"innocent until proven guilty" applies to criminal trials, where the state presents the evidence. Civil cases, where an individual or company sues another have a different burden of proof - the preponderance of evidence. It's based on which party is most likely to be correct in their interpretation of the facts than proof beyond all reasonable doubt.
That said, that the music company being represented by the RIAA has to demonstrate that infringement actually occurred is a fair point, which is an avenue being pursued in several cases now. As you say, merely 'making available' a copyrighted work does not fall under the distribution clause under a strict reading of the law. Otherwise libraries wouldn't be allowed to have photocopier machines next to all those books, nor could art galleries dare allow patrons in with a camera.
Then if it's not unlimited, or even close, they should stop selling it as unlimited (and no, the * certainly wasn't always there). Pipex does this, but has a hidden cap of ~40GB a month - if you go past it, not only will you have to live with the general traffic shaping of P2P to 30KB/s but they throttle everything bar unencrypted http to 5KB/s. Yes, that includes online banking and webmail, causing timeouts making the service unusable with no warning or other notification.
Then try getting the customer services to actually admit you're being throttled for hitting the secret limits on your unlimited account, or how long you'll be throttled for, or what you have to do avoid being throttled. "download less during peak hours" was the best they could come up with.
I've now switched to an ISP with no throttling, but an explicit total useage cap. 45GB onpeak, 300GB offpeak, 832Kb upload speed for £30pcm. No shaping, no throttling. Good customer service, transparency about everything, constant investment by entanet in centrals to keep up with demand. ADSL24 absolutely rocks compared to pipex, tiscali and orange.
Mainstream ISPs have got far too used to having a steady income from grandmas who pay £20 a month to download less than a GB. Now people are actually starting to use the unlimited bandwidth they're supposedly paying for, the ISPs are panicking because they spent all our money on LLU to extract more profit from the existing bandwidth instead of increasing their central capacity to cover what was coming in the future. Its not contention that's the problem (I'm still on a contended service of course) it's the deliberate throttling and shaping then lying about it to cover their lack of investment that's the problem.
I'd be very happy indeed with ISPs being required to explicitly state up front what their usage caps are, the penalties for exceeding them, their exact definition of on/off peak, exactly what shaping they do and when. I'd also like significant negative changes in these conditions to be grounds to allow people to leave their contract without penalty - being stuck for 10 months with an ISP that's just completely changed their throttling to cripple your service, and you're the one who has to pay to leave is completely unfair.
People are pissed about the vista sound system because it cut off a bunch of X-fi and audigy users at the knees. All those directsound games that use EAX 4&5, and video playback using hardware accelerated ac3 and dts decoding for the soundtrack have to do everything in software in vista. Often in stereo, as quite a few games can't even tell the card can do 5.1. Alchemy works to an extent in translating directsound calls to openal on the fly for some games, but it's cpu overhead that should be entirely un-necessary.
So people are faced with stark choices. Dual boot windows XP and vista for old games and new directx 10 games. Not available for all, as vista upgrade supposed disables your old xp licence, and quite a few new machines preinstalled with vista don't even have xp drivers available once you do track down a copy to use. Run vista exclusively, and just live with crap sound in the older games that don't work in alchemy (which includes all audigy users last I checked)? Or just switch to onboard sound, bin your £150 soundcard and take the CPU hit to run it all in software, and have EAX 2 at best to boot. Oh, and if you watch video, don't forget to pay for a software codec so you can do the DD/DTS decoding in software too.
Yes, Microsoft have basically killed creative as a soundcard company (no point having hardware accelerated sound any more) which isn't actually a bad thing, but they've also screwed a whole bunch of gamers and forced them to dualboot XP or live with significantly worse sound until such time as software sound engines catch up to what used to be done in dedicated hardware.
The worst thing is the suspicion is that it was done not to improve the OS, but to make it harder to work round the embedded DRM protecting secure windows media files - in effect, crippling gamers to keep the music studios happy by try to provide a 'secure audio path' from DRM file to speakers, to at least prevent digital copies.
The movie business has done an excellent business of killing the cinema experience. The studios take such a big cut of the ticket sales (90% for the first week I believe is usual) that cinemas struggle to make money even with every seat filled with big blockbusters. They make their money largely from the concessions stand, which is why it's so damn expensive and they try to stop you bringing your own in. Then add in the random patrols of staff with night-vision gear looking for cameras, the sticky mess on the floors because they can't afford the time to clean the screenroom between showings properly, and of course the completely uncivilised assholes that actually go to cinemas - teenagers chatting throughout, mobile phones, the rustle of sweet bags the entire film, the little SOB that kept kicking my seat throughout the last film despite his mum's best attempts to stop him...
Frankly, if I can watch it on my own sofa on my own TV snuggled up with my other half, it's a damn sight better. For that big movie experience, I've got access to a digital projector which fills my whole wall. We can pause when we want, we can eat what we want - and with cheap DVD rental and an upscaler, it looks pretty decent too.
Want to save the cinema going experience? The studios need to be less greedy. The cinemas can't raise prices any more, they're already approaching eye-watering levels. Take a smaller cut, let the cinemas provide a better experience for less money, and you might reverse the decline in cinema audiences.
Yes, it's legal to close the source if you either wrote the material yourself, or had the copyright of contributions signed over to you (as the FSF does so they can take legal action against those who don't follow the terms of the GPL while distributing their code). This is quite commonly done (sort of) to allow two licenced versions of the same software. QT, for example has a GPL version, but linking against the libraries thus requires your own code to be GPL. They also have a pay-for otherwise identical non-GPL version so that commercial businesses wanting to embed QT code in their app don't have to GPL their app - but they do have to pay for that option.
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
Heh. I can just imagine a 'tie-inspector' walking round making sure your business attire is up to standard, or else he unleashes an angry cat on you. Or maybe he tortures a cute kitten in front of you, not sure on that point.
I think he was making the point that you can't just go changing a physical contract after its been signed without notifying and getting agreement of both sides, and expect it to be binding. Putting up the changed version online and saying 'well, it's up to you to check and see if the contract has changed - failure to complain or cancel your service means you accept the new terms' would be ludicrous in the real world, it's amazing that this even needed to go to court.
Yes, it must be IT imcompetance and bribery. It couldn't possibly be that microsoft office is the current industry standard, that all the school systems run microsoft office, that all the staff are trained on microsoft office, all their teaching resources are in microsoft office, all the staff laptops run microsoft office, all the students are taught microsoft office in classes using microsoft office specific lesson plans and ECDL training software.
Lets tell everyone to switch to an entirely different office suite at home with different scripting languages, different interfaces and different file formats. Lets make them as incompatible as possible to save the parents a few quid!
I run virtually my entire school network on linux servers, yet we still have office 2003 on the supported desktops and the recommended software for the student laptops. If people want to use their office software that's absolutely fine by me - but 97-2003.doc format etc is still the document format that everybody uses and is official supported.
With the educational discounts, office is pretty cheap, and everyone already knows it. Changing one toolbar button is enough to confuse half the teaching staff, switching to openoffice really would kill them (which is why we're not going to 2007 any time soon). Plus, we use the ODBC links between excel and MS SQL quite heavily (so I'm told) and we're switching to exchange shortly.
You may not believe it, but sometimes IT admins in the real world make software choices based on other things that the licence. If you don't, knock yourself out. I have senior management to report to, and small financial savings are not worth the massive support overhead and loss of functionality.
The reason old memory is more expensive than it was is because it's old and scarce. Hardly anybody makes it any more, so the mass production economies of scale and competition that drove the price down have gone, and the prices have risen in their absence. It's like old car parts; they might have been common as muck on the road 30 years ago, but now they're a 'classic' car and the parts can be pretty hard to get hold of, and expensive because of it.
As for cheap RAM... $CN30 is just under £14. For £12.89+tax I can get 512MB of basic DDR2 PC4200 which is an order of magnitude faster than that old SDRAM - not bad for rip off britain! Progress forever marches on...
Copyrights don't expire for lack of enforcement; you're thinking of trademarks becoming generic, i.e. if Hormel allow SPAM (allcaps) to become the same as spam, i.e. mass email marketing, they could lose the trademark on it, and anyone could sell spiced ham as SPAM! Just as hoover is a stand-in for vacuum cleaner in the UK as well as a specific brand, or kleenex is any tissue in the US.
copyrights don't expire until they enter the public domain, which for software in germany is - I believe - 70 years from date of publication.
The real people who should be up in arms against commercial violators of the GPL are the authors who hold the copyright on the code being misused.
Well, harald is going after people distributing his own code, i.e. netfilter;) But I know what you mean - the FSF should be much stronger going after commercial GPL violators for copyright infringement.
Two of them can be used as a 2Gb pseudo-trunk without having trunking support on the Gb switch supposedly. That might be handy for a media server or lan gaming server of some sort (you'd need a hell of a raid array to saturate a 2Gb network though!) Add in the need to act as a router for the rest of the network, or just the need to connect to two different networks (say, lan and a DMZ) and you need 3 gigabit ports.
The 680i chipset comes with two nvidia Gb ports, and the pseudo trunking comes from 2 extra marvell controllers - thus the 4 ports, the 2 nvidia ports are 'free' in a sense. Besides, home networks are getting bigger and more complex all the time - beats having to buy pci-e x1 network cards (about the only slots available between sli graphic cards)!
Sigh. You've missed the point entirely. People use electrolytic to mean 'electrolyte soaked paper layer capacitors' which are prone to failure, especially if its one of the capacitors manufactured with a bad liquid electrolyte formula. Solid alumninum polymer capacitors are far more reliable - which when you're buying motherboards, is quite important; definitely so if you've had bad liquid-electrolytic capacitors fail in the past, as I have.
I thought you were arguing that it had liquid (i.e. non-solid polymer) electrolytic capacitors on this board, and used the same shorthand in return. I now see you were arguing the technical difference between a true non-electrolytic capacitor and the whole class of solid and non-solid electrolytic capacitors. For this mistake, I apologise - it was your use of 'typical surface mount capacitors' that threw me - solid polymer capacitors are anything but typical, liquid electrolytics are. I must admit, I'm not aware of any motherboard that uses true non-electrolytic capacitors completely, the capacitance per unit volume is just too useful in small spaces.
For calling you a twit, I stand by. What people want to know is whether the board is prone to failure due to physical liquid electrolyte breakdown and leakage. That problem is largely resolved by solid polymer capacitors. That it is still - technically - an electrolytic capacitor is a point not relevant to anyone not an electrical engineer - as most enthusiasts are not.
You might have avoided the original post's troll mod if you had phrased your post differently; bemoaned the articles misuse of the term non-electrolytic to refer to solid-state electrolytic capacitors rather than going on a rant about surface mount and calling him a dimwit. Call me as full of shit as you wish, but the common usage of electrolytic to stand in for failure-prone liquid electrolytic isn't going to disappear just by insulting me.
solid polymer capacitors are much more reliable than liquid electrolytics. I too have had problems with bad liquid electrolytic capacitors, which is why I stick to solid polymer capacitors these days.
You twit. http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Pr oducts_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2553&ModelName=GA-N 680SLI-DQ6
The Industry's Leading All-Solid Capacitor motherboard Design To ensure a longer for systems in daily operation and boost system stability under extreme conditions, this platform adopts cutting-edge Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors from the world's leading vendors. With these high-quality components , users can take advantage of better electronic conductivity and excellent heat resistance for enhanced system durability. There are indeed 100% non-electrolytic capacitors on this board, despite what it 'looks' like to you. There's even a pretty sticker on the box saying 100% solid capacitors. It's not like it's a hugely rare feature these days, other boards have 100% solid caps too, like the ASUS P5N32 SLI PLUS.
Probably the best ripper on linux is DVD::rip - it should be in your distro repository.
On windows, I like Nero recode - comes with Nero Burning Rom (commercial) - lets you shrink DVD9 to DVD5 and choose which tracks you want, or to mpeg4 or H.264 if you want to store on a media pc.
Oh, if you get a DVD these guys can't handle due to braindead copy protection, usually DVD Fab free or DVD decrypter (if you can find a copy on say, mrbass.org, it is technically illegal to distribute since it was acquired and shut down by macrovision) can remove the copy protection and save it as files, then you run dvd shrink on the files to get it down to a DVD5.
Slavery was once perfectly legal in the US. Not that I'm comparing slavery to indefinite extension of copyright terms ; I'm pointing out that just because its a law does not mean its a just or fair law that should be supported. Rosa Parks is another example where an unjust law was challenged and eventually defeated by public flouting of it.
A lot of folks here could benefit from a realistic and balanced discussion that properly respects the right of others to protect their property...
Thats your mistake right there. Copyrighted material is not property. No matter how many times people like you say 'intellectual property' it doesn't make it true. Copyrighted works are in the public domain* - its just that for a limited time, in order to get more material into the public domain, authors are supposed to have a limited exclusive time of distribution. Its NOT ownership of property, it never was - ideas, stories, music, cannot be owned - it belongs to all in the public domain.
This idea is being lost. Its time we restored it, banished the fiction of 'intellectual property', got rid of copyright altogether and looked to a different method of promoting progress in science and the useful arts. And you say 'china' like its a bad thing. I see china, where copyrighted works are used and shared by all for minimal cost, benefiting the society and users rather than big corporations and I see a good thing much closer to the original copyright ideals than our current twisted approach in the west of lock it up, deny it to the public and keep it hidden.
How much music has re-entered the public domain since copyright began? How much instead has been locked up, mouldering away in vaults? How much has passed several release dates, only for copyright duration to be extended again, and again, and again keeping it locked away? The public is being stolen from. Its time we took it back.
*the reason all this material is in the public domain by default is for one main reason; free speech. You can't prevent someone repeating or sharing an idea, story, music etc because they have a free speech right to do so. Sharing flames with tapers etc. Copyright temporarily removes that free speech right, in order to reward authors sharing their material with a short period of exclusivity before it returns to the public domain covered by free speech. Current copyright approach ignores this entirely, and effectively will extend copyright duration forever, thus eliminating the whole point of copyright, that of a full and healthy public domain of material freely shared and built on in new works. BSD (and to some extent GPL) software is much closer to the original plan of copyright than closed commercial software development.
This is plainly some cunning terrorist code system - off to gitmo with you if you won't tell us what secret information he's concealing! And you swore - that's blasphemous heresy, and disrespect of the one true God is also an unamerican terrorist activity.
Oh, don't worry about that babies thing, as long as they're democrat babies.
What pisses me off is they removed the hardware emulation from the EU version to cut costs, then made it nearly $100 more expensive after tax (current difference is $180, as no sign of the price cut in UK - $680 for the 60GB model before VAT). That's just a 'fuck you' from Sony to Europe. For the record, I don't own an Xbox360.
This is truly pathetic, and goes to show the lengths some people will go to in order to keep on getting music, movies and other stuff for free. If the pirate bay really gave a damn about free speech, they would remove *all* copyrighted material, and merely use the site to host information that genuinely should be protected, like leaked documents from whistleblowers, information that governments want suppressed, political opinions far outside the mainstream etc etc. The fact is, maybe 0.01% of stuff on TPB will fall into a 'geneuine protected speech' category, the rest is just copyrighted stuff people want to leech. All the 'good' things you mentioned are almost certainly copyrighted too you know. Who gets to decide what is 'good' infringing material, and what is 'bad' infringing material? Defending free speech means defending all of it, even those things that you disagree with personally.
Ah, but leeching free copies of spiderman 3 isn't free speech at all! I hear you say. Which just goes to show what a good job the media industry have done.
Remember, copyright is a two-way deal. I suspend my free speech right to diseminate copies of public domain material for a period of exclusivity for creating copies by the original author. For 14 years, if I remember rightly. All so that ever greater amounts of creative works enter the public domain, for the benefit of all - our shared culture to grow ever richer, for derivative works to grow, for the education and entertainment of all. All works will enter the public domain, because the stories and ideas and shared culture that people create from also come from the public domain.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years. Copyright isn't a deal any more. It's 'intellectual property'. Ideas, stories, music all of it. Locked up in digital vaults, defended by infinitely-extending copyright duration. Huge amounts of material should be in the public domain by now, and yet none of it is. Some musicians in the UK are complaining that their 'property' is about to expire after 50 years. Well, the deal was even less generous when they created the works, yet they want to extend the duration of the copyrights again, and again, and again after the fact.
Well you know what? Stuff them. They had a deal. and they broke it, over and over again. I have a right to make backup copies, I have a right to share these materials with my friends and I have a right watch it in any damn way I please. The law may not recognise these rights, but any law which criminalises 60-70% of the population (and if you include trivial violations like media shifting, it's damn near 100%) is a bad law, and should be repealed. There are alternative ways to encourage and fund creative works, and get them into the public domain - lets explore that.
You argue my views, and the exercise of them is illegal, and should be prevented by people like TPB. How is that any different than making illegal and banning 'proper' free speech like whistleblowers? They feel that all speech is to be protected, even copyright violations, as copyright law is broken, just as laws protecting corporations from whistleblowers or banning political speech are broken.
They trivialise the entire argument into "my human rights to get free hollywood movies". The human rights underlying the whole copyright argument - free speech, privacy, anonymity, corporate mal-influence over the political process, restriction of the public domain, DRM etc etc are pretty important too. Defending the pirate bay is a way to bring the whole thing into the open, and perhaps reform the political and legal landscape to benefit the public and the artists rather than all the money and influence being with corporate middlemen who add nothing to the exchange, only pervert the system for their monetary benefit.
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"innocent until proven guilty" applies to criminal trials, where the state presents the evidence. Civil cases, where an individual or company sues another have a different burden of proof - the preponderance of evidence. It's based on which party is most likely to be correct in their interpretation of the facts than proof beyond all reasonable doubt.
That said, that the music company being represented by the RIAA has to demonstrate that infringement actually occurred is a fair point, which is an avenue being pursued in several cases now. As you say, merely 'making available' a copyrighted work does not fall under the distribution clause under a strict reading of the law. Otherwise libraries wouldn't be allowed to have photocopier machines next to all those books, nor could art galleries dare allow patrons in with a camera.
I believe AOL is on there because they didn't forward the RIAA's 'we have your IP and you're screwed unless you cough up' emails/letters.
Then if it's not unlimited, or even close, they should stop selling it as unlimited (and no, the * certainly wasn't always there). Pipex does this, but has a hidden cap of ~40GB a month - if you go past it, not only will you have to live with the general traffic shaping of P2P to 30KB/s but they throttle everything bar unencrypted http to 5KB/s. Yes, that includes online banking and webmail, causing timeouts making the service unusable with no warning or other notification.
Then try getting the customer services to actually admit you're being throttled for hitting the secret limits on your unlimited account, or how long you'll be throttled for, or what you have to do avoid being throttled. "download less during peak hours" was the best they could come up with.
I've now switched to an ISP with no throttling, but an explicit total useage cap. 45GB onpeak, 300GB offpeak, 832Kb upload speed for £30pcm. No shaping, no throttling. Good customer service, transparency about everything, constant investment by entanet in centrals to keep up with demand. ADSL24 absolutely rocks compared to pipex, tiscali and orange.
Mainstream ISPs have got far too used to having a steady income from grandmas who pay £20 a month to download less than a GB.
Now people are actually starting to use the unlimited bandwidth they're supposedly paying for, the ISPs are panicking because they spent all our money on LLU to extract more profit from the existing bandwidth instead of increasing their central capacity to cover what was coming in the future. Its not contention that's the problem (I'm still on a contended service of course) it's the deliberate throttling and shaping then lying about it to cover their lack of investment that's the problem.
I'd be very happy indeed with ISPs being required to explicitly state up front what their usage caps are, the penalties for exceeding them, their exact definition of on/off peak, exactly what shaping they do and when. I'd also like significant negative changes in these conditions to be grounds to allow people to leave their contract without penalty - being stuck for 10 months with an ISP that's just completely changed their throttling to cripple your service, and you're the one who has to pay to leave is completely unfair.
ISP's like pipex UK already just pre-emptively throttle ALL encrypted traffic.
People are pissed about the vista sound system because it cut off a bunch of X-fi and audigy users at the knees. All those directsound games that use EAX 4&5, and video playback using hardware accelerated ac3 and dts decoding for the soundtrack have to do everything in software in vista. Often in stereo, as quite a few games can't even tell the card can do 5.1. Alchemy works to an extent in translating directsound calls to openal on the fly for some games, but it's cpu overhead that should be entirely un-necessary.
So people are faced with stark choices. Dual boot windows XP and vista for old games and new directx 10 games. Not available for all, as vista upgrade supposed disables your old xp licence, and quite a few new machines preinstalled with vista don't even have xp drivers available once you do track down a copy to use. Run vista exclusively, and just live with crap sound in the older games that don't work in alchemy (which includes all audigy users last I checked)? Or just switch to onboard sound, bin your £150 soundcard and take the CPU hit to run it all in software, and have EAX 2 at best to boot. Oh, and if you watch video, don't forget to pay for a software codec so you can do the DD/DTS decoding in software too.
Yes, Microsoft have basically killed creative as a soundcard company (no point having hardware accelerated sound any more) which isn't actually a bad thing, but they've also screwed a whole bunch of gamers and forced them to dualboot XP or live with significantly worse sound until such time as software sound engines catch up to what used to be done in dedicated hardware.
The worst thing is the suspicion is that it was done not to improve the OS, but to make it harder to work round the embedded DRM protecting secure windows media files - in effect, crippling gamers to keep the music studios happy by try to provide a 'secure audio path' from DRM file to speakers, to at least prevent digital copies.
It's more because mathematics ends with an s. Math's as opposed to Math' - in the UK, at least.
The movie business has done an excellent business of killing the cinema experience. The studios take such a big cut of the ticket sales (90% for the first week I believe is usual) that cinemas struggle to make money even with every seat filled with big blockbusters. They make their money largely from the concessions stand, which is why it's so damn expensive and they try to stop you bringing your own in.
Then add in the random patrols of staff with night-vision gear looking for cameras, the sticky mess on the floors because they can't afford the time to clean the screenroom between showings properly, and of course the completely uncivilised assholes that actually go to cinemas - teenagers chatting throughout, mobile phones, the rustle of sweet bags the entire film, the little SOB that kept kicking my seat throughout the last film despite his mum's best attempts to stop him...
Frankly, if I can watch it on my own sofa on my own TV snuggled up with my other half, it's a damn sight better. For that big movie experience, I've got access to a digital projector which fills my whole wall. We can pause when we want, we can eat what we want - and with cheap DVD rental and an upscaler, it looks pretty decent too.
Want to save the cinema going experience? The studios need to be less greedy. The cinemas can't raise prices any more, they're already approaching eye-watering levels. Take a smaller cut, let the cinemas provide a better experience for less money, and you might reverse the decline in cinema audiences.
Yes, it's legal to close the source if you either wrote the material yourself, or had the copyright of contributions signed over to you (as the FSF does so they can take legal action against those who don't follow the terms of the GPL while distributing their code). This is quite commonly done (sort of) to allow two licenced versions of the same software. QT, for example has a GPL version, but linking against the libraries thus requires your own code to be GPL. They also have a pay-for otherwise identical non-GPL version so that commercial businesses wanting to embed QT code in their app don't have to GPL their app - but they do have to pay for that option.
Heh. I can just imagine a 'tie-inspector' walking round making sure your business attire is up to standard, or else he unleashes an angry cat on you. Or maybe he tortures a cute kitten in front of you, not sure on that point.
I think he was making the point that you can't just go changing a physical contract after its been signed without notifying and getting agreement of both sides, and expect it to be binding. Putting up the changed version online and saying 'well, it's up to you to check and see if the contract has changed - failure to complain or cancel your service means you accept the new terms' would be ludicrous in the real world, it's amazing that this even needed to go to court.
Yes, it must be IT imcompetance and bribery. It couldn't possibly be that microsoft office is the current industry standard, that all the school systems run microsoft office, that all the staff are trained on microsoft office, all their teaching resources are in microsoft office, all the staff laptops run microsoft office, all the students are taught microsoft office in classes using microsoft office specific lesson plans and ECDL training software.
.doc format etc is still the document format that everybody uses and is official supported.
Lets tell everyone to switch to an entirely different office suite at home with different scripting languages, different interfaces and different file formats. Lets make them as incompatible as possible to save the parents a few quid!
I run virtually my entire school network on linux servers, yet we still have office 2003 on the supported desktops and the recommended software for the student laptops. If people want to use their office software that's absolutely fine by me - but 97-2003
With the educational discounts, office is pretty cheap, and everyone already knows it. Changing one toolbar button is enough to confuse half the teaching staff, switching to openoffice really would kill them (which is why we're not going to 2007 any time soon). Plus, we use the ODBC links between excel and MS SQL quite heavily (so I'm told) and we're switching to exchange shortly.
You may not believe it, but sometimes IT admins in the real world make software choices based on other things that the licence. If you don't, knock yourself out. I have senior management to report to, and small financial savings are not worth the massive support overhead and loss of functionality.
The reason old memory is more expensive than it was is because it's old and scarce. Hardly anybody makes it any more, so the mass production economies of scale and competition that drove the price down have gone, and the prices have risen in their absence. It's like old car parts; they might have been common as muck on the road 30 years ago, but now they're a 'classic' car and the parts can be pretty hard to get hold of, and expensive because of it.
As for cheap RAM... $CN30 is just under £14. For £12.89+tax I can get 512MB of basic DDR2 PC4200 which is an order of magnitude faster than that old SDRAM - not bad for rip off britain! Progress forever marches on...
Copyrights don't expire for lack of enforcement; you're thinking of trademarks becoming generic, i.e. if Hormel allow SPAM (allcaps) to become the same as spam, i.e. mass email marketing, they could lose the trademark on it, and anyone could sell spiced ham as SPAM! Just as hoover is a stand-in for vacuum cleaner in the UK as well as a specific brand, or kleenex is any tissue in the US.
;) But I know what you mean - the FSF should be much stronger going after commercial GPL violators for copyright infringement.
copyrights don't expire until they enter the public domain, which for software in germany is - I believe - 70 years from date of publication.
The real people who should be up in arms against commercial violators of the GPL are the authors who hold the copyright on the code being misused.
Well, harald is going after people distributing his own code, i.e. netfilter
They're now widely back in stock in the UK. I'm guessing you're in the US, so a PAL version probably isn't what you're after.
You might like silentpcreview.com - they're obviously specialized in reviewing quiet parts, but I think they might be up to your review standards.
Two of them can be used as a 2Gb pseudo-trunk without having trunking support on the Gb switch supposedly. That might be handy for a media server or lan gaming server of some sort (you'd need a hell of a raid array to saturate a 2Gb network though!) Add in the need to act as a router for the rest of the network, or just the need to connect to two different networks (say, lan and a DMZ) and you need 3 gigabit ports.
The 680i chipset comes with two nvidia Gb ports, and the pseudo trunking comes from 2 extra marvell controllers - thus the 4 ports, the 2 nvidia ports are 'free' in a sense. Besides, home networks are getting bigger and more complex all the time - beats having to buy pci-e x1 network cards (about the only slots available between sli graphic cards)!
Sigh. You've missed the point entirely. People use electrolytic to mean 'electrolyte soaked paper layer capacitors' which are prone to failure, especially if its one of the capacitors manufactured with a bad liquid electrolyte formula. Solid alumninum polymer capacitors are far more reliable - which when you're buying motherboards, is quite important; definitely so if you've had bad liquid-electrolytic capacitors fail in the past, as I have.
I thought you were arguing that it had liquid (i.e. non-solid polymer) electrolytic capacitors on this board, and used the same shorthand in return. I now see you were arguing the technical difference between a true non-electrolytic capacitor and the whole class of solid and non-solid electrolytic capacitors. For this mistake, I apologise - it was your use of 'typical surface mount capacitors' that threw me - solid polymer capacitors are anything but typical, liquid electrolytics are. I must admit, I'm not aware of any motherboard that uses true non-electrolytic capacitors completely, the capacitance per unit volume is just too useful in small spaces.
For calling you a twit, I stand by. What people want to know is whether the board is prone to failure due to physical liquid electrolyte breakdown and leakage. That problem is largely resolved by solid polymer capacitors. That it is still - technically - an electrolytic capacitor is a point not relevant to anyone not an electrical engineer - as most enthusiasts are not.
You might have avoided the original post's troll mod if you had phrased your post differently; bemoaned the articles misuse of the term non-electrolytic to refer to solid-state electrolytic capacitors rather than going on a rant about surface mount and calling him a dimwit. Call me as full of shit as you wish, but the common usage of electrolytic to stand in for failure-prone liquid electrolytic isn't going to disappear just by insulting me.
solid polymer capacitors are much more reliable than liquid electrolytics. I too have had problems with bad liquid electrolytic capacitors, which is why I stick to solid polymer capacitors these days.
To ensure a longer for systems in daily operation and boost system stability under extreme conditions, this platform adopts cutting-edge Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors from the world's leading vendors. With these high-quality components , users can take advantage of better electronic conductivity and excellent heat resistance for enhanced system durability. There are indeed 100% non-electrolytic capacitors on this board, despite what it 'looks' like to you. There's even a pretty sticker on the box saying 100% solid capacitors. It's not like it's a hugely rare feature these days, other boards have 100% solid caps too, like the ASUS P5N32 SLI PLUS.
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?P
800/1066/1333FSB, ATA/133, 4DDR2 DIMM, 2 PCI Express x16, 1 PCI Express x8, 1 PCI Express x1, 3PCI, USB 2.0/1.1, IEEE 1394a, Audio, Quad Gigabit LAN, RAID/SATA, eSATA
Features exclusive Silent Pipe II fanless cooling technology and 100% solid capacitors
Probably the best ripper on linux is DVD::rip - it should be in your distro repository.
On windows, I like Nero recode - comes with Nero Burning Rom (commercial) - lets you shrink DVD9 to DVD5 and choose which tracks you want, or to mpeg4 or H.264 if you want to store on a media pc.
The best free windows one IMO is dvd shrink - a bit less point-and-clicky, but still pretty simple. Yes, you can get technically better results with the proper multi-pass CCE rippers; but for most purposes the point-and-click recoders do a plenty good enough job, and they're much, much faster.
Oh, if you get a DVD these guys can't handle due to braindead copy protection, usually DVD Fab free or DVD decrypter (if you can find a copy on say, mrbass.org, it is technically illegal to distribute since it was acquired and shut down by macrovision) can remove the copy protection and save it as files, then you run dvd shrink on the files to get it down to a DVD5.
Good luck!
Slavery was once perfectly legal in the US. Not that I'm comparing slavery to indefinite extension of copyright terms ; I'm pointing out that just because its a law does not mean its a just or fair law that should be supported. Rosa Parks is another example where an unjust law was challenged and eventually defeated by public flouting of it.
A lot of folks here could benefit from a realistic and balanced discussion that properly respects the right of others to protect their property...
Thats your mistake right there. Copyrighted material is not property. No matter how many times people like you say 'intellectual property' it doesn't make it true. Copyrighted works are in the public domain* - its just that for a limited time, in order to get more material into the public domain, authors are supposed to have a limited exclusive time of distribution. Its NOT ownership of property, it never was - ideas, stories, music, cannot be owned - it belongs to all in the public domain.
This idea is being lost. Its time we restored it, banished the fiction of 'intellectual property', got rid of copyright altogether and looked to a different method of promoting progress in science and the useful arts. And you say 'china' like its a bad thing. I see china, where copyrighted works are used and shared by all for minimal cost, benefiting the society and users rather than big corporations and I see a good thing much closer to the original copyright ideals than our current twisted approach in the west of lock it up, deny it to the public and keep it hidden.
How much music has re-entered the public domain since copyright began? How much instead has been locked up, mouldering away in vaults? How much has passed several release dates, only for copyright duration to be extended again, and again, and again keeping it locked away? The public is being stolen from. Its time we took it back.
*the reason all this material is in the public domain by default is for one main reason; free speech. You can't prevent someone repeating or sharing an idea, story, music etc because they have a free speech right to do so. Sharing flames with tapers etc. Copyright temporarily removes that free speech right, in order to reward authors sharing their material with a short period of exclusivity before it returns to the public domain covered by free speech. Current copyright approach ignores this entirely, and effectively will extend copyright duration forever, thus eliminating the whole point of copyright, that of a full and healthy public domain of material freely shared and built on in new works. BSD (and to some extent GPL) software is much closer to the original plan of copyright than closed commercial software development.
This is plainly some cunning terrorist code system - off to gitmo with you if you won't tell us what secret information he's concealing!
And you swore - that's blasphemous heresy, and disrespect of the one true God is also an unamerican terrorist activity.
Oh, don't worry about that babies thing, as long as they're democrat babies.
What pisses me off is they removed the hardware emulation from the EU version to cut costs, then made it nearly $100 more expensive after tax (current difference is $180, as no sign of the price cut in UK - $680 for the 60GB model before VAT). That's just a 'fuck you' from Sony to Europe. For the record, I don't own an Xbox360.
Ah, but leeching free copies of spiderman 3 isn't free speech at all! I hear you say. Which just goes to show what a good job the media industry have done.
Remember, copyright is a two-way deal. I suspend my free speech right to diseminate copies of public domain material for a period of exclusivity for creating copies by the original author. For 14 years, if I remember rightly. All so that ever greater amounts of creative works enter the public domain, for the benefit of all - our shared culture to grow ever richer, for derivative works to grow, for the education and entertainment of all. All works will enter the public domain, because the stories and ideas and shared culture that people create from also come from the public domain.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years. Copyright isn't a deal any more. It's 'intellectual property'. Ideas, stories, music all of it. Locked up in digital vaults, defended by infinitely-extending copyright duration. Huge amounts of material should be in the public domain by now, and yet none of it is. Some musicians in the UK are complaining that their 'property' is about to expire after 50 years. Well, the deal was even less generous when they created the works, yet they want to extend the duration of the copyrights again, and again, and again after the fact.
Well you know what? Stuff them. They had a deal. and they broke it, over and over again. I have a right to make backup copies, I have a right to share these materials with my friends and I have a right watch it in any damn way I please. The law may not recognise these rights, but any law which criminalises 60-70% of the population (and if you include trivial violations like media shifting, it's damn near 100%) is a bad law, and should be repealed. There are alternative ways to encourage and fund creative works, and get them into the public domain - lets explore that.
You argue my views, and the exercise of them is illegal, and should be prevented by people like TPB. How is that any different than making illegal and banning 'proper' free speech like whistleblowers? They feel that all speech is to be protected, even copyright violations, as copyright law is broken, just as laws protecting corporations from whistleblowers or banning political speech are broken. They trivialise the entire argument into "my human rights to get free hollywood movies". The human rights underlying the whole copyright argument - free speech, privacy, anonymity, corporate mal-influence over the political process, restriction of the public domain, DRM etc etc are pretty important too. Defending the pirate bay is a way to bring the whole thing into the open, and perhaps reform the political and legal landscape to benefit the public and the artists rather than all the money and influence being with corporate middlemen who add nothing to the exchange, only pervert the system for their monetary benefit.
Gah, swap lenovo for IBM. Keep forgetting they've sold off their desktop business, as lenovo kit still comes IBM branded!