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User: zooblethorpe

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  1. Apple DRM not annoying? Pass me that spliff... on FSF, Political Activism or Crossing the Line? · · Score: 1
    If DRM doesn't sort itself out the same way, it probably means that it's probably not all that bad for the honest folks. I know Apple's DRM has never annoyed me at all when I'm trying to do legal listening to my music.

    Obviously you've never tried to listen to iTMS tracks with anything other than Apple products. Apple updated iTunes to version 6, and in the process made it impossible to convert M4P files short of burning to CD and ripping again, which 1) is a PITA for any even moderately sized collection, and 2) causes further degradation of the audio quality. Yes, I'm annoyed. This means I can't listen to my own music that I've already bought and paid for on anything but what Apple wants me to use. This is so far beyond reasonable that it makes me right royally cheesed off.

    Incidentally, if anyone knows of some other means of turning M4P into MP3 or OGG besides JHymn, by all means let me know. JHymn has so far tried to play it honourably, using Apple's own license data to unlock the DRM, but the upgrade to ver 6 has rendered JHymn dead in the water. This is exactly this kind of idiocy by the powers that be that push regular folk towards piracy. Dammit, I already paid for it, don't you dare have the gall to try to tell me what to do with it now. Copyright, fine, but if I want to play a music file using someone else's player, I should be able to. Copyright is now being "extended" into a catch-all legal excuse for monopolies, and Orwell and Rand are looking more and more prescient as time passes. I long for the days gone by when they looked merely paranoid.

  2. "Laissez faire is good" == "I'm already a Have" on Hardware Firms Go Against Crowd on Net Neutrality · · Score: 2, Insightful
    To me, this is like saying "whatever power [and market] structures exist are free/fair".

    Precisely -- this is exactly what the folks opposing net neutrality are saying. The very important subtext is, "they're fair so long as they benefit me." No market is inherently fair. Whoever believes this needs to pass me some of what they're smoking. No relationship centered around limited (or limitable) resources is inherently fair. Some party to the relationship almost always has the upper hand.

    One thing that people almost always forget (or perhaps ignore) when quoting Adam Smith is that the world in his day was somewhat smaller. His economic examples describe situations where all the actors know each other. This forms a community, built around human mores, in which each actor has a vested interest in how that community functions. In a nutshell, his description of the "Invisible Hand" states that people in a community who are working in their own self interest are also working in the interest of the greater good. This largely seems to hold true -- people have multifarious motivations, which generally help balance out. Those people whose motivations are too skewed in one direction or another are usually considered unhealthy, or in extreme cases, pathological.

    Now, we have corporations, entities that do not play by human rules. Think about it -- when the only motive is profit, behaviour rapidly approaches what would be called "sociopathic" if exhibited by an individual.

    Consequently, when someone says "whatever power [and market] structures exist are free/fair", and when that someone is a corporate representative, you better damn well be suspicious.

  3. Pot, meet Kettle on What Happened to Blue Security · · Score: 1
    a copyrighter who isn't a retarded illiterate

    <sigh.> I presume you meant to say copywriter. Nice try though.

    the fact that they were complicit in the spammer's taking blogs down also shows their lack of competence

    <sigh> again. Read elsewhere in this thread -- they were blackholed to start, so shifting their record to another IP presented no immediate threat to wherever they were moving to. The DDoS only started after they shifted IPs.

  4. ECON 101: Walmart has no incentive to allow unions on Wal-mart's Wikipedia War · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Walmart happens to not want to cooperate with unions because they think they can offer their employees a better deal directly. What's wrong with that?

    Oh, goodness, you have a terrible misspelling there. Let me fix that for you:

    Walmart happens to not want to cooperate with unions because they think they can offer their shareholders a better deal directly. What's wrong with that?

    Never forget to look at where the motivation comes from. Walmart (and any other non-employee-owned large corporation) couldn't give a rodent's posterior for its employees beyond what they bring to the bottom line. For easily replaced menial labor, there's not much contribution made by any single individual, so there's no incentive for Walmart to allow any employee organizing that could even potentially lead to demands from the rank and file for higher pay, more benefits, etc., all things that would only reduce that already meager added value.

    Remember, Walmart is beholden to the interests of its shareholders, not those of its employees. José, Leroy, and Nancy on the checkout line don't have any leverage over company policy, whereas JP Morgan and Prudential wield considerable influence. When it comes to business, follow the money.

  5. W learned that he can get away with it. on New Congressional Bill Makes DMCA Look Tame · · Score: 1
    What is amazing is that [W.] has learned nothing for the 2 companies that he bankrupted nor what he has done to Iraq.

    Oh, I think you mis-read the man. He learned quite a bit indeed from his failed companies, and quite a bit from Iraq too. He has learned that he can get away with it. And that makes him very dangerous indeed, as he has no sense of responsibility, no sense of the cost of his actions, for he has been shielded from the consequences all of his silver-spooned life.

    He is the perfect representation for the Baby Boomer, consumerist, coddled, gimme generation. I must assume that the general griping, followed by apathy, is basically the same reaction you get when someone who isn't accustomed to real work discovers something unhappy about themselves -- they bitch, and then shrug and either ignore it or resign themselves to it.

    He is also the perfect morality play for parents and would-be parents on why it is a bad idea to constantly shield children from the natural consequences of their actions. Kids only learn the limits by running into them. If no limits are set, they go on a rampage, and that doesn't magically stop simply because they "grow up". W. is still on a rampage, and he's busy taking all of us to hell with him.

    Excuse me if I sound bitter.

  6. AjaxWrite: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable on AjaxWrite to "Compete" with MS Word · · Score: 2

    Why Ajax isn't always appropriate:

    Service Temporarily Unavailable
    The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
    Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.ajaxlaunch.com Port 80

    Portability across platforms is great, but we'll still need a local copy. Which would seem to bring us back to XUL...

  7. The nice part about fertilizer is it's shit on Kids Build Soybean Fueled Sports Car · · Score: 1

    While I take your point that farming extracts an ecological cost, it works pretty well if you remember to put back in what you take out. And in this case, you can put back out what you take in -- you farm, you reap, you eat, you shit, you put the shit back in the soil. Voila. Cycle begins anew.

    Add another step in there by way of a fermenter, and you can generate plenty of natural gas for cooking and heating from your own toilet waste. Works best on farms with livestock, of course, as then you have plenty more raw material to throw in the fermenter. But once the shit's done farting and you've burned off all the gas coming out of that last load in the fermenter, voila. Fertilizer. See Wikipedia's biogas page:

    Biogas digesters take the biodegradable feedstock, and convert it into two useful products: gas and digestate. The biogas can vary in composition typically from 50-80% methane, with the majority of the balance being made up of carbon dioxide.

    The digestate comprises of lignin and cellulose fibres, along with the remnants of the anaerobic microorganisms. This digestate can be used on land as a soil amendment, to increase moisture retention in soil and improve fertility. (emphasis mine)

  8. Similar devices used in Japan for years now... on Driving Away Teens With High Frequency Noise · · Score: 1

    Just go to Takadanobaba station on the Yamanote line, head out to the Big Box building right there, and stand in the doorway closest to the Yamanote train and Tozai subway entrances. Sure is bloody annoying, and no, it doesn't do much to drive the teens away, they still cluster there. But then TVs drive me nuts, and many people I talk to think I'm crazy as they hear nothing, so maybe the kids hanging out at Big Box simply can't hear the sound. Which begs the question of exactly how effective this Mosquito device will be...

    ¥2 for the interested.

    Cheers,
  9. Japanese pronunciation on Goto Leads to Faster Code · · Score: 1
    * Note: Pronunciation instruction may only apply if you live in the city of Boston. People living in other localities may need to contact the appropriate authorities for further instruction.

    Indeed. For the average Merkun, the easier and closer pronunciation would probably be the two words go toe , with the accent on "toe". (No offense to the GP poster, but what's up with the "r"s?) Strictly speaking, there are only five Japanese vowels, and they are all flat, very like what you get with Spanish. Vowel length is another important pronunciation distinction, but this doesn't happen in English, as this language uses syllabic stress instead. That's why you may sometimes see the Japanese surname Goto variously spelled as Gotoh or Gotou, or even with diacritics as Gotö or Gotô, to emphasize that the second "o" is supposed to be long.

    Just my ¥2 as a Japanese-English translator. Eigo de no hatsuon ha dou de mo ii n da kedo, dekireba, chikai hodo ii ja nai desu ka.

  10. Freedom more important to devs than user whinging on Should Linux Have a Binary Kernel Driver Layer? · · Score: 1

    This is not about preaching. This is not about pushing ideology. This is about developers maintaining creative control over the kernel, the kernel that they themselves have been building. Exactly what is your problem with this?

    You say here that 'not only do users not care about "Free", but they will actively dislike "Free".' While regrettable, that is fine -- that is the users' prerogative. I sincerely expect they will think more highly of "Free" the tighter the IP and DRM restrictions become, but these related issues have been discussed to better effect in many other threads.

    The trouble with your argument here is that the folks building and maintaining the Linux kernel (and most of the rest of userland Linux software too) are precisely the people who are concerned with this "Free" that you apparently couldn't give a rat's ass about. This has nothing to do with wanting 'to push their ideoligy [sic] on others', and everything to do with wanting to stay in control. As A nonymous Coward noted, building an unchanging driver API for the convenience of corporates does nothing for the kernel:

    A "stable" binary API removes the possibility of keeping everything up to date and would dramatically show down the adoption of new features and general improvements.

    Again, this has nothing to do with pushing ideology. This has to do with developers maintaining control over their own project, a project that has been provided to you as a courtesy out of the strong moral belief of many in the OSS community that the tools we use to get our work done should be freely available.

    Furthermore, given the significant number of websites devoted to OSS usability concerns (over 17,000 at last count), I think we can safely regard as invalidated your claim that '"Free" software people ... don't care about makeing [sic] functional easy to use systems.' They would indeed seem to care, but specifically within the scope of making free software -- i.e., they are not interested in kowtowing to your whinging demands that they gut their principles solely to make something passably usable right this very moment, and shackle themselves with a rigid driver API that hampers kernel development far into the future and threatens to scuttle years of effort to make a fully-usable computer system that is not beholden to secret vested interests.

    You, sir, appear to be crying out that consumer convenience is more important than freedom. This is much in tune with the prevailing cultural trends in the United States. I find this deeply ironic -- "Give me liberty or give me death" has been turned into "give me convenience or I shall whinge", while "the land of the free and the home of the brave" has become "the land of the sheep and the home of the enslaved". While I understand the frustration apparent in your posting regarding when things do not work, I cannot agree with your sentiment. Some things, sir, are more important than instant gratification. I am deeply sorry that you do not appear able to recognize this.

  11. It's the physics, stoopid on Raised Flooring Obsolete or Not? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Note that I'm not calling the parent poster stoopid, but rather the design of forcing cold air through the *floor*. As the parent here notes, cold air falls. This is presumably why most home fridges have the freezer on top.

    I was most surprised to read this article. I've never worked in a data center, but I have worked in semiconductor production cleanrooms, and given the photos I've seen of data centers with the grated flooring, I guess I always assumed the ventilation was handled the same way as in a cleanroom -- new air in from the ceiling, old air whisked away through the floor. (This ensures that any particles, which will naturally fall if heavier than air, will be sucked out of the room.) Note that this is obviously *not* a passive system designed to use convection, but rather an active system using lots of fans.

    While a passive convection system with the cold pulled up from below is a nice theory, you can run into the same problems others have pointed out -- what if the bottom units suck in all the cold air? The top units are left too warm.

    Meanwhile, if you drop cold air from above, sure, the top units might suck a lot of that in -- but any cold air that isn't sucked in will naturally continue to drop relative to warmer air, ensuring that the lower units are not cooked. If you want to be especially careful about it, you could route all the cold air outputs towards the perimeter of the room and put the uptakes in the center of the ceiling to ensure a vortical flow.

    Just my ¥2.

  12. *MOD PARENT UP* on Sony DRM Installs a Rootkit? · · Score: 1

    C'mon folks, fire up your editors and compilers and have some fun!

  13. Re:In democratic america... on Sony DRM Installs a Rootkit? · · Score: 1
    damn... you know it's getting scary when the soviet russia joke is not only unfunny, but frightening....

    Even worse is when the soviet russia joke is *accurate*. (8-(

  14. Re:My results on OpenOffice Bloated? · · Score: 1
    You're running Excel *and* Crossover Office, *and* Excel is not a native app, and you're comparing it a native app.

    To stretch the point a bit, isn't this essentially the same complaint against TFA, just the other way round?

  15. Better yet, OOo can recover bad MSO docs on OpenOffice Bloated? · · Score: 1

    I've had to deal with some convoluted MSO doc issues, what with complex corporate templates then being mangled by the occasional bug in doc processing tools. Sometimes simply opening a borked MSO doc would cause the program to crash (mostly seen in Word and Excel). This was the only reason I kept OOo on my XP machine at work, as OOo simply trashed all the careful layout positioning of the original (much better in newer versions) -- but when a doc went belly up, OOo was the only thing we had that could open the doc, and then fix it. Simply opening in OOo and saving would fix whatever the issue was, and we could re-open in MSO. Sure, we had to copy and paste content back into an older version if we were worried about borked layout positioning, but we could get the content, which was the most important thing.

    For all the other issues, it looks like the OOo dev team understands MSO's file formats better than MS does. :)

  16. Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages on OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released · · Score: 1
    I've never written a paper in which the header and footer counted towards word count... and I've written a lot of papers.

    Actually, that's precisely my point -- OOo's current word count seems to include the headers and footers, and there's no option I'm aware of to exclude these. So any attempt at writing a paper in OOo based on that word count will wind up giving you a paper that's shorter than you think it is.

    I agree with you about file size, that's quite nice. I've also been able to use OOo to "fix" files that Word had corrupted to the point that Word couldn't open them anymore -- a quick open and save in OOo, and suddenly Word could read them again. Interesting, that -- the OOo team seems to understand the MS Word format better than MS does. :)

  17. Re:Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages on OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released · · Score: 1

    In my case, I have translation clients that insist I bill by the Japanese no-spaces character count of the source document, which also usually includes some Latin-based text that they don't want me billing for, hence the need to have CJK chars counted separately. In Japanese business and academia, writing assignments are usually restricted / ordered / billed by the character count, with 400 moji (characters) a common size. I also have clients that insist I bill by the English word count of the target document, in which case a separate CJK count helps me see if I've missed anything. MS Word's counter seems to check for double-byteness, as double-byte Latin text is counted as if it were CJK characters. This is actually usually a good thing, however, as double-byte Latin text can sometimes be hard to spot visually, but can bork a doc for someone on older OSes, or without the right fonts installed.

    Cheers,

  18. Why not OOo? Word count, Asian languages on OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released · · Score: 1

    In answer to your question why anyone would still use MSO, there is still some functionality that OOo cannot match. Word count stands out as a biggie for most professional writers. Some of the things we need any word count feature to do include:

    1. Count words / chars for the whole doc
    2. Count words / chars for a portion of the doc
    3. Include or exclude footnotes from the count

    OOo has long had the ability to do #1 above, and, cosmetically, has moved the word count function since the 1.9 series to where MS Word users expect it -- not in doc stats under the File menu, but rather under the Tools menu. OOo has also finally came up to par for #2, allowing us to count words for selections. However, OOo is still incapable of #3, ensuring that no one in academia (a notable target population) can use OOo for serious paper writing.

    Another important facet of any major international office suite is the ability to handle multiple languages. I'm a Japanese translator, and CJK support is an absolute must for any product I'll consider. OOo has happily had Asian language support for as long as I've known it, but word count falls through again. Any professional writing in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean requires:

    4. Count of any non-CJK words, together with a
    count of any CJK characters, not including spaces

    MS Word has done this since at least 1998 (provided you had the right options installed), yet OOo fails, and thus renders itself unusable for those of us dealing with CJK text in a professional setting.

    Issue 17964, focusing on these word count issues, has been open for more than two years now. While it's good to see some progress (counts of selections), the lack of proper CJK counting means I still have no other option than to use MSO for my business needs.

    Sure, the OOo source is freely available, and, in principle, I could develop a proper word count on my own. But I must point out again that I am a translator, not a coder -- and though I have fun learning about programming in my spare time, I don't have much of it, and I already have a product that does the job for me: MSO. I have no need to fix OOo, and I haven't the time or expertise to do so. OOo's shortcomings simply prevent me from adopting it for myself, and worse, prevent me from promoting its use in my office. There are many things about OOo that would be fabulous to be able to use, from the better data source integration to the open XML doc format and file import/export XSL transformation capabilities. But the lack of an adequate and accurate CJK count is a show-stopper for all of us at my workplace.

  19. Re:not practical on Microchips for Dangerous Animals? · · Score: 1

    Ah, grasshopper, you have much to learn, for it is clear you have never been to Japan.

    In answer to your initial question, yes, in all likelihood the Japanese government is willing (and even able) to establish and monitor a program of this sort. This is a country that requires you to go through "Immigration" (sic) to leave. If there's one thing the Japanese government is good at, it's bureaucracy.

    Just my ¥2. :D

  20. Re:firefox and international characters? on Update on Standards and CSS in IE7 · · Score: 1
    Nothing works in firefox. Try doing File-Open on a filename with japanese characters. Gives a "file-not-found" error.

    Um, I just did, and it worked... ?

    file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/[me]/%83f% 83X%83N%83g%83b%83v/%90V%8BK%83e%83L%83X%83g%20%83 h%83L%83%85%83%81%83%93%83g.txt

    which equals

    file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/[me]/æ-è¦ã fãããf .txt

    (i.e. shinki tekisuto dokyumento.txt) escaped to sjis encoding. I opened the file using Firefox's [File] -> [Open File...] dialog (aka Ctrl-O). However, if you just try to type that URL into the address bar as Japanese text, you'll get the "file [filename] cannot be found" error. Find some way to escape it first (use the [Open...] dialog or massage the filename in your code) and you'll be fine.

  21. Re:Iam certain on Riot Control Ray-Gun for Use in Iraq · · Score: 1
    Things are bad enough, over there, why go out of our way to make things worse, when it is cheaper, easier and quicker (not to mention more ethical) NOT to?
    When you stand to make more money by stirring the pot until it bubbles over.
  22. Re:Good about: config explanation on Firefox Hacks · · Score: 1
    Type in "spywarearcata.com" in a Google search box and see. No results at all.

    I just tried and got 40 hits, 27 of them on /. pages.

    I must say though that your domain name seems a little misleading, which might be part of the reaction you're getting.

  23. Re:I'm the 4th kid from the right. on High School Kids Beat MIT at Robotics Competition · · Score: 1

    Excellent job you guys did, Cristian, and thank you for speaking up here on /. I am duly impressed, and wish you all the best of luck. :D

  24. ## Mod parent up ## on High School Kids Beat MIT at Robotics Competition · · Score: 1
    Ironically, very few things capture the American spirit of individualism, hard work, risk-taking, and a pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude like stories such as this one.

    The sad fact is that most of the Boomer generation folk currently running the show didn't really have to work that hard to get where they are, and have become dull and complacent as a result. They then try to keep down the ones that do have to work their asses off, the ones that are harder, stronger, sharper, and smarter for having to really use their talents on a regular basis just to survive.

    It's these folk, the underdogs, that form the foundation of much of the American myth of identity, and yet it's these same salt-of-the-earth types that are denied at every opportunity.

  25. "Crimaliens" on the radio on High School Kids Beat MIT at Robotics Competition · · Score: 1

    A quick google search shows a number of possibilities. Reading through a couple makes me very sad that people are so scared. The most relevant link would seem to be down, but the google cache still has a copy.