Yeah, but the "Linux has support for x languages" argument is only a factor if you speak one of those languages; for me, I never speak anything but English, so for an OS to support non-English languages, it doesn't make a difference to me.
The use of profanity in this algorithm is mandatory.
Saying Linux is bad because it isn't like Windows doesn't hold up. You're just not used to the way it does things.
Most browsers give you a way of loading new URLs without having to clear the URL field; in mozilla you can middle click directly into the page and it loads the new link, or you could open a new tab (thus blanking the URL bar) and paste the new URL into it; in Konq there's a specific "clear URL" button, etc.
Either that, or you could just learn to clear the URL field before you copy the URL.
You think rampant Windows piracy hurts Microsoft? If anything, it only serves to further their monopoly lock-in, thus forcing everybody else to use Windows just to be compatible with the pirates.
In the long run, piracy keeps the market saturated with Windows. If everybody had to actually pay for it, you'd see a ton of people switch to something cheaper (Linux, or whatever else, really), which would hurt MS, big time.
Of course this very scenario may happen with WINE + Linux. But, of course, this is going to take time. If MS opened up Windows, they would only speed the process.
No. Showing the Windows sourcecode to the WINE developers is a bad thing. So bad, in fact, that the WINE developers actively avoid it.
This is so that MS can't claim that they saw the code and simply copied it. Of course, if it were made legal for them to see it, I still doubt that they'd go for it... MS might change their minds later and decide to sue them into oblivion for having inside knowledge of the code...
pardon my french, but what the fuck are you talking about? I've said it before and I'll say it again... I've never once seen an X program that couldn't copy with a left click and drag, then subsequently paste with a middle click. It's actually easier than Windows because you don't have to fool around with this "CTRL+C" and "CTRL+V" silliness.
Don't get me wrong, Linux and X have their faults... but really, copy/pasting is *NOT* one of them!
It IS hacker proof - we don't have access to the source, how are we supposed to hack on the code?
That's actually a fairly profound insight.
Despite what the popular media will try to tell you, REAL hackers are the whitehats, people like Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman. In that case, windows quite literally IS hacker proof... only MS's internal team has access to the source code, so only they can hack on it.
What they probably were trying to say is that it's cracker proof, and that would have been the painfully obvious and blatant lie that everybody here is making it out to be.
It's a story about licensing, and open vs closed source politics. I think the "Your rights online" category is just a catch-all for this kind of topic.
I disagree. Recently I've seen a number of programs change their configuration file syntax from "hacked up mishmash" to wellformed XML, and readability increased dramatically. With the old syntaxes, I had to look up how to do this or that in the manual, I constantly forgot how to write it... it was very annoying. On the other hand, the XML is pretty much self-documenting. All the tags have long, descriptive names, etc, and everything Just Makes Sense(tm).
XML might be a bitch to parse from the programmer's perspective, but it's a treat to parse from the user's perspective (well, my perspective as a user, anyway).
Nah, Sega Dreamcast is *way* too suspicious. Hackers would be like "WTF? How is that possible?" and then they'd explore further.
What you'd really want to do is set the fingerprint to something like the old, unpatched Windows 95. Then the attackers will think "ROFL, dumbass admin running windoze! ATTACK!" and then your logs show some lame attack that might have worked on windows, but doesn't work on linux, and you get an early warning of any attacks that come your way:)
I have the Sony MZ-N707, which is one of the newer models that has MDLP.
I don't know much of the technical specs of the technology, but I do know this much:
There are three compression settings when recording, they all sound exactly the same to me, except that on the highest setting, I can easily get 5 hours of music to a single minidisk, and on the lowest setting I can barely get 1 hour of music to a minidisk.
So, since I can't hear the difference, 1 minidisk == 5 CDs, for me.
What should companies be doing to prevent the loss of income from pirating while leaving inviolate the right of the consumer to make copies of materials to which we own legal license?
It's extremely simple: Make something worth buying, while still being cheap enough that we can afford to pay for it.
The target audience for most computer games these days roughly equates to "students", and students, almost by definition, have no money. I can't speak for all of slashdot, but if I could even afford some of the latest games (and if they ran on my platform *cough*, *cough*), then I would buy them in a hurry.
This basic economics here! If something doesn't sell, try reducing the price before slapping me in the face and using technology to take away my fair-use rights.
I kinda thought that XFCE3 was cool but ugly, and went back to Fvwm. Now I've got XFCE4 (cvs) installed, and it kicks ass! When XFCE4 comes out of CVS, I'll reccommend it to anybody. It's a lightweight DE that looks good AND doesn't take three years to load! Woohoo!:)
There is nothing about Perl that requires your code to be open source. In fact, you can even "compile" perl code into a binary, so that the source code is no longer available for reading...
To my disapointment, when I went into the *UNIX side of the computer lab at the start of this semester, I had noticed that they had upgraded from some pure-UNIX OS to Red Hat 8.0.
Boy, you need a smack.
Some of us at "lesser privileged" universities have Windows in their Computer Science labs! I would die to be in a RH8 computer lab... next year it's not so bad, Solaris and FreeBSD, but this year it's all Windows... f*ck.
the BSA certainly can't patent a method for making themselves look like idiots by letting a search tool plow blindly through a set of data for them. Plenty of prior art there...
You mean his development kit didn't come with the operating system itself?
I think your argument is flawed...
IBM restricts development kits of OS/2, OS/2 dies. MS readily gives anybody a copy of the development kit for Win95, and Win95 takes off. But the development kits for linux come with linux, nevermind "being given the development kit upon request".
I realize this is a joke, but there are fanatical supporters of every OS. Trust me on this one. For any OS you can think of, no matter how obscure, there is somebody, somewhere that would die before admitting that OS either a) has flaws or b) is crappy. Whether it's Linux, Windows, BeOS, anything, there will be fanatical supporters.
There are Windows fanatics. There might not be many here, but they exist.
Let me know when every application in Linux, cuts, copies and pastes in the same way.
I would honestly like to know what you're talking about.
I've yet to see a single linux application that didn't copy text by selecting it, and paste text by middle clicking. No silly "ctrl+c ctrl+v" combinations (though many apps support this), just select, then middle click. Simple as can be.
So far, I've been able to copy & paste in this manner with (at least) gaim, mozilla, evolution, xterms (and thus every console program ever written), as well as a slew of others that I can't remember.
Sure, I won't deny that linux has it's problems, but I'd hardly call copy&paste one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the "Linux has support for x languages" argument is only a factor if you speak one of those languages; for me, I never speak anything but English, so for an OS to support non-English languages, it doesn't make a difference to me.
The use of profanity in this algorithm is mandatory.
Saying Linux is bad because it isn't like Windows doesn't hold up. You're just not used to the way it does things.
Most browsers give you a way of loading new URLs without having to clear the URL field; in mozilla you can middle click directly into the page and it loads the new link, or you could open a new tab (thus blanking the URL bar) and paste the new URL into it; in Konq there's a specific "clear URL" button, etc.
Either that, or you could just learn to clear the URL field before you copy the URL.
end up hurting MS in the long in the run
You think rampant Windows piracy hurts Microsoft? If anything, it only serves to further their monopoly lock-in, thus forcing everybody else to use Windows just to be compatible with the pirates.
In the long run, piracy keeps the market saturated with Windows. If everybody had to actually pay for it, you'd see a ton of people switch to something cheaper (Linux, or whatever else, really), which would hurt MS, big time.
Of course this very scenario may happen with WINE + Linux. But, of course, this is going to take time. If MS opened up Windows, they would only speed the process.
No. Showing the Windows sourcecode to the WINE developers is a bad thing. So bad, in fact, that the WINE developers actively avoid it.
This is so that MS can't claim that they saw the code and simply copied it. Of course, if it were made legal for them to see it, I still doubt that they'd go for it... MS might change their minds later and decide to sue them into oblivion for having inside knowledge of the code...
Copying and pasting is a bitch
pardon my french, but what the fuck are you talking about? I've said it before and I'll say it again... I've never once seen an X program that couldn't copy with a left click and drag, then subsequently paste with a middle click. It's actually easier than Windows because you don't have to fool around with this "CTRL+C" and "CTRL+V" silliness.
Don't get me wrong, Linux and X have their faults... but really, copy/pasting is *NOT* one of them!
It IS hacker proof - we don't have access to the source, how are we supposed to hack on the code?
That's actually a fairly profound insight.
Despite what the popular media will try to tell you, REAL hackers are the whitehats, people like Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman. In that case, windows quite literally IS hacker proof... only MS's internal team has access to the source code, so only they can hack on it.
What they probably were trying to say is that it's cracker proof, and that would have been the painfully obvious and blatant lie that everybody here is making it out to be.
Don't worry, they'll probably post it again then, too.
Where do people get their perspective these days?
It's all about the entertainment value. "Gore invented the internet" jokes are a lot funnier than "Bush killed 100 people" jokes.
Hey did you hear the one about Bush? He killed 100 people! See? It's just not funny.
It's a story about licensing, and open vs closed source politics. I think the "Your rights online" category is just a catch-all for this kind of topic.
I agree XML is ugly as hell to type in manually,
I disagree. Recently I've seen a number of programs change their configuration file syntax from "hacked up mishmash" to wellformed XML, and readability increased dramatically. With the old syntaxes, I had to look up how to do this or that in the manual, I constantly forgot how to write it... it was very annoying. On the other hand, the XML is pretty much self-documenting. All the tags have long, descriptive names, etc, and everything Just Makes Sense(tm).
XML might be a bitch to parse from the programmer's perspective, but it's a treat to parse from the user's perspective (well, my perspective as a user, anyway).
Nah, Sega Dreamcast is *way* too suspicious. Hackers would be like "WTF? How is that possible?" and then they'd explore further.
:)
What you'd really want to do is set the fingerprint to something like the old, unpatched Windows 95. Then the attackers will think "ROFL, dumbass admin running windoze! ATTACK!" and then your logs show some lame attack that might have worked on windows, but doesn't work on linux, and you get an early warning of any attacks that come your way
What if I want to put all of the MP3's I legitimately downloaded from MP3.com or 1Sound.com or Ampcast.com or Besonic.com or JavaMusic.com or...
What if I want to use it for listening to music that I've created myself?!? Is that pirating, too?
I have the Sony MZ-N707, which is one of the newer models that has MDLP.
I don't know much of the technical specs of the technology, but I do know this much:
There are three compression settings when recording, they all sound exactly the same to me, except that on the highest setting, I can easily get 5 hours of music to a single minidisk, and on the lowest setting I can barely get 1 hour of music to a minidisk.
So, since I can't hear the difference, 1 minidisk == 5 CDs, for me.
What should companies be doing to prevent the loss of income from pirating while leaving inviolate the right of the consumer to make copies of materials to which we own legal license?
It's extremely simple: Make something worth buying, while still being cheap enough that we can afford to pay for it.
The target audience for most computer games these days roughly equates to "students", and students, almost by definition, have no money. I can't speak for all of slashdot, but if I could even afford some of the latest games (and if they ran on my platform *cough*, *cough*), then I would buy them in a hurry.
This basic economics here! If something doesn't sell, try reducing the price before slapping me in the face and using technology to take away my fair-use rights.
I personally prefer XFCE
:)
XFCE4 or XFCE3?
I kinda thought that XFCE3 was cool but ugly, and went back to Fvwm. Now I've got XFCE4 (cvs) installed, and it kicks ass! When XFCE4 comes out of CVS, I'll reccommend it to anybody. It's a lightweight DE that looks good AND doesn't take three years to load! Woohoo!
Which one stands head and shoulders above the rest? Any suggestions?
If you want it done right, do it yourself:
Linux From Scratch
in an open source language (Perl)
There is nothing about Perl that requires your code to be open source. In fact, you can even "compile" perl code into a binary, so that the source code is no longer available for reading...
4.3.0 FrontPage
:)
There's your problem...
To my disapointment, when I went into the *UNIX side of the computer lab at the start of this semester, I had noticed that they had upgraded from some pure-UNIX OS to Red Hat 8.0.
Boy, you need a smack.
Some of us at "lesser privileged" universities have Windows in their Computer Science labs! I would die to be in a RH8 computer lab... next year it's not so bad, Solaris and FreeBSD, but this year it's all Windows... f*ck.
Can you write a closed source program with GPL software? NOT LIKELY...
I ask you, kind sir, to cite the part of the GPL that states you are not able to write a closed source program with GPL'd tools and libs.
the BSA certainly can't patent a method for making themselves look like idiots by letting a search tool plow blindly through a set of data for them. Plenty of prior art there...
Since when has prior art ever stopped anybody?
Ummm, it has.
Then why do we keep hearing statistics like "Linux has 3% of the desktop market"? I'd hardly call 3% a great amount of success.
Sure, we've surpassed OS/2. That's because OS/2 is dead and gone. When will we surpass Windows?
they handed him, on the spot, a development kit
You mean his development kit didn't come with the operating system itself?
I think your argument is flawed...
IBM restricts development kits of OS/2, OS/2 dies. MS readily gives anybody a copy of the development kit for Win95, and Win95 takes off. But the development kits for linux come with linux, nevermind "being given the development kit upon request".
So why hasn't Linux taken off yet?
You aware of fanatics in any other camp?
I realize this is a joke, but there are fanatical supporters of every OS. Trust me on this one. For any OS you can think of, no matter how obscure, there is somebody, somewhere that would die before admitting that OS either a) has flaws or b) is crappy. Whether it's Linux, Windows, BeOS, anything, there will be fanatical supporters.
There are Windows fanatics. There might not be many here, but they exist.
Let me know when every application in Linux, cuts, copies and pastes in the same way.
I would honestly like to know what you're talking about.
I've yet to see a single linux application that didn't copy text by selecting it, and paste text by middle clicking. No silly "ctrl+c ctrl+v" combinations (though many apps support this), just select, then middle click. Simple as can be.
So far, I've been able to copy & paste in this manner with (at least) gaim, mozilla, evolution, xterms (and thus every console program ever written), as well as a slew of others that I can't remember.
Sure, I won't deny that linux has it's problems, but I'd hardly call copy&paste one of them.