You might have a point there, but there is something else here which I think is being missed. One of the record industry's largest sales demographics is teenagers. This demographic wants to obtain their music in a format which is hard to obtain for people of their age. Rather than complaining that teens are stealing music and trying to scare them, how about making it easier for them to obtain mp3's?
I even have an idea along these lines. Nobody is confused by a vending machine. Vending machines in the right areas also make plenty of money, even if they sell something odd rather than candy or drinks. Why don't we have music vending machines? You put in some money, pick songs you want off iTunes or something like that, and then you plug in any standard USB removable hard drive (since that's what most mp3 players are), and the music is transferred over.
There are of course logisitics problems with how to get the music to the machines, but it's not really that big of a deal if these machines are put in malls, shopping centers, walmarts, and commercial music stores.
You're damn right it's a bad idea to be in a technology cold war with your kids. My parents tried to pull some stuff like this on me back when I was 15 (I'm much older now).
They had a computer repair guy come and put what they thought was some sort of "stealth" keylogger on the system, and "lock" me out of Windows by setting a windows password (this was 9x....). I had anticipated they'd do shit like that and I had Linux on a seperate drive which could only be booted from a floppy. He didn't notice. I didn't even use the Windows on the computer.
I ended up finding the keylogger on the computer and saw that it was set up to email him. I got his email address and his next email "from the program" included CIH (for those who don't remember it was a rather nasty virus back in the day).
A technology war with your kids is an absolutely terrible idea. They may not be as intelligent as I was at the time, but I'll be they know someone who is. It's a much better idea to talk to your kids and explain what your problems with their behavior are than to try to spy on them or be draconian.
The internal IP can be very useful if the person has several computers inside their house, is behind a transparent proxy like some college and office networks use, etc.
You've got a really good point there about adverts that don't steal control or attention. Adverts in the desktop background, at the Windows login screen, or even as a screen saver are all decent ideas I think most people could put up with. The thing is, Windows is already so vulnerable to spyware and such that users are already used to advertisements on their computers and loath their appearance.
I think that before this can really be handled well Microsoft will need to do something about the proliferation of spyware and adware on Windows.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I am glad we don't have crap like that for Linux. My point was more that most copy pretection schemes are a kludge "fix" and are pointless anyway.
I don't know what you're talking about with games being 5 years old. I bought UT2004 ECE when it came out and it installs and runs fine on Linux, as does a lot of software based on the Unreal engine. It's not just iD. It's Epic and some other company's too.
One thing I have noticed is that a lot of new games work fine with Wine as well, except for one stupid stumbling block: copy protection. A lot of copy protection schemes utilize abnormal bastardization of the host OS and hardware, which either Linux itself or Wine won't allow for. Thus, the games don't work without a no-CD crack or something like that. Most notably is GTA: San Andreas, which doesn't even work under VMware without a crack and lots of screwing around.
And a picture is a lot more believable and not quite so succeptiple to a phone tap.
Anyway, yeah, the police really need a better way to handle busts so that kind of thing couldn't or shouldn't be a problem... gee, like doing them all at the same time.
I can omly think of one reason they may have done this, a valid one anyway, and it's because the picture was taken with a cell phone. In my area the police will often have sort of "raid" days where they go out and have a list of people they're going to raid. It's a big deal if you tip someone off, and they may have suspected this guy was tipping of someone he knew with a picture from his phone.
Hey, if everyone wants to bag on Microsoft not making a next generation file system, what is stopping Linux and the Open Source community from doing it? Oh, that's right- it's easier to just complain about MS than to actually get your hands dirty. Nevermind then, carry on.
What Microsoft uses, FAT32 and NTFS, are ages behind file systems like ResierFS (especially reiserfs v4) and even Ext3, both of which are OSS projects and have been in use for years now.
The supposed purpose of a government is to protect and take care of the population. I don't think this really goes very far towards that "goal". Instead of gathering government workers they should be getting ahold of skilled professionals, scientists, etc.
I do get something akin to that with my sprint dsl connection. I get 6Mb/s down and 750k up and a static IP for 70.00 a month. If my speed drops or my connection goes out all it takes is a phone call and I get a 15.00 discount on next month's bill and it's usually corrected right away. That doesn't need to happen often though, because I do actually get the speed I pay for.
A lot of that might be because I live very close to their local distribution center, and in a small town where not many people except businesses have dsl.
I like the runner up a lot better too. In my opinion, the winner is too Web-2.0-ish, and I don't think a site like Slashdot should encourage people to use trendy "standards" like that. I think site members (at least, people who've been registered for more than 6 months or so) should have been able to vote on the designs.
Actually, a friend of mine made a pretty good point the other day. Sending spam costs very little, so it's profitable even if only a few people click on it. However, something like what Bluesecurity was doing makes it cost more to send spam in the sense that it can drive up personell and web hosting costs, thus greatly reducing profits.
I see another problem here that'll be a pain in my neck even though I don't at all intend to use Vista myself. I fix other people's computers, and when somebody has an issue that keeps Windows from even booting a good way to fix it is to boot into another OS, like Knoppix. At very least using Knoppix is a good way to backup their data before a reinstall or something. This will prevent that from working.
Also, on the note of using FAT32 so both OS'es can deal with each other's file systems; there is a native Windows driver for full read/write to Ext2/3 partitions that works pretty well. What I usually do is make three partitions; two small ones and one big one. Each OS goes on a small one and then I use Ext2 on the large one since it doesn't have the file size and naming restrictions FAT32 does.
This could actually be a bad thing. One thing I have noticed is that most businesses do change their SSID's. They tend to change them to relfect which business owns the AP. So, if it's a targeted attack, this law makes the security worse by making it easier to figure out which AP belongs to which business.
The FireGL series of cards isn't for playing games at all actually. They're geared towards graphically intense things like 3D animation, CAD, and video editing. The same goes for nVidia's Quadro series of cards. Both sorts of cards are geared more towards percision than speed. Your end result are very nice looking images, but lower framerates.
It already exists, and it's called the Bill of Rights. Sadly, no one seems to ever enforce it when it really matters.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
What part of this is so damn hard for them to understand? If they want to change this they have to amend the constitution.
See, if someone wants to say the bill isn't aimed at a specific group of people, like reporters, then when doesn't it specifically say that? Law has nothing to do with intentions and everything to do with the ink on the paper.
If we focus too much on reducing the need then when we finally do run out we won't have a method to get more from elsewhere. If we focus on being able to get more resources from elsewhere then we'll be able to do so if we need to.
Also, these are entwined fields of study. A lot of the research going into space travel is focused on making fuel and other resources last for as long as possible onboard a space craft. Any advancements in that field will end up being used more broadly.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but before employing any software in a production environment I tend test the hell out of it.
I've done this before and explained that's how and why I found the flaw.
You might have a point there, but there is something else here which I think is being missed. One of the record industry's largest sales demographics is teenagers. This demographic wants to obtain their music in a format which is hard to obtain for people of their age. Rather than complaining that teens are stealing music and trying to scare them, how about making it easier for them to obtain mp3's?
I even have an idea along these lines. Nobody is confused by a vending machine. Vending machines in the right areas also make plenty of money, even if they sell something odd rather than candy or drinks. Why don't we have music vending machines? You put in some money, pick songs you want off iTunes or something like that, and then you plug in any standard USB removable hard drive (since that's what most mp3 players are), and the music is transferred over.
There are of course logisitics problems with how to get the music to the machines, but it's not really that big of a deal if these machines are put in malls, shopping centers, walmarts, and commercial music stores.
You're damn right it's a bad idea to be in a technology cold war with your kids. My parents tried to pull some stuff like this on me back when I was 15 (I'm much older now).
They had a computer repair guy come and put what they thought was some sort of "stealth" keylogger on the system, and "lock" me out of Windows by setting a windows password (this was 9x....). I had anticipated they'd do shit like that and I had Linux on a seperate drive which could only be booted from a floppy. He didn't notice. I didn't even use the Windows on the computer.
I ended up finding the keylogger on the computer and saw that it was set up to email him. I got his email address and his next email "from the program" included CIH (for those who don't remember it was a rather nasty virus back in the day).
A technology war with your kids is an absolutely terrible idea. They may not be as intelligent as I was at the time, but I'll be they know someone who is. It's a much better idea to talk to your kids and explain what your problems with their behavior are than to try to spy on them or be draconian.
You must be new here. Confusion is the whole point.... Hail Discordia!
The internal IP can be very useful if the person has several computers inside their house, is behind a transparent proxy like some college and office networks use, etc.
You've got a really good point there about adverts that don't steal control or attention. Adverts in the desktop background, at the Windows login screen, or even as a screen saver are all decent ideas I think most people could put up with. The thing is, Windows is already so vulnerable to spyware and such that users are already used to advertisements on their computers and loath their appearance.
I think that before this can really be handled well Microsoft will need to do something about the proliferation of spyware and adware on Windows.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I am glad we don't have crap like that for Linux. My point was more that most copy pretection schemes are a kludge "fix" and are pointless anyway.
I don't know what you're talking about with games being 5 years old. I bought UT2004 ECE when it came out and it installs and runs fine on Linux, as does a lot of software based on the Unreal engine. It's not just iD. It's Epic and some other company's too.
One thing I have noticed is that a lot of new games work fine with Wine as well, except for one stupid stumbling block: copy protection. A lot of copy protection schemes utilize abnormal bastardization of the host OS and hardware, which either Linux itself or Wine won't allow for. Thus, the games don't work without a no-CD crack or something like that. Most notably is GTA: San Andreas, which doesn't even work under VMware without a crack and lots of screwing around.
And a picture is a lot more believable and not quite so succeptiple to a phone tap.
Anyway, yeah, the police really need a better way to handle busts so that kind of thing couldn't or shouldn't be a problem... gee, like doing them all at the same time.
I can omly think of one reason they may have done this, a valid one anyway, and it's because the picture was taken with a cell phone. In my area the police will often have sort of "raid" days where they go out and have a list of people they're going to raid. It's a big deal if you tip someone off, and they may have suspected this guy was tipping of someone he knew with a picture from his phone.
and you'd need a 256-bit 1GHz+ memory interface
I take it you haven't looked at AMD's Opteron chips much, have you?
Hey, if everyone wants to bag on Microsoft not making a next generation file system, what is stopping Linux and the Open Source community from doing it? Oh, that's right- it's easier to just complain about MS than to actually get your hands dirty. Nevermind then, carry on.
What Microsoft uses, FAT32 and NTFS, are ages behind file systems like ResierFS (especially reiserfs v4) and even Ext3, both of which are OSS projects and have been in use for years now.
The supposed purpose of a government is to protect and take care of the population. I don't think this really goes very far towards that "goal". Instead of gathering government workers they should be getting ahold of skilled professionals, scientists, etc.
I do get something akin to that with my sprint dsl connection. I get 6Mb/s down and 750k up and a static IP for 70.00 a month. If my speed drops or my connection goes out all it takes is a phone call and I get a 15.00 discount on next month's bill and it's usually corrected right away. That doesn't need to happen often though, because I do actually get the speed I pay for.
A lot of that might be because I live very close to their local distribution center, and in a small town where not many people except businesses have dsl.
I like the runner up a lot better too. In my opinion, the winner is too Web-2.0-ish, and I don't think a site like Slashdot should encourage people to use trendy "standards" like that. I think site members (at least, people who've been registered for more than 6 months or so) should have been able to vote on the designs.
Comparing it to so social security is a bad idea because SS is regularly abused by employers and various agencies.
Actually, a friend of mine made a pretty good point the other day. Sending spam costs very little, so it's profitable even if only a few people click on it. However, something like what Bluesecurity was doing makes it cost more to send spam in the sense that it can drive up personell and web hosting costs, thus greatly reducing profits.
You sound like Steve Irwin.
I see another problem here that'll be a pain in my neck even though I don't at all intend to use Vista myself. I fix other people's computers, and when somebody has an issue that keeps Windows from even booting a good way to fix it is to boot into another OS, like Knoppix. At very least using Knoppix is a good way to backup their data before a reinstall or something. This will prevent that from working.
Also, on the note of using FAT32 so both OS'es can deal with each other's file systems; there is a native Windows driver for full read/write to Ext2/3 partitions that works pretty well. What I usually do is make three partitions; two small ones and one big one. Each OS goes on a small one and then I use Ext2 on the large one since it doesn't have the file size and naming restrictions FAT32 does.
This could actually be a bad thing. One thing I have noticed is that most businesses do change their SSID's. They tend to change them to relfect which business owns the AP. So, if it's a targeted attack, this law makes the security worse by making it easier to figure out which AP belongs to which business.
Saying Linux is too fat is like complaining that there are too many pieces in an erector set. You don't have to use what you don't want to.
The FireGL series of cards isn't for playing games at all actually. They're geared towards graphically intense things like 3D animation, CAD, and video editing. The same goes for nVidia's Quadro series of cards. Both sorts of cards are geared more towards percision than speed. Your end result are very nice looking images, but lower framerates.
It already exists, and it's called the Bill of Rights. Sadly, no one seems to ever enforce it when it really matters.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
What part of this is so damn hard for them to understand? If they want to change this they have to amend the constitution.
See, if someone wants to say the bill isn't aimed at a specific group of people, like reporters, then when doesn't it specifically say that? Law has nothing to do with intentions and everything to do with the ink on the paper.
If we focus too much on reducing the need then when we finally do run out we won't have a method to get more from elsewhere. If we focus on being able to get more resources from elsewhere then we'll be able to do so if we need to.
Also, these are entwined fields of study. A lot of the research going into space travel is focused on making fuel and other resources last for as long as possible onboard a space craft. Any advancements in that field will end up being used more broadly.