The thing that really ticks me off more than anything is that the lady paid $300 for one of those ripoff store warranties. This kind of money is normally pure profit for companies, since very few people actually collect on it. However, when someone does have a problem, I expect them to fulfill their obligations on it, not lie and jerk around the customer who bought it for THREE MONTHS. To fix a friggin' POWER BUTTON.
Three months is nothing. Manufacturers can be worse than this. They can hold your product until the warranty expires even if it broke down on you in the the first month. These things happen all the time. The service centers that repair these things are massive and they have thousands of products going in and out everyday. Things are bound to get lost once in a while. This woman doesn't have a shot in hell of winning. Most places don't have guaranteed turn around times and don't guarantee your data either. Exactly what kind of case could she possibley have? She claims the laptop was stolen and that a false ticket was made for it but I don't see anything to back that up. Best Buy may have treated her badly but I don't think they did anything that broke the law or contract they had. Personally I wouldn't want to believe that there are people with less than stellar character working in one of these places, handling my data but I'm also not naive. If you're worried about identity theft then secure your data. Trusting anyone with your private data is just stupid. As for compensation they were more than fair. They paid for the laptop +$500. They even offered her more money than that at one point.
They aren't now, but that's only because they're worth so much money. 10-15 years ago yahoo and google were nothing more than baby noises. They're both goofy names but have become mainstreamed so nobody notices it. Stupid names aren't strictly associated with open source software and they haven't prevented software from becoming popular and ultimately making those same stupid monikers into household names.
There has been a lot of Linux kernel changes that have made a huge impact on regular users. To name a few, the new scheduler (noticeably better desktop performance), dynamic ticks (noticeably better battery life), and mac80211 (much better and more reliable wireless infrastructure/drivers). There are a slew of other but you get the picture.
On the contrary, it is a lack of support on the side of Linux developers. In order to compete, and finally see the oft-mentioned "year of the Linux desktop", it is up to the developers to put in the effort to make Linux run as well as possible.
Why? If you take away all vendor provided drivers Linux supports a crapload more hardware out of the box than Windows. If more than just a handful of vendors made their own drivers for Linux it would be a no contest, hands down win for Linux. The support is really missing from the vendor side of things, not the Linux side.
And they will love you for it, until they try to edit their photos with GIMP.
How many people do you think actually buy Photoshop and among those that do how many use it for nothing more than cropping pictures? People think they need Photoshop to do these things but if they tried Linux (Hell, even Vista can handle most people's needs with Photo Gallery) they would quickly learn that that isn't the case. The only case where Photoshop is even necessary is for professional use.
If my info on GNU/Hurd was invalid, then I stand corrected. I assumed that Hurd was the microkernel with Linux (usually Debian) on top. I should have been clearer about that.
That is not an accurate description of GNU/Hurd. Hurd replaces Linux. They are mutually exclusive (not counting virtualization), hence GNU,/Hurd vs GNU/Linux. GNU/Hurd is the Hurd microkernel combined with the GNU userland to make a complete operating system. GNU/Linux is the Linux monolithic kernel combined with the GNU userland to make a different, although similar operating system. They are similar because the userland is exactly the same and they wouldn't seem very different to the casual user but underneath they are very different from each other, obviously as one is a microkernel and the other is a monolithic kernel.
I think the real reason that software patents are stifling compared to "real" patents is that software patents don't cover a specific implementation they cover an idea which is completley the opposite of what patents were meant for to begin with. Copyright in software is enough to cover implementation, patents are unneeded. Unfortunately with software patents we can bar other people from creating AVs for SMTP gateways in general without regard to implementation. This isn't how patents were meant to be used.
What I would like to know, personally, is why the aircrack-ng patches for injection (http://patches.aircrack-ng.org/) are still out-of-tree.
As far as I know the new mac80211 wireless framework supports injection for any driver that uses it. You need to be running a beta version of aircrack-ng to take advantage of it though.
The environment is a federal issue, not a state issue. States should not be able to arbitrarily set limitations on what their citizens can do.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't know what the word arbitrarily means, because it certainly doesn't make sense in the context you put it in.
It isn't Gentoo's "fault' that I didn't learn anything from it. I'm just saying that Gentoo elitists should give up the illusion that the install process is some profound leaning experience/initiation that every Linux user should have to go through.
I use Gentoo and I think that the install process is full of information. A stage1 install can teach you a lot about Linux like how to partition a disk in Linux, how to install a filesystem, how to install grub, setting up networking in linux, compiling a kernel, etc. You don't need to know anything about these things in most other distros to get the system up and running but it is required in Gentoo. There is good explanations in the hand book on how to do these things and what values you need to look for and use in your particular setup.
I guess it's just the T series that lacks these options then. I've never noticed a firewire port on any of the R series I've seen and I've never run across a Thinkpad with a webcam either.
They are rather concerned about this since the stock GPL could well "contaminate" the rest of their codebase, requiring them to release the some or all of the products for the GPL'd code in question. The GPL has occasionally been nicknamed the "General Public Virus" for this reason. This leaves them vulnerable, and lets just about anyone use the source code for whatever purposes they desire, 99% of which will not involve paying McAfee one cent.
Why do people like you get this so completely wrong everytime the GPL comes up in discussion? The GPL doesn't force anyone to release their code. If you want to use the GPL then you must release your code when you distribute. If you unwittingly or just stupidly release code that is linked to GPL code and you don't release the source then you must cease distributing the infringing software. That's it. McAfee has a choice. They don't have to give their IP away even if GPL code slipped into one of their products. They would just have to stop distributing it.
WTF wasn't consumer friendly about the ThinkPad? Granted, I've been a big ThinkPad fan for some time myself, but really, what are they talking about? How do you make a notebook more consumer-friendly? For that matter, how could a notebook not be consumer friendly and sell?
I think they mean the lack of firewire and a webcam. These two things are not available on Thinkpads and a lot of consumers expect them in a consumer level notebook.
I think, once the initial knee-jerk anti-MS crud is past, people won't mind. Just like any web/presentation technology, it has it's pros and cons. But look, to work with Silverlight, to create Silverlight, you don't need an expensive suite of tools.
Think again. I'm a free software advocate that is in love with Mono and most Linux users out there still have an intense hatred for it despite applications like Beagle, Banshee, F-Spot, Tomboy, and MonoDevelop. I think all of these applications are top-notch but most Linux users out there seem to stay away from them soley because they are built on Mono. It's a big stumbling block for a lot of Linux users out there even though I don't understand their misplaced fear.
Musicians write and perform music and the apps themselves are designed to let them do that with a minimum of hassle. Do you really think that any pro musician wants to spend any time whatsoever setting up the OS audio, let alone even having to choose which audio code to run, when OSX requires nothing of the sort and outperforms Linux anyways?
First of all ARTS and ESD are being deprecated and OSS has been deprecrated already so take them out of the picture. Linux can do low latency scheduling and in combination with PulseAudio, JACK, and ALSA it is a pretty powerful audio workstation. Thrown in Ardour and the whole thing is hard to beat for the grand price of FREE. In fact I would love to know what CoreAudio does so much better than these technologies. Do you have specific features in mind or are you just stating your opinion? I don't know anything about CoreAudio so I would love to know.
As for musicians' ability to install a Linux audio workstation...they don't have to worry about any of that. That's what distro's are for. There are even distro's geared towards audio and others towards video and graphics. It doesn't seem like you have been paying attention to Linux development for the past few years.
If the Canon A570IS ran a GPLd OS, that would be awesome to modify that so that I can do things that Canon hadn't thought of or doesn't want users to be able to do, like time-lapse, recording RAW, changing the menu system, etc...
Where did they buy their legal copy of XP for the EEE from? I thought Microsoft wasn't selling it at retail any more. I know I can still get it OEM but most people don't have the connections for that nor do they have the resources to install XP onto a machine without a DVD/CD-ROM drive.
You can still pick up a copy of XP at your local big box store.
Now, if you do the same thing with "SECUNIA", you get 72. 7+2 = 9. And 9, added to itself, is 18, and its digits also add up to 9. So nine is obviously significant.
No, no. Nine isn't significant. You missed the easy explanation. 18 is 6 times 3. 666
Oh, and Javascript was NOT designed as a "display customization language". It was originally designed to script (drumroll please...) Java. As in Java, Java. Not Java Applets (though that was included in the spec), but straight-up, plain-Jane, gosh-darn-that-looks-like-semantically-funny-Java Java. Mozilla still supports the full Livescript API in case you want to play around at some point.
Not exactly true. Javascript was not invented to be a scripting environment for Java. It wasn't named Javascript initially and the syntax is similar to C just as Java syntax is similar to C. In fact the name Javascript was more of a marketing ploy than anything else. Javascript was developed by a Netscape engineer and indeed seems to be invented for the purpose of web-based scripting, not Java scripting.
Right there is a pretty big roadblock. Big media isn't interested unless it is going to help with DRM.
Having Ogg and Theora as web standards doesn't prevent big media from releasing content in a different format.
Secondly, the average person isn't really all that interested in whatever superior quality ogg has. It's really a nominal difference on most players and in most listening environments. MP3 does just fine for them.
Thirdly, and in conjunction with my second point, MP3 is old, well-known, and for the most part easy to use. People are familiar with it and therefore are reluctant to change. The fact is MP3 got their first. It causes to few real problems to push people to care about open standards. I myself like to think I'm at least a little enlightened/aware of digital media issues, and I don't even have that much ogg in my library. It's probably 90% MP3, then 5% FLAC and ogg.
If Ogg and Theora become standards it is very likely that audio and video devices will add support for the codecs. Ipod users don't seem to have a problem using AAC so I don't see it being a very big issue for users to switch to Ogg.
Slashdot Mirror
Three months is nothing. Manufacturers can be worse than this. They can hold your product until the warranty expires even if it broke down on you in the the first month. These things happen all the time. The service centers that repair these things are massive and they have thousands of products going in and out everyday. Things are bound to get lost once in a while. This woman doesn't have a shot in hell of winning. Most places don't have guaranteed turn around times and don't guarantee your data either. Exactly what kind of case could she possibley have? She claims the laptop was stolen and that a false ticket was made for it but I don't see anything to back that up. Best Buy may have treated her badly but I don't think they did anything that broke the law or contract they had. Personally I wouldn't want to believe that there are people with less than stellar character working in one of these places, handling my data but I'm also not naive. If you're worried about identity theft then secure your data. Trusting anyone with your private data is just stupid. As for compensation they were more than fair. They paid for the laptop +$500. They even offered her more money than that at one point.
Because "Yahoo!" and "Google" aren't stupid
They aren't now, but that's only because they're worth so much money. 10-15 years ago yahoo and google were nothing more than baby noises. They're both goofy names but have become mainstreamed so nobody notices it. Stupid names aren't strictly associated with open source software and they haven't prevented software from becoming popular and ultimately making those same stupid monikers into household names.
There has been a lot of Linux kernel changes that have made a huge impact on regular users. To name a few, the new scheduler (noticeably better desktop performance), dynamic ticks (noticeably better battery life), and mac80211 (much better and more reliable wireless infrastructure/drivers). There are a slew of other but you get the picture.
On the contrary, it is a lack of support on the side of Linux developers. In order to compete, and finally see the oft-mentioned "year of the Linux desktop", it is up to the developers to put in the effort to make Linux run as well as possible.
Why? If you take away all vendor provided drivers Linux supports a crapload more hardware out of the box than Windows. If more than just a handful of vendors made their own drivers for Linux it would be a no contest, hands down win for Linux. The support is really missing from the vendor side of things, not the Linux side.
And they will love you for it, until they try to edit their photos with GIMP.
How many people do you think actually buy Photoshop and among those that do how many use it for nothing more than cropping pictures? People think they need Photoshop to do these things but if they tried Linux (Hell, even Vista can handle most people's needs with Photo Gallery) they would quickly learn that that isn't the case. The only case where Photoshop is even necessary is for professional use.
If my info on GNU/Hurd was invalid, then I stand corrected. I assumed that Hurd was the microkernel with Linux (usually Debian) on top. I should have been clearer about that.
That is not an accurate description of GNU/Hurd. Hurd replaces Linux. They are mutually exclusive (not counting virtualization), hence GNU,/Hurd vs GNU/Linux. GNU/Hurd is the Hurd microkernel combined with the GNU userland to make a complete operating system. GNU/Linux is the Linux monolithic kernel combined with the GNU userland to make a different, although similar operating system. They are similar because the userland is exactly the same and they wouldn't seem very different to the casual user but underneath they are very different from each other, obviously as one is a microkernel and the other is a monolithic kernel.
I think the real reason that software patents are stifling compared to "real" patents is that software patents don't cover a specific implementation they cover an idea which is completley the opposite of what patents were meant for to begin with. Copyright in software is enough to cover implementation, patents are unneeded. Unfortunately with software patents we can bar other people from creating AVs for SMTP gateways in general without regard to implementation. This isn't how patents were meant to be used.
GTKHtml is crap. It was forked so long ago that there isn't a shred or resemblance between GTKHtml and Webkit.
What I would like to know, personally, is why the aircrack-ng patches for injection (http://patches.aircrack-ng.org/) are still out-of-tree.
As far as I know the new mac80211 wireless framework supports injection for any driver that uses it. You need to be running a beta version of aircrack-ng to take advantage of it though.
The environment is a federal issue, not a state issue. States should not be able to arbitrarily set limitations on what their citizens can do.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't know what the word arbitrarily means, because it certainly doesn't make sense in the context you put it in.
I use Gentoo and I think that the install process is full of information. A stage1 install can teach you a lot about Linux like how to partition a disk in Linux, how to install a filesystem, how to install grub, setting up networking in linux, compiling a kernel, etc. You don't need to know anything about these things in most other distros to get the system up and running but it is required in Gentoo. There is good explanations in the hand book on how to do these things and what values you need to look for and use in your particular setup.
I guess it's just the T series that lacks these options then. I've never noticed a firewire port on any of the R series I've seen and I've never run across a Thinkpad with a webcam either.
Why do people like you get this so completely wrong everytime the GPL comes up in discussion? The GPL doesn't force anyone to release their code. If you want to use the GPL then you must release your code when you distribute. If you unwittingly or just stupidly release code that is linked to GPL code and you don't release the source then you must cease distributing the infringing software. That's it. McAfee has a choice. They don't have to give their IP away even if GPL code slipped into one of their products. They would just have to stop distributing it.
I think they mean the lack of firewire and a webcam. These two things are not available on Thinkpads and a lot of consumers expect them in a consumer level notebook.
Moonlight
Think again. I'm a free software advocate that is in love with Mono and most Linux users out there still have an intense hatred for it despite applications like Beagle, Banshee, F-Spot, Tomboy, and MonoDevelop. I think all of these applications are top-notch but most Linux users out there seem to stay away from them soley because they are built on Mono. It's a big stumbling block for a lot of Linux users out there even though I don't understand their misplaced fear.
Musicians write and perform music and the apps themselves are designed to let them do that with a minimum of hassle. Do you really think that any pro musician wants to spend any time whatsoever setting up the OS audio, let alone even having to choose which audio code to run, when OSX requires nothing of the sort and outperforms Linux anyways?
First of all ARTS and ESD are being deprecated and OSS has been deprecrated already so take them out of the picture. Linux can do low latency scheduling and in combination with PulseAudio, JACK, and ALSA it is a pretty powerful audio workstation. Thrown in Ardour and the whole thing is hard to beat for the grand price of FREE. In fact I would love to know what CoreAudio does so much better than these technologies. Do you have specific features in mind or are you just stating your opinion? I don't know anything about CoreAudio so I would love to know.
As for musicians' ability to install a Linux audio workstation...they don't have to worry about any of that. That's what distro's are for. There are even distro's geared towards audio and others towards video and graphics. It doesn't seem like you have been paying attention to Linux development for the past few years.
Check out 64 Studio
If the Canon A570IS ran a GPLd OS, that would be awesome to modify that so that I can do things that Canon hadn't thought of or doesn't want users to be able to do, like time-lapse, recording RAW, changing the menu system, etc...
I think you're looking for this: CHDK
Where did they buy their legal copy of XP for the EEE from? I thought Microsoft wasn't selling it at retail any more. I know I can still get it OEM but most people don't have the connections for that nor do they have the resources to install XP onto a machine without a DVD/CD-ROM drive.
You can still pick up a copy of XP at your local big box store.
Nope. MacOS is not Unix. MacOS is Mach+FreeBSD. Linux is more similar to traditional Unix than MacOS.
No, no. Nine isn't significant. You missed the easy explanation. 18 is 6 times 3. 666
Javascript is influenced by Self. Java is not. Java is very different from Self and Javascript.
Not exactly true. Javascript was not invented to be a scripting environment for Java. It wasn't named Javascript initially and the syntax is similar to C just as Java syntax is similar to C. In fact the name Javascript was more of a marketing ploy than anything else. Javascript was developed by a Netscape engineer and indeed seems to be invented for the purpose of web-based scripting, not Java scripting.
Having Ogg and Theora as web standards doesn't prevent big media from releasing content in a different format.
If Ogg and Theora become standards it is very likely that audio and video devices will add support for the codecs. Ipod users don't seem to have a problem using AAC so I don't see it being a very big issue for users to switch to Ogg.
So /dev/null converted your copy of Sounds of Silence to the acoustic version? Cool.