Windows XP (and 2000) used to be able to use PAE to address above 4GB of RAM with 32-bit versions. IIRC however, they disabled it because too many driver makers assumed there was a direct correlation between the paged memory and the physical memory and PAE and remapping breaks that, causing all sorts of odd bugs. So they disabled it generally in SP2 for XP and SP1 2003 for 32 bit versions.
That's not entirely true, for drivers and antivirus software at least. I've a couple of bits of hardware, not least my logitech quickcam 9000 that don't work on win 7, and kaspersky, avg and sophos all had problems with the windows 7 beta, though they seem to work ok on the RC so far.
they're called ISPs, and they charge people for the delivery of content - any content - and they're happy.
Personally, I'd say that ISP's are in the business of charging people for the delivery of content at extortionate rates and then failing to live up to their end of the bargain with FUP's and bandwidth restrictions. However, your point that distributors like valve with steam, apple with itunes, netflix streaming and hulu are the people with the new business model is certainly valid. Witness the scurry of the content companies as they realise that easy to use portals are beating their restrictive drm'd and overpriced ones into the ground. And none of them come close to matching the pirate bay for sheer range of choice and price.
So basically they're using their internet connection to improve the availability of public domain material, for the benefit of the their fellow man? That sounds very laudable, and greatly in line with the intent of the public domain, freely shared for all to use.
OK, so it's not material back in the public domain yet. But since the copyright industry has decided they're going to unilaterally rewrite the length of their copyright term after the works were created (and get legislators to go along with it by bribery), I have no moral problem whatsoever with rewriting it to be much shorter instead.
According to the article, only some 5% of firefox users use adblock plus, and generally, firefox only makes up some 20% (or less) or the browser audience. Personally, adblock plus and easylist and the element hider addon are why I use firefox in the first place; nothing else blocks such a high percentage of random annoying ads, and certainly nothing else does it without leaving big chunks of whitespace where the ads used to be, which is almost as annoying as the inline ads in the first place.
However, some sites test to see if you're blocking the ads and then blocking you in return, or putting up some kind of extra nagging inline css bar, which seems more effective than getting in an arms race.
That said, I have started to see adverts as you describe, served up from the same area as other website graphic elements - often integrated video ads. Uusually that's enough to make me leave and not come back.
Yes, I just spotted that option too. I've been visiting (and posting and metamoderating) for years, so it's nice they've added that in recognition that the comments are really what make slashdot what it is. That said, I've also been running adblock plus and easylist and easylist privacy and the element hiding adblock helper for a good long time anyway, so it wasn't like I saw seeing most of the ads or the whitespace automatically anyway. Now, if the ads hadn't always been so US centric, I might not have blocked them in the first place...
The idea is to have a standard method for those sites that are prepared to block you altogether (or do a honking great popup asking you to turn it off) if you don't turn off the ad-blocker for that site.
I am encountering such notices more often now, with adblock plus and easylist. It's fair enough; I have no obligation to view the ads, and they've no obligation to let me view the other content if I don't. Depending upon the value of the site to me, I'll either unblock them or blacklist the site altogether, so I don't end up wasting my time (and their bandwidth) there again. I used to adblock sites by hand, but there's just so many out there (and I've yet to buy a single thing from a clickthrough ad, and I only ever clicked them by mistake) that it was just simpler to install easylist.
Having a standard mechanism for such a 'view my ads or please bugger off' warning, so the webmaster don't have to code something specific every time sounds like a good idea - as long as we get an option to ignore the metatag request for a given site, and another to ignore them altogether. Webmasters can then choose to block adblock users that ignore the metatag, or not, as currently.
Re:Remember when Apple was going to buy Nintendo?
on
Apple Eyeing EA?
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You know, I did just look up the meaning of literally, in Merriam-Webster.
1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually 2 : in effect : virtually usage: Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.
Perhaps you should read this article by a dictionary editor defending the use of 'literally' for emphasis.
The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat."
It's been used for emphasis of true statements in english since the 17th century. And it's hardly the only example:
In the case of literally, the "right" meaning is said to be "exactly as described; in a literal way," because that's what the base word literal is supposed to mean. In fact, the literal meaning of literal would be something like "according to the letter," but it's almost never used this way. "He copied the manuscript literally" would be one possible example. So when we use literally to refer to something other than individual letters -to whole words, or to thoughts in general - we are already walking down the figurative path, and if we end up with people eating curry so hot that their mouths are "literally on fire," how surprised can we be?
The trouble with usage criticism of the sort leveled at literally is that it's typically uneven: Parallel uses are frequent and usually pass unnoticed. For every peruse there's a scan for every hopefully there's a clearly; and for every literally there's a really: Or did you expect people to complain when really is used to emphasize things that are not "real"? When Meg, in Little Women, moaned that "It's been such a dismal day I'm really dying for some amusement," she wasn't the one dying.
I live in the really-rural countryside in the south of england. Average local bus service? 4 times a day.
I live out here because it's as close to work as I could afford, and my job is at a rural boarding school. It's a 15 minute car ride, or a 2 hour triple bus ride, including half of it going in mostly the wrong direction to the local town centre for the exchange.
I don't choose to live in the boonies; it's the only place I could afford a flat bigger than a hankie, and I'm not going to give up a steady job just for the joy of taking the bus instead of my car.
Ironically, I live about 10 minutes walk from the train station. Shame it only goes east-west, linking west coast to london, when the county layout (including my commute) is entirely north-south. All the local services were closed down decades ago. We're train-through country, here.
This kind of destructive behaviour is what most ordinary people still associate with viruses; if it's not hosing the computer entirely, it's nothing to worry about. That they're partly responsible for the spam tsunami, and that their credit card details might be leaking all over the place, just simply doesn't seem to be on their radar.
so they keep that 3 month trial of norton they got with the computer 3 years ago, and think they're safe because their computer hasn't blown up yet.
Plus they have a remarkable tolerance for popups - the amount of pcs I get asked to look at because they're 'a bit slow' that are utterly riddled with spyware, maladware and a notification area that fills half the start bar, and are hitting swap space as soon as they boot up...
If I never have to go to the hospital, call the police, drive on the roads or send any kids to the schools, I still have to pay the exact same council tax as someone who uses all of them.
That's just the way general taxes work; everyone pays the bill so you have the option of using the services if you need them, and it's assumed everybody uses some but not all of them.
Most households already have a TV, and thus have to pay the tax anyway, for now. This discussion is happening in the UK too; with many people now watching the BBC iplayer instead of over an aerial, how long can we stick to only having the TV as the basis for the tax, before people switch to only watching online with no tv, and thus avoiding funding the BBC? It's not so much paying for the website streaming per se, it's that the BBC programme making funding is based on having some 95% of the population paying the tax. If that drops significantly, because people dump their tv for their broadband, the BBC is in trouble - and I'm sure the same applies to RTE.
Either sell advertising to cover the cost Dear God no. I've seen US TV, with the adverts virtually every 5 minutes. I have no idea how you bear it.
charge people who do watch it online through the website. Hmm, lets have a nice online record of what people watch, tied to their real name and credit card, held by the state broadcaster. Weren't people screaming about youtube having to hand over its viewing records with just IPs a while back?
I think is a premature move, but as broadcast TV slowly becomes obsolete, the only way to keep the ad-free public service system running is to maintain the high subscription levels. Perhaps we'd be better served if it become a completely ordinary tax, like the council tax, where every household pays it regardless.
Oops, I forgot one of the biggest areas large companies spend their profit they get from avoiding taxes - marketing. That again lets them gain marketshare to the cost of their smaller competitors, and eventually the public by the formation of monopolies.
If large companies have to cut their ad budgets in order to pay the taxes that they've been avoiding, I for one am not going to lose much sleep over it.
If they could raise prices on their goods to cover it, or lower wages, they already would have done so. Wages and the prices of their goods are not based upon their actual cost, but on what the market will bear in both cases.
Corporation taxes are paid out of profits, i.e. what's left over after they've paid their wage bill and running costs.
So where does the extra profit go, in those companies that get extra by avoiding the taxes that their competitors are paying?
It goes on higher bonuses for senior management. It goes into cash reserves. It gets invested into other profitable offshore tax dodges, sorry, capital investments. It gets paid out in dividends, thus gaining more investors back. It goes out in R&D, allowing them to unfairly get ahead of the competition.
Allowing some multinational companies to avoid paying their taxes while their smaller more agile competitors aren't big enough to do so diverts money into areas that are good for the multinational and its top earners, but not for the country as a whole that hosts them and allows them to do business in th first place. It costs local jobs, as the best drivers for job creation are smaller companies; the big ones just offshore, and smaller companies are at a disadvantage as they're paying their taxes and the big ones aren't.
It's a bit like pollution; allowing some companies to pollute, while others have to pay extra to clean up, gives the polluters an advantage at the expense of the common good of the public.
Allowing big companies to take advantage of tax dodges, while small ones can't pushes the market towards monopolies, and monopolies are almost always a bad thing in capitalism, as it lets them set the market rate for goods and wages, instead of having to abide by it.
In the end, it's about fairness. People pay taxes on their labour and purchases, in order to support the services they need that need to be paid for collectively. Companies need to pay taxes on their capital and investments - taxes on growth - in order to fund the common areas that they need to do business in the first place; roads, police and legal frameworks, infrastructure, a military to protect them, etc etc.
While it's certainly fair to argue over what the government should be paying for, and what the taxes need to be on investments, goods and labour in order to pay for that should be, it's entirely reasonable we should ensure the playing field is fair; just as everyone is expected to pay their income taxes, companies should pay their fair taxes too. Letting the biggest get out of it with loopholes distorts the market in their favour.
One of the big parts of the G20 meeting in London recently was a commitment to tackle the major tax havens, and put pressure on secretive banking countries with the threat of tax sanctions if they didn't become more open to tax investigations.
The cayman islands was one big target, along with Jersey, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Luxembourg, Singapore and Monaco. I believe a number have already caved, and are opening their books.
Of course, XPM is free with windows 7 professional upwards - and ironically, it's the one of the few ways to get a new XP licence unless you're buying a netbook or downgrading vista licences.
I dunno about you, but installing XP on new standalone hardware (using our legacy VLK licences) is a royal pain in the bum these days. Needing a floppy disk to install the SATA drivers, or patching the OS ISO, futzing around trying to find compatible sound card drivers, wireless network card drivers, the multitude of patches (thank $deity for SP3 rollup, it was getting rediculous post-patching SP2 even with WSUS).
You'd be amazed how many people are stuck on XP because of one or two legacy specialist apps that haven't been updated in forever, and simply won't run on a more modern OS. Giving people a simple way to still run them for no additional cost really will be useful to break with the past, and move forwards. When was the last time you tried running an 8 year old version of a linux distro or OSX on modern hardware?
Sure, some people prefer XP, or windows 2000. Fair enough. Me, I like 64-bit support and having more than 4GB of RAM, so XP simply doesn't cut it any more (XP64 is an utter abomination). Vista 64 is ok, but windows 7 beta and RC are simply better. Free virtualisation, plus a free copy of XP is a hell of a better deal than vmware workstation, which doesn't run on windows 7 yet anyway. Virtual PC works for OSes other than the bundled XP, btw - I've been testing it, and you can have multiple different VMs too, including linux.
I take it you haven't flown in Europe lately. A number of airlines are starting to enforce the 1 bag only carry-on rule - i.e. you get your laptop bag, or your normal bag, but not both. The cabin size limits are pretty tight, too.
I have a swissgear rucksack I use for both my laptop and other crap I use to keep myself amused for the 6-8 hours I'm going to be travelling to the airport, waiting at the airport, sitting on the plane, and waiting at the other end. Yet there was one time I needed to carry something particularly large in my carry-on, and there was simply no way I could fit the lappie in too.
So in the hold it went, in my suitcase, packed in solid foam. Fortunately, it made it. If I only had a normal laptop bag, it would probably travel in the hold a lot more often, as it's simply not big enough for the amount of extra stuff I take that doesn't go in the hold - the 15kg hold weight limit is starting to be a real pain in the arse.
And if a black person dislikes discrimination, they should just leave and find a society that doesn't have it?
This is rediculous. Laws are made by people, and can be changed by people. If the laws are not serving the public, then they should be protested, publically disobeyed and eventually, rewritten.
Copyright was written for the benefit of the public - to entice more creators to create and put their work into the public domain (where it belongs, as everyone has a free speech right to say or repeat what they wish, a right explicitly removed by copyright) so yet more works could be created inspired by them.
Any creator who tells you they came up with their entire work whole cloth without any inspiration, input or other assistance from the existing body of culture, history and knowledge built up in the public domain is simply lying.
Copyright was intended to improve the public domain, by granting a limited, temporary monopoly on making copies. Now, it's just a bloated perpetual new ownership system, such that new media barons can extract rent from the public for everything created since steamboat willie.
For every game maker that complains 'you're all thieves, taking my work for nothing' I ask when it will return to the public domain, and when they intend to pay their licence fee to the descendants of every person that ever had a hand in creating the knowledge that made possible the tools they use to make that game.
I'd also like to know when they intend to start paying their sysadmin a royalty every time they login to their network servers.
I do find it odd that it's got such a generous expiration date
The semi-official launch date for windows 7 is Q1 2010; so June 2010 does give them a bit of headroom for overruns, and/or to give people time to backup and do a clean install once the RTM comes out (there won't be an official upgrade path from RC to RTM, any more than there's one from beta to RC). There's also no plan to do another RC.
Many suspect they may try to push the RTM forward, and get it out this autumn but given Microsoft's launch delay history, I'm not going to be holding my breath for a release this year.
the XPM beta, including the free copy of XP should be starting shortly. It's anybody's guess as to how long the beta will run for before expiry, though the final release should mirror the windows 7 release.
However, there's little/no GPU acceleration so a big chunk of XP diehards (gamers) won't be switching.
Do you use the enterprise server or powerpack (or free!) version for your servers?
Any issues with samba integration with windows desktops, if you use them? (been having some crashes and performance issues lately with ubuntu LTS server tied into our AD doing filesharing)
Kubuntu is not great. It's basically the vanilla KDE packages with a couple of basic QT apps thrown on top; the real love, and bulk of development, goes into the ubuntu GNOME side, and GTK apps for everything ubuntu specific.
I haven't tried mandriva lately, but they've always been a KDE-lovin' distro with all the management utils etc written in QT. From a quick browse round their site, they still look like the emphasis for distro custom apps being in QT.
Hah, that describes my experience with mandrake exactly.
Mandrake were my first full-time distro as primary boot; I'd experimented with caldera, redhat and SuSE 7.3 (all retail distros available in the shop, back when I only had dialup - I still have those SuSE discs!).
Mandrake got a lot of things right back then, it was the first distro that 'just worked' for me, without needing manual package compiles to make up for missing apps.
I remember switching because their funding worries made it look like they would go commercial only, and even then may not survive, and I didn't want to get stuck on a dead distro.
After looking at the debian forums, I ran screaming to gentoo instead. The distro itself was ok (but flexible!), but the user community was great. I eventually got fed up with the declining quality of the ebuild library, and the increasing problems with having to upgrade everything constantly, with ever growing risks of breakages when you applied a security fix, if you didn't keep up with the changes on a regular basis.
And there was ubuntu. The forum support of gentoo, with the famous debian package library, with a pretty interface on top.
I did think of going back to mandriva, after gentoo - but that was right after the mandriva 9.2 'cd drive killer' kernel bug. OK, it turned out to be LG's fault in the end, but it did rather put me off!
Perhaps it's time to have another look, see if KDE 4 is anything like usable yet; I always did prefer KDE to GNOME, but the switch to 4 has been pretty crappy.
I'd heard they were going to include a virtual environment in 7 with XP-equivalent DLLs for backwards compatibility for legacy apps, but running a VM-hosted version of XP SP3 fully integrated into the host OS takes it to a whole new level - and free, to boot.
Modding the 360 doesn't require a modchip, merely reflashing the drive firmware via a sata cable. The games are as easy to download as pc dodgy games, and they're stealthed these days so they're not picked up on as rips on live.
There are softmods for the wii (using zelda save games I believe), but I don't think that allows playing dodgy discs, that still needs a modchip.
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Eliminate trivial software patents in the US, that prevent free distros from distributing this sort of stuff in the US.
Or buy a commercial distro, like you paid for windows or OSX, that paid the patent fees and has this stuff included by default.
Free distros simply can't simply have all the things that have patent fees attached, because they could be sued and shut down entirely because of it.
Windows XP (and 2000) used to be able to use PAE to address above 4GB of RAM with 32-bit versions. IIRC however, they disabled it because too many driver makers assumed there was a direct correlation between the paged memory and the physical memory and PAE and remapping breaks that, causing all sorts of odd bugs. So they disabled it generally in SP2 for XP and SP1 2003 for 32 bit versions.
That's not entirely true, for drivers and antivirus software at least. I've a couple of bits of hardware, not least my logitech quickcam 9000 that don't work on win 7, and kaspersky, avg and sophos all had problems with the windows 7 beta, though they seem to work ok on the RC so far.
they're called ISPs, and they charge people for the delivery of content - any content - and they're happy.
Personally, I'd say that ISP's are in the business of charging people for the delivery of content at extortionate rates and then failing to live up to their end of the bargain with FUP's and bandwidth restrictions. However, your point that distributors like valve with steam, apple with itunes, netflix streaming and hulu are the people with the new business model is certainly valid. Witness the scurry of the content companies as they realise that easy to use portals are beating their restrictive drm'd and overpriced ones into the ground. And none of them come close to matching the pirate bay for sheer range of choice and price.
So basically they're using their internet connection to improve the availability of public domain material, for the benefit of the their fellow man? That sounds very laudable, and greatly in line with the intent of the public domain, freely shared for all to use.
OK, so it's not material back in the public domain yet. But since the copyright industry has decided they're going to unilaterally rewrite the length of their copyright term after the works were created (and get legislators to go along with it by bribery), I have no moral problem whatsoever with rewriting it to be much shorter instead.
According to the article, only some 5% of firefox users use adblock plus, and generally, firefox only makes up some 20% (or less) or the browser audience. Personally, adblock plus and easylist and the element hider addon are why I use firefox in the first place; nothing else blocks such a high percentage of random annoying ads, and certainly nothing else does it without leaving big chunks of whitespace where the ads used to be, which is almost as annoying as the inline ads in the first place.
However, some sites test to see if you're blocking the ads and then blocking you in return, or putting up some kind of extra nagging inline css bar, which seems more effective than getting in an arms race.
That said, I have started to see adverts as you describe, served up from the same area as other website graphic elements - often integrated video ads. Uusually that's enough to make me leave and not come back.
Yes, I just spotted that option too. I've been visiting (and posting and metamoderating) for years, so it's nice they've added that in recognition that the comments are really what make slashdot what it is. That said, I've also been running adblock plus and easylist and easylist privacy and the element hiding adblock helper for a good long time anyway, so it wasn't like I saw seeing most of the ads or the whitespace automatically anyway. Now, if the ads hadn't always been so US centric, I might not have blocked them in the first place...
But anyway - thanks slashdot!
The idea is to have a standard method for those sites that are prepared to block you altogether (or do a honking great popup asking you to turn it off) if you don't turn off the ad-blocker for that site.
I am encountering such notices more often now, with adblock plus and easylist. It's fair enough; I have no obligation to view the ads, and they've no obligation to let me view the other content if I don't. Depending upon the value of the site to me, I'll either unblock them or blacklist the site altogether, so I don't end up wasting my time (and their bandwidth) there again. I used to adblock sites by hand, but there's just so many out there (and I've yet to buy a single thing from a clickthrough ad, and I only ever clicked them by mistake) that it was just simpler to install easylist.
Having a standard mechanism for such a 'view my ads or please bugger off' warning, so the webmaster don't have to code something specific every time sounds like a good idea - as long as we get an option to ignore the metatag request for a given site, and another to ignore them altogether. Webmasters can then choose to block adblock users that ignore the metatag, or not, as currently.
You know, I did just look up the meaning of literally, in Merriam-Webster.
Perhaps you should read this article by a dictionary editor defending the use of 'literally' for emphasis.
It's been used for emphasis of true statements in english since the 17th century. And it's hardly the only example:
So really - just get over it.
I live in the really-rural countryside in the south of england. Average local bus service? 4 times a day.
I live out here because it's as close to work as I could afford, and my job is at a rural boarding school. It's a 15 minute car ride, or a 2 hour triple bus ride, including half of it going in mostly the wrong direction to the local town centre for the exchange.
I don't choose to live in the boonies; it's the only place I could afford a flat bigger than a hankie, and I'm not going to give up a steady job just for the joy of taking the bus instead of my car.
Ironically, I live about 10 minutes walk from the train station. Shame it only goes east-west, linking west coast to london, when the county layout (including my commute) is entirely north-south. All the local services were closed down decades ago. We're train-through country, here.
This kind of destructive behaviour is what most ordinary people still associate with viruses; if it's not hosing the computer entirely, it's nothing to worry about. That they're partly responsible for the spam tsunami, and that their credit card details might be leaking all over the place, just simply doesn't seem to be on their radar.
so they keep that 3 month trial of norton they got with the computer 3 years ago, and think they're safe because their computer hasn't blown up yet.
Plus they have a remarkable tolerance for popups - the amount of pcs I get asked to look at because they're 'a bit slow' that are utterly riddled with spyware, maladware and a notification area that fills half the start bar, and are hitting swap space as soon as they boot up...
If I never have to go to the hospital, call the police, drive on the roads or send any kids to the schools, I still have to pay the exact same council tax as someone who uses all of them.
That's just the way general taxes work; everyone pays the bill so you have the option of using the services if you need them, and it's assumed everybody uses some but not all of them.
Most households already have a TV, and thus have to pay the tax anyway, for now. This discussion is happening in the UK too; with many people now watching the BBC iplayer instead of over an aerial, how long can we stick to only having the TV as the basis for the tax, before people switch to only watching online with no tv, and thus avoiding funding the BBC? It's not so much paying for the website streaming per se, it's that the BBC programme making funding is based on having some 95% of the population paying the tax. If that drops significantly, because people dump their tv for their broadband, the BBC is in trouble - and I'm sure the same applies to RTE.
Either sell advertising to cover the cost Dear God no. I've seen US TV, with the adverts virtually every 5 minutes. I have no idea how you bear it.
charge people who do watch it online through the website. Hmm, lets have a nice online record of what people watch, tied to their real name and credit card, held by the state broadcaster. Weren't people screaming about youtube having to hand over its viewing records with just IPs a while back?
I think is a premature move, but as broadcast TV slowly becomes obsolete, the only way to keep the ad-free public service system running is to maintain the high subscription levels. Perhaps we'd be better served if it become a completely ordinary tax, like the council tax, where every household pays it regardless.
Oops, I forgot one of the biggest areas large companies spend their profit they get from avoiding taxes - marketing. That again lets them gain marketshare to the cost of their smaller competitors, and eventually the public by the formation of monopolies.
If large companies have to cut their ad budgets in order to pay the taxes that they've been avoiding, I for one am not going to lose much sleep over it.
If they could raise prices on their goods to cover it, or lower wages, they already would have done so. Wages and the prices of their goods are not based upon their actual cost, but on what the market will bear in both cases.
Corporation taxes are paid out of profits, i.e. what's left over after they've paid their wage bill and running costs.
So where does the extra profit go, in those companies that get extra by avoiding the taxes that their competitors are paying?
It goes on higher bonuses for senior management. It goes into cash reserves. It gets invested into other profitable offshore tax dodges, sorry, capital investments. It gets paid out in dividends, thus gaining more investors back. It goes out in R&D, allowing them to unfairly get ahead of the competition.
Allowing some multinational companies to avoid paying their taxes while their smaller more agile competitors aren't big enough to do so diverts money into areas that are good for the multinational and its top earners, but not for the country as a whole that hosts them and allows them to do business in th first place. It costs local jobs, as the best drivers for job creation are smaller companies; the big ones just offshore, and smaller companies are at a disadvantage as they're paying their taxes and the big ones aren't.
It's a bit like pollution; allowing some companies to pollute, while others have to pay extra to clean up, gives the polluters an advantage at the expense of the common good of the public.
Allowing big companies to take advantage of tax dodges, while small ones can't pushes the market towards monopolies, and monopolies are almost always a bad thing in capitalism, as it lets them set the market rate for goods and wages, instead of having to abide by it.
In the end, it's about fairness. People pay taxes on their labour and purchases, in order to support the services they need that need to be paid for collectively. Companies need to pay taxes on their capital and investments - taxes on growth - in order to fund the common areas that they need to do business in the first place; roads, police and legal frameworks, infrastructure, a military to protect them, etc etc.
While it's certainly fair to argue over what the government should be paying for, and what the taxes need to be on investments, goods and labour in order to pay for that should be, it's entirely reasonable we should ensure the playing field is fair; just as everyone is expected to pay their income taxes, companies should pay their fair taxes too. Letting the biggest get out of it with loopholes distorts the market in their favour.
One of the big parts of the G20 meeting in London recently was a commitment to tackle the major tax havens, and put pressure on secretive banking countries with the threat of tax sanctions if they didn't become more open to tax investigations.
The cayman islands was one big target, along with Jersey, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Luxembourg, Singapore and Monaco. I believe a number have already caved, and are opening their books.
Of course, XPM is free with windows 7 professional upwards - and ironically, it's the one of the few ways to get a new XP licence unless you're buying a netbook or downgrading vista licences.
I dunno about you, but installing XP on new standalone hardware (using our legacy VLK licences) is a royal pain in the bum these days. Needing a floppy disk to install the SATA drivers, or patching the OS ISO, futzing around trying to find compatible sound card drivers, wireless network card drivers, the multitude of patches (thank $deity for SP3 rollup, it was getting rediculous post-patching SP2 even with WSUS).
You'd be amazed how many people are stuck on XP because of one or two legacy specialist apps that haven't been updated in forever, and simply won't run on a more modern OS. Giving people a simple way to still run them for no additional cost really will be useful to break with the past, and move forwards. When was the last time you tried running an 8 year old version of a linux distro or OSX on modern hardware?
Sure, some people prefer XP, or windows 2000. Fair enough. Me, I like 64-bit support and having more than 4GB of RAM, so XP simply doesn't cut it any more (XP64 is an utter abomination). Vista 64 is ok, but windows 7 beta and RC are simply better. Free virtualisation, plus a free copy of XP is a hell of a better deal than vmware workstation, which doesn't run on windows 7 yet anyway. Virtual PC works for OSes other than the bundled XP, btw - I've been testing it, and you can have multiple different VMs too, including linux.
I take it you haven't flown in Europe lately. A number of airlines are starting to enforce the 1 bag only carry-on rule - i.e. you get your laptop bag, or your normal bag, but not both. The cabin size limits are pretty tight, too.
I have a swissgear rucksack I use for both my laptop and other crap I use to keep myself amused for the 6-8 hours I'm going to be travelling to the airport, waiting at the airport, sitting on the plane, and waiting at the other end. Yet there was one time I needed to carry something particularly large in my carry-on, and there was simply no way I could fit the lappie in too.
So in the hold it went, in my suitcase, packed in solid foam. Fortunately, it made it. If I only had a normal laptop bag, it would probably travel in the hold a lot more often, as it's simply not big enough for the amount of extra stuff I take that doesn't go in the hold - the 15kg hold weight limit is starting to be a real pain in the arse.
And if a black person dislikes discrimination, they should just leave and find a society that doesn't have it?
This is rediculous. Laws are made by people, and can be changed by people. If the laws are not serving the public, then they should be protested, publically disobeyed and eventually, rewritten.
Copyright was written for the benefit of the public - to entice more creators to create and put their work into the public domain (where it belongs, as everyone has a free speech right to say or repeat what they wish, a right explicitly removed by copyright) so yet more works could be created inspired by them.
Any creator who tells you they came up with their entire work whole cloth without any inspiration, input or other assistance from the existing body of culture, history and knowledge built up in the public domain is simply lying.
Copyright was intended to improve the public domain, by granting a limited, temporary monopoly on making copies. Now, it's just a bloated perpetual new ownership system, such that new media barons can extract rent from the public for everything created since steamboat willie.
For every game maker that complains 'you're all thieves, taking my work for nothing' I ask when it will return to the public domain, and when they intend to pay their licence fee to the descendants of every person that ever had a hand in creating the knowledge that made possible the tools they use to make that game.
I'd also like to know when they intend to start paying their sysadmin a royalty every time they login to their network servers.
I do find it odd that it's got such a generous expiration date
The semi-official launch date for windows 7 is Q1 2010; so June 2010 does give them a bit of headroom for overruns, and/or to give people time to backup and do a clean install once the RTM comes out (there won't be an official upgrade path from RC to RTM, any more than there's one from beta to RC). There's also no plan to do another RC.
Many suspect they may try to push the RTM forward, and get it out this autumn but given Microsoft's launch delay history, I'm not going to be holding my breath for a release this year.
the XPM beta, including the free copy of XP should be starting shortly. It's anybody's guess as to how long the beta will run for before expiry, though the final release should mirror the windows 7 release.
However, there's little/no GPU acceleration so a big chunk of XP diehards (gamers) won't be switching.
Do you use the enterprise server or powerpack (or free!) version for your servers?
Any issues with samba integration with windows desktops, if you use them? (been having some crashes and performance issues lately with ubuntu LTS server tied into our AD doing filesharing)
Kubuntu is not great. It's basically the vanilla KDE packages with a couple of basic QT apps thrown on top; the real love, and bulk of development, goes into the ubuntu GNOME side, and GTK apps for everything ubuntu specific.
I haven't tried mandriva lately, but they've always been a KDE-lovin' distro with all the management utils etc written in QT. From a quick browse round their site, they still look like the emphasis for distro custom apps being in QT.
Hah, that describes my experience with mandrake exactly.
Mandrake were my first full-time distro as primary boot; I'd experimented with caldera, redhat and SuSE 7.3 (all retail distros available in the shop, back when I only had dialup - I still have those SuSE discs!).
Mandrake got a lot of things right back then, it was the first distro that 'just worked' for me, without needing manual package compiles to make up for missing apps.
I remember switching because their funding worries made it look like they would go commercial only, and even then may not survive, and I didn't want to get stuck on a dead distro.
After looking at the debian forums, I ran screaming to gentoo instead. The distro itself was ok (but flexible!), but the user community was great. I eventually got fed up with the declining quality of the ebuild library, and the increasing problems with having to upgrade everything constantly, with ever growing risks of breakages when you applied a security fix, if you didn't keep up with the changes on a regular basis.
And there was ubuntu. The forum support of gentoo, with the famous debian package library, with a pretty interface on top.
I did think of going back to mandriva, after gentoo - but that was right after the mandriva 9.2 'cd drive killer' kernel bug. OK, it turned out to be LG's fault in the end, but it did rather put me off!
Perhaps it's time to have another look, see if KDE 4 is anything like usable yet; I always did prefer KDE to GNOME, but the switch to 4 has been pretty crappy.
I'd heard they were going to include a virtual environment in 7 with XP-equivalent DLLs for backwards compatibility for legacy apps, but running a VM-hosted version of XP SP3 fully integrated into the host OS takes it to a whole new level - and free, to boot.
Definitely a step forward.
Modding the 360 doesn't require a modchip, merely reflashing the drive firmware via a sata cable. The games are as easy to download as pc dodgy games, and they're stealthed these days so they're not picked up on as rips on live.
There are softmods for the wii (using zelda save games I believe), but I don't think that allows playing dodgy discs, that still needs a modchip.