It's the "consumers" (i. e. "the people") who granted the music companies their copyrights anyway. If they're not going to abide by the terms of the agreement, why shouldn't the people be allowed to revoke their copyright privileges?
Because individuals revoking copyright privileges through illegal downloads is a form of vigilante justice, rather than a formal and legal revocation.
If you claim we can each revoke another citizen's rights based on our own perceptions of the wrongness of what he did and mete out what we see as a fitting punishment, then an extreme application of your logic might be the story of Emmet Till. A more severe punishment for a more minor "crime", to be sure. But since you endorse the opinion that we don't have to involve the legal or legislative systems, and can act as individuals, meting out our personally preferred punishments for what we have determined to be crimes, you're tacitly approving the actions of the men who killed that boy.
Now I'm not applying this to all music downloaders. Those who download merely because they want free music are just pirates. Those who justify their piracy as a form of punishment for misdeeds by an artist, corporation, or industry are vigilantes of a sort.
Looks like the video link is already Slashdotted. But the video also seems to be all over YouTube (particularly since the story is a few days old). Here's a link to it at YouTube.
Is ball lightning supposed to bounce around the ground like that? I thought it floated. 'Course, I could be mistaken.
Graphic design is a much different beast than illustration.
Graphic design is the understanding of how colors, shapes, text, empty space, and images all work together in conveying a message (not just the substance of it, but the gist of it, the emotion of it, etc.), and applying that knowledge to the message you have to convey. It's like layout on steroids. And while some graphic designers draw all the parts of their designs, some primarily use clipart, photos, and text without doing any drawing at all.
Road signs use graphic design. The side of a cereal box uses graphic design. The tray liners at McDonalds use graphic design. Graphic design is communicating visually, not just textually.
If you're looking for ways to make buttons, there are lots of books and web sites full of Photoshop tips for doing that. Anyone can make a button. A graphic designer makes a button that is the right color and size to fit into the larger concept so it feels like a part of the whole rather than a random element slapped in.
The best way to learn graphic design, IMO, is to look at things with a critical eye. What makes other designs work for you or not work for you? When something looks amateurish, try to isolate the elements that make you feel that way. When something looks really slick, try to isolate the elements that make you like it. Over time, you'll get a better feel for what makes a design look slick or look sick, and that will be your greatest aid in better design.
Often I'm copying multiple files, or directories, or copying a file, checking it on the browser, then editing it and copying it again. I've tried a few of the webdisk programs that allow you to treat a remote directory like it was local via SCP or SFTP, but they usually threw errors.
If I'm copying 4 selected files from a dir of 20, the GUI makes it easy to control+click them then drag them over instead of having to type out all their names.
For now, I use CyberDuck as my SFTP client on Mac, but I'd prefer the explorer interface for displaying the remote dir tree.
I like WinSCP's GUI. I use the command line it when and where necessary and am not Unix averse, but when I'm doing SCP/SFTP, I prefer a nice GUI and I like WinSCP.
Mac also has vi and pico, but I prefer to use TextWrangler and would use Crimson Editor (the text editor I used on my Windows boxes) if I could.
IMO, it's all about what you're comfortable with. "Better" is not just about code quality or functionality, but the comfort zone too. While OSX is better than Windows in many ways, and there's always an app available to do things I did in Windows, it's still taking some getting used to.
I don't care about Microsoft Office, Photoshop, etc. They all have Mac versions. I went through the compatibility list to see if I could get a couple of my fave Windows freeware apps like WinAmp and WinSCP. Both said they'd been successfully installed and run under CrossOver Office, but I guess that's just on Linux. On my MacBook Pro, they both exited with errors during the install.
I wonder, though, if there's some leftover crust from trying DarWine that's interfering with Crossover Office.
I think I'll wait for version 6.1 and see how the early adopters have fared with troubleshooting and workarounds before I invest more time in this. Definitely won't invest $59.95 in it.
As neat as this is, I was sort of disappointed to find out it's a mobile disc like Roomba. I still have sci-fi dreams of androids and other human-like robots. Not to say this isn't cool or that I won't be buying one in a few years time when my kid is old enough for some father-son geek projects. But I still wanted it to be more human-like.
My main question is will it have PAM capabilities ("Phone As Modem"), so it can be tethered to your laptop as a cellular modem? And furthermore, will it offer PAM alongside Cingular's emerging 3G HSDPA (High Speed Data Packet Access) service, which gives EVDO or better speeds. Despite all the pretty and cool features, PAM and HSDPA are going to be big selling features for me.
Luckily the phone starts shipping within weeks of my old contract being through, so I'll be in the market for one. But if Treo has PAM/HSDPA and iPhone doesn't... it will be a hard decision.
I used Pegasus for years. Probably the best feature was the filtering rules and their integration with the distribution lists. Back in the 90s, I was able to use a ruleset to essentially make Pegasus Mail a listserver, managing a list of over 5,000 subscribers.
But, yes, as time passed, Pegasus was passed in so many other areas by commercial and OSS apps that eventually about the only advantage it had were those powerful rulesets and they just did not make up for its shortcomings in other areas.
I bought the manuals twice to support it, but eventually had to switch off of Pegasus. And I'm sort of glad I switched to Thunderbird about a year before I switched to Mac, because when I switched to Mac, moving my entire Thunderbird between platforms set-up was pretty easy. Moving all my mail and multiple accounts with Pegasus would have been a bear.
I still miss a few Pegasus features, but overall, it was time for it to step up or sit down.
Detect where the user is coming from and display the content or don't. The technology is mature, simple, and highly porous. Now, if the other site takes the extra step of hacking through your protection layer by lying about the referrer, then take them to court immediately.
The site doesn't set the referrer string. The browser does. Detecting where the visitor is coming from depends on the visotor's browser to tell you. Usually the browser will, but a firewall or proxy server might strip that out. So then you have entirely legitimate users who are being denied the content because they are not coming from the correct place.
Beside that, the guy wasn't "deep linking" to a page. He was linking directly to the audio file, so that the user was never actually sent to the site. Their media player came up and played the file and the originating site never got the page view or access to the user.
I've always seen "deep linking" as linking to an HTML page and getting a lot of bogus gateway pages, search pages, etc. out of the way. Some sites object to that because when you do that instead of linking to their home page, they only get one pageview instead of the 3 or 4 it might take for the user to reach that content. I think we all agree that kind of objection is bogus.
When you source a non-html file off of someone else's server without permission, either by direct linking or embedding it in your own page, it's called leeching.
When Fuddruckers was leeching a flash game off a developer's site they were broadly condemned, and he was cheered for serving up brutal photos of cattle mutilation to children who were unlucky enough to go to the Fuddruckers page for the game.
Now I can understand those users who think that the site should have tried this method for reaming the leecher site instead of going the legal route. But no method of content protection is foolproof, and that's not saying it's bad because it might not prevent all leeching, but because you can have false positives. So besides the extra effort of erecting porous walls to prevent content theft, you have the customer service issues with all your legitimate users who generate false positives.
If a content protection scheme would generate 1% false positives, but I had 10,000 uniques a day, then I've got to deal with 20 extra complaints a day (where I might be able to win the customer back) and 80 lost customers who just got offended or frustrated and bailed. In the meantime, the bastard who caused me all this difficulty merely loses the ability to link to my content.
If I take him to court instead, then he has legal costs for defense, legal costs for any damages awarded, a court order preventing him from further leeching (and jail time if I catch him violating it), and I don't have to deal with the cost issues of 100 false positives a day.
Still, it would make it somewhere between spotty and completely ineffective to deep-link to a site that did referer filtering.
Yes, but the point you're not getting is that every legitimate visitor to the legitimate website would also be subject to the referrer checking. Any of them who had their referrer headers stripped or otherwise altered by a firewall, proxy server, etc. would also be denied access to the content.
That's why filtering based on referrers is inadvisable, not because it is only partial protection against leeching, but because it can shut out legitimate users.
Another method would be to create an alias you link to, like mystreamingvideo.wmv. Only you've got an.htaccess file in that directory that treats.wmv files as PHP, and the actual content of mystreamingvideo.wmv is a PHP script that checks for some authentication token like an encrypted cookie, a session header, etc. If that authentication token is there, it proxies out the desired video. If the token isn't, then it proxies out a video containing an explanation of why the video isn't being received.
That increases your overhead, but can be fairly effective because you don't even need a persistent token, just one that can be embedded in the browser and accessed while the viewer is on the page where the content is embedded.
As for the rest of you lot... They shouldn't have to take their content offline to prevent leeching. And while there are solutions to help prevent it, they should not be mandatory.
Assume Neighbor A has a swimming pool in his back yard. He has a fence around the yard and another fence around the pool. Both are gated and locked. But Neighbor B's kid climbs over both fences and goes swimming. Only he slips while running around the patio, bonks his head, rolls into the pool and drowns. Neighbor B sues Neighbor A, claiming Neighbor A didn't do enough to keep Neighbor B's kid out of the pool.
Now, if you're the sort who is claiming it's the website's duty to play cat and mouse with leechers, trying to protect their content, and they should have no legal recourse, then you're the sort who sides with Neighbor B. You're the sort that says burglars should be able to sue homeowners if they fall down the stairs while robbing a house.
- Greg
If you believe that's the case, then please provide me your address. I'll tap into your power lines and suck down $8 worth of electricity a day. When you complain that I'm costing you $240 a month, I'll say that if you don't like it, you should get your power turned off.
I disagree. All we need is one major desktop vendor to make a stripped down custom distro and sell it installed on their computers.
WalMart doesthis. They were, at one time, pushing a line of $199 PCs with Linspire on them.
They didn't sell that well and now the lowest priced Linux PC is the same price as the lowest priced Windows machine. They're generally similarly equipped, but the Linux machine has an AMD Sempron at 2.0 GHz while the Windows box has a 3.2 GHz Celeron D.
Even if the Celeron D is more of a dog than the Sempron, it has a higher clock speed, so it at least looks like there's no savings or advantage (i.e. getting more for your money because you're not paying the "Microsoft Tax") to be had by choosing the Linux based system.
Still, WalMart has been pushing Linux boxes for years and they're the world's largest retailer, but this has not significantly accelerated Linux adoption.
What Linux needs is not esoteric, under the hood reasons why it's better than Windows, or cosmetic reasons why it's "as good as" Windows. Linux needs a "killer app" that does something that Windows cannot do and that people want so badly, they'll at least dual boot or VM a Linux distro (with the free VMWare Player) to get it.
Create a game that only runs on Linux and is so cool that millions of people want it, and you'll start seeing people boot Linux. And once they're in it, they'll realize they can browse, e-mail, etc. in Linux after they're done playing (instead of having to reboot back to Windows). When they realize they can have all their needed apps, plus their favorite app, in Linux without having to reboot, you'll see them start using Linux more and more for the convenience of having everything they want in one place. But you have to give them something they want badly and can't get in Windows before you'll see that start happening.
As well, IIRC, Corel sold their distro to Xandros about a year after Microsoft pumped $135 million of much needed cash into Corel in a "joint development and marketing alliance" to get Corel to port their various Windows apps to the.Net architecture.
Prior to this, Corel had been poised to port WordPerfect to Linux (natively - I believe there was already a WINE-based port) and were working on all sorts of initiatives to help make desktop Linux competitive with Windows. Then they got this investment, they talked about staying the course with Linux, but it languished, announced projects languished, and then they sold it.
You linux freak are just moronic, really. Just join a church and be done with it.
First, if I was a true Linux *freak*, I'd have specified a distro.
Second, anyone who assumes that a single-minded devotion requires a "church" is "just moronic, really." Why not a temple, mosque, ashram, synagogue...???? Hmmm??? Are you a Christian or Scientologist who can't think in terms outside of his narrow little "church" bubble, or are you an anti-Christian/anti-Scientology bigot who sees "church" members as some sort of fanatics? Why are you so for or against churches that you're blind to other houses of worship????
I'm waiting to see a worm that exploits a vulnerability to execute code and does the following:
Searches the windows registry to identify your network card and downloads the proper network driver and a basic kernel.
Overwrites the MBR so that the next time you restart your PC a bootloader loads the kernel and a network driver, begins an unattended install of Linux, and sets the bootloader to boot into Linux by default.
Does NOT overwrite or reformat the Windows partition, but instead mounts it so you can get access to all the files in your Windows partition from Linux.
Runs a little "You now have Linux. Let us show you why you should keep it" demo at startup.
Then the interesting thing would be to see how many people actually just keep Linux.:-)
On a tangent: I'm noticing a lot of speculation that the reason for the younger demographic going with PCs is price. Although that age group is certainly (by necessity) more price-conscious, the Mac mini is cheap enough that they could go get a Mac if they actually wanted one. The fact that they're not suggests to me that they don't want a Mac, not that they can't afford one.
I think that's flawed logic. First, notebook sales are HUGE in that demographic, to the extent that desktops are becoming a dying breed among young people, and a Mac Mini would require some pretty heavy modding to be a viable substitute for a notebook.
I'm not saying Gateway is better than Mac or that I'd prefer it over Mac. I'm just debunking the argument Pfhreak made. At the low end, you can get into a Gateway notebook for $400 less than the lowest end MacBook, and while you get less power under the hood, you get around 34% more screen area.
A democratically elected government does not ensure a decent primary education, nor does a totalitarian regime ensure a poor education. The U.S. is 55th in the world in national literacy rates, with Cuba finishing just 1/10th of a percentage point behind us for 56th. We're 26 places behind freakin' Kazakhstan.
Whether the new education minister will actually make good on his claims to improve primary education remains to be seen, but don't assume that just because he wasn't elected, he's corrupt and won't make good.
The minister's points are valid. What good is a nation of kids who can point and click if they cannot write a decent sentence or do math without a calculator? Once the educational system is meeting certain basic standards of education in literacy and mathematics (the "three Rs" - reading, writing, and arithmetic), then taking the education of the children to the next level with computers is warranted, but until then, giving computers to a bunch of semi-literate kids with poor math skills is a stupid idea.
I didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite". It's not going to hurt these kids to get a good grounding in the basics and get the computers a little later in their education.
Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.
Lupas Rename. Got it off NoNags if I recall correctly. Works beautifully. Of course, if you have PHP or Perl installed and know them well, you can whip up a quick script to do it too.
Recently, to get a bunch of EPS files working in ImageMagick with transparent backgrounds, I just slapped together a script to append a line of code to each one.
Yup, I'm running Apache, MySQL, ImageMagick, FreeType, GhostScript, PHP, and Perl on a Windows box. It's not a production environment, just a dev box, but it works well enough for me while I retain access to Flash 8, PhotoShop 7, and other tools I'm using on my current project.
This is not to denigrate Linux. My production server is CentOS. But I'll never switch to Linux as my base OS on my desktop machine. My desktop machines will always be Mac or Windows with Linux in a VM for when I really need it.
Honestly, with the Parallels VM for Mac, next time I buy new hardware, I'll get a Mac system with Windows and Linux (and maybe a copy of BeOS for fun) virtualized.
Proper spelling and grammar are unnatural constructs foisted upon the world by upper class tits that needed another way to make themselves feel special.
No, they're constructs through which a language is kept intelligible to the greatest number of its speakers.
Look at Latin. French and Italian have a common root language, but through people gradually mucking about with it, two entirely separate languages developed.
If you do not maintain consistency, you eventually fork the language.
Slashdot Mirror
If you claim we can each revoke another citizen's rights based on our own perceptions of the wrongness of what he did and mete out what we see as a fitting punishment, then an extreme application of your logic might be the story of Emmet Till. A more severe punishment for a more minor "crime", to be sure. But since you endorse the opinion that we don't have to involve the legal or legislative systems, and can act as individuals, meting out our personally preferred punishments for what we have determined to be crimes, you're tacitly approving the actions of the men who killed that boy.
Now I'm not applying this to all music downloaders. Those who download merely because they want free music are just pirates. Those who justify their piracy as a form of punishment for misdeeds by an artist, corporation, or industry are vigilantes of a sort.
- Greg
If it passes the duck test, it would be pretty reasonable to call it a duck, even if it were a cygnet that merely resembled an ugly young duck.
- Greg
Brazilians, apparently.
Looks like the video link is already Slashdotted. But the video also seems to be all over YouTube (particularly since the story is a few days old). Here's a link to it at YouTube.
Is ball lightning supposed to bounce around the ground like that? I thought it floated. 'Course, I could be mistaken.
- Greg
"Second, if it is not immoral for producers to "steal," then why on earth should any consumer feel guilty for taking it back?"
Ummm... because two wrongs don't make a right?
- Greg
Graphic design is a much different beast than illustration.
Graphic design is the understanding of how colors, shapes, text, empty space, and images all work together in conveying a message (not just the substance of it, but the gist of it, the emotion of it, etc.), and applying that knowledge to the message you have to convey. It's like layout on steroids. And while some graphic designers draw all the parts of their designs, some primarily use clipart, photos, and text without doing any drawing at all.
Road signs use graphic design. The side of a cereal box uses graphic design. The tray liners at McDonalds use graphic design. Graphic design is communicating visually, not just textually.
If you're looking for ways to make buttons, there are lots of books and web sites full of Photoshop tips for doing that. Anyone can make a button. A graphic designer makes a button that is the right color and size to fit into the larger concept so it feels like a part of the whole rather than a random element slapped in.
The best way to learn graphic design, IMO, is to look at things with a critical eye. What makes other designs work for you or not work for you? When something looks amateurish, try to isolate the elements that make you feel that way. When something looks really slick, try to isolate the elements that make you like it. Over time, you'll get a better feel for what makes a design look slick or look sick, and that will be your greatest aid in better design.
- Greg
Often I'm copying multiple files, or directories, or copying a file, checking it on the browser, then editing it and copying it again. I've tried a few of the webdisk programs that allow you to treat a remote directory like it was local via SCP or SFTP, but they usually threw errors.
If I'm copying 4 selected files from a dir of 20, the GUI makes it easy to control+click them then drag them over instead of having to type out all their names.
For now, I use CyberDuck as my SFTP client on Mac, but I'd prefer the explorer interface for displaying the remote dir tree.
- Greg
I like WinSCP's GUI. I use the command line it when and where necessary and am not Unix averse, but when I'm doing SCP/SFTP, I prefer a nice GUI and I like WinSCP.
Mac also has vi and pico, but I prefer to use TextWrangler and would use Crimson Editor (the text editor I used on my Windows boxes) if I could.
IMO, it's all about what you're comfortable with. "Better" is not just about code quality or functionality, but the comfort zone too. While OSX is better than Windows in many ways, and there's always an app available to do things I did in Windows, it's still taking some getting used to.
- Greg
I don't care about Microsoft Office, Photoshop, etc. They all have Mac versions. I went through the compatibility list to see if I could get a couple of my fave Windows freeware apps like WinAmp and WinSCP. Both said they'd been successfully installed and run under CrossOver Office, but I guess that's just on Linux. On my MacBook Pro, they both exited with errors during the install.
I wonder, though, if there's some leftover crust from trying DarWine that's interfering with Crossover Office.
I think I'll wait for version 6.1 and see how the early adopters have fared with troubleshooting and workarounds before I invest more time in this. Definitely won't invest $59.95 in it.
- Greg
As neat as this is, I was sort of disappointed to find out it's a mobile disc like Roomba. I still have sci-fi dreams of androids and other human-like robots. Not to say this isn't cool or that I won't be buying one in a few years time when my kid is old enough for some father-son geek projects. But I still wanted it to be more human-like.
My main question is will it have PAM capabilities ("Phone As Modem"), so it can be tethered to your laptop as a cellular modem? And furthermore, will it offer PAM alongside Cingular's emerging 3G HSDPA (High Speed Data Packet Access) service, which gives EVDO or better speeds. Despite all the pretty and cool features, PAM and HSDPA are going to be big selling features for me.
Luckily the phone starts shipping within weeks of my old contract being through, so I'll be in the market for one. But if Treo has PAM/HSDPA and iPhone doesn't... it will be a hard decision.
- Greg
I used Pegasus for years. Probably the best feature was the filtering rules and their integration with the distribution lists. Back in the 90s, I was able to use a ruleset to essentially make Pegasus Mail a listserver, managing a list of over 5,000 subscribers.
But, yes, as time passed, Pegasus was passed in so many other areas by commercial and OSS apps that eventually about the only advantage it had were those powerful rulesets and they just did not make up for its shortcomings in other areas.
I bought the manuals twice to support it, but eventually had to switch off of Pegasus. And I'm sort of glad I switched to Thunderbird about a year before I switched to Mac, because when I switched to Mac, moving my entire Thunderbird between platforms set-up was pretty easy. Moving all my mail and multiple accounts with Pegasus would have been a bear.
I still miss a few Pegasus features, but overall, it was time for it to step up or sit down.
Greg
Detect where the user is coming from and display the content or don't. The technology is mature, simple, and highly porous. Now, if the other site takes the extra step of hacking through your protection layer by lying about the referrer, then take them to court immediately.
The site doesn't set the referrer string. The browser does. Detecting where the visitor is coming from depends on the visotor's browser to tell you. Usually the browser will, but a firewall or proxy server might strip that out. So then you have entirely legitimate users who are being denied the content because they are not coming from the correct place.
Beside that, the guy wasn't "deep linking" to a page. He was linking directly to the audio file, so that the user was never actually sent to the site. Their media player came up and played the file and the originating site never got the page view or access to the user.
I've always seen "deep linking" as linking to an HTML page and getting a lot of bogus gateway pages, search pages, etc. out of the way. Some sites object to that because when you do that instead of linking to their home page, they only get one pageview instead of the 3 or 4 it might take for the user to reach that content. I think we all agree that kind of objection is bogus.
When you source a non-html file off of someone else's server without permission, either by direct linking or embedding it in your own page, it's called leeching.
When Fuddruckers was leeching a flash game off a developer's site they were broadly condemned, and he was cheered for serving up brutal photos of cattle mutilation to children who were unlucky enough to go to the Fuddruckers page for the game.
Now I can understand those users who think that the site should have tried this method for reaming the leecher site instead of going the legal route. But no method of content protection is foolproof, and that's not saying it's bad because it might not prevent all leeching, but because you can have false positives. So besides the extra effort of erecting porous walls to prevent content theft, you have the customer service issues with all your legitimate users who generate false positives.
If a content protection scheme would generate 1% false positives, but I had 10,000 uniques a day, then I've got to deal with 20 extra complaints a day (where I might be able to win the customer back) and 80 lost customers who just got offended or frustrated and bailed. In the meantime, the bastard who caused me all this difficulty merely loses the ability to link to my content.
If I take him to court instead, then he has legal costs for defense, legal costs for any damages awarded, a court order preventing him from further leeching (and jail time if I catch him violating it), and I don't have to deal with the cost issues of 100 false positives a day.
- Greg
Still, it would make it somewhere between spotty and completely ineffective to deep-link to a site that did referer filtering.
.htaccess file in that directory that treats .wmv files as PHP, and the actual content of mystreamingvideo.wmv is a PHP script that checks for some authentication token like an encrypted cookie, a session header, etc. If that authentication token is there, it proxies out the desired video. If the token isn't, then it proxies out a video containing an explanation of why the video isn't being received.
Yes, but the point you're not getting is that every legitimate visitor to the legitimate website would also be subject to the referrer checking. Any of them who had their referrer headers stripped or otherwise altered by a firewall, proxy server, etc. would also be denied access to the content.
That's why filtering based on referrers is inadvisable, not because it is only partial protection against leeching, but because it can shut out legitimate users.
Another method would be to create an alias you link to, like mystreamingvideo.wmv. Only you've got an
That increases your overhead, but can be fairly effective because you don't even need a persistent token, just one that can be embedded in the browser and accessed while the viewer is on the page where the content is embedded.
As for the rest of you lot... They shouldn't have to take their content offline to prevent leeching. And while there are solutions to help prevent it, they should not be mandatory.
Assume Neighbor A has a swimming pool in his back yard. He has a fence around the yard and another fence around the pool. Both are gated and locked. But Neighbor B's kid climbs over both fences and goes swimming. Only he slips while running around the patio, bonks his head, rolls into the pool and drowns. Neighbor B sues Neighbor A, claiming Neighbor A didn't do enough to keep Neighbor B's kid out of the pool.
Now, if you're the sort who is claiming it's the website's duty to play cat and mouse with leechers, trying to protect their content, and they should have no legal recourse, then you're the sort who sides with Neighbor B. You're the sort that says burglars should be able to sue homeowners if they fall down the stairs while robbing a house.
- Greg If you believe that's the case, then please provide me your address. I'll tap into your power lines and suck down $8 worth of electricity a day. When you complain that I'm costing you $240 a month, I'll say that if you don't like it, you should get your power turned off.
WalMart does this. They were, at one time, pushing a line of $199 PCs with Linspire on them.
They didn't sell that well and now the lowest priced Linux PC is the same price as the lowest priced Windows machine. They're generally similarly equipped, but the Linux machine has an AMD Sempron at 2.0 GHz while the Windows box has a 3.2 GHz Celeron D.
Even if the Celeron D is more of a dog than the Sempron, it has a higher clock speed, so it at least looks like there's no savings or advantage (i.e. getting more for your money because you're not paying the "Microsoft Tax") to be had by choosing the Linux based system.
Still, WalMart has been pushing Linux boxes for years and they're the world's largest retailer, but this has not significantly accelerated Linux adoption.
What Linux needs is not esoteric, under the hood reasons why it's better than Windows, or cosmetic reasons why it's "as good as" Windows. Linux needs a "killer app" that does something that Windows cannot do and that people want so badly, they'll at least dual boot or VM a Linux distro (with the free VMWare Player) to get it.
Create a game that only runs on Linux and is so cool that millions of people want it, and you'll start seeing people boot Linux. And once they're in it, they'll realize they can browse, e-mail, etc. in Linux after they're done playing (instead of having to reboot back to Windows). When they realize they can have all their needed apps, plus their favorite app, in Linux without having to reboot, you'll see them start using Linux more and more for the convenience of having everything they want in one place. But you have to give them something they want badly and can't get in Windows before you'll see that start happening.
- Greg
IIRC, Xandros is what became of Corel Linux.
.Net architecture.
As well, IIRC, Corel sold their distro to Xandros about a year after Microsoft pumped $135 million of much needed cash into Corel in a "joint development and marketing alliance" to get Corel to port their various Windows apps to the
Prior to this, Corel had been poised to port WordPerfect to Linux (natively - I believe there was already a WINE-based port) and were working on all sorts of initiatives to help make desktop Linux competitive with Windows. Then they got this investment, they talked about staying the course with Linux, but it languished, announced projects languished, and then they sold it.
- Greg
First, if I was a true Linux *freak*, I'd have specified a distro.
Second, anyone who assumes that a single-minded devotion requires a "church" is "just moronic, really." Why not a temple, mosque, ashram, synagogue...???? Hmmm??? Are you a Christian or Scientologist who can't think in terms outside of his narrow little "church" bubble, or are you an anti-Christian/anti-Scientology bigot who sees "church" members as some sort of fanatics? Why are you so for or against churches that you're blind to other houses of worship????
Then the interesting thing would be to see how many people actually just keep Linux.
- Greg
I think that's flawed logic. First, notebook sales are HUGE in that demographic, to the extent that desktops are becoming a dying breed among young people, and a Mac Mini would require some pretty heavy modding to be a viable substitute for a notebook.
I'm not saying Gateway is better than Mac or that I'd prefer it over Mac. I'm just debunking the argument Pfhreak made. At the low end, you can get into a Gateway notebook for $400 less than the lowest end MacBook, and while you get less power under the hood, you get around 34% more screen area.
- Greg
CBS has long been the butt of jokes due to its geriatric-skewing demo. Looks like Apple now knows where they should concentrate their ad dollars.
Of course, with Justin Long leaving. I'm waiting for the commercials where they have Wilford Brimley saying "hi, I'm a Mac."
- Greg
A democratically elected government does not ensure a decent primary education, nor does a totalitarian regime ensure a poor education. The U.S. is 55th in the world in national literacy rates, with Cuba finishing just 1/10th of a percentage point behind us for 56th. We're 26 places behind freakin' Kazakhstan.
Whether the new education minister will actually make good on his claims to improve primary education remains to be seen, but don't assume that just because he wasn't elected, he's corrupt and won't make good.
- Greg
The minister's points are valid. What good is a nation of kids who can point and click if they cannot write a decent sentence or do math without a calculator? Once the educational system is meeting certain basic standards of education in literacy and mathematics (the "three Rs" - reading, writing, and arithmetic), then taking the education of the children to the next level with computers is warranted, but until then, giving computers to a bunch of semi-literate kids with poor math skills is a stupid idea.
I didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite". It's not going to hurt these kids to get a good grounding in the basics and get the computers a little later in their education.
- Greg
Lupas Rename. Got it off NoNags if I recall correctly. Works beautifully. Of course, if you have PHP or Perl installed and know them well, you can whip up a quick script to do it too.
Recently, to get a bunch of EPS files working in ImageMagick with transparent backgrounds, I just slapped together a script to append a line of code to each one.
Yup, I'm running Apache, MySQL, ImageMagick, FreeType, GhostScript, PHP, and Perl on a Windows box. It's not a production environment, just a dev box, but it works well enough for me while I retain access to Flash 8, PhotoShop 7, and other tools I'm using on my current project.
This is not to denigrate Linux. My production server is CentOS. But I'll never switch to Linux as my base OS on my desktop machine. My desktop machines will always be Mac or Windows with Linux in a VM for when I really need it.
Honestly, with the Parallels VM for Mac, next time I buy new hardware, I'll get a Mac system with Windows and Linux (and maybe a copy of BeOS for fun) virtualized.
- Greg
No, they're constructs through which a language is kept intelligible to the greatest number of its speakers.
Look at Latin. French and Italian have a common root language, but through people gradually mucking about with it, two entirely separate languages developed.
If you do not maintain consistency, you eventually fork the language.
- Greg