I wasn't around during the Nazi rule in Germany. I wasn't around in 1971 when that general-interest computer book came out. I don't have any recollection of any at-length discussions of the Z3.
I guess as a person interested in history I found it midly interesting. Then again as my father always said, "Show me what happened yesterday and I don't give a shit but show me what happens tomorrow and then I will be more than interested."
Sounds better than our modern day Gilligan's Island (aka Survivor). I'd watch that.
You don't have to worry about spiders or poisonous snakes while watching beautiful butterflies... You instead have to worry about Spider and Snake the two gangsters w/the butterfly knives:)
If you are planning on using them to write a large amount of data (here they used 500mb) for easy transport, I don't see why you wouldn't use a software RAID configuration.
It is well known that software RAID usually produces about 2x the speed that you would have w/a traditional setup. USB drives aren't exactly fast as it is (2.0 is getting there though).
I know plenty of people that use several 256MB drives to carry their data around. If RAID was this easy on any platform I would suggest they do the same thing.
When it's pretty, *you* will say "Wow, that's pretty, but it's slowing it down, let me go into control panels, and registry settings, and god knows what else to tweak my settings while I overclock the damn thing and stick it in a freezer." Then you'll bitch about it on Slashdot. Which is exactly what's supposed to happen.
There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.
Instead of clicking through a bunch of menus, finding the options, selecting radio buttons, etc, just disable it by default and ask at install/setup time "do you want the 'pretty version'? Be warned that it may affect system performance."
I don't mind that they are a possible thing to include. What I don't want to see is them enabled/installed by default.
You have to go through a bunch of settings to tweak it for "optimum performance" or whatever. Those should be enabled by default. The fancy stuff should be enabled easily but it should be up to the user to decide if they are turned on.
It's also a federal law that protects the US mail from being tampered with. There is no federal law that governs email.
The stupid disclaimer at the bottom will certainly not work if the person messes up and sends it to another country... Just because my email address is.com/.net/.org doesn't necessarily mean that I (or my mail server) has to be under the same law as the originator's.
I consider a 100+ word message at the bottom of an email spam. Most emails are a sentence or two. What the hell do I need another 100+ words tacked on the end for? Shouldn't we have some sort of mandate similar to Usenet signatures? That said...
It may be legally privileged and/or confidential and is intended only for the use of the addressee(s).
If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any unauthorized disclosure, dissemination, distribution, copying or the taking of any action in reliance on the information herein is strictly prohibited.
If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete this message.
Now, while the lawyer notes that they are only asking you to do these things I see another flaw... If the document wasn't intended for the use by the addressee the rest of the notice is moot. It's up to the sender to guarantee that the message is delivered to the correct John.Doe@yahoo.com. I don't see how I would have to follow any of that if a) I didn't sign it and b) I am not the person they intended anyway.
No addressee should forward, print, copy, or otherwise reproduce this message in any manner that would allow it to be viewed by any individual not originally listed as a recipient.
If I am sent it incorrectly I am not allowed to look at it anyway. It doesn't make sense.
Drop the price of a CD to $10 US or even close to $5 US.
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
Give a greater percentage of the money to the artist, and take the costs for the things the label supposedly provides (marketing, production, distribution) out of the label's share instead of the artist's.
I don't see how this has anything to do w/anything. *MOST* people could give two flying shits about the artist and how much money they make. I am one of them. I support free music.
Stop treating your customers like criminals. If you treat them like they're criminals, they're going to disregard the law.
They disregarded the law before they started treating them like criminals.
Destroy ClearChannel. Utterly. Simply refuse to deal with them. Replace them with small local stations that are in tune with their audience. This will allow people to discover music that they like.
Sadly most people don't know that Infinity and ClearChannel exist. The ones that do already have a clue and don't listen. People think that what CC and Infinity feed them is good. Remember... People are sheep.
By the way, it's "fair use" not "free use." The copyright holder still owns the work, not the public. There is a subtle difference, but an important one.
It sure is. Unfortunately for the conglomorate cartels it isn't up to them what consitutes "fair use". It's up to the legal system.
Record labels in the United States have been sensitive to these consumer concerns, worrying particularly about earlier versions of copy-protection technology that had difficulty playing in nontraditional CD players such as game consoles or car stereos. They've released many protected CDs overseas, but only a small number in the United States and United Kingdom, where perceived opposition has been the highest.
Oh please, they are unconcerned with how we feel. They are only concerned with how much money they will make. I don't see how not releasing a copy-protected CD because people will balk is being concerned w/our feelings.
I wasn't aware that free-use included allowing a limit to be placed on something you have purchased. Making a few copies for home use sounds good but it's all bullshit. They are trying to limit one of the few "freedoms" we still have.
"I think the labels have been relaxing a little in terms of usage rules," said Liz Brooks, vice president of business development at Buy.com's music division.
I realize that this quote comes from a VP at Buy.com but I wasn't aware that the labels got to decide what rules we had to follow regarding fair use. Wow.
Just remember all this when you are supporting the cartels. Your money goes to developing methods and laws to limit your freedoms and to supporting suits against your fellow man.
On the subject of a probable licensing model for the open-source Solaris, John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's Software Group, said: "We have to consider what licensing model we use and what levels of free usage we want.
I'll tell you what level of free you should use. The only one that exsists. FREE. Not free with reservations, not free with restrictions, not free blah blah blah, FREE.
I don't see the necessity for most of this stuff...
512MB of RAM is understandable, 1GB is not necessary. College students should be doing research and writing papers. IE/Moz/etc and a word processor do not require that much RAM.
A flat panel display is nice but not required. If they are going to ask for it why not just require a 19" LCD by Dell?
HD sizes were a bit much... Shouldn't they limit them to 3GB or less so that they can't be downloading movies and music quite as much?
The wireless is nice and I won't comment on that;)
Gigabit ethernet is nice but unnecessary. The Internet is only so fast. The campus network being blazing fast will only encourage file trading and MPAA/RIAA violations internally.
It's called compromise. You don't have to spend all your time w/the S.O. and you certainly don't have to spend all your time playing the damn game. The S.O. will have to understand and so will your gaming buddies.
Things don't have to be as black and white as "stop playing" or "dumping the S.O."
I geocache a lot. My user account includes my gf's name but she doesn't participate nearly as much as I do. She doesn't mind when I go out and do it as long as she gets some "her time" too. YMMV.
Rachel Seymour, a college student from Portland, Oregon, has had her 2002 Kia Spectra serviced 12 times for a Check Engine light problem. Each time, she's forced to take it to a Kia dealership, where a technician hooks her car up to a computer, runs a battery of tests and charges her $120 to diagnose and repair the same problem: a loose gas cap.
Well, no offense to Ms. Seymour, but she's one dumbass motherfucker. Who the fuck in their right mind pays $120 twelve times ($1440 in total) to be told the same fucking thing? After the first time they told me it was a loose gas cap and I knew that I was tightening it down as best as it could be done I would have ignored (or covered/disabled) the light (which she apparently did after her twelvth visit).
I purchased my second new Saturn SL-series in 8/2002. I just had to take it in for a slipping clutch (at 29,900 which is unheard of as far as I am concerned). They offered me a rental car for free, service that would be finished the next day (probably because they were paying for the rental), and it was all under warranty. Now, like I said, it is unlikely that user error caused a slipping clutch at 30k but it is possible. No questions asked. Seems like they weren't trying to place the blame on the user here and just fixed the damn thing. I wonder if they didn't cover the first time or two and then told her to fuck off and started charging her for wasting their time?
I suggest that Ms. Seymour smartens the fuck up about her car company choices or her insistence on bringing the god damn car back to people who are obviously fucking with her...
I don't see how giving these fucking codes to the smalltime mechanics is going to help one fucking bit for a problem of utter stupidity. Ms. Seymour is going to see cause $$$'s in any automechanic's eyes. In fact, I would be more apt to trust a dealership's service department than some independent... YMMV.
I'll cite everyone's favorite example of DivX (the players, not the codec). Buy a movie but you only get to watch it a set number of times? Yeah, that worked real well. I'm not convinced giving away the players would have fixed that.
I am not so sure that this applies here. MS is already entrenched enough that if they do this people will not even notice.
Remember that most people are buying computers w/the "MS tax" built in and don't even realize it one way or the other. It will likely continue on this track. The consumers will be oblivious to what they are paying for and will just do it. The only difference is that MS now "owns" what you used to and can control BOTH sides of the equation.
We could wind up with a legion of blue screened remote managed zombies or a legion of boxes that don't work with anything else.
And the beauty of MS' plan is seen. Don't you remember how people just accepted reboots with Win9x? "Oh yeah, I have to restart my machine 7 or 8 times a day."
Do you think that they are going to complain when they are seriously under the belief that they didn't have to pay for the hardware?
I disagree. I think both Microsoft and Sun will become obsolete and useless as they continue to try to trap people into their DRM and obsolete-by-design software while manufacturers of good hardware will continue to make some money, and software will become more and more Libre ("free").
I see no justification for this based on current activity. People want cheap everything. They don't care what they pay for a computer. They just want it to work. If someone hears that their computer is FREE and they just have to pay for the OS they are going to jump at the chance!
It is likely going to be a slow process. Something like how they are testing the waters with the XBox. Lock the hardware, sell it cheap, and charge out the ass for the games...
It's going to take a few years for people to slowly become accustomed to it (it's already happened as we are paying for Windows with our new systems) but in the end MS will prevail in this instance.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't around during the Nazi rule in Germany. I wasn't around in 1971 when that general-interest computer book came out. I don't have any recollection of any at-length discussions of the Z3.
I guess as a person interested in history I found it midly interesting. Then again as my father always said, "Show me what happened yesterday and I don't give a shit but show me what happens tomorrow and then I will be more than interested."
Sounds better than our modern day Gilligan's Island (aka Survivor). I'd watch that.
:)
You don't have to worry about spiders or poisonous snakes while watching beautiful butterflies... You instead have to worry about Spider and Snake the two gangsters w/the butterfly knives
You're obviously unaware that it was named "Ginger" during development. See here.
Hey, if Ginger is leading that tour I'm *REAL* fucking curious. :)
I don't care for Palms, I certainly don't care for Sprint, and I certainly am not "some zit-faced hip-hop kid".
It works well most of the time. I realize that they have their issues but at $30 for the device I had nothing really to lose.
The application support is generally shitty but there is SSH, email, AIM, and web. I don't really use much more as it is.
Unfortunately for us, in the US at least, we have become overly obsessed with germs and germ fighting. Everything you see kills 99.9% of bacteria!
Soon we will be bathing in extra strength bleach, drinking pool water (we basically do), and using disposable/burnable everything.
The more that we try to "fight" bacteria the more our civilization becomes prone to simple infection.
If you are planning on using them to write a large amount of data (here they used 500mb) for easy transport, I don't see why you wouldn't use a software RAID configuration.
It is well known that software RAID usually produces about 2x the speed that you would have w/a traditional setup. USB drives aren't exactly fast as it is (2.0 is getting there though).
I know plenty of people that use several 256MB drives to carry their data around. If RAID was this easy on any platform I would suggest they do the same thing.
That's going to scare away non-technical users though.
And their systems will run faster for it. That's why I worded it that way.
When it's pretty, *you* will say "Wow, that's pretty, but it's slowing it down, let me go into control panels, and registry settings, and god knows what else to tweak my settings while I overclock the damn thing and stick it in a freezer." Then you'll bitch about it on Slashdot. Which is exactly what's supposed to happen.
There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.
Instead of clicking through a bunch of menus, finding the options, selecting radio buttons, etc, just disable it by default and ask at install/setup time "do you want the 'pretty version'? Be warned that it may affect system performance."
I think that eliminates the problems.
I don't mind that they are a possible thing to include. What I don't want to see is them enabled/installed by default.
You have to go through a bunch of settings to tweak it for "optimum performance" or whatever. Those should be enabled by default. The fancy stuff should be enabled easily but it should be up to the user to decide if they are turned on.
Checking your downloads and searches while out of town for a few days or at school. Very useful indeed.
Mostly for claiming that it was someone else that used your computer to do all that illegal downloading, not you. Right?
It's also a federal law that protects the US mail from being tampered with. There is no federal law that governs email.
.com/.net/.org doesn't necessarily mean that I (or my mail server) has to be under the same law as the originator's.
The stupid disclaimer at the bottom will certainly not work if the person messes up and sends it to another country... Just because my email address is
I consider a 100+ word message at the bottom of an email spam. Most emails are a sentence or two. What the hell do I need another 100+ words tacked on the end for? Shouldn't we have some sort of mandate similar to Usenet signatures? That said...
:)
It may be legally privileged and/or confidential and is intended only for the use of the addressee(s).
If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any unauthorized disclosure, dissemination, distribution, copying or the taking of any action in reliance on the information herein is strictly prohibited.
If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete this message.
Now, while the lawyer notes that they are only asking you to do these things I see another flaw... If the document wasn't intended for the use by the addressee the rest of the notice is moot. It's up to the sender to guarantee that the message is delivered to the correct John.Doe@yahoo.com. I don't see how I would have to follow any of that if a) I didn't sign it and b) I am not the person they intended anyway.
No addressee should forward, print, copy, or otherwise reproduce this message in any manner that would allow it to be viewed by any individual not originally listed as a recipient.
If I am sent it incorrectly I am not allowed to look at it anyway. It doesn't make sense.
Then again IANAL
Drop the price of a CD to $10 US or even close to $5 US.
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
Give a greater percentage of the money to the artist, and take the costs for the things the label supposedly provides (marketing, production, distribution) out of the label's share instead of the artist's.
I don't see how this has anything to do w/anything. *MOST* people could give two flying shits about the artist and how much money they make. I am one of them. I support free music.
Stop treating your customers like criminals. If you treat them like they're criminals, they're going to disregard the law.
They disregarded the law before they started treating them like criminals.
Destroy ClearChannel. Utterly. Simply refuse to deal with them. Replace them with small local stations that are in tune with their audience. This will allow people to discover music that they like.
Sadly most people don't know that Infinity and ClearChannel exist. The ones that do already have a clue and don't listen. People think that what CC and Infinity feed them is good. Remember... People are sheep.
By the way, it's "fair use" not "free use." The copyright holder still owns the work, not the public. There is a subtle difference, but an important one.
It sure is. Unfortunately for the conglomorate cartels it isn't up to them what consitutes "fair use". It's up to the legal system.
Record labels in the United States have been sensitive to these consumer concerns, worrying particularly about earlier versions of copy-protection technology that had difficulty playing in nontraditional CD players such as game consoles or car stereos. They've released many protected CDs overseas, but only a small number in the United States and United Kingdom, where perceived opposition has been the highest.
Oh please, they are unconcerned with how we feel. They are only concerned with how much money they will make. I don't see how not releasing a copy-protected CD because people will balk is being concerned w/our feelings.
I wasn't aware that free-use included allowing a limit to be placed on something you have purchased. Making a few copies for home use sounds good but it's all bullshit. They are trying to limit one of the few "freedoms" we still have.
"I think the labels have been relaxing a little in terms of usage rules," said Liz Brooks, vice president of business development at Buy.com's music division.
I realize that this quote comes from a VP at Buy.com but I wasn't aware that the labels got to decide what rules we had to follow regarding fair use. Wow.
Just remember all this when you are supporting the cartels. Your money goes to developing methods and laws to limit your freedoms and to supporting suits against your fellow man.
I support Public Domain. That's the only Free as in Free license.
On the subject of a probable licensing model for the open-source Solaris, John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's Software Group, said: "We have to consider what licensing model we use and what levels of free usage we want.
I'll tell you what level of free you should use. The only one that exsists. FREE. Not free with reservations, not free with restrictions, not free blah blah blah, FREE.
I don't see the necessity for most of this stuff...
;)
512MB of RAM is understandable, 1GB is not necessary. College students should be doing research and writing papers. IE/Moz/etc and a word processor do not require that much RAM.
A flat panel display is nice but not required. If they are going to ask for it why not just require a 19" LCD by Dell?
HD sizes were a bit much... Shouldn't they limit them to 3GB or less so that they can't be downloading movies and music quite as much?
The wireless is nice and I won't comment on that
Gigabit ethernet is nice but unnecessary. The Internet is only so fast. The campus network being blazing fast will only encourage file trading and MPAA/RIAA violations internally.
It's called compromise. You don't have to spend all your time w/the S.O. and you certainly don't have to spend all your time playing the damn game. The S.O. will have to understand and so will your gaming buddies.
Things don't have to be as black and white as "stop playing" or "dumping the S.O."
I geocache a lot. My user account includes my gf's name but she doesn't participate nearly as much as I do. She doesn't mind when I go out and do it as long as she gets some "her time" too. YMMV.
Rachel Seymour, a college student from Portland, Oregon, has had her 2002 Kia Spectra serviced 12 times for a Check Engine light problem. Each time, she's forced to take it to a Kia dealership, where a technician hooks her car up to a computer, runs a battery of tests and charges her $120 to diagnose and repair the same problem: a loose gas cap.
Well, no offense to Ms. Seymour, but she's one dumbass motherfucker. Who the fuck in their right mind pays $120 twelve times ($1440 in total) to be told the same fucking thing? After the first time they told me it was a loose gas cap and I knew that I was tightening it down as best as it could be done I would have ignored (or covered/disabled) the light (which she apparently did after her twelvth visit).
I purchased my second new Saturn SL-series in 8/2002. I just had to take it in for a slipping clutch (at 29,900 which is unheard of as far as I am concerned). They offered me a rental car for free, service that would be finished the next day (probably because they were paying for the rental), and it was all under warranty. Now, like I said, it is unlikely that user error caused a slipping clutch at 30k but it is possible. No questions asked. Seems like they weren't trying to place the blame on the user here and just fixed the damn thing. I wonder if they didn't cover the first time or two and then told her to fuck off and started charging her for wasting their time?
I suggest that Ms. Seymour smartens the fuck up about her car company choices or her insistence on bringing the god damn car back to people who are obviously fucking with her...
I don't see how giving these fucking codes to the smalltime mechanics is going to help one fucking bit for a problem of utter stupidity. Ms. Seymour is going to see cause $$$'s in any automechanic's eyes. In fact, I would be more apt to trust a dealership's service department than some independent... YMMV.
just hook this thing up to the fBSD webserver when it is posted on /.
Two birds with one stone.
I'll cite everyone's favorite example of DivX (the players, not the codec). Buy a movie but you only get to watch it a set number of times? Yeah, that worked real well. I'm not convinced giving away the players would have fixed that.
I am not so sure that this applies here. MS is already entrenched enough that if they do this people will not even notice.
Remember that most people are buying computers w/the "MS tax" built in and don't even realize it one way or the other. It will likely continue on this track. The consumers will be oblivious to what they are paying for and will just do it. The only difference is that MS now "owns" what you used to and can control BOTH sides of the equation.
We could wind up with a legion of blue screened remote managed zombies or a legion of boxes that don't work with anything else.
And the beauty of MS' plan is seen. Don't you remember how people just accepted reboots with Win9x? "Oh yeah, I have to restart my machine 7 or 8 times a day."
Do you think that they are going to complain when they are seriously under the belief that they didn't have to pay for the hardware?
I disagree. I think both Microsoft and Sun will become obsolete and useless as they continue to try to trap people into their DRM and obsolete-by-design software while manufacturers of good hardware will continue to make some money, and software will become more and more Libre ("free").
I see no justification for this based on current activity. People want cheap everything. They don't care what they pay for a computer. They just want it to work. If someone hears that their computer is FREE and they just have to pay for the OS they are going to jump at the chance!
It is likely going to be a slow process. Something like how they are testing the waters with the XBox. Lock the hardware, sell it cheap, and charge out the ass for the games...
It's going to take a few years for people to slowly become accustomed to it (it's already happened as we are paying for Windows with our new systems) but in the end MS will prevail in this instance.