Lack of humor? Donno, there is some pretty humorous stuff in the kernel.:) "lpX: printer on fire"? And don't forget all those fun fun swear words... the Linux kernel is not only funny, it's PG-rated!
Most importantly, it will provide significant benefits to you.
...Look, there's nothing wrong with banner ads or corporate sponsorship, but...
Is it just me, or have more and more stories been taking on a decidedly 'advertisatory' (to coin a word) tone in the past year?
SlashDot did not used to be like this.
At least CNN.com and whatnot put 'ADVERTISEMENT' at the top of "stories that look like ads", and they put 'SPONSORED BY' by "stories that are sponsored by the very companies they cover". (Look at this gem of a screenshot). Shouldn't SlashDot do the same?
I might wish to politely suggest that, except in cases where anonymity is needed (e.g. when discussing something that could get someone sued, like DeCSS or something anti-MPAA or anti-RIAA), Anonymous Cowards should not be allowed to post stories.
When I read this story, the first thing I thought was that the poster was an employee for either IBM or Rational...
For the umpteenth time, the store is run by Cafe Press. They run Windows. I did not choose their OS, thanks. Believe me, I would not have chosen what they did.
Oh, actually I don't think Office sucks at all. It's quite nice (albeit a bit large?). No, but you must consider this: If MS hadn't obtained their 95+% monopoly in desktop OS market share, might WordPerfect or some other alternative (remember Ami Pro?) became just as good as Word is now?
There are still people who prefer WordPerfect. They're rarer than blue moons, but hey.
...because it is under, or not under, any specific license (even our beloved GPL). It's going to fail because Microsoft's "mindshare" is so phenomenal that it would take nothing short of a miracle for ANYONE to impact its 95+% of the Word Processor market.
I don't like that reality either. But, at the moment, it's true. That's why we need to keep pushing the existing suits remaining against MS. Because they DO have a huge monopoly, because they DID get it through illicit means, and because it IS making it virtually impossible for competitors (like the Gobe Productive people) to break into any of the many fields MS dominates.
What happens if you shove four of these in four consecutive (vertically) 5.25" drive bays? Would they overheat? That might limit the usefulness if you had to space them out... you'd have to buy twice as big a case as physically needed.
Maybe if you alternated... P3, coolerunit, P3, coolerunit, P3....;)
Recently, I had a very interesting conversation on the phone with the Verizon Residential DSL support people. So I call up; I realize (due to factors of age and gender) I don't "sound like a geek" but I am. After a few minutes the tech realized he was conversing with a fellow techie, and we worked together to solve my problem (him using Verizon's proprietary tools and me using RoaringPenguin's pppoe and standard Linux TCP/IP tools). He was quite nice and we even had an ongoing side-discussion about running Linux on the PowerPC architecture while we worked to solve the problem.
Then it came time to hand off the problem to Verizon's internal tech support team, since it became obvious that it was a systemic problem affecting people in my area (or at least me, but we determined that the problem was clearly on their end, not mine). At this point, my friend tech apologized, and warned me that this report might not go anywhere-- since I was not running Windows on my box. Apparently, internal tech support only honors reports from people running Windows...
It's just another example of how the legions of PHBs running the telecom field (and the dot-com field, as I can testify from having worked far too long in said field) are trying to regulate everything in the support process. It's all about the Benjamins, and these people believe that by regulating, and restricting, and prohibiting everything-- to the point of "scripting" common tech support dialogs and replacing human operators with "automatic phone support systems", they can make more money.
They may be right, they may be wrong. In any case, I don't like it...
The faux pas isn't the target audience itself-- it's a bad misjudgment of how far "market penetration" (if I must wax Corporate for the moment) will go among said target audience.
Or, to put it more clearly-- this CD is targeted at bringing open-source software to people who otherwise would not use it, or maybe even have heard of it.
But how many of those people are going to have heard of OpenCD.org? Joe Beer and his wife Martha surely aren't reading SlashDot. Or Kuro5hin. Or $OTHER_GEEK_HANGOUT_SITE.
Not to be a fatalist, but I don't think this CD (which is an EXCELLENT idea in concept) will get very many users. Sure, here and there a rabid OSS person will show it to all of their friends, and that's a Good Thing. But one thing SlashDot readers (and posters) tend to underestimate is the colossal "mindshare" Windows and Microsoft products in general hold. People, realize-- to many people in this country, Bill Gates is a "great business leader", to some almost a hero. Many people aspire to be like him, and hardly anyone (excepting geeks) has anything against what he's doing. We at SlashDot aren't quite so complacent-- but the great masses of people in this country ARE!
Going against the MS monopoly with this nice OSS CD is like... well... To make an analogy to Star Control 2, it would be rather like going up against a fully-loaded Ur-Quan Dreadnought in a Shofixti Scout. With the Glory Device broken...
STEP 1: There is no support for codex X.
STEP 2: They add DLL support for codec X.
STEP 3: After a good amount of time spent reverse-engineering, they add native support for codec X.
It's the step 3 that's gonna really get them in trouble. Codecs only remain "DLL-only" in MPlayer for so long. After a time, the MPlayer guys figure out how to reverse-engineer the codec-- or someone else does, and the MPlayer guys adapt the code to their project...
Heck, the EULA for many of these DLLs may say "Only on approved operating systems", who knows... no one reads the things. Not even me.;)
MPlayer is a great project. I was absolutely astonished when I first downloaded it and played with its many features. But I'm terrified that any day now, They (you know, MS or Sorenson or Real or the RIAA or the MPAA or possibly all five) are going to slap the MPlayer guys with a lawsuit (yes, MPlayer HQ is in, what, Hungary? But look at what happened to our friend Skylarov (sp.?) in Russia) and b3wm, down goes the project, and it's officially verboten in the US (like DeCSS).
How will they sue the MPlayer people? Simple. They could sue under the anti-reverse-engineering clause of the DMCA. Or they could employ any number of other recent pro-corporate laws which are slowly making it illegal to reverse-engineer anything, even if it's necessary for you to do your work. (Remember, there is STILL no legal and MPAA-approved solution for playing your DVDs in Linux (let alone more obscure OSes like FreeBSD or OpenBSD)-- unless, of course, you count hooking up the output of your set-top DVD player into the video input of your TV tuner card...
Personally, I don't forsee any 'mainstream' Linux dists (if there really is such a thing in terms of desktop use;) ) including MPlayer any time soon, for fear of being named as co-defendants in a possibly gruesome lawsuit...
Remember: MPlayer was created using reverse engineering. The SPA/MPAA/RIAA/MS/etc. folks are really really pushing (and paying off congresspeople, naturally) to make reverse engineering a criminal offense. It may already be... this is a dangerous area, a legal powder-keg waiting to go off.
At BEST, MPlayer will be a "gray market" program for the forseeable future-- if not forever. Again, yes, I love it-- but I worry for it. More properly, I worry for its creators...
SEMI-pornographic? Almost SEMI-pornographic? Ye gads, at least 80% of 'I Will Fear No Evil' is little more than an Internet sex story set to paper (by no less than one of the great modern fathers of sci-fi!). Heinlein was truly a dirty old man.
Let's count the kinks/fetishes/atypical-sexual-thingies/stuff-pr0n -on-the-Net-consists of just in that one Heinlein novel alone... lesbianism, spanking, pregnancy, threesomes, body paint, forced feminization (of a sort)... am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, don't forget the "old decaying guy magically becomes really young and good-looking and has lots of sex" element. That has to be in half a billion Internet fantasy stories out there...
I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that if you're careful, you can share a chain of SCSI devices between multiple machines...
Maybe making a SCSI RAID, or an IDE raid connected to one of those IDE-to-SCSI adaptor thingees (Promise sells such things; they even sell ready-to-go SCSI-connectable RAID cases.. just fill with IDE (!!!) hard drives!) and plugging it into all yer boxes would work? ^_^
FireWire(TM) is a registered trademark of Apple Computer. Expect a call from their lawyers within the next 5 milliseconds. (Expect the case to settle out of court within the next 5 years.);)
I think you grossly overestimate the intelligent/sophistication/wisdom of the average human being.
Go pick a random 25-year-old college grad and try to bring up any topic not related to sports, sex, beer, fashion, movies, celebrities or currently popular music. You'll see very quickly what the core of the problem is.
And even sicker is that anyone who dares protest this state of affairs is branded a "communist" or a "hippie".
This is not how capitalism is supposed to be.
We need a sound balance of capitalism and socialism-- and a heavy dose of fairness. Unfortunately, lots of people do not have the Buddha-nature and are quite selfish and greedy. (And I'm sorry, I don't care how much of your $billions you gave away to charity, BillG, wanting/insisting upon 100% market share in every market you touch does make you "quite selfish and greedy").
Slashdot Mirror
Lack of humor? Donno, there is some pretty humorous stuff in the kernel. :) "lpX: printer on fire"? And don't forget all those fun fun swear words... the Linux kernel is not only funny, it's PG-rated!
Most importantly, it will provide significant benefits to you.
...Look, there's nothing wrong with banner ads or corporate sponsorship, but...
Is it just me, or have more and more stories been taking on a decidedly 'advertisatory' (to coin a word) tone in the past year?
SlashDot did not used to be like this.
At least CNN.com and whatnot put 'ADVERTISEMENT' at the top of "stories that look like ads", and they put 'SPONSORED BY' by "stories that are sponsored by the very companies they cover". (Look at this gem of a screenshot). Shouldn't SlashDot do the same?
I might wish to politely suggest that, except in cases where anonymity is needed (e.g. when discussing something that could get someone sued, like DeCSS or something anti-MPAA or anti-RIAA), Anonymous Cowards should not be allowed to post stories.
When I read this story, the first thing I thought was that the poster was an employee for either IBM or Rational...
I'm not promoting their business. I'm promoting my products, which I happen to be distributing using their services.
Don't like that? That's nice. Give me an alternative that does everything they do, as well as they do, and runs something other than Windows.
Can't do that? Tough cookies for you.
For the umpteenth time, the store is run by Cafe Press. They run Windows. I did not choose their OS, thanks. Believe me, I would not have chosen what they did.
Oh, actually I don't think Office sucks at all. It's quite nice (albeit a bit large?). No, but you must consider this: If MS hadn't obtained their 95+% monopoly in desktop OS market share, might WordPerfect or some other alternative (remember Ami Pro?) became just as good as Word is now?
There are still people who prefer WordPerfect. They're rarer than blue moons, but hey.
...because it is under, or not under, any specific license (even our beloved GPL). It's going to fail because Microsoft's "mindshare" is so phenomenal that it would take nothing short of a miracle for ANYONE to impact its 95+% of the Word Processor market.
I don't like that reality either. But, at the moment, it's true. That's why we need to keep pushing the existing suits remaining against MS. Because they DO have a huge monopoly, because they DID get it through illicit means, and because it IS making it virtually impossible for competitors (like the Gobe Productive people) to break into any of the many fields MS dominates.
You know the first question 'the public' will have is... "...but does it run Windows?"
Sun: The Panties are the Computer
What happens if you shove four of these in four consecutive (vertically) 5.25" drive bays? Would they overheat? That might limit the usefulness if you had to space them out... you'd have to buy twice as big a case as physically needed. Maybe if you alternated... P3, coolerunit, P3, coolerunit, P3.... ;)
I donno who Reza is, but she's obviously not me. I'm not overweight. (Unlike most of the people on SlashDot, I'd suspect... ;) )
Recently, I had a very interesting conversation on the phone with the Verizon Residential DSL support people. So I call up; I realize (due to factors of age and gender) I don't "sound like a geek" but I am. After a few minutes the tech realized he was conversing with a fellow techie, and we worked together to solve my problem (him using Verizon's proprietary tools and me using RoaringPenguin's pppoe and standard Linux TCP/IP tools). He was quite nice and we even had an ongoing side-discussion about running Linux on the PowerPC architecture while we worked to solve the problem.
Then it came time to hand off the problem to Verizon's internal tech support team, since it became obvious that it was a systemic problem affecting people in my area (or at least me, but we determined that the problem was clearly on their end, not mine). At this point, my friend tech apologized, and warned me that this report might not go anywhere-- since I was not running Windows on my box. Apparently, internal tech support only honors reports from people running Windows...
It's just another example of how the legions of PHBs running the telecom field (and the dot-com field, as I can testify from having worked far too long in said field) are trying to regulate everything in the support process. It's all about the Benjamins, and these people believe that by regulating, and restricting, and prohibiting everything-- to the point of "scripting" common tech support dialogs and replacing human operators with "automatic phone support systems", they can make more money.
They may be right, they may be wrong. In any case, I don't like it...
They fed the software, produced by Redmond titan Microsoft Corporation, a digital image of the Earth. The software interpreted this as "OURS"...
The faux pas isn't the target audience itself-- it's a bad misjudgment of how far "market penetration" (if I must wax Corporate for the moment) will go among said target audience.
Or, to put it more clearly-- this CD is targeted at bringing open-source software to people who otherwise would not use it, or maybe even have heard of it.
But how many of those people are going to have heard of OpenCD.org? Joe Beer and his wife Martha surely aren't reading SlashDot. Or Kuro5hin. Or $OTHER_GEEK_HANGOUT_SITE.
Not to be a fatalist, but I don't think this CD (which is an EXCELLENT idea in concept) will get very many users. Sure, here and there a rabid OSS person will show it to all of their friends, and that's a Good Thing. But one thing SlashDot readers (and posters) tend to underestimate is the colossal "mindshare" Windows and Microsoft products in general hold. People, realize-- to many people in this country, Bill Gates is a "great business leader", to some almost a hero. Many people aspire to be like him, and hardly anyone (excepting geeks) has anything against what he's doing. We at SlashDot aren't quite so complacent-- but the great masses of people in this country ARE!
Going against the MS monopoly with this nice OSS CD is like... well... To make an analogy to Star Control 2, it would be rather like going up against a fully-loaded Ur-Quan Dreadnought in a Shofixti Scout. With the Glory Device broken...
The way MPlayer development seems to progress is:
;)
STEP 1: There is no support for codex X.
STEP 2: They add DLL support for codec X.
STEP 3: After a good amount of time spent reverse-engineering, they add native support for codec X.
It's the step 3 that's gonna really get them in trouble. Codecs only remain "DLL-only" in MPlayer for so long. After a time, the MPlayer guys figure out how to reverse-engineer the codec-- or someone else does, and the MPlayer guys adapt the code to their project...
Heck, the EULA for many of these DLLs may say "Only on approved operating systems", who knows... no one reads the things. Not even me.
MPlayer is a great project. I was absolutely astonished when I first downloaded it and played with its many features. But I'm terrified that any day now, They (you know, MS or Sorenson or Real or the RIAA or the MPAA or possibly all five) are going to slap the MPlayer guys with a lawsuit (yes, MPlayer HQ is in, what, Hungary? But look at what happened to our friend Skylarov (sp.?) in Russia) and b3wm, down goes the project, and it's officially verboten in the US (like DeCSS).
;) ) including MPlayer any time soon, for fear of being named as co-defendants in a possibly gruesome lawsuit...
How will they sue the MPlayer people? Simple. They could sue under the anti-reverse-engineering clause of the DMCA. Or they could employ any number of other recent pro-corporate laws which are slowly making it illegal to reverse-engineer anything, even if it's necessary for you to do your work. (Remember, there is STILL no legal and MPAA-approved solution for playing your DVDs in Linux (let alone more obscure OSes like FreeBSD or OpenBSD)-- unless, of course, you count hooking up the output of your set-top DVD player into the video input of your TV tuner card...
Personally, I don't forsee any 'mainstream' Linux dists (if there really is such a thing in terms of desktop use
Remember: MPlayer was created using reverse engineering. The SPA/MPAA/RIAA/MS/etc. folks are really really pushing (and paying off congresspeople, naturally) to make reverse engineering a criminal offense. It may already be... this is a dangerous area, a legal powder-keg waiting to go off.
At BEST, MPlayer will be a "gray market" program for the forseeable future-- if not forever. Again, yes, I love it-- but I worry for it. More properly, I worry for its creators...
SEMI-pornographic? Almost SEMI-pornographic? Ye gads, at least 80% of 'I Will Fear No Evil' is little more than an Internet sex story set to paper (by no less than one of the great modern fathers of sci-fi!). Heinlein was truly a dirty old man.
n -on-the-Net-consists of just in that one Heinlein novel alone... lesbianism, spanking, pregnancy, threesomes, body paint, forced feminization (of a sort)... am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, don't forget the "old decaying guy magically becomes really young and good-looking and has lots of sex" element. That has to be in half a billion Internet fantasy stories out there...
Let's count the kinks/fetishes/atypical-sexual-thingies/stuff-pr0
What if, in the future, companies start requesting the data collected by such "we can guess who and what you are" systems for demographic purposes?
"Well, according to this data, 25% of our customers are pregnant gay men, and 14% are neo-Nazis with an interest in cooking..."
But seriously. Something evil tells me that it's only a matter of time before this stuff is taken as the Word of Gord(TM)...
Ahhh, glasshoppa. You young and idealistic. Jesi-chan tell you how it is...
It no matta pliah aht.
It no matta dictionary wuhd.
It matta how many billion yen yoah company wohth...
A) They're not trying, they're doing. (Thanks, Yoda ;) ) ;)
B) They're not "getting around" it, they're just ignoring it.
C) This is nothing new...
I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that if you're careful, you can share a chain of SCSI devices between multiple machines...
Maybe making a SCSI RAID, or an IDE raid connected to one of those IDE-to-SCSI adaptor thingees (Promise sells such things; they even sell ready-to-go SCSI-connectable RAID cases.. just fill with IDE (!!!) hard drives!) and plugging it into all yer boxes would work? ^_^
FireWire(TM) is a registered trademark of Apple Computer. Expect a call from their lawyers within the next 5 milliseconds. (Expect the case to settle out of court within the next 5 years.) ;)
lp0: printer no longer on fire
No. No, they won't. They would have already.
I think you grossly overestimate the intelligent/sophistication/wisdom of the average human being.
Go pick a random 25-year-old college grad and try to bring up any topic not related to sports, sex, beer, fashion, movies, celebrities or currently popular music. You'll see very quickly what the core of the problem is.
And even sicker is that anyone who dares protest this state of affairs is branded a "communist" or a "hippie".
This is not how capitalism is supposed to be.
We need a sound balance of capitalism and socialism-- and a heavy dose of fairness. Unfortunately, lots of people do not have the Buddha-nature and are quite selfish and greedy. (And I'm sorry, I don't care how much of your $billions you gave away to charity, BillG, wanting/insisting upon 100% market share in every market you touch does make you "quite selfish and greedy").
If they're getting little reception, maybe they should adjust the rabbit ears on the TV... (DUCKS)
;)
Okay, okay, dated joke