Remember though that Microsoft will market it and people will buy it because they think it's got to be better. This is also the version that will be on the bittorrent sites with all the activation crap removed.
My annoyance is every time portage (yes that means I use gentoo, no I do not have yellow stickers and an exhaust tip for my laptop) finds and sets up a new update, I lose my SpellBound extension. This means I have to load firefox up as root, install the extension, quit, load up as root again, install the dictionary, quit, and then I'm free to go. I do not know if this is a problem with firefox, SpellBound, or a combination of the two, but it's pretty damn annoying after a while.
Although as I close this rant, Adblock seems to always stay around with each update, so my uneducated finger points to SpellBound as being the culprit.
I'd start by contacting people who know how to do it and can actually help you. A few responses on slashdot aren't going to help you along the entire process. Maybe even bring in a consultant.
I usually code better when I've been drinking a little. It helps me to see the problem and solution a lot more clearly. I also don't mind commenting the code so much. When I look at it the next day, I think, "hey, it looks good, and runs fine...but how the hell does it work?"
This seems like a big company diversifying and buying a portion of a smaller company, not trying to incorporate antivirus capabilities into their microprocessor line of products.
And Centrino was just a branding for a specific CPU, WiFi, and chipset. It wasn't some flashy new technology, just flashy marketing. I don't think you can really make virus detection software at the CPU level anyway.
I think these self swipe readers are a huge security hole. Anyone can spend a few hundred dollars for a magnetic card writer and change the information on the card. Getting a credit card number isn't that difficult either. It seems crazy to me that retailers AND credit card companies don't seem to care much about this. Is it really cheaper to let people scam the system than to make the system more secure?
Exactly. They could continue putting games on DVDs for a while longer, but they need something to get people to buy the blu-ray players. I think it's the entire reason behind this. When the PS2 came out, one of the selling forces was a DVD player because at the time, it cost over a hundred for a stand along DVD player. Sony is taking a gamble, but it could pay off in the end.
um...it's never been a Democracy. It's always been a Republic. That said, it's our fault for electing these people and our fault for not demanding more from them. However, I think this all has more to do with laziness and government inefficiency than a conspiracy to withhold important information from the public.
There is nothing inherently wrong with DRM. I think this guy is saying that DRM should always work in that if I pay for something, I should be able to play that file without having to worry about DRM. The problem, however, is that currently DRM doesn't work this well.
I have no intentions on purchasing any DRM music any time soon. I want to be able to play music files on Linux, xbox and my ipod. Currently, MP3s do the job well and I have no intentions on using anything else.
It's going to be how little people have to work to use it. Nobody wants another gadget that they can't figure out how to use. That said, nobody wants DRM that won't work properly. Everybody (including geeks) wants things to work out of the box and that's where these companies should focus on.
They should make lots of mockups. They should get people to let them install this crap in their homes and see how they like or dislike it. The company that rushes some central media player that can only do what my modded xbox can do now isn't going to do well. It's going to take a lot of testing to get the final product done right.
My guess is Apple might come out with some interesting products and I'm going to be watching out for what they do.
So stop bitching to people on slashdot, drive down there, and help out. What's your point here? To guilt us into feeling bad? To motivate us to help them? Why go through the trouble? Help them now and don't worry about others. If you're intentions are to recruit slashdotters to help you on your quest to save them, you're wasting your time due to distance reasons.
Maybe I'm sounding hypocritical, but put your money where your mouth is and go help the people.
I wouldn't be surprised if I did miss the point of the beta in that I wasn't impressed with any new features. But then what features are the developers looking for? Not to sound rude, but I guess I am missing your point.
But Apple could put a simple copy protection that looks for some specific chip on the motherboard that only exists on their hardware. So you get OSX, crack it in two seconds, and you've just violated the DMCA.
What most people (not most people here though) never understood about laws like the DMCA is that software and hardware manufacturers could control many aspects of their product using simple copy protection schemes and just rely on the DMCA to enforce their rules.
I hope people find it usefull. I tried the Vista beta a month or so ago and I wasn't impressed one bit. Nothing felt different or improved. I don't know if I was expecting some radical changes, but other than the "theme", it looked the same as XP. In fact, judging from "look and feel" it rendered the clear type fonts very blurry compared to xorg on gentoo which I'm currently typing this on.
However, the only thing I can saw I was pleased about was its performance. On a 2.4 ghz celeron with 512 mb of ram, it ran fine, just as fast as XP on the same system.
What did impress me about a week later was when I took that spare HD I used for vista and loaded OSX on it. Now that looked beautiful, ran fast, ran native OSX apps fine, and my conclusion from that week of OS experimentation was that if OSX ever made it to whitebox computers legally (let's not start this discussion again) it would knock Microsoft out of the water.
Let's face it, few home users will switch to Vista legally. Most will get it with a new computer. My school uses Windows 2000 and probably won't switch to even XP for a while. So go figure.
It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the `main' function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
so basically it depends on the program and it's not always going to require being licensed under the GPL.
Alright, I got it, an mp3 player that doubles as a text messaging device. Instead of beeps, it plays ringtones you pick from your mp3 player. Java makes cool games possible. XML makes it seem cool to those who don't realize it just means humans can read the tags I will hide with DRM thus playacting the RIAA thinking people can't pirate ringtones.
Your frustrations are understood. I've felt that with linux and especially gentoo, a little effort setting shit up means you can relax and enjoy it's there. The difficulty with linux is setting it up, but then it always works and you don't have to worry about it. k G
Last summer I got serious about using linux. Before that, I tried various versions of redhat and mandrake and it was alright. But I always felt once I started to go beyond the beaten path, it was a pain in the ass. By that I pretty much mean dealing with their RPMs when installing a package outside their package manager.
So I bit the bullet and spent several days installing and setting up Gentoo. Every step of the way was a learning experience. My reason for switching to linux is because I was bored with windows and I wanted to force myself to learn something new. So now it's approaching the end of another summer. I'm sitting in front of two computers running Gentoo.
However, both have windows XP on them. I have crossover office on each computer and the apps that are supported run fine. I'm a student and usually I can get by with openoffice, but sometimes I need office. I just got an ipod photo and I've been trying to get it to work seamlessly between windows and gentoo. It's been a struggle with iTunes, gtkpod and ipodslave for KDE, but I'm working on it.
I tried the OSX86 last weekend and I was impressed. I tried windows vista beta and I was very unimpressed. There is never going to be a magic bullet OS. Each will have it's uses. I've learned that it is mostly dependent on the applications for it. If the vendors made perfect linux versions of every program I needed, it would be a lot better. It takes time to figure out which OSS programs are just as good as the windows counterparts and which ones are shit. 10 days with any operating system isn't going to mean much.
And I have not had a chance yet to read the article bc it's down at the moment.
Yes, the number of downloads from one place is a horrible metric to determine accurately how many people are using the browser. Some download it 10 times on one computer, others download it from their distro's package manager 10 times. Others copy it to a flash drive and pass it along to 10 other computers.
So before everyone tries to get a +5 insightful for pointing this out, let's just be happy that a good open source browser that does it's best to stick to standards is doing so well.
not to nitpick, but you could probably do it without the inverter. A cigarette lighter connector and a voltage regulator could probably do the job well enough and make it a little more efficient. A lot cheaper too.
You could also hook it to your car stereo if it has an amp turn on signal. This way it would start and stop with the head unit.
All good points and I can relate to your troubles with the ndiswrapper because I've just had to deal with that pain in the ass. I got a linksys card and after days of trying and trying, I had to end up using a netgear driver. This was only after I had to hunt down what chipset this damn thing used. However, these problems aren't so much with linux, but the other software that's required to make an operating system run. The more and more you look into it, linux isn't some big OS or program, but a collection of many small programs with specific tasks. And it takes lots of people to coordinate these programs in such a way that others can easily integrate them with their software.
I've been using linux exclusively for about a year now and I'm happy with it. There are always small things that crop up and I have to jump on the forums and see what I should do. The biggest problem I've found with running linux is not the technology, but the difficulty it seems to bring it all together into one usable package. The myriad of choices means developers have to account for so much that they lose focus on their product and have to worry if it will work for X or Y or Z.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember though that Microsoft will market it and people will buy it because they think it's got to be better. This is also the version that will be on the bittorrent sites with all the activation crap removed.
My annoyance is every time portage (yes that means I use gentoo, no I do not have yellow stickers and an exhaust tip for my laptop) finds and sets up a new update, I lose my SpellBound extension. This means I have to load firefox up as root, install the extension, quit, load up as root again, install the dictionary, quit, and then I'm free to go. I do not know if this is a problem with firefox, SpellBound, or a combination of the two, but it's pretty damn annoying after a while.
Although as I close this rant, Adblock seems to always stay around with each update, so my uneducated finger points to SpellBound as being the culprit.
I'd start by contacting people who know how to do it and can actually help you. A few responses on slashdot aren't going to help you along the entire process. Maybe even bring in a consultant.
I usually code better when I've been drinking a little. It helps me to see the problem and solution a lot more clearly. I also don't mind commenting the code so much. When I look at it the next day, I think, "hey, it looks good, and runs fine...but how the hell does it work?"
This seems like a big company diversifying and buying a portion of a smaller company, not trying to incorporate antivirus capabilities into their microprocessor line of products.
And Centrino was just a branding for a specific CPU, WiFi, and chipset. It wasn't some flashy new technology, just flashy marketing. I don't think you can really make virus detection software at the CPU level anyway.
I think these self swipe readers are a huge security hole. Anyone can spend a few hundred dollars for a magnetic card writer and change the information on the card. Getting a credit card number isn't that difficult either. It seems crazy to me that retailers AND credit card companies don't seem to care much about this. Is it really cheaper to let people scam the system than to make the system more secure?
Exactly. They could continue putting games on DVDs for a while longer, but they need something to get people to buy the blu-ray players. I think it's the entire reason behind this. When the PS2 came out, one of the selling forces was a DVD player because at the time, it cost over a hundred for a stand along DVD player. Sony is taking a gamble, but it could pay off in the end.
um...it's never been a Democracy. It's always been a Republic. That said, it's our fault for electing these people and our fault for not demanding more from them. However, I think this all has more to do with laziness and government inefficiency than a conspiracy to withhold important information from the public.
There is nothing inherently wrong with DRM. I think this guy is saying that DRM should always work in that if I pay for something, I should be able to play that file without having to worry about DRM. The problem, however, is that currently DRM doesn't work this well.
I have no intentions on purchasing any DRM music any time soon. I want to be able to play music files on Linux, xbox and my ipod. Currently, MP3s do the job well and I have no intentions on using anything else.
It's going to be how little people have to work to use it. Nobody wants another gadget that they can't figure out how to use. That said, nobody wants DRM that won't work properly. Everybody (including geeks) wants things to work out of the box and that's where these companies should focus on.
They should make lots of mockups. They should get people to let them install this crap in their homes and see how they like or dislike it. The company that rushes some central media player that can only do what my modded xbox can do now isn't going to do well. It's going to take a lot of testing to get the final product done right.
My guess is Apple might come out with some interesting products and I'm going to be watching out for what they do.
So stop bitching to people on slashdot, drive down there, and help out. What's your point here? To guilt us into feeling bad? To motivate us to help them? Why go through the trouble? Help them now and don't worry about others. If you're intentions are to recruit slashdotters to help you on your quest to save them, you're wasting your time due to distance reasons.
Maybe I'm sounding hypocritical, but put your money where your mouth is and go help the people.
Yeah, but the key difference is since it's open source if Sun stopped paying people to work on it, others could fork it and keep improving it.
It may not be a perfect system, but it's better than one entity controlling the future of it.
I wouldn't be surprised if I did miss the point of the beta in that I wasn't impressed with any new features. But then what features are the developers looking for? Not to sound rude, but I guess I am missing your point.
But Apple could put a simple copy protection that looks for some specific chip on the motherboard that only exists on their hardware. So you get OSX, crack it in two seconds, and you've just violated the DMCA.
What most people (not most people here though) never understood about laws like the DMCA is that software and hardware manufacturers could control many aspects of their product using simple copy protection schemes and just rely on the DMCA to enforce their rules.
It's not going to stop at printer cartridges.
I hope people find it usefull. I tried the Vista beta a month or so ago and I wasn't impressed one bit. Nothing felt different or improved. I don't know if I was expecting some radical changes, but other than the "theme", it looked the same as XP. In fact, judging from "look and feel" it rendered the clear type fonts very blurry compared to xorg on gentoo which I'm currently typing this on.
However, the only thing I can saw I was pleased about was its performance. On a 2.4 ghz celeron with 512 mb of ram, it ran fine, just as fast as XP on the same system.
What did impress me about a week later was when I took that spare HD I used for vista and loaded OSX on it. Now that looked beautiful, ran fast, ran native OSX apps fine, and my conclusion from that week of OS experimentation was that if OSX ever made it to whitebox computers legally (let's not start this discussion again) it would knock Microsoft out of the water.
Let's face it, few home users will switch to Vista legally. Most will get it with a new computer. My school uses Windows 2000 and probably won't switch to even XP for a while. So go figure.
It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the `main' function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
so basically it depends on the program and it's not always going to require being licensed under the GPL.
I'm thinking mp3 player + SMS + ringtones + java
wait, it needs something...
XML!
Alright, I got it, an mp3 player that doubles as a text messaging device. Instead of beeps, it plays ringtones you pick from your mp3 player. Java makes cool games possible. XML makes it seem cool to those who don't realize it just means humans can read the tags I will hide with DRM thus playacting the RIAA thinking people can't pirate ringtones.
I think I'm on to something...
Yes, and sometimes sarcasm can be interpreted as insightful.
Your frustrations are understood. I've felt that with linux and especially gentoo, a little effort setting shit up means you can relax and enjoy it's there. The difficulty with linux is setting it up, but then it always works and you don't have to worry about it. k G
Last summer I got serious about using linux. Before that, I tried various versions of redhat and mandrake and it was alright. But I always felt once I started to go beyond the beaten path, it was a pain in the ass. By that I pretty much mean dealing with their RPMs when installing a package outside their package manager.
So I bit the bullet and spent several days installing and setting up Gentoo. Every step of the way was a learning experience. My reason for switching to linux is because I was bored with windows and I wanted to force myself to learn something new. So now it's approaching the end of another summer. I'm sitting in front of two computers running Gentoo.
However, both have windows XP on them. I have crossover office on each computer and the apps that are supported run fine. I'm a student and usually I can get by with openoffice, but sometimes I need office. I just got an ipod photo and I've been trying to get it to work seamlessly between windows and gentoo. It's been a struggle with iTunes, gtkpod and ipodslave for KDE, but I'm working on it.
I tried the OSX86 last weekend and I was impressed. I tried windows vista beta and I was very unimpressed. There is never going to be a magic bullet OS. Each will have it's uses. I've learned that it is mostly dependent on the applications for it. If the vendors made perfect linux versions of every program I needed, it would be a lot better. It takes time to figure out which OSS programs are just as good as the windows counterparts and which ones are shit. 10 days with any operating system isn't going to mean much.
And I have not had a chance yet to read the article bc it's down at the moment.
dude, win32codecs. it can handle many types of files other than the ones you're interested in.
Hey Moderators! Do not mod down as troll until you've read the history of moderation!
I have and it's all lies lies I tells ya!
Yes, the number of downloads from one place is a horrible metric to determine accurately how many people are using the browser. Some download it 10 times on one computer, others download it from their distro's package manager 10 times. Others copy it to a flash drive and pass it along to 10 other computers.
So before everyone tries to get a +5 insightful for pointing this out, let's just be happy that a good open source browser that does it's best to stick to standards is doing so well.
not to nitpick, but you could probably do it without the inverter. A cigarette lighter connector and a voltage regulator could probably do the job well enough and make it a little more efficient. A lot cheaper too.
You could also hook it to your car stereo if it has an amp turn on signal. This way it would start and stop with the head unit.
All good points and I can relate to your troubles with the ndiswrapper because I've just had to deal with that pain in the ass. I got a linksys card and after days of trying and trying, I had to end up using a netgear driver. This was only after I had to hunt down what chipset this damn thing used. However, these problems aren't so much with linux, but the other software that's required to make an operating system run. The more and more you look into it, linux isn't some big OS or program, but a collection of many small programs with specific tasks. And it takes lots of people to coordinate these programs in such a way that others can easily integrate them with their software.
I've been using linux exclusively for about a year now and I'm happy with it. There are always small things that crop up and I have to jump on the forums and see what I should do. The biggest problem I've found with running linux is not the technology, but the difficulty it seems to bring it all together into one usable package. The myriad of choices means developers have to account for so much that they lose focus on their product and have to worry if it will work for X or Y or Z.