the matter. Basically the plaintiff was saying "Washington state is overstepping its authority by interfering with interstate commerce" and a Washington state court ruled "no we're not." What'd be more impressive is if the federal courts agree.
Startup Speed: IE6. But only because it mostly starts up with Windows. Opera is a fairly close second, and Mozilla takes at least 10x as long.
Winner: IE
Interface: It's a matter of preference. If you like root-level windows for each page, Mozilla is better. If you like MDIs, Opera is better.
Winner: either Mozilla or Opera
Rendering Speed: Definitely Opera. Mozilla beats out IE by a bit, but Opera is much faster.
Winner: Opera
Image Rendering: Opera. It's damn fast.
Winner: Opera
Interface Speed: Opera and IE are tied. They're both win32 native speed. On slow machines (like mine) IE tends to drag resources sometimes though, pausing interface responsiveness for a short period of time. Mozilla is just damn slow on a p266.
Winner: Opera, but not by much
Download & Install: You must be joking. Opera v5.11 is 2.18 megabytes. Neither IE or Mozilla come close.
Winner: Opera, by far
Editable Text Boxes: They're identical in Opera and IE. And yes, Mozilla's suck.
Winner: Opera and IE tie
Stability: Mozilla crashes every once in a while (though much less than it used to), Opera crashes every once in a while (though much less than it used to), and IE is pretty solid.
Winner: IE, by a small amount
Loading Cached Pages: Opera and Mozilla both theoretically load them instantly, but Mozilla takes a bit of time to do so on my machine (i only have 96mb RAM and a p266).
Winner: Opera by a small amount
Sidebar: Sidebars suck. I turn them off in all browsers.
Winner: Tie between all of them, since they can all be turned off
Standards support: Opera supports nearly all standards perfectly, with some of the advanced features of CSS2 being the sole exception. IE does not properly support even CSS1. Mozilla supports standards nearly perfectly with a few CSS2 bugs.
Winner: Mozilla, by a small bit. It's helped by the fact that it also supports non-standard pages better than Opera ("de facto Netscape standards") with its quirks-mode backwards compatibility
Gender Recognition: Opera has it. IE and Mozilla don't.
Winner: Opera, by far.
Cost: Opera is free with ad banners, or $30 without. IE and Mozilla are both free.
Winner: IE and Mozilla tie.
Overall Winner: Opera. It's small, fast, and the gesture recognition kicks ass. And in v5.11 Java/JavaScript/Flash/etc. all work properly 99.9% of the time, and CSS rendering is nearly flawless (much better than IE6's CSS anyway). And it's fast on my p266. Did I mention that I like the gesture recognition?
I've read the damn FAQ. Hell, I spend more time there than here. It's still pronounced "kuh roh five hin," and it's still l33t. More l33t than you anyway.
Pronounced "kuh roh five heen," kuro5hin is a weblog for the l33t. After all, if slashdot was l33t, it'd be named Slashd0t. Kuro5hin did not make a similar mistake by picking something inane like "kuroshin" as its name.
In case anybody's interested in contacting the university about this, I've dug up some contact information (all publically available on their site). Please keep emails civil and explain issues calmly to try to convince them that what they're doing is wrong. (Note: most of these contacts are actually fielded by executive assistants and such; the President doesn't actually answer his own phone or email, but if a good deal of mail comes in it'll still be noticed and possibly brought to his attention).
President J Bernard Machen:
Tel: (801) 581-5701
Fax: (801) 581-6892
Email: president@utah.edu
General Counsel John K. Morris:
Tel: (801) 581-5115
Fax: (801 )585-7007
Email: dolson@legal.admin.utah.edu
Associate Vice President for Information Technology and Outreach Clifford J. Drew:
Tel: (801) 581-7838
Fax: (801) 585-5993
Email: sturpin@aoce.utah.edu
Vice President for Student Affairs Barbara H. Snyder:
Tel: (801) 581-7793
Fax: (801) 585-3890
Email: chebert@saff.utah.edu
Vice President for University Relations Fred C. Esplin:
Tel: (801) 581-4088
Fax: (801) 581-3654
Email: jyoung@park.admin.utah.edu
Those are all the relevant people I could find in a quick search. If you're a Utah State alumnus, contact Mr. Esplin, as he's in charge of alumni affairs, and let him know that you will withhold any donations until this matter is resolved satisfactorily (universities tend to pay attention when alumni are upset).
Well certainly in that case I'd side with the worker, as a contract has been signed. What I disagree with are the "worker protection" laws which do not involve breaking contracts. If I offer you a job, with no specified time period, and pay you by the month, and then after a certain period of time I no longer need you to work for me anymore, why shouldn't I just be able to fire you at the end of the month? Why should I be forced to continue paying you despite the fact that I no longer wish to employ your services?
See, such laws will just make me hire fewer people in the first place. If I can easily fire people, I might hire 10 people when I need them, and then fire 5 when half are no longer needed. But with "worker protection" laws, I'll probably just hire 5 or 6 and make them work harder, since I don't want to take the risk of hiring and being stuck with additional people I might not need in the future.
I'm not talking about breaking contracts, but about restrictions many companies put on in addition to contracts. Certainly if I sign a 2-year employment contract with Joe, I should not be able to fire him after 6 months. But if I sign a 3-month contract with him, there should be no problem with me firing him after 3 months.
Simply put, I don't care about your "protecting people" and whatnot if that involves forcing me to pay people against my will. And you'll see this in many European countries - since they can't fire people, they just don't hire as many people in the first place, or move a lot of their manufacturing to eastern europe.
That's not very useful, as it only changes the physical monitor resolution, and does not correct the size of the desktop appropriately. When I change from a 800x600 desktop taking up my entire screen to a 1024x768 desktop, I don't want the new desktop taking up only a little box in the middle of the screen. And when I change back down to 640x480 I don't want it taking up twice the screen width so I have to scroll around.
I can do this in Windows from the taskbar, with no reboots or anything. Why can't I do it in X?
And I better not even start on changing color depths without restarting.
I'm not so sure about that. If I am paying you to do a job for me, and I decide that for some reason I no longer wish to pay you to do that job for me, why should I be forced to continue paying you for a job I no care for you to do?
Uh, that he did it? Regardless of whether or not he went to jail, he did it, and cops all over America are commiting other crimes as well. I think what got that guy was the media. If it hadn't been reported nation wide, his own police unit probably could have covered it up enough.
So by your logic, since cops are evil since a few cops commit crimes, black people are very evil, because many black people commit crimes. Yay for collective labelling.
Watch the first part of the tape, before that part. Rodney King was very violently resisting arrest, striking the police officers several times in the process.
Are these the same "peaceful protestors" who threw molotov cocktails and golf balls at police, smashed hundreds of shop windows, and basically rioted for a few days?
And many people also don't know that the cops were firing tear gas in response to Molotov cocktails and golf balls being thrown at them. The protestors only stopped throwing them when they RAN OUT of molotov cocktails and golf balls.
Hell, even the ironically named "Indymedia" admitted this.
Uhh, you can't protest illegally in the US without being a criminal, as should be pretty self-evident. You can of course still protest legally all you want. Occupying someone else's building is not a legal form of protest, so of course they'd be driven off if this were to happen the US. I'd be pissed if a bunch of "protestors" were camping on my front lawn too.
Well, you don't have a single fiber running to your house in these hybrid systems. There's copper lines to the house, but then they all meet up, and you and your 100 closest neighbors (or possibly more) all share a single fiber for the remainder of the travel to the telco.
It amazes me that nobody who introduces RMS ever seems to be familiar with him, his work, or his positions. This has to be at least the fifth or sixth time I've either seen or heard about an introducer who was corrected (sometimes rather testily) by RMS that "i do free software damnit, not open source!" That's sometimes followed by a decently-long explanation of how "this [confusion] is an error we must work hard to correct" and how open source is not about freedom.
Now regardless of what you think of RMS's position on this matter, one should at least have the courtesy to introduce him as a "Free Software advocate," and a founder of the "Free Software movement" since that's what he calls himself. And you'd have to be very uninformed to not know that's what he calls himself, which leads me to believe that the people doing the introductions are unfamiliar with him and his work, and didn't bother to do even such simple research as reading fsf.org.
I live in an area that has these hybrid lines, and I cannot get DSL either. DSL takes advantage of the "wated" bandwidth in copper lines; you only really use a small portion of the bandwidth for voice communications. But with fiber optic lines, there is no such waste. The phone company allocates a small portion of the bandwidth of each fiber to each phone line, enough to do voice transmission (at around 8 kilobytes/second). So no, you cannot "wire directly to the internet" through the fiber, because you and several hundred of your neighbors are already sharing that same fiber for your voice phone calls; there's no spare bandwidth.
I believe allot of the people who write GPL code purposefully intend for people to use it *FOR FREE*.
Then they are using the wrong license. The GNU GPL explicitly allows anyone to sell copies of the licensed software for a fee, and RMS has repeatedly reiterated this point in interviews and FAQs.
If you downloaded the ISO and you feel you owe Mandrake something, go out and buy the retail version.
This is what I don't get. If I downloaded the ISO and then decided it was worth more than the $0 I paid and wanted to support the company, why should I go buy the retail version? I already have the ISO; I don't need the retail version. Buying it is just a waste of paper, plastic, and manufacturing costs, and the only reason I'd be doing it is to support the company. So why not just take the money I would've spent on a retail version and donate it directly, producing less garbage in the process?
I don't see this as a particularly bad idea, since it gives the customer a choice of how much to pay based on how much he/she thinks the product is worth. The usual method to make more money is to raise prices. However, in Mandrake's case, they're keeping the prices the same, but accepting donations - this means that the people who think Mandrake is worth $75 can give a donation to pay that much, while those who think it's worth whatever the retail price is don't have to.
In addition, there are many people who buy a boxed version of RedHat or Mandrake instead of downloading the ISO to "support the company." If you already downloaded the ISO, why waste paper, plastic, and manufacturing costs for a boxed copy you don't need, just to support the company, when you could just donate the money and support the company directly? Or buying a tshirt to support the company; why buy a tshirt if I'm never going to wear it and don't want it? Why not donate the $15 the tshirt costs directly to the company instead?
There's a few other companies using this sort of method, such as GetRight as well, and many are doing it at the request of customers who thought the product was worth much more than what they paid for it.
So really I don't think there's any problem with it. People already donate to companies, but it's in the form of buying stuff you don't need (tshirts, boxed software, mousepads, mugs, etc.) solely for the purpose of supporting the company. I'd argue that that's 90% a donation anyway, so just going the whole way and making it a donation explicitly isn't really a problem.
Still, this is not nearly as problematic as them actually *owning* your posts would've been. If Google had claimed ownership, that brings up a host of bad situations, such as you having to obtain Google's permission if you wanted to release a book containing your posts (which would now be posts owned by Google).
Slashdot Mirror
Plastic.com?!?!?!? Please spare us. Plastic.com, apart from being fugly, is a lame imitation of metafilter, kuro5hin, half-empty, and a host of other similar but better sites that pre-date it.
Please let plastic.com die in peace.
This is nice, but it seems like federal courts would have to be the last say on the matter. Basically the plaintiff was saying "Washington state is overstepping its authority by interfering with interstate commerce" and a Washington state court ruled "no we're not." What'd be more impressive is if the federal courts agree.
Let's compare those to Opera now (v5.11):
Startup Speed: IE6. But only because it mostly starts up with Windows. Opera is a fairly close second, and Mozilla takes at least 10x as long.
Winner: IE
Interface: It's a matter of preference. If you like root-level windows for each page, Mozilla is better. If you like MDIs, Opera is better.
Winner: either Mozilla or Opera
Rendering Speed: Definitely Opera. Mozilla beats out IE by a bit, but Opera is much faster.
Winner: Opera
Image Rendering: Opera. It's damn fast.
Winner: Opera
Interface Speed: Opera and IE are tied. They're both win32 native speed. On slow machines (like mine) IE tends to drag resources sometimes though, pausing interface responsiveness for a short period of time. Mozilla is just damn slow on a p266.
Winner: Opera, but not by much
Download & Install: You must be joking. Opera v5.11 is 2.18 megabytes. Neither IE or Mozilla come close.
Winner: Opera, by far
Editable Text Boxes: They're identical in Opera and IE. And yes, Mozilla's suck.
Winner: Opera and IE tie
Stability: Mozilla crashes every once in a while (though much less than it used to), Opera crashes every once in a while (though much less than it used to), and IE is pretty solid.
Winner: IE, by a small amount
Loading Cached Pages: Opera and Mozilla both theoretically load them instantly, but Mozilla takes a bit of time to do so on my machine (i only have 96mb RAM and a p266).
Winner: Opera by a small amount
Sidebar: Sidebars suck. I turn them off in all browsers.
Winner: Tie between all of them, since they can all be turned off
Standards support: Opera supports nearly all standards perfectly, with some of the advanced features of CSS2 being the sole exception. IE does not properly support even CSS1. Mozilla supports standards nearly perfectly with a few CSS2 bugs.
Winner: Mozilla, by a small bit. It's helped by the fact that it also supports non-standard pages better than Opera ("de facto Netscape standards") with its quirks-mode backwards compatibility
Gender Recognition: Opera has it. IE and Mozilla don't.
Winner: Opera, by far.
Cost: Opera is free with ad banners, or $30 without. IE and Mozilla are both free.
Winner: IE and Mozilla tie.
Overall Winner: Opera. It's small, fast, and the gesture recognition kicks ass. And in v5.11 Java/JavaScript/Flash/etc. all work properly 99.9% of the time, and CSS rendering is nearly flawless (much better than IE6's CSS anyway). And it's fast on my p266. Did I mention that I like the gesture recognition?
Especially since the copy of RedHat I purchased came bundled with Lynx. REDHAT IS STIFLING INNOVATION BY ILLEGALLY TYING PRODUCTS%#!#%!
I've read the damn FAQ. Hell, I spend more time there than here. It's still pronounced "kuh roh five hin," and it's still l33t. More l33t than you anyway.
Pronounced "kuh roh five heen," kuro5hin is a weblog for the l33t. After all, if slashdot was l33t, it'd be named Slashd0t. Kuro5hin did not make a similar mistake by picking something inane like "kuroshin" as its name.
In case anybody's interested in contacting the university about this, I've dug up some contact information (all publically available on their site). Please keep emails civil and explain issues calmly to try to convince them that what they're doing is wrong. (Note: most of these contacts are actually fielded by executive assistants and such; the President doesn't actually answer his own phone or email, but if a good deal of mail comes in it'll still be noticed and possibly brought to his attention).
President J Bernard Machen:
Tel: (801) 581-5701
Fax: (801) 581-6892
Email: president@utah.edu
General Counsel John K. Morris:
Tel: (801) 581-5115
Fax: (801 )585-7007
Email: dolson@legal.admin.utah.edu
Associate Vice President for Information Technology and Outreach Clifford J. Drew:
Tel: (801) 581-7838
Fax: (801) 585-5993
Email: sturpin@aoce.utah.edu
Board of Trustees:
Tel: (801) 581-3033
Fax: (801) 585-8211
Email: calleen.bennett@utah.edu
Vice President for Student Affairs Barbara H. Snyder:
Tel: (801) 581-7793
Fax: (801) 585-3890
Email: chebert@saff.utah.edu
Vice President for University Relations Fred C. Esplin:
Tel: (801) 581-4088
Fax: (801) 581-3654
Email: jyoung@park.admin.utah.edu
Those are all the relevant people I could find in a quick search. If you're a Utah State alumnus, contact Mr. Esplin, as he's in charge of alumni affairs, and let him know that you will withhold any donations until this matter is resolved satisfactorily (universities tend to pay attention when alumni are upset).
haha, the cops were throwing molotov cocktails at themselves. right.
and i suppose the groups who claimed to have a goal of "killing every last pig" were really cops too?
Well certainly in that case I'd side with the worker, as a contract has been signed. What I disagree with are the "worker protection" laws which do not involve breaking contracts. If I offer you a job, with no specified time period, and pay you by the month, and then after a certain period of time I no longer need you to work for me anymore, why shouldn't I just be able to fire you at the end of the month? Why should I be forced to continue paying you despite the fact that I no longer wish to employ your services?
See, such laws will just make me hire fewer people in the first place. If I can easily fire people, I might hire 10 people when I need them, and then fire 5 when half are no longer needed. But with "worker protection" laws, I'll probably just hire 5 or 6 and make them work harder, since I don't want to take the risk of hiring and being stuck with additional people I might not need in the future.
I'm not talking about breaking contracts, but about restrictions many companies put on in addition to contracts. Certainly if I sign a 2-year employment contract with Joe, I should not be able to fire him after 6 months. But if I sign a 3-month contract with him, there should be no problem with me firing him after 3 months.
Simply put, I don't care about your "protecting people" and whatnot if that involves forcing me to pay people against my will. And you'll see this in many European countries - since they can't fire people, they just don't hire as many people in the first place, or move a lot of their manufacturing to eastern europe.
That's not very useful, as it only changes the physical monitor resolution, and does not correct the size of the desktop appropriately. When I change from a 800x600 desktop taking up my entire screen to a 1024x768 desktop, I don't want the new desktop taking up only a little box in the middle of the screen. And when I change back down to 640x480 I don't want it taking up twice the screen width so I have to scroll around.
I can do this in Windows from the taskbar, with no reboots or anything. Why can't I do it in X?
And I better not even start on changing color depths without restarting.
Of course in windows you don't have to reboot to do that.
And I only reboot windows 98 maybe once a week. Win2k maybe once a month.
I'm not so sure about that. If I am paying you to do a job for me, and I decide that for some reason I no longer wish to pay you to do that job for me, why should I be forced to continue paying you for a job I no care for you to do?
Uh, that he did it? Regardless of whether or not he went to jail, he did it, and cops all over America are commiting other crimes as well. I think what got that guy was the media. If it hadn't been reported nation wide, his own police unit probably could have covered it up enough.
So by your logic, since cops are evil since a few cops commit crimes, black people are very evil, because many black people commit crimes. Yay for collective labelling.
Watch the first part of the tape, before that part. Rodney King was very violently resisting arrest, striking the police officers several times in the process.
Are these the same "peaceful protestors" who threw molotov cocktails and golf balls at police, smashed hundreds of shop windows, and basically rioted for a few days?
And many people also don't know that the cops were firing tear gas in response to Molotov cocktails and golf balls being thrown at them. The protestors only stopped throwing them when they RAN OUT of molotov cocktails and golf balls.
Hell, even the ironically named "Indymedia" admitted this.
Uhh, you can't protest illegally in the US without being a criminal, as should be pretty self-evident. You can of course still protest legally all you want. Occupying someone else's building is not a legal form of protest, so of course they'd be driven off if this were to happen the US. I'd be pissed if a bunch of "protestors" were camping on my front lawn too.
Well, you don't have a single fiber running to your house in these hybrid systems. There's copper lines to the house, but then they all meet up, and you and your 100 closest neighbors (or possibly more) all share a single fiber for the remainder of the travel to the telco.
It amazes me that nobody who introduces RMS ever seems to be familiar with him, his work, or his positions. This has to be at least the fifth or sixth time I've either seen or heard about an introducer who was corrected (sometimes rather testily) by RMS that "i do free software damnit, not open source!" That's sometimes followed by a decently-long explanation of how "this [confusion] is an error we must work hard to correct" and how open source is not about freedom.
Now regardless of what you think of RMS's position on this matter, one should at least have the courtesy to introduce him as a "Free Software advocate," and a founder of the "Free Software movement" since that's what he calls himself. And you'd have to be very uninformed to not know that's what he calls himself, which leads me to believe that the people doing the introductions are unfamiliar with him and his work, and didn't bother to do even such simple research as reading fsf.org.
I live in an area that has these hybrid lines, and I cannot get DSL either. DSL takes advantage of the "wated" bandwidth in copper lines; you only really use a small portion of the bandwidth for voice communications. But with fiber optic lines, there is no such waste. The phone company allocates a small portion of the bandwidth of each fiber to each phone line, enough to do voice transmission (at around 8 kilobytes/second). So no, you cannot "wire directly to the internet" through the fiber, because you and several hundred of your neighbors are already sharing that same fiber for your voice phone calls; there's no spare bandwidth.
I believe allot of the people who write GPL code purposefully intend for people to use it *FOR FREE*.
Then they are using the wrong license. The GNU GPL explicitly allows anyone to sell copies of the licensed software for a fee, and RMS has repeatedly reiterated this point in interviews and FAQs.
If you downloaded the ISO and you feel you owe Mandrake something, go out and buy the retail version.
This is what I don't get. If I downloaded the ISO and then decided it was worth more than the $0 I paid and wanted to support the company, why should I go buy the retail version? I already have the ISO; I don't need the retail version. Buying it is just a waste of paper, plastic, and manufacturing costs, and the only reason I'd be doing it is to support the company. So why not just take the money I would've spent on a retail version and donate it directly, producing less garbage in the process?
I don't see this as a particularly bad idea, since it gives the customer a choice of how much to pay based on how much he/she thinks the product is worth. The usual method to make more money is to raise prices. However, in Mandrake's case, they're keeping the prices the same, but accepting donations - this means that the people who think Mandrake is worth $75 can give a donation to pay that much, while those who think it's worth whatever the retail price is don't have to.
In addition, there are many people who buy a boxed version of RedHat or Mandrake instead of downloading the ISO to "support the company." If you already downloaded the ISO, why waste paper, plastic, and manufacturing costs for a boxed copy you don't need, just to support the company, when you could just donate the money and support the company directly? Or buying a tshirt to support the company; why buy a tshirt if I'm never going to wear it and don't want it? Why not donate the $15 the tshirt costs directly to the company instead?
There's a few other companies using this sort of method, such as GetRight as well, and many are doing it at the request of customers who thought the product was worth much more than what they paid for it.
So really I don't think there's any problem with it. People already donate to companies, but it's in the form of buying stuff you don't need (tshirts, boxed software, mousepads, mugs, etc.) solely for the purpose of supporting the company. I'd argue that that's 90% a donation anyway, so just going the whole way and making it a donation explicitly isn't really a problem.
Ah ok, I had missed that part.
Still, this is not nearly as problematic as them actually *owning* your posts would've been. If Google had claimed ownership, that brings up a host of bad situations, such as you having to obtain Google's permission if you wanted to release a book containing your posts (which would now be posts owned by Google).