While I don't have a problem with the concept of government organizations selling advertising per se, I wonder what happens when the buyer has a political agenda. Will equal time/treatment/space/pricing be given to those that oppose the current administration's agenda, or will it become a propaganda machine to further cement their holding of power?
I have a Nokia 3360, one of the last phones ever made with buttons big enough and far enough apart that you can actually press the one you mean to without a toothpick. It's also durable: I don't know how many times I've dropped it -- usually onto concrete or tile from waist-high -- and it's survived.
One of the most disturbing trends in phones I've seen lately is the combination rocker-switch buttons. These are absolute garbage, and I would be more than happy to pay the extra dollar or two the manufacturer saves by using them instead of real buttons. What's next, those cheesy flat membrane panels that went out with the 80's?
So far it appears that Nokia hasn't given up on the durability front, but with their adoption of rocker-switch buttons, I wonder for how long. I've seen some phones that literally come apart in your hand if you twist/flip/slide them open too fast, or push down too hard on their buttons.
Will there be an actual retail boxed release for Linux, or will this be like other recent games that run on Linux: You have to buy the Windows media, copy the data files from it, and then download the Linux engine to run it?
I'll buy it either way (and run it on my Linux box), but I'd really like the retailer I buy it from to know that my purchase is for a Linux platform.
If you
know there is a compatibility issue and you can work around it, then you should.
Mmmm... And what happens when you try to install Windows dual-boot alongside an existing Linux installation? What steps does its installer take to preserve your data, or even the MBR?
So by posting your rant instead of dictating it to a Holy Scribe, you are taking bread out of his mouth and defiling the holy Slashdot Archive. By reading it, I am stealing the livelihood of the High Priests, the only true literates qualified to read these sacred pages to the unwashed masses.
Bullshit. That mentality about reading and writing went out with the middle ages.
Programming is just another form of writing. Whether someone wishes to write for free or for pay, it's his decision to make. If you believe your job is devalued by others choosing to write software for free, perhaps your position wasn't worth that much to begin with.
No, what we really need is more support for over-the-airwaves broadcast television. Time was, you "paid" for the programming by watching (they hoped) the advertisements. Cable came along, then encrypted satellite, and now almost everyone's been duped into paying twice for most programming.
The only time I ever subscribed to a TV service was when I lived in a place where over-the-air reception was impossible. Now that most of my favorite shows are becoming available on DVD, I don't think I would subscribe even if I found myself in that situation again.
...it's probably an illegal biotech lab by their definitions too. I really need to throw out that months-old foil-wrapped leftover something-or-other in there.
I've been meaning to do this, and this is just the kick in the butt I needed... I'm going to get one of the last chip-free ones issued. I have no doubt that no matter how much reassurance the power-grubbing muckety-mucks give that this will be secure, it won't be. Remember the Diebold electronic voting machines?
Thankfully, passports are good for 10 years from their issuance, and hopefully by then they'll have the most serious bugs worked out.
That's fine until the RIAA gets their hands on one of those 'trusted' friends and starts turning the screws. How many people will he give up to save his own ass? And how many people will they give up in turn? I think anonymous is a far better way to go -- if you're going to engage in this sort of thing at all.
I am eagerly awaiting the day they start offshoring attorneys. Except for the rare times someone needs to appear in court (I'm thinking of civil law here), there's no reason I can think of that the paper-pushers have to be statebound. To take it a step further, even courts could be virtualized with videoconferencing equipment. I can't wait until a good attorney costs $8/hour (what's that work out to in rupees?)
Funny, isn't Sun essentially doing with JDS what everyone's condemned in Microsoft for so long? Instead of offering JDS as an application suite, which is basically what it is, they've packaged it as an entire OS distribution, from the kernel up. What happened to the Java message of "write once, run anywhere"? Sounds to me like Sun's Java Desktop System will only run on Sun's flavor of the OS. There's already no doubt that's the only way they're going to support it.
Furthermore, they seem to want to "embrace and extend" (remember that one?) the Gnome desktop by re-writing large parts of it in Java (not yet in the current release, but stay tuned). I wonder how long it'll be before file format incompatibilities start to creep in.
Every vendor wants their lock-in, and to a large extent I think *that* is the reason behind corporate interest in GNU/Linux on the desktop. If I'm considering migrating off of Microsoft's desktop after having been in their stranglehold for so long, I'll be damned if I want to expose myself to the same situation with a different vendor.
Best of luck Sun, but I think a better play would have been to certify your applications to work with several of the major distros that are already out there. Customers are wising up to the dangers of the single-vendor OS and applications stack.
Not unless you personally constructed every piece of the device, from the source code, to everything that interacts with the source code, including the compiler, the EEPROM burners, and the chipsets on the device itself.
And do you even have this option with closed source? You don't.
Believe me, if the end application is valuable enough, someone will take the time and effort to run down the entire audit trail you described, if given the source code to do so. Personally, I like having the option. Trust, but verify.
Yep, and after a few of those have happened, expect new legislation. And it won't be legislation that forces the employers to back off, instead it'll extend the ability of companies to invade our privacy in the interest of workplace safety. Think TIA, but for corporations worried about "unstable people...under huge stress".
If the time tracking device just printed a receipt showing time in, time out, and total hours:minutes for the shift, it would be exponentially harder for managers to get away with this sort of thing.
Come to think of it, if the new touchscreen voting devices that are sprouting up everywhere did this, election fraud would also be a lot harder to pull off.
Yep, I think the groundwork is already well-laid for one or more short squeezes. Add to that the spectacular job they've done (and will likely continue to do) in selling their FUD to the unwashed masses, and the prospect of shorting this stock is really spooky.
Take a look at the stats on this sucker at yahoo, especially the % held by insiders and the short % of float. No thanks, I won't touch it -- short or long.
An interesting idea, but I think it has the same problems that are
keeping public key authenticated e-mail from catching on. Suppose
I suddenly have a MUA that bounces every unfunded and unwhitelisted
e-mail it receives with a message that says "You have to deposit $X
into my PayPal account before I will read your e-mail. If I deem
you/it worthy, your $X will be refunded, and you'll be added to my
whitelist so you won't have to do this again."
Now if the sender wants me to see his e-mail, he'll have to do the
following:
Sign up with PayPal if he's not already, and fund the account.
Make a payment to my account.
Add information to the e-mail that references the payment, and
send it again.
If the instructions in my bounce message are detailed enough, even my
tech-illiterate mother would be able to follow these steps and get her
e-mail to me, but the real point is the hassle factor. What about
the hiring manager who just got my resume from some recruiting firm?
Will he really bother, or will my bounce message and resume just
go in the bitbucket? What about automated e-mail, like the MTA
bounce message I get for making a typo in the recipient line?
Even if I've anticipated the automated e-mail and whitelisted it
in advance, what happens when the addresses of those senders change,
like after a buyout or merger?
E-mail authentication, whether it involves money or just encryption, is
a chicken-and-egg problem. As for using a whitelist and blocking
anyone that's not on it, I can imagine too many scenarios where I would
miss something from a sender that's not on my whitelist.
I'm talking about hackers as they used to be known, before the media attached all the negative connotations it carries today. You're probably thinking of those I would call crackers. If it helps, substitute "computer geek" for "hacker", and my meaning should be clearer.
Let's face it, both vendors have top-end products that are screaming fast. They'll put up more polygons per second than anything that came before, and just about any game that's currently out there is going to look fantastic on either brand. Provided you run Windows...
Which I don't. So when it came time to upgrade my system (about 2 weeks ago), Nvidia won hands-down -- and it was because they are Linux friendly, not because some rigged benchmark somewhere said they are a few frames per second faster than the other guy. Nvidia has been providing quality Linux drivers for their products for a long time, and I hope they'll continue to do so.
I've been playing a lot of Neverwinter Nights on my 5900 and it looks beautiful. I'm planning to purchase more Linux games as soon as my budget permits. Yes, there are people out there running Linux who appreciate high-end graphics cards. Probably more than the marketing types think; after all, most hacker types I know are also hardcore gamers.
What he *actually* said was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Granted, it's debatable as to how much initiative he took in its creation, but he was in fact involved in legislation and funding that helped to shape it.
Whenever I see this twisting of words and facts perpetuated, it reminds me of the fools who just can't say nuclear (it's "noo-clee-ar", not "noo-kyoo-lar", damn it!!!).
Naptha (Zippo lighter fluid) will remove most types of adhesive tape and sticker residue, including the stuff that duct tape leaves behind. Just be careful with plastics; the naptha will attack some types and leave you with an even bigger gooey mess.
Well, there's a certain satisfaction in removing the offending material entirely. Beyond that, your method only works for players that have a rewind to zero function. It also precludes using a rewinding machine to save wear and tear on the player's tape heads.
Back in the days before DVD, whenever I bought a new VHS video for my collection I'd do a few things during my first viewing of it. First, I fast-forwarded through all the commercials at the beginning of the tape. Sometimes this would come out to more than 15 minutes worth of crap. Next, I took the tape out of the player, cut the labels at the cartridge seam, removed the screws from the cartridge, and opened it up. Then, I carefully removed the take-up spool, and cut the tape. I unspooled all the crap from the take-up spool, pulled out the little retainer clip, and threw the crap in the trash. Finally, I reconnected the remaining tape to the take-up spool and put the retaining clip back in, and put everything back together. Voila! My tape was now configured the way it should have been from the getgo: no commercials.
I'm pretty sure I was well within my legal rights to do this to tapes I had purchased legitimately, and that no *AA organization or anyone else would even think about going after me for it. All this has changed with the DMCA and digital formats. IANAL, but it seems pretty stupid to me that physically hacking a tape I bought is perfectly legal, while digitally doing the same thing in a much less invasive manner to a DVD is not.
...IMHO to fight increasingly draconian DRM measures, is to simply continue proving that they WON'T WORK. If the end user is able play back the media in question even once, then it must also be possible to copy it. Granted, it may take a certain level of sophistication to get a *perfect* copy, but it can be done.
OTOH, if a not-so-perfect copy is all that's needed, most anyone can manage that. Witness the bootleg recordings of movies made with camcorders that get distributed all over the net, sometimes even before the official release date. Or the sealed-in-the-discman demo cds that people have managed to copy, sometimes by just cutting the headphone line and attaching it to a line-in jack.
I don't know when it will happen, but someday the media producers have to wake up and realize that DRM only costs them money for imagined protection, and in some cases -- when DRM doesn't allow legitimate playback -- hurts the very markets they are trying to cultivate.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't have a problem with the concept of government organizations selling advertising per se, I wonder what happens when the buyer has a political agenda. Will equal time/treatment/space/pricing be given to those that oppose the current administration's agenda, or will it become a propaganda machine to further cement their holding of power?
Last I heard, Sun sold their soul to M$ for about $2 billion.
I have a Nokia 3360, one of the last phones ever made with buttons big enough and far enough apart that you can actually press the one you mean to without a toothpick. It's also durable: I don't know how many times I've dropped it -- usually onto concrete or tile from waist-high -- and it's survived.
One of the most disturbing trends in phones I've seen lately is the combination rocker-switch buttons. These are absolute garbage, and I would be more than happy to pay the extra dollar or two the manufacturer saves by using them instead of real buttons. What's next, those cheesy flat membrane panels that went out with the 80's?
So far it appears that Nokia hasn't given up on the durability front, but with their adoption of rocker-switch buttons, I wonder for how long. I've seen some phones that literally come apart in your hand if you twist/flip/slide them open too fast, or push down too hard on their buttons.
Will there be an actual retail boxed release for Linux, or will this be like other recent games that run on Linux: You have to buy the Windows media, copy the data files from it, and then download the Linux engine to run it?
I'll buy it either way (and run it on my Linux box), but I'd really like the retailer I buy it from to know that my purchase is for a Linux platform.
Mmmm... And what happens when you try to install Windows dual-boot alongside an existing Linux installation? What steps does its installer take to preserve your data, or even the MBR?
Hmmm...
So by posting your rant instead of dictating it to a Holy Scribe, you are taking bread out of his mouth and defiling the holy Slashdot Archive. By reading it, I am stealing the livelihood of the High Priests, the only true literates qualified to read these sacred pages to the unwashed masses.
Bullshit. That mentality about reading and writing went out with the middle ages.
Programming is just another form of writing. Whether someone wishes to write for free or for pay, it's his decision to make. If you believe your job is devalued by others choosing to write software for free, perhaps your position wasn't worth that much to begin with.
No, what we really need is more support for over-the-airwaves broadcast television. Time was, you "paid" for the programming by watching (they hoped) the advertisements. Cable came along, then encrypted satellite, and now almost everyone's been duped into paying twice for most programming.
The only time I ever subscribed to a TV service was when I lived in a place where over-the-air reception was impossible. Now that most of my favorite shows are becoming available on DVD, I don't think I would subscribe even if I found myself in that situation again.
I applaud ATI for their efforts.
...it's probably an illegal biotech lab by their definitions too. I really need to throw out that months-old foil-wrapped leftover something-or-other in there.
I've been meaning to do this, and this is just the kick in the butt I needed... I'm going to get one of the last chip-free ones issued. I have no doubt that no matter how much reassurance the power-grubbing muckety-mucks give that this will be secure, it won't be. Remember the Diebold electronic voting machines?
Thankfully, passports are good for 10 years from their issuance, and hopefully by then they'll have the most serious bugs worked out.
That's fine until the RIAA gets their hands on one of those 'trusted' friends and starts turning the screws. How many people will he give up to save his own ass? And how many people will they give up in turn? I think anonymous is a far better way to go -- if you're going to engage in this sort of thing at all.
I am eagerly awaiting the day they start offshoring attorneys. Except for the rare times someone needs to appear in court (I'm thinking of civil law here), there's no reason I can think of that the paper-pushers have to be statebound. To take it a step further, even courts could be virtualized with videoconferencing equipment. I can't wait until a good attorney costs $8/hour (what's that work out to in rupees?)
Funny, isn't Sun essentially doing with JDS what everyone's condemned in Microsoft for so long? Instead of offering JDS as an application suite, which is basically what it is, they've packaged it as an entire OS distribution, from the kernel up. What happened to the Java message of "write once, run anywhere"? Sounds to me like Sun's Java Desktop System will only run on Sun's flavor of the OS. There's already no doubt that's the only way they're going to support it.
Furthermore, they seem to want to "embrace and extend" (remember that one?) the Gnome desktop by re-writing large parts of it in Java (not yet in the current release, but stay tuned). I wonder how long it'll be before file format incompatibilities start to creep in.
Every vendor wants their lock-in, and to a large extent I think *that* is the reason behind corporate interest in GNU/Linux on the desktop. If I'm considering migrating off of Microsoft's desktop after having been in their stranglehold for so long, I'll be damned if I want to expose myself to the same situation with a different vendor.
Best of luck Sun, but I think a better play would have been to certify your applications to work with several of the major distros that are already out there. Customers are wising up to the dangers of the single-vendor OS and applications stack.
And do you even have this option with closed source? You don't.
Believe me, if the end application is valuable enough, someone will take the time and effort to run down the entire audit trail you described, if given the source code to do so. Personally, I like having the option. Trust, but verify.
Yep, and after a few of those have happened, expect new legislation. And it won't be legislation that forces the employers to back off, instead it'll extend the ability of companies to invade our privacy in the interest of workplace safety. Think TIA, but for corporations worried about "unstable people...under huge stress".
If the time tracking device just printed a receipt showing time in, time out, and total hours:minutes for the shift, it would be exponentially harder for managers to get away with this sort of thing.
Come to think of it, if the new touchscreen voting devices that are sprouting up everywhere did this, election fraud would also be a lot harder to pull off.
Yep, I think the groundwork is already well-laid for one or more short squeezes. Add to that the spectacular job they've done (and will likely continue to do) in selling their FUD to the unwashed masses, and the prospect of shorting this stock is really spooky.
Take a look at the stats on this sucker at yahoo, especially the % held by insiders and the short % of float. No thanks, I won't touch it -- short or long.
Now if the sender wants me to see his e-mail, he'll have to do the following:
- Sign up with PayPal if he's not already, and fund the account.
- Make a payment to my account.
- Add information to the e-mail that references the payment, and
send it again.
If the instructions in my bounce message are detailed enough, even my tech-illiterate mother would be able to follow these steps and get her e-mail to me, but the real point is the hassle factor. What about the hiring manager who just got my resume from some recruiting firm? Will he really bother, or will my bounce message and resume just go in the bitbucket? What about automated e-mail, like the MTA bounce message I get for making a typo in the recipient line? Even if I've anticipated the automated e-mail and whitelisted it in advance, what happens when the addresses of those senders change, like after a buyout or merger?E-mail authentication, whether it involves money or just encryption, is a chicken-and-egg problem. As for using a whitelist and blocking anyone that's not on it, I can imagine too many scenarios where I would miss something from a sender that's not on my whitelist.
I'm talking about hackers as they used to be known, before the media attached all the negative connotations it carries today. You're probably thinking of those I would call crackers. If it helps, substitute "computer geek" for "hacker", and my meaning should be clearer.
Let's face it, both vendors have top-end products that are screaming fast. They'll put up more polygons per second than anything that came before, and just about any game that's currently out there is going to look fantastic on either brand. Provided you run Windows...
Which I don't. So when it came time to upgrade my system (about 2 weeks ago), Nvidia won hands-down -- and it was because they are Linux friendly, not because some rigged benchmark somewhere said they are a few frames per second faster than the other guy. Nvidia has been providing quality Linux drivers for their products for a long time, and I hope they'll continue to do so.
I've been playing a lot of Neverwinter Nights on my 5900 and it looks beautiful. I'm planning to purchase more Linux games as soon as my budget permits. Yes, there are people out there running Linux who appreciate high-end graphics cards. Probably more than the marketing types think; after all, most hacker types I know are also hardcore gamers.
What he *actually* said was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Granted, it's debatable as to how much initiative he took in its creation, but he was in fact involved in legislation and funding that helped to shape it.
Whenever I see this twisting of words and facts perpetuated, it reminds me of the fools who just can't say nuclear (it's "noo-clee-ar", not "noo-kyoo-lar", damn it!!!).
Naptha (Zippo lighter fluid) will remove most types of adhesive tape and sticker residue, including the stuff that duct tape leaves behind. Just be careful with plastics; the naptha will attack some types and leave you with an even bigger gooey mess.
Well, there's a certain satisfaction in removing the offending material entirely. Beyond that, your method only works for players that have a rewind to zero function. It also precludes using a rewinding machine to save wear and tear on the player's tape heads.
Back in the days before DVD, whenever I bought a new VHS video for my collection I'd do a few things during my first viewing of it. First, I fast-forwarded through all the commercials at the beginning of the tape. Sometimes this would come out to more than 15 minutes worth of crap. Next, I took the tape out of the player, cut the labels at the cartridge seam, removed the screws from the cartridge, and opened it up. Then, I carefully removed the take-up spool, and cut the tape. I unspooled all the crap from the take-up spool, pulled out the little retainer clip, and threw the crap in the trash. Finally, I reconnected the remaining tape to the take-up spool and put the retaining clip back in, and put everything back together. Voila! My tape was now configured the way it should have been from the getgo: no commercials.
I'm pretty sure I was well within my legal rights to do this to tapes I had purchased legitimately, and that no *AA organization or anyone else would even think about going after me for it. All this has changed with the DMCA and digital formats. IANAL, but it seems pretty stupid to me that physically hacking a tape I bought is perfectly legal, while digitally doing the same thing in a much less invasive manner to a DVD is not.
GIF is such an old format, it's a wonder anyone even remembers what it is. Its utility was long ago surpassed by JPG and then PNG.
...IMHO to fight increasingly draconian DRM measures, is to simply continue proving that they WON'T WORK. If the end user is able play back the media in question even once, then it must also be possible to copy it. Granted, it may take a certain level of sophistication to get a *perfect* copy, but it can be done.
OTOH, if a not-so-perfect copy is all that's needed, most anyone can manage that. Witness the bootleg recordings of movies made with camcorders that get distributed all over the net, sometimes even before the official release date. Or the sealed-in-the-discman demo cds that people have managed to copy, sometimes by just cutting the headphone line and attaching it to a line-in jack.
I don't know when it will happen, but someday the media producers have to wake up and realize that DRM only costs them money for imagined protection, and in some cases -- when DRM doesn't allow legitimate playback -- hurts the very markets they are trying to cultivate.