Every day women in tech fields experience little degrading things: people talking to our boobs, assuming that we are secretaries, shouting us down, and paying us less.
I'm not sure that this is unique to tech, if it really still exists and is as bad as you say it is.
For example: Have you actually been "shouted down"? If that ever happened to me, in any job that doesn't directly involve shouting, I'd be gone.
Assuming you're a secretary? Takes but a moment to correct that one. Or find a place with a semi-casual dress code and start wearing ThinkGeek shirts to work. At least then, if they're staring at your boobs, they'll also be staring at "Bow before me, for I am root."
It is not our responsibility to act like one of the boys.
If you want to be socially accepted in any group, you're going to have to do something.
It doesn't mean you have to "act like one of the boys." It does mean you have to loosen up, learn to take a joke (even a *gasp* dirty joke), and so on. It means you have to act like you belong.
It is the responsibility of men to realize that we are not one of the boys, but we are fellow humans, and as such have every right to do the jobs we love and be respected while we do it.
No one gets respect automatically. You have to earn it.
And it doesn't matter whose responsibility it is. If they won't magically behave the way you want them to, then you're the one who has to change -- because at that point, if you don't change, no one will.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is what it is. No matter how much you whine on Slashdot, geeks are going to continue to stare at your boobs until you force them to respect your intellect, your sense of humor, your personality.
And it is possible for you to demand respect, but you do it by acting like a really and truly interesting human, and not playing the female victim all the time. You may really be a victim, but stop wallowing in it and do something about it. (And do it yourself, don't talk to the boss -- tattling is bad, no matter what social group you're in.)
I suspect that if you can make that work, you wouldn't have anything to complain about on Slashdot.
1) AIM is a Virus downloading service disguised as a chat protocol.
I understand your frustration, but that's even more nonsensical a statement than "The Internet is for Porn!"
If Aim would simply filter out the bad traffic (and they should be able to know if a client is spamming the servers like crazy by heuristics alone) it would stop a lot of scams dead in their tracks.
And if that kid's sister is smart enough to be in college at all, she should know enough to be skeptical. For example, a quick reply of "What was that?" to the brother, who can then say "I didn't send you anything", and then they know what happened.
What's more, don't work on 1000+ college student laptops without at the very least removing admin rights from the students. Or if the laptops belong to the students, make them pay for you to clean up after their messes, and they'll learn very quickly not to click on random crap sent to them via AIM.
But if you really want to do it your way, convince everyone to use Jabber, and give them an official school Jabber account. Then you can do the filtering yourself.
Personally, I'd much rather piss off the one moronic user by not protecting them from themself -- it's their fault anyway. In fact, this probably happened, which is probably why they added these "features" in the first place.
Instead, they've chosen to piss off everyone who sends a URL with a php extension (webcomics, Bash quotes, etc come to mind), and everyone who knows about the issue.
And for what?
So that some clueless morons are protected from other clueless morons. So that you're protected from any virus/worm/"hacker" who doesn't know about tinyurl.com (or any of the numerous other ways around that filter).
First, punctuation is your friend it's really fucking annoying to read long sentences like this are you too fucking lazy to include a period and break it into multiple sentences or what fucking moron.
That said:
To install Ubuntu doesn't help him at all.
Yes, that is a complete sentence. You put a period there. The first letter of the next word is capitalized. Go back to grade school and learn to fucking write.
Anyway, I'd think that installing Ubuntu does help, as at that point, you're forced to find something like Pidgin -- I think Pidgin (or Gaim) might actually be included in the default install. I know Kopete is in the default Kubuntu install, and I find it a bit better -- it has webcam support, for one.
Overkill? Yes, but it would work. Is your way better? Maybe, but you chose to bitch at someone for suggesting Ubuntu, instead of replying directly to the person who had the problem.
They don't just block the link, either -- they lag your connection for about 20 seconds, then kill the conversation. I'm not sure how it looks to a real MSN client, though.
I don't suppose it's occurred to Microsoft that PHP is a perfectly valid scripting language used by a significant number of... No, of course they wouldn't. To Microsoft, real websites use ASP.NET...
I mean, I frequently send links to specific webcomics to people I know on IM, but most of the people I know are on Yahoo or something better.
Yeah, on my Kopete, on the sending end, it lags for maybe 20 seconds (though maybe that's because I'm downloading something, but I suspect it's deliberate), then says "connection closed" and warns me that the message wasn't sent correctly.
On the receiving end, it just tells me that I closed the chat window.
I play an MMO which has a reasonable language filter, or as reasonable as it can be. Rather than bleeping stuff, it simply substitutes the "bad" word for an "equivalent". It also makes for some rather hilarious conversations, once they decided that in most cases, you were allowed to swear so long as you didn't attempt to bypass the language filter.
It doesn't catch everything, as it doesn't look at the boundries of words, so that you can't get around "fuck" by saying "fucker" or "fucking".
Here's a short list of what I can remember:
fuck -> darn shit -> dang slut -> girl whore -> maid bitch -> dog asshole -> ant bastard -> idiot wtf -> wt password -> soul pussy -> cat (any body part not outright censored) -> toe (some body parts are completely censored -- cock, for instance)
And so on. It also has funny things like: If you attempt to say your password in any way inside the game, it will actually boot your to your desktop with an error message of something like "Please try to keep your password safe!"
What's funny is, I think it's actually legal to say things like "darn you", but not things like "so I was darning this girl..."
It's also entirely illegal to attempt to circumvent the language filter -- you can say "darn you, you piece of dang", but not "f uck you"...
In general, it rarely causes problems, although it becomes a problem if you want to talk about out-of-character things like Alfred Hitchcock. (Yes, actually did run into that one.) I also fail to see why private messages should be censored that way... But anyway, it's tolerated mostly because it's actually hilarious, and only very occasionally is unavoidable. For example, the Archons occasionally post computer security tips to the boards, but "password" is censored, so they have to say something like "passwrod".
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not opposed to a voluntary censorship on the receiving end, even one that an admin (or parent) can turn on and leave on. I'm also not opposed to banning people for swearing and making assholes of themselves in large public areas of an MMO (usually they're jailed instead of banned, but whatever). But I do agree that on a private IM, or any other private message, it's not up to the network to unilaterally censor anything, especially such broad crap like.info.
This is why I have accounts all over the place on my Kopete -- there are people that I actually want/need to talk to occasionally who are on various other networks, everything from MSN to Yahoo. It's actually no more work for me to set those up and maintain them than it is to run Jabber.
But I also used to have a Jabber server. (Or I used to, and I will again when I get around to setting it up again.) I tell most people to just download Google Talk, though. That's the thing -- Jabber is trying to take IM where Email already is. Anyone can setup a mailserver and start selling or giving away email addresses, so there's actually competition for services.
Using MSN IM instead of Jabber is a bit like using Myspace instead of email.
I'm prepared to put £50 on the table now which says I could find half a dozen companies with a similar unholy mashup of spreadsheets in use somewhere in less than a day.
I'm betting I could find quite a few companies who barely use Excel at all.
And you're telling me that these places could easily convert to OpenOffice?
There are places which could.
As for the place you just described, my bet is that sooner or later, their unholy mashup of spreadsheets is going to turn around and bite them in the ass. They are then going to be faced with either paying someone an assload of money to sort out the situation (which may not even work), or buying a commercial package, or switch to a more flexible architecture.
I mean, I really, really hate Filemaker, but I'd much rather use it than Excel -- and if they're switching to something entirely new anyway, they may as well go with something like Kexi.
They have a rationale. I know that no one ever reads the stuff linked to in the article, but read the stuff linked to in the article.
Thanks for your links. I'm doing my best to skim, but so far, I'm still getting nothing more than "We think we might get some evidence here, so hand over the files."
What I don't see here is why the RIAA is actually allowed to sue here -- what evidence they actually have pointing to this particular person, or their laptop, or their former employer.
This is part of the reason why they have to have investigators find infringers, rather than just starting with A. Aaronson and ending with Mr. Zykowski.
Judging by past RIAA lawsuits, it wouldn't be out of character for them to do that. They have, in fact, filed suit against people who have never used a computer in their life, people who don't know how to use filesharing, people who are actually dead...
In any case, what's the legal procedure for the judge to be sure that they haven't just flipped through the phone book at random?
But assuming you do meet that standard, a lot of material is discoverable.
I'm just a little skeptical that they've met that standard.
If they have, then of course, I figure they have the right to that material -- although I think you're dismissing this part a bit much:
In an infringement case dealing with music and sound recordings, why would people look through emails (other than emails that have suspicious attachments, like mp3s, or zip files containing mp3s, etc.) as opposed to just searching for the audio files on the drive and taking an inventory of those?
Well, for one, they might be looking for possible stenography, though that's a bit far-fetched.
But you're assuming that no one would have sound files of a personal nature. I'm not sure you can say that, and certainly not if VoIP becomes truly mainstream. Certainly, if they were searching for videos, they're going to hit the defendant's private porn collection, maybe including videos recorded by girlfriends -- hey, it's happened before.
So yes, it's entirely possible they could hit something personal, even if they're just looking at sound recordings. I'm not saying that means it shouldn't be in discovery, but I am saying that I really hope they had some real evidence to even get that far. I think if they just handed the judge a screenshot of an IP address in a spreadsheet, they should be laughed at -- but unfortunately, things like that can and do get taken seriously.
"Yes, your honor, my client did make all those files available for sharing, but if nobody had downloaded them, my client might not have shared them in the first place."
So the question is, then, whether merely making the files available is itself a crime.
For example, let's say the guy has a Windows computer, and has given the computer a name of "Johnson", with a username "Johnson" and password "Johnson". Or something almost as stupid, that someone would actually do. They then shared a folder on their hard drive not related to the music, on their open wireless network, so their brother could get some files or something. At which point, someone could drive past, notice a Windows network with a computer named "Johnson", and try that as a username/password, and suddenly gain access to the C$ share.
That's an extreme example, I know. But I think we need something a little more specific than simply making the files available.
And if making the files available isn't itself a crime, then your "Schroedinger's Cat defense" really should hold, because law enforcement isn't really allowed to encourage people to commit a crime and then nail them for it -- that's called "entrapment".
Do you mean lie and state that you thought Star Wars Ep. IV was Creative Commons?
Well, GP was suggesting you claim you didn't know it was copyrighted, which I think is even more ludicrous.
10 years ago, consoles made a lot of sense, as back then, far less people were on the Internet. So non-technical people had less need for a PC. Now a lot of non-technical people have a PC.
And the typical PC is far, far less powerful than the typical console.
You're not going to find a "non-technical person" who bought a PC for web and email playing Bioshock on it -- probably not even Oblivion. For that, you need something much more powerful. Which means that for many people, it's not a question of whether they already have a PC or not. It's a question of whether they want to buy a new PC or a new console, because their old one won't cut it.
Now a good high end PC can be put together for less than £1000. Also I can (and have) built very good PCs for less than £250 excluding the price of a high end graphics card. Also we are now seeing projects to build low end PCs for less than $100...
Let's see -- by my estimate, that high-end PC is $2000 US, which is more than I said. And the low-end PCs, well, let's compare apples to apples -- a PS2 can be had for less than $100, and I think it's fair to consider that a low-end console.
But think about it. Which makes more sense -- $2000 for a high-end PC that can also play games, or $100 for a low-end PC and $350 for a game console that's every bit as powerful as that $2000 PC, if not more?
Also, older generations of consoles relied heavily on very specialised custom hardware. But now its becoming more cost effective to build a console using more off the shelf technology.
It's far from "off the shelf". The Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC processor, and is perhaps closest to "off the shelf", as similar cores have been used in Macs for awhile (before the switch to Intel). But the PS3 uses the Cell, which is very specialized custom hardware.
But even if you're right, so what? Economies of scale, combined with the licensing fees of the games themselves, plus Microsoft's willingness to actually lose money just to stay in the gaming business, all of that means that a new console will be cheaper than an equivalent computer. Assuming you can actually build an equivalent computer -- the Xbox 360 came out with, what, 3, 4 cores? At the time, we were just barely starting to see dual-core on the desktop.
What separates that generic console specification from a PC is peripherals like a keyboard and mouse etc.
And also that a console can actually have a fundamentally different architecture. It can share RAM between the CPU and the GPU. It can experiment with other architectures, even bizarre stuff like the Cell.
It can, in short, drop all of the legacy bullshit that plagues the PC. My desktop PC still has a floppy controller, for God's sake! I don't have anything plugged into it, but why are we wasting silicon on that? But more relevantly, it's still capable of running 386 code!
We're having a major leap forward with x86_64, but I'm just pointing out, PCs have to run legacy stuff as well as they ever have. Consoles, when they bother with backwards compatibility, are a full generation ahead, meaning they actually have the raw brute processing power to emulate the old architecture -- the PS1 is actually included as a really cheap separate chip on the PS2.
So the cost advantages of a console are not going to last. Why buy a closed box when it will be possible to buy an open box which I can put whatever I like on it. Being closed becomes a reason not to buy it.
Tell that to the millions of people who buy Windows.
I really, really hope you're right, but I have a feeling that in the era you're talking about, when generic processing is $50 a pop, people will still buy whatever the new Xbox is, because it'll run whatever the new Halo is. They don't want to hear about closed vs open, they want to hear where there are great games.
It is, in fact, possible -- even easy -- to download and burn many games and play them on consoles. It's even safer than doing the same for PCs, because it's a lot harder to put spyware on a console.
Piracy is really no more a threat to PC games than it is to music or movies. Which is to say, it's not a threat.
Now consider that it's easier, cheaper and faster to develop games for PC versus consoles.
I don't know how you could have arrived at this conclusion.
That may be true if you're making a Flash game or something. PCs are cheaper than console dev kits, so yes, the barrier of entry is lower.
However, the PC is not a game platform the way a console is. It's more like an infinite number of platforms. There are two major video card manufacturers, and a few minor ones -- and Intel might become a major player in the future. There are two different processor instruction sets (x86 and x86_64) even in the Windows world, and more on the Mac or Linux -- not to mention the shading languages for the video cards themselves. There's at least three major versions of Windows you'll want to support -- 2k, XP, and Vista -- and all of those have more than a few permutations. There's CD drives, DVD drives, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives -- the only way you can guarantee that everyone can read your game is to ship a CD, at which point you exclude people who only have floppy drives. There are way more keys on a keyboard than buttons on a controller, and you better bet the users are going to want to customize them all.
Compare that to a console -- the most variation you're going to get is, some PS3s have 10 gigs, some have 50 gigs. Some Xbox 360s have a hard drive, some don't, and some have HD-DVD, but all have standard DVD. And all Wiis are basically the same. It is actually possible to pick one console and go for the lowest common denominator -- for example, go Xbox 360, standard DVD, and don't use the hard drive. That's simply not possible on the PC, because there is no lowest common denominator that will actually work everywhere, and support even close to the amount of power you'd get with that Xbox game I just described.
Now, it certainly would be possible to develop an abstraction on top of the PC. For example, you could develop your game in C# or Java, or do the low-level stuff in C++ and most of the logic in Python, meaning most or all of your code isn't even aware of the CPU architecture it's running on. You could develop strictly for OpenGL, strictly by the spec (with no vendor-specific extensions), or you could write a wrapper around all the vendor-specific stuff so you can use it in an abstract way. You could, in short, develop a platform for the PC that is as easy to develop for as a console.
But that takes time and money, and it also takes skilled programmers -- and judging by the number of "loading" screens you see in modern games, the industry is either badly in need of skilled programmers, or is just plain lazy.
It's not just private trackers. Most clients don't like other clients who don't share, meaning you won't get much before you're disconnected.
Especially when you're starting out. From what I remember, when I was on a 2 mbit half-duplex connection, I would always start out downloading at maybe 5k. After awhile, I'd have something to share, but if I restricted my upload rate to, say, 50k up, I'd only get 50k or so down, or less.
However, if I restricted my upload rate to 150k (and downloaded at 50k), then after maybe ten minutes, I could flip it around -- limit upload to 50k, and I could download at 150k. I couldn't quite go to zero, though, without other clients starting to hate me.
what do 95% of compatibility have got to do with anything if the one feature i need is the one not covered by those 95%, huh, Sherlock?
Then it sucks to be you. There are going to be people out there who have all their needs met by that 95%. Submit a feature request, and maybe with the next patch, you'll be one of them.
"Compatability with office" is a difficult thing. Particularly as most computing people don't actually make full use of Office's capabilities.
No, that makes it easier.
But there are enough different users using and abusing Office that no two people have the same list of "things which must work".
Not exactly the same, but sometimes there is enough overlap.
Really simple, obvious example -- most people don't need PowerPoint. Therefore, no matter how much Impress is broken, it won't affect them at all.
I'm not saying that it's common for a whole component to be unneeded, I'm saying that it's common for some subset of features to be unneeded. And it is, in fact, possible to find groups of people for which, when you make a list of all the features that are needed by any of them, those features are all present and well supported by OpenOffice (or even KOffice). Which means, of course, the features which are broken in OO are things that particular group doesn't need.
For every group of people like that you get to switch, it helps -- at least it raises awareness. It means that, for instance, the next time someone decides to make a complex accounting spreadsheet, they might consider starting in OpenOffice, or creating it in a manner which is more portable than the macros they're used to. It also means we get more feedback as to what OpenOffice actually needs fixed.
Boot that Linux LiveCD again and use it to re-install the bootloader.
Either from the LiveCD or from inside Linux, create a bootloader entry for Windows.
But then, that's just because I like Grub, not the Windows bootloader. It's not really any more user-friendly, but it is fewer steps.
My point was, you can take a Windows computer and, using nothing other than a Linux install CD, repartition it for dual-boot. You can't do the reverse -- the Windows install CD won't let you repartition an existing OS to make room for it. You'll at the very least need a Windows install CD and some other bootable rescue environment -- probably a boot CD, and probably Linux, though as you point out, Boot Camp probably works pretty well. (I've never used Boot Camp, as I don't have an Intel Mac.)
In other words, any way you cut it, Linux is more user-friendly to setup dual-boot with than Windows is. Maybe it's not as nice as it could be, but I find it a bit unrealistic to say that this is the one thing holding Linux adoption back.
But in any event, while we are talking about the discovery portion of a case, where the two sides are engaged in gathering the evidence that they need, I really don't see your point.
Well, my original point was that generally, I had assumed that no matter what portion of a case you're in, you need at least some rationale for demanding evidence.
I flatly reject the idea that anyone who is a copyright holder can drag anyone else into a lawsuit and immediately demand to see all of the audio files on their computer. So what, exactly, is required for the judge to approve a subpoena of this information?
So we have things like Rule 26(a), which requires each party to voluntarily give a lot of information to the other side without having to be asked about it, 26(b), which allows any party to get all probative non-privileged evidence, or even non-admissible evidence which will lead to admissible evidence. If the other side has a good reason, they can object to it and the whole thing gets hashed out by the judge, as we see here.
Again, I want to know if there is anything that has to happen, other than the plaintiff proving that they own the copyright to some work which the defendant may or may not have ever heard of before.
Maybe there's no avoiding it, but at this point, it's still a lot of hassle and expense to deal with a truly absurd case, even if you won at every step during discovery -- meaning you managed to prevent them from rifling through your personal files because they kind of, sort of suspect that you have something.
I'm not a lawyer either, and I admit the possibility (probability?) that I've missed something obvious. Then again, we humans miss obvious things so often, even in our own fields, that I should probably just put it in my sig.
Because 64-bit Linux is actually pretty thoroughly 64-bit, except Flash -- and you can actually run Flash on a 64-bit browser. The only place I've had serious problems is running Flash in nspluginwrapper in Konqueror, which means Konqueror is emulating the 64-bit Firefox plugin architecture in order to run nspluginwrapper as a plugin, which is a wrapper for the 32-bit Firefox.
My friend, who has a 32-bit processor and a 32-bit Linux, hasn't had any problems getting Flash to run in a 32-bit Konqueror. And before I switched to Ubuntu, I had no serious problems getting Flash to run in nspluginwrapper in a 64-bit Firefox, which is still the default for Ubuntu (but not Kubuntu).
Yeah, and like Windows, there are better alternatives.
I don't actually remember what it was, but I do remember adding exactly one repository to my sources.list (a process that is getting increasingly easier) in order to get all the codecs for my Linux. I think I even have a 32-bit mplayer somewhere with the win32 codecs, but I so rarely come across a file that my 64-bit mplayer (or VLC) won't play.
If anything, we could be nearing the end of the consoles. Within 5 years we are likely to have...
Right, we'll have huge improvements that are available for the PC.
But what makes you think a console won't have them?
The only advantage the PC has over a console is its openness -- that I can download a few simple tools and start to develop a game, for free. Or I can download games for free, or pay for them, as well as buy them on disc. Or that it's easy and cheap to upgrade things like disk space...
plus the Wii is doing well on game play not technology. The trend is towards technology becoming less important.
Indeed. Which would also make the PC less important, as people will buy things like the Wii, as the tech keeps getting cheaper.
The PC is here to stay, but I can't say the same for future generations of closed source consoles, which limit the number of applications on their systems.
Yes, they limit it to only games. What a horrible limitation.
I know what you meant -- they limit homebrew and indie games. But it's precisely because of that that consoles get to start out so much cheaper than an equivalent PC, if, indeed, an equivalent exists.
Imagine yourself as John Q. Public for a moment. On your left is a PC, which can get viruses -- don't know what they are, but they sound scary -- and can crash, and all that other bad stuff. It costs $1000, at least -- maybe $3000 -- and you get a bunch of crappy free games that might come with spyware (etc) on them. There are also some very nice, high-end games for it, at maybe $50 each.
And on your right is an Xbox 360. It costs $350 or so, and you can get a bunch of crappy games for small amounts of money, but they're guaranteed to be safe. You also get the same, high-end games, at maybe $55 or $60 each.
So, decisions, decisions: $1000 PC for crappy indie + $50/game, or $350 Xbox for $60/game. Oh, almost forgot -- you can rent games for that Xbox, beat them quickly, and take them back, or buy them if you find you like them enough to play again (or couldn't finish quickly enough). But suppose you buy all your games -- you're still going to have to buy about 60 or 70 brand new games for each before that Xbox costs as much as the PC, and you still have to maintain the PC -- you don't have to maintain the Xbox.
Now, I'll take the gaming PC every time, and I'll put Linux on it. But I don't think I'll ever be able to declare consoles dead, just as I hope they're never able to declare PC gaming really and truly dead -- though the way things are going, it might be.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that this is unique to tech, if it really still exists and is as bad as you say it is.
For example: Have you actually been "shouted down"? If that ever happened to me, in any job that doesn't directly involve shouting, I'd be gone.
Assuming you're a secretary? Takes but a moment to correct that one. Or find a place with a semi-casual dress code and start wearing ThinkGeek shirts to work. At least then, if they're staring at your boobs, they'll also be staring at "Bow before me, for I am root."
If you want to be socially accepted in any group, you're going to have to do something.
It doesn't mean you have to "act like one of the boys." It does mean you have to loosen up, learn to take a joke (even a *gasp* dirty joke), and so on. It means you have to act like you belong.
No one gets respect automatically. You have to earn it.
And it doesn't matter whose responsibility it is. If they won't magically behave the way you want them to, then you're the one who has to change -- because at that point, if you don't change, no one will.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is what it is. No matter how much you whine on Slashdot, geeks are going to continue to stare at your boobs until you force them to respect your intellect, your sense of humor, your personality.
And it is possible for you to demand respect, but you do it by acting like a really and truly interesting human, and not playing the female victim all the time. You may really be a victim, but stop wallowing in it and do something about it. (And do it yourself, don't talk to the boss -- tattling is bad, no matter what social group you're in.)
I suspect that if you can make that work, you wouldn't have anything to complain about on Slashdot.
It's still moronic, and I still think MSN should stop doing it.
And I will keep bringing this up to people who use MSN until either MSN stops, or everyone I know is using some other IM client.
I understand your frustration, but that's even more nonsensical a statement than "The Internet is for Porn!"
And if that kid's sister is smart enough to be in college at all, she should know enough to be skeptical. For example, a quick reply of "What was that?" to the brother, who can then say "I didn't send you anything", and then they know what happened.
What's more, don't work on 1000+ college student laptops without at the very least removing admin rights from the students. Or if the laptops belong to the students, make them pay for you to clean up after their messes, and they'll learn very quickly not to click on random crap sent to them via AIM.
But if you really want to do it your way, convince everyone to use Jabber, and give them an official school Jabber account. Then you can do the filtering yourself.
Well, it depends who they want to piss off.
Personally, I'd much rather piss off the one moronic user by not protecting them from themself -- it's their fault anyway. In fact, this probably happened, which is probably why they added these "features" in the first place.
Instead, they've chosen to piss off everyone who sends a URL with a php extension (webcomics, Bash quotes, etc come to mind), and everyone who knows about the issue.
And for what?
So that some clueless morons are protected from other clueless morons. So that you're protected from any virus/worm/"hacker" who doesn't know about tinyurl.com (or any of the numerous other ways around that filter).
First, punctuation is your friend it's really fucking annoying to read long sentences like this are you too fucking lazy to include a period and break it into multiple sentences or what fucking moron.
That said:
Yes, that is a complete sentence. You put a period there. The first letter of the next word is capitalized. Go back to grade school and learn to fucking write.
Anyway, I'd think that installing Ubuntu does help, as at that point, you're forced to find something like Pidgin -- I think Pidgin (or Gaim) might actually be included in the default install. I know Kopete is in the default Kubuntu install, and I find it a bit better -- it has webcam support, for one.
Overkill? Yes, but it would work. Is your way better? Maybe, but you chose to bitch at someone for suggesting Ubuntu, instead of replying directly to the person who had the problem.
Yes, they do. Just tested it.
They don't just block the link, either -- they lag your connection for about 20 seconds, then kill the conversation. I'm not sure how it looks to a real MSN client, though.
I don't suppose it's occurred to Microsoft that PHP is a perfectly valid scripting language used by a significant number of... No, of course they wouldn't. To Microsoft, real websites use ASP.NET...
I mean, I frequently send links to specific webcomics to people I know on IM, but most of the people I know are on Yahoo or something better.
Yeah, on my Kopete, on the sending end, it lags for maybe 20 seconds (though maybe that's because I'm downloading something, but I suspect it's deliberate), then says "connection closed" and warns me that the message wasn't sent correctly.
On the receiving end, it just tells me that I closed the chat window.
I play an MMO which has a reasonable language filter, or as reasonable as it can be. Rather than bleeping stuff, it simply substitutes the "bad" word for an "equivalent". It also makes for some rather hilarious conversations, once they decided that in most cases, you were allowed to swear so long as you didn't attempt to bypass the language filter.
.info.
It doesn't catch everything, as it doesn't look at the boundries of words, so that you can't get around "fuck" by saying "fucker" or "fucking".
Here's a short list of what I can remember:
fuck -> darn
shit -> dang
slut -> girl
whore -> maid
bitch -> dog
asshole -> ant
bastard -> idiot
wtf -> wt
password -> soul
pussy -> cat
(any body part not outright censored) -> toe
(some body parts are completely censored -- cock, for instance)
And so on. It also has funny things like: If you attempt to say your password in any way inside the game, it will actually boot your to your desktop with an error message of something like "Please try to keep your password safe!"
What's funny is, I think it's actually legal to say things like "darn you", but not things like "so I was darning this girl..."
It's also entirely illegal to attempt to circumvent the language filter -- you can say "darn you, you piece of dang", but not "f uck you"...
In general, it rarely causes problems, although it becomes a problem if you want to talk about out-of-character things like Alfred Hitchcock. (Yes, actually did run into that one.) I also fail to see why private messages should be censored that way... But anyway, it's tolerated mostly because it's actually hilarious, and only very occasionally is unavoidable. For example, the Archons occasionally post computer security tips to the boards, but "password" is censored, so they have to say something like "passwrod".
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not opposed to a voluntary censorship on the receiving end, even one that an admin (or parent) can turn on and leave on. I'm also not opposed to banning people for swearing and making assholes of themselves in large public areas of an MMO (usually they're jailed instead of banned, but whatever). But I do agree that on a private IM, or any other private message, it's not up to the network to unilaterally censor anything, especially such broad crap like
This is why I have accounts all over the place on my Kopete -- there are people that I actually want/need to talk to occasionally who are on various other networks, everything from MSN to Yahoo. It's actually no more work for me to set those up and maintain them than it is to run Jabber.
But I also used to have a Jabber server. (Or I used to, and I will again when I get around to setting it up again.) I tell most people to just download Google Talk, though. That's the thing -- Jabber is trying to take IM where Email already is. Anyone can setup a mailserver and start selling or giving away email addresses, so there's actually competition for services.
Using MSN IM instead of Jabber is a bit like using Myspace instead of email.
Why do we even bother?
This is not a "GPL fiasco" any more than pirating a movie is a "DVD fiasco".
And who's to say our ideology is the one that's kooky? You do realize that the "commercial world" is an ideology itself, and...
Never mind, it's over your head. Fucking troll.
I'm betting I could find quite a few companies who barely use Excel at all.
There are places which could.
As for the place you just described, my bet is that sooner or later, their unholy mashup of spreadsheets is going to turn around and bite them in the ass. They are then going to be faced with either paying someone an assload of money to sort out the situation (which may not even work), or buying a commercial package, or switch to a more flexible architecture.
I mean, I really, really hate Filemaker, but I'd much rather use it than Excel -- and if they're switching to something entirely new anyway, they may as well go with something like Kexi.
Thanks for your links. I'm doing my best to skim, but so far, I'm still getting nothing more than "We think we might get some evidence here, so hand over the files."
What I don't see here is why the RIAA is actually allowed to sue here -- what evidence they actually have pointing to this particular person, or their laptop, or their former employer.
Judging by past RIAA lawsuits, it wouldn't be out of character for them to do that. They have, in fact, filed suit against people who have never used a computer in their life, people who don't know how to use filesharing, people who are actually dead...
In any case, what's the legal procedure for the judge to be sure that they haven't just flipped through the phone book at random?
I'm just a little skeptical that they've met that standard.
If they have, then of course, I figure they have the right to that material -- although I think you're dismissing this part a bit much:
Well, for one, they might be looking for possible stenography, though that's a bit far-fetched.
But you're assuming that no one would have sound files of a personal nature. I'm not sure you can say that, and certainly not if VoIP becomes truly mainstream. Certainly, if they were searching for videos, they're going to hit the defendant's private porn collection, maybe including videos recorded by girlfriends -- hey, it's happened before.
So yes, it's entirely possible they could hit something personal, even if they're just looking at sound recordings. I'm not saying that means it shouldn't be in discovery, but I am saying that I really hope they had some real evidence to even get that far. I think if they just handed the judge a screenshot of an IP address in a spreadsheet, they should be laughed at -- but unfortunately, things like that can and do get taken seriously.
So the question is, then, whether merely making the files available is itself a crime.
For example, let's say the guy has a Windows computer, and has given the computer a name of "Johnson", with a username "Johnson" and password "Johnson". Or something almost as stupid, that someone would actually do. They then shared a folder on their hard drive not related to the music, on their open wireless network, so their brother could get some files or something. At which point, someone could drive past, notice a Windows network with a computer named "Johnson", and try that as a username/password, and suddenly gain access to the C$ share.
That's an extreme example, I know. But I think we need something a little more specific than simply making the files available.
And if making the files available isn't itself a crime, then your "Schroedinger's Cat defense" really should hold, because law enforcement isn't really allowed to encourage people to commit a crime and then nail them for it -- that's called "entrapment".
Well, GP was suggesting you claim you didn't know it was copyrighted, which I think is even more ludicrous.
Follow the link, you lazy bastard.
And the typical PC is far, far less powerful than the typical console.
You're not going to find a "non-technical person" who bought a PC for web and email playing Bioshock on it -- probably not even Oblivion. For that, you need something much more powerful. Which means that for many people, it's not a question of whether they already have a PC or not. It's a question of whether they want to buy a new PC or a new console, because their old one won't cut it.
Let's see -- by my estimate, that high-end PC is $2000 US, which is more than I said. And the low-end PCs, well, let's compare apples to apples -- a PS2 can be had for less than $100, and I think it's fair to consider that a low-end console.
But think about it. Which makes more sense -- $2000 for a high-end PC that can also play games, or $100 for a low-end PC and $350 for a game console that's every bit as powerful as that $2000 PC, if not more?
It's far from "off the shelf". The Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC processor, and is perhaps closest to "off the shelf", as similar cores have been used in Macs for awhile (before the switch to Intel). But the PS3 uses the Cell, which is very specialized custom hardware.
But even if you're right, so what? Economies of scale, combined with the licensing fees of the games themselves, plus Microsoft's willingness to actually lose money just to stay in the gaming business, all of that means that a new console will be cheaper than an equivalent computer. Assuming you can actually build an equivalent computer -- the Xbox 360 came out with, what, 3, 4 cores? At the time, we were just barely starting to see dual-core on the desktop.
And also that a console can actually have a fundamentally different architecture. It can share RAM between the CPU and the GPU. It can experiment with other architectures, even bizarre stuff like the Cell.
It can, in short, drop all of the legacy bullshit that plagues the PC. My desktop PC still has a floppy controller, for God's sake! I don't have anything plugged into it, but why are we wasting silicon on that? But more relevantly, it's still capable of running 386 code!
We're having a major leap forward with x86_64, but I'm just pointing out, PCs have to run legacy stuff as well as they ever have. Consoles, when they bother with backwards compatibility, are a full generation ahead, meaning they actually have the raw brute processing power to emulate the old architecture -- the PS1 is actually included as a really cheap separate chip on the PS2.
Tell that to the millions of people who buy Windows.
I really, really hope you're right, but I have a feeling that in the era you're talking about, when generic processing is $50 a pop, people will still buy whatever the new Xbox is, because it'll run whatever the new Halo is. They don't want to hear about closed vs open, they want to hear where there are great games.
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It is, in fact, possible -- even easy -- to download and burn many games and play them on consoles. It's even safer than doing the same for PCs, because it's a lot harder to put spyware on a console.
Piracy is really no more a threat to PC games than it is to music or movies. Which is to say, it's not a threat.
I don't know how you could have arrived at this conclusion.
That may be true if you're making a Flash game or something. PCs are cheaper than console dev kits, so yes, the barrier of entry is lower.
However, the PC is not a game platform the way a console is. It's more like an infinite number of platforms. There are two major video card manufacturers, and a few minor ones -- and Intel might become a major player in the future. There are two different processor instruction sets (x86 and x86_64) even in the Windows world, and more on the Mac or Linux -- not to mention the shading languages for the video cards themselves. There's at least three major versions of Windows you'll want to support -- 2k, XP, and Vista -- and all of those have more than a few permutations. There's CD drives, DVD drives, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives -- the only way you can guarantee that everyone can read your game is to ship a CD, at which point you exclude people who only have floppy drives. There are way more keys on a keyboard than buttons on a controller, and you better bet the users are going to want to customize them all.
Compare that to a console -- the most variation you're going to get is, some PS3s have 10 gigs, some have 50 gigs. Some Xbox 360s have a hard drive, some don't, and some have HD-DVD, but all have standard DVD. And all Wiis are basically the same. It is actually possible to pick one console and go for the lowest common denominator -- for example, go Xbox 360, standard DVD, and don't use the hard drive. That's simply not possible on the PC, because there is no lowest common denominator that will actually work everywhere, and support even close to the amount of power you'd get with that Xbox game I just described.
Now, it certainly would be possible to develop an abstraction on top of the PC. For example, you could develop your game in C# or Java, or do the low-level stuff in C++ and most of the logic in Python, meaning most or all of your code isn't even aware of the CPU architecture it's running on. You could develop strictly for OpenGL, strictly by the spec (with no vendor-specific extensions), or you could write a wrapper around all the vendor-specific stuff so you can use it in an abstract way. You could, in short, develop a platform for the PC that is as easy to develop for as a console.
But that takes time and money, and it also takes skilled programmers -- and judging by the number of "loading" screens you see in modern games, the industry is either badly in need of skilled programmers, or is just plain lazy.
It's not just private trackers. Most clients don't like other clients who don't share, meaning you won't get much before you're disconnected.
Especially when you're starting out. From what I remember, when I was on a 2 mbit half-duplex connection, I would always start out downloading at maybe 5k. After awhile, I'd have something to share, but if I restricted my upload rate to, say, 50k up, I'd only get 50k or so down, or less.
However, if I restricted my upload rate to 150k (and downloaded at 50k), then after maybe ten minutes, I could flip it around -- limit upload to 50k, and I could download at 150k. I couldn't quite go to zero, though, without other clients starting to hate me.
Then it sucks to be you. There are going to be people out there who have all their needs met by that 95%. Submit a feature request, and maybe with the next patch, you'll be one of them.
No, that makes it easier.
Not exactly the same, but sometimes there is enough overlap.
Really simple, obvious example -- most people don't need PowerPoint. Therefore, no matter how much Impress is broken, it won't affect them at all.
I'm not saying that it's common for a whole component to be unneeded, I'm saying that it's common for some subset of features to be unneeded. And it is, in fact, possible to find groups of people for which, when you make a list of all the features that are needed by any of them, those features are all present and well supported by OpenOffice (or even KOffice). Which means, of course, the features which are broken in OO are things that particular group doesn't need.
For every group of people like that you get to switch, it helps -- at least it raises awareness. It means that, for instance, the next time someone decides to make a complex accounting spreadsheet, they might consider starting in OpenOffice, or creating it in a manner which is more portable than the macros they're used to. It also means we get more feedback as to what OpenOffice actually needs fixed.
I'd have done it like this:
But then, that's just because I like Grub, not the Windows bootloader. It's not really any more user-friendly, but it is fewer steps.
My point was, you can take a Windows computer and, using nothing other than a Linux install CD, repartition it for dual-boot. You can't do the reverse -- the Windows install CD won't let you repartition an existing OS to make room for it. You'll at the very least need a Windows install CD and some other bootable rescue environment -- probably a boot CD, and probably Linux, though as you point out, Boot Camp probably works pretty well. (I've never used Boot Camp, as I don't have an Intel Mac.)
In other words, any way you cut it, Linux is more user-friendly to setup dual-boot with than Windows is. Maybe it's not as nice as it could be, but I find it a bit unrealistic to say that this is the one thing holding Linux adoption back.
Well, my original point was that generally, I had assumed that no matter what portion of a case you're in, you need at least some rationale for demanding evidence.
I flatly reject the idea that anyone who is a copyright holder can drag anyone else into a lawsuit and immediately demand to see all of the audio files on their computer. So what, exactly, is required for the judge to approve a subpoena of this information?
Again, I want to know if there is anything that has to happen, other than the plaintiff proving that they own the copyright to some work which the defendant may or may not have ever heard of before.
Maybe there's no avoiding it, but at this point, it's still a lot of hassle and expense to deal with a truly absurd case, even if you won at every step during discovery -- meaning you managed to prevent them from rifling through your personal files because they kind of, sort of suspect that you have something.
I'm not a lawyer either, and I admit the possibility (probability?) that I've missed something obvious. Then again, we humans miss obvious things so often, even in our own fields, that I should probably just put it in my sig.
Because 64-bit Linux is actually pretty thoroughly 64-bit, except Flash -- and you can actually run Flash on a 64-bit browser. The only place I've had serious problems is running Flash in nspluginwrapper in Konqueror, which means Konqueror is emulating the 64-bit Firefox plugin architecture in order to run nspluginwrapper as a plugin, which is a wrapper for the 32-bit Firefox.
My friend, who has a 32-bit processor and a 32-bit Linux, hasn't had any problems getting Flash to run in a 32-bit Konqueror. And before I switched to Ubuntu, I had no serious problems getting Flash to run in nspluginwrapper in a 64-bit Firefox, which is still the default for Ubuntu (but not Kubuntu).
Yeah, and like Windows, there are better alternatives.
I don't actually remember what it was, but I do remember adding exactly one repository to my sources.list (a process that is getting increasingly easier) in order to get all the codecs for my Linux. I think I even have a 32-bit mplayer somewhere with the win32 codecs, but I so rarely come across a file that my 64-bit mplayer (or VLC) won't play.
Right, we'll have huge improvements that are available for the PC.
But what makes you think a console won't have them?
The only advantage the PC has over a console is its openness -- that I can download a few simple tools and start to develop a game, for free. Or I can download games for free, or pay for them, as well as buy them on disc. Or that it's easy and cheap to upgrade things like disk space...
Indeed. Which would also make the PC less important, as people will buy things like the Wii, as the tech keeps getting cheaper.
Yes, they limit it to only games. What a horrible limitation.
I know what you meant -- they limit homebrew and indie games. But it's precisely because of that that consoles get to start out so much cheaper than an equivalent PC, if, indeed, an equivalent exists.
Imagine yourself as John Q. Public for a moment. On your left is a PC, which can get viruses -- don't know what they are, but they sound scary -- and can crash, and all that other bad stuff. It costs $1000, at least -- maybe $3000 -- and you get a bunch of crappy free games that might come with spyware (etc) on them. There are also some very nice, high-end games for it, at maybe $50 each.
And on your right is an Xbox 360. It costs $350 or so, and you can get a bunch of crappy games for small amounts of money, but they're guaranteed to be safe. You also get the same, high-end games, at maybe $55 or $60 each.
So, decisions, decisions: $1000 PC for crappy indie + $50/game, or $350 Xbox for $60/game. Oh, almost forgot -- you can rent games for that Xbox, beat them quickly, and take them back, or buy them if you find you like them enough to play again (or couldn't finish quickly enough). But suppose you buy all your games -- you're still going to have to buy about 60 or 70 brand new games for each before that Xbox costs as much as the PC, and you still have to maintain the PC -- you don't have to maintain the Xbox.
Now, I'll take the gaming PC every time, and I'll put Linux on it. But I don't think I'll ever be able to declare consoles dead, just as I hope they're never able to declare PC gaming really and truly dead -- though the way things are going, it might be.