It's called a licence agreement. Read their current ones and you'll see how far a lawsuit for damages would go.
That's the whole issue...at what point is a license agreement just a joke? Maybe it's mildly valid for a copy of photoshop or something similar..
But my bank's website doesn't make me agree that occasionally a bill payment won't go through. If you went to a real bank and had to sign a license agreement saying "just in case one of our bank tellers is drunk, we accept no responsibility for lost or misplaced payments" you'd laugh and find a new bank.
It really is quite simple. Anyone who puts their important data in one place, at the mercy of one system, with one login service is putting all their eggs in one basket. It provides a single point of failure that would be unacceptable to any corporate user. So why would private users fall for it?
Use Passport and.Net if you like, but make sure you have a contingency plan. Just like if you are a one-car family, you better make sure you have an alternative method of getting to work if it dies one morn.
With most utilities, if they fail, you can sue for damages. E.g., if my electricity provider has an outage that lets my freezer defrost and ruins my food, I can get damages to repalce the spoiled food. How will MS deal with users who end up paying extra interest because they couldn't complete bank payments on time because.Net or Passport are down?
What would the big deal be for ActiveX support on linux?
The obvious answer: the same as its use on Microsoft platforms; expose
COM's binary, language-independent, object interface standards.
(The networked version of this, DCOM, uses RPC for transport.)
COM is at the heart of what Microsoft has called OLE these many years,
and as time has passed there has been semantic erosion of their distinction.
ActiveX controls are the successor to OLE controls (*.OCX), which are
the successor to Visual Basic (*.VBX) controls. Such controls are the
bread-and-butter of contemporary corporate PC software development,
as well as the business of a thriving industry of third-party control makers,
not the least of which is Marietta's MicroHelp, recently acquired by an
ambitious Internet firm.
COM objects are semantically equivalent to Java classes, but also
provide the ability to discover what interfaces exist at run time,
via QueryInterface. This important feature is being introduced to Java
through the JavaBeans Spec 1.0, via the BeanInfo class ("introspection").
To quote Microsoft, (May 23, 1996 Draft)
"The integration of Java and COM can be achieved by just making
changes to the Java VM, and not adding any new keywords or
constructs to the Java language."
Visual J++ 1.1 includes Wizards that allow you to use ActiveX objects as
Java classes and vice-versa.
However, COM objects are instantiated with native code, not
on a "platform-independent" Java Virtual Machine. Cross-platform
congruence or differentiation depends on the implementation
of the object on each platform, rather than on the implementation
of the Java Virtual Machine on each platform. In this aspect, one might
compare ActiveX objects to Netscape plug-ins, rather than Java classes.
Sure, you can disable the popups through javascript or a proxy, but a more longterm solution:
Don't click them.
They'll die on their own (as they are beginning to do, if you've noticed that dot-commers with business models based on page view ad sales...are in the outs investment-wise).
Another way: don't keep silent when your company uses them on its web sites -- complain loudly...
just read slashdot at 0 and read all the rascist shit that ppl just post for fun, unrelated to whatever topic is being discussed.
all replies to this thread, and its moderation as flamebait show me that here are ppl who will argue all day that alewando is projecting his/her internal biases on cliff, but it's a fact. to say these kids as "inner-city" and assume that there is some inherent quality that they share (whether in terms of intelligence or economic status or whatever) is both classist and racist.
i wonder when most slashdotters will wake up to the fact that a lot of ppl have prefabricated notions of what it 'means' to be a certain race, and while not on the same scale as the KKK, it's still racism.
keep your opinions, but question what's being fed to you. last week in toronto, there was a front page story in the NATIONAL newspaper about government beureaucracy causing the deportation of a polish immigrant family that underpaid some immigration fee by $50.
ask yourself why that's front page news, when non-white families w/ similar or even more tragic stories are deported daily.
and at one point, yes, i would have argued it over and over like most of the replies to this thread, but at some point, you must recognize that not everybody even cares enough to think about motivations for people's behaviour, but that maybe you should.
so, all i'm saying is think about it. put that rational thought that everybody here seems to prize so much to good use and realize your own motivations and the realities that ppl can't be lumped into categories based on superficial similarities.
hopefully someone'll read this, as for how many years it'll take to be able to salvage the damage to my karma, that's another story...
I really fail to see how anyone can argue that age limits on violent and explicit material are anything other than a sane policy. It has been shown that children are more vulnerable to these things than adults, and so limiting their exposure to these kinds of materials is nothing more than caring for our future.
When violence becomes a part of society that is tolerated, then we must make sure that it does not become accepted. Currently American culture, such as it is, tolerates violence as being an inevitable consequcne of allowing firearms to be possessed by people, but it hasn't gotten to the stage yet where people accept violence as a tool for getting ahead in life. So, in order to make sure that people don't begin to perceive violence as a valid socio-economic tool of advancement, we need to make sure that children don't perceive violence as being "cool".
These kinds of laws, whilst perhaps not being strictly Constituional, are very necessary. We cannot let our children fall into the trap that violence is good, and nothing shouls be allowed to stand in the way of ensuring this. When the Constitution was drafted, if they'd have realised the threats that children face everyday, I'm sure they'd have realised that sometimes, freedom of speech is not an abolute concept.
while i tend to see pretty much constant complaining about HP hardware (printers, etc.) in linux, everyone seems to forget that Hewlett Packard has been a pretty good supporter of linux for a while now...
i recently picked up another computer for my house and got a great deal on a Kayak PII-450 w/ SCSI. At first I was scared about hardware support but there's extensive documentation about all elements of their boxes.
hp-linux.org was a great resource for me, as well as HP's own documentation on linux support for various models.
and in case you're wondering, that site also has info on making stuff like your printers work. so stop whining and check it out, or for christ's sake write your own!
The Bottom Line is that, if this is true, no matter how many lawyers Sony has, they're violating the license on POSE. and they can fight it all day, but in the end, they'll have to release their additions to the source.
moral of the story: big companies don't get open source. see the apple article posted today...it's a paradigm so far removed from their culture that they ignore it.
so if the FSF has to take them to court to enforce it, then they will...take this opportunity to throw some $$ their way.
OT: gpl violations aside, that was probably the _most_ obnoxious email i've ever read.
"So as I'm sitting here working and playing with my Palm, people
tend to whip theirs out and play with it, as if to say "Hey, I'm one of
you, look, I have a palm too..!"
ya. because everybody's so concerned with impressing this guy.
Compressed Data: Law Newsletter Has to Sneak Past Filters
There is nothing wrong with David Carney's spell-checker. It is on purpose that in his e-mail newsletter, Tech Law Journal, he misspells words like sex (sez) and pornography (pormography) and camouflages the names of computer viruses. If he did not, he explained last week in an editor's note, his journal would never get past the computers at readers' offices that screen incoming e-mail messages for references to sex or network security.
Mr. Carney's newsletter, which is sent daily to more than a thousand subscribers, covers legal and regulatory issues affecting the computer and Internet industries. Most of its readers are at law firms, universities or government agencies -- the institutions most likely to have powerful filtering software on their e- mail server computers.
The trouble is, these filters are dumb: they can't tell the difference between a sexual solicitation sent by e-mail and a news story about restrictions on online pornography or between a computer virus and a story about a computer virus. "I often advise my readers to get a free e-mail account at Yahoo or Hotmail, so they can get the newsletter at home," Mr. Carney said. "It's the only way to avoid these blocks."
Many readers of Tech Law Journal have accepted the misspellings as a necessary evil, but at least one sees a larger issue at stake.
"It's a sad day for journalism -- and for the American public -- when a news organization has to resort to consciously misspelling words in order to reach its readers," said Judith F. Krug, a journal subscriber and director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, in an interview via e-mail.
"This highlights the problem with filters," she wrote. "They're incapable of distinguishing between information that is innocuous and information that is objectionable, let alone making the fine distinction between information that is constitutionally protected and that which is not."
Online content filters that screen e-mail or restrict access to certain Web sites have inspired a variety of creative work-arounds -- some legal and some not. Last year, Beaver College in Glenside, Pa., decided to change its name to Arcadia University, in part because some filters intended to screen out sexually explicit material blocked access to its site. And recently, when the music file- sharing service Napster was ordered to block the access it provided to copyrighted music, some users began renaming titles in a form of pig Latin to confuse the filter.
Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and consultant who has studied filters, is well aware of their limitations. "Ironically," he said, "people are being forced to work around a computer's natural stupidity."
I haven't seen this system in action yet, but it's hard to believe that anything running on top of an OS like Linux is going to have satisfactory performance for Amiga end users.
Linux has a lot of neat things going for it, and x86 boxes are awefully fast these days, especially compared to 68k-based Amiga hardware. But put a 700 MHz Linux box right next to a 50 MHz Amiga (which is exactly the situation that I have at home) and then copy a few megabytes from a CD to hard disk. See how slow the GUI gets? Now try it on the Amiga. Ah, smooooooth.
People tell me that it's a good "feature" when a modern dynamic-scheduling OS keeps low-priority processes from starving even if it means that high-priority processes have to slow down a bit. Well, once you've used an Amiga, you know that "feature" is worse than useless. Maybe it makes sense for servers, but if you're running a GUI and there's a user sitting there who expects the machine to be snappy, it just doesn't work. (Low priority tasks are supposed to starve when the GUI needs to update! I don't give a rat's ass if copying a 20 Megabyte file takes an extra 400 milliseconds, but I sure as hell do care if the GUI ever makes me wait that long!)
This was one of the reasons that QNX Neutrino looked so promising. With a realtime kernel, you should be able to guarantee that the GUI keeps up with human perception. QNX Neutrino had the potention to meet (or even exceed!) Amiga users' expectations. With something like Linux, the GUI's responsiveness is held hostage by the machine's load. (And apparently even an I/O bound process is enough to screw things up?!)
Let's hope that Tao avoids the same technological mistake that Windows and Unix made. Otherwise, it seems unlikely that users of ten-year-old Amigas will be interested in downgrading to the "technology" of the 21st century.
whatever...yet another article on overclocking. but I'll take more CPU's and better components over a faster CPU any day.
I've had my Dual 466 Celeron for over a year and a half now, and it's absolutely fantastic, and rock-solid stable. Sure, I've upgraded the RAM over that time from 128MB to 512, but through it all I've felt no need to upgrade the processor(s)
The motherboard recently went south on me and I had to replace it. I got looking around and noticed that Asus now has a dual PIII board for ~$230CDN. I ended up just RMAing this board, but I know when I do eventually need to upgrade there's no WAY I'll be going back to a single processor board.
If you're running Linux, FreeBSD or Win2k (or even BeOS) an SMP system makes a world of difference under heavy load. Recompiling? Encoding MP3's? Running VMWare? These operations are sped up very noticeably.
For people looking for a new machine: Save your precious dollars on the fastest processor. Fill up on RAM, get a good video card, and get an SMP board. I'd rather have 2 800MHz chips than a 1.6GHz any day of the week.
AMD: I'd rather get an SMP chipset out of you than Yet Another "Fastest" Processor. I'd much rather own a Duron or Athalon than a crappy Celeron or PIII, but I'd take an SMP Celeron over a single Duron..
This has been said many times before, but since we can read the article 3 times, I'll say it again...
Many may argue, rightly or wrongly, that it was a terrible mistake for Corel to enter the Linux market. Personally, I think it was a good move at the wrong time. They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
But it was still a good idea. If they had stayed the course and shifted their base market of law firms over to Linux, they would have saved their base the unnecessary costs of Windows, while at the same time preventing Microsoft from pulling the OS API rug out from under them once they become a serious threat to MSOffice again. The shift to Linux was nothing more than self defense for Corel... they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
But Corel has been rudderless for far too long. They've attempted a Java office suite which went nowhere. And now, they attempted to enter the Linux market rather than use Linux to shift their own market to their own turf, and now they're back to square one. What a shame, since WordPerfect is still a damn good wordprocessor.
I've been using Applix Office at home, and I like it a lot. But moving files from home to work, where they have Windows, is tough.
It's a wonder that they existed this long without full compatibility with Office...not that Office is the best, but it's definitely the most common.
Actually, it's toughest in the other direction (work to home) because I have to remember to save files in earlier file formats; as usual, I am the weakest link in this chain. What I would really love is one of those programs that seem to grow up around the Mac ecosphere to translate PC files into other files -- even just to plain ol' text would be good if it would help me read it.
That said, one major flaw for me is the non-portability of spreadsheets with certain types of formulas in them between Applix's spreadsheet program and Excel.
Exactly...corporations (when they get big enough) tend towards keeping down the other companies that might steal a chunk of their market share
Multinational corporations essentially control governments - Once we had Standard Oil and United Fruit (United Fruit liked to send marines to Latin American republics when they got uppity), now we have Monsanto (destroying the agricultural viability of small farms in africa by trying to westernize their methods and force genetically engineered crops on people) or Shell (who don't flinch when governments exterminate indigenous peoples like the Ogoni of Nigeria to make room for their pipelines).
There have always been people on the fringes of society outside of easy control, be they the Hobo radicals of the IWW back in the day speading sarcastic activism or haX0rs today making things tough for AT&T or Earth First!ers utterly humiliating the IMF and World Bank when they assume they have everyone's tacit approval in industrialized nations because they're "creating markets".
Again, things have changed precious little in the past one hundred years - the technology has just changed. Instead of a dull, meanial job in front of a factory machine, we're given a dull, meanial job in a cubicle in a call center.
And just because today's biggest and most talked-about companies happen to be in the computer industry doesn't mean they're doing anything differently than the companies before them.
Rambus is a design for a memory system from Rambus Inc. It is extraordinarily fast on paper. Intel chose their design and decided to support it on a lot of their new products.
The implementation took a long time to get around to getting around. It is now here. Intel bet a LOT on Rambus, because it would give them significant control over a lot of markets. (IE: They own rambus designs)
Rambus is significantly different from the DRAM used commonly today. It requires changes to how stuff is laid out on the motherboard. And it is manufactured differently, to very demanding tolerances.
It is now in production and is competing with DDR-DRAM, which uses existing manufacturing processes, generally works with existing chipsets, and is easy to support. And it doesn't require a fan setup for the memory alone. And runs far cooler. And gives almost as good performance when set up correctly as a RAMBUS setup. And is also capable of being manufactured in quantity, whereas RDRAM is extremely difficult to manufacture. DDRDRAM is also about a fifth of the cost of a RDRAM setup.
You do the math, and read up on it a bit.. I think you will agree that for all intents and purposes (read: mainstream pcs, servers, et al), Rambus is DOA.
that's the greatest idea ever. the reason mp3 became so widespread in the first place is that it's sounds almost the same, but the size is so much smaller. if everyone had unlimited bandwidth, they'd have started trading.wav files from the start.
come on, ppl...what is the big deal here? this is the same as the Napster issue, the same as the open source thing, and the fact that anyone can still muster any sort of enthusiasm against it surprises me. as has been stated numerous times is numerous response threads, this company has to maintain control of their IP. they _have_ to. and it's entirely within their rights to do so. why does everyone start whining about it? MP3s are not open source. The Iron Chef is not open source. Only open source is open source, and you cannot apply the GNU license to other things! Besides, all true fans know that regardless of whether fansites are shut down, you're still a fan.
Oh, hogwash. If this was the main issue, then the money side of things wouldn't matter. But really, most of them are more interested in living in mansions, driving expensive cars, and boinking supermodels. Can't blame 'em for that...
then this says more about people producing the music you choose to listen to than anything else.
you know what? sisqo (for example) probably is more interested in a mansion/car/supermodel. so don't buy/listen to his music
everyone's missing the point: artists recieve no compensation when people distribute ripped mp3s of their music. i'm not talking about ripping your collection to your hd to make a huge playlist. i'm not against mp3 as a format. but the way people have latched onto it and justify it over and over again to avoid admitting they don't like to pay for music is sickening.
not all music is over commercialized. there are bands who have contracts with major labels who still invest effort, talent and time into their albums...buy those instead.
because while you're pirating your mp3s to send "a message of discontent to huge record labels worldwide", smaller bands are getting dropped all over the place because they're not selling 15 billion singles a second.
the main issue here is theft...the fact is music is not like software. too many people, katz included, are viewing music as a commodity. and yes, that's the way it's been fed to people, but at the same time, there's a reason why artists create albums. well-crafted songs are one thing, but an album represents a hour-ish long attempt to create a coherent/cohesive mood and statement. by pirating mp3s, ppl create a situation that debases all artists, bringing (insert your favorite band here) down to the level of a sisqo or christina aguilera.
just because the law can't keep up with looters during a riot, doesn't mean that guy carrying away a tv on his shoulder is remotely morally or ethically right to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called a licence agreement. Read their current ones and you'll see how far a lawsuit for damages would go.
That's the whole issue...at what point is a license agreement just a joke? Maybe it's mildly valid for a copy of photoshop or something similar..
But my bank's website doesn't make me agree that occasionally a bill payment won't go through. If you went to a real bank and had to sign a license agreement saying "just in case one of our bank tellers is drunk, we accept no responsibility for lost or misplaced payments" you'd laugh and find a new bank.
It really is quite simple. Anyone who puts their important data in one place, at the mercy of one system, with one login service is putting all their eggs in one basket. It provides a single point of failure that would be unacceptable to any corporate user. So why would private users fall for it?
.Net if you like, but make sure you have a contingency plan. Just like if you are a one-car family, you better make sure you have an alternative method of getting to work if it dies one morn.
.Net or Passport are down?
Use Passport and
With most utilities, if they fail, you can sue for damages. E.g., if my electricity provider has an outage that lets my freezer defrost and ruins my food, I can get damages to repalce the spoiled food. How will MS deal with users who end up paying extra interest because they couldn't complete bank payments on time because
read about this 6 months ago!
t h/ docs/traf012100.htm
here
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/indep
for goatse-wary slashppl
What would the big deal be for ActiveX support on linux?
The obvious answer: the same as its use on Microsoft platforms; expose
COM's binary, language-independent, object interface standards.
(The networked version of this, DCOM, uses RPC for transport.)
COM is at the heart of what Microsoft has called OLE these many years,
and as time has passed there has been semantic erosion of their distinction.
ActiveX controls are the successor to OLE controls (*.OCX), which are
the successor to Visual Basic (*.VBX) controls. Such controls are the
bread-and-butter of contemporary corporate PC software development,
as well as the business of a thriving industry of third-party control makers,
not the least of which is Marietta's MicroHelp, recently acquired by an
ambitious Internet firm.
COM objects are semantically equivalent to Java classes, but also
provide the ability to discover what interfaces exist at run time,
via QueryInterface. This important feature is being introduced to Java
through the JavaBeans Spec 1.0, via the BeanInfo class ("introspection").
To quote Microsoft, (May 23, 1996 Draft)
"The integration of Java and COM can be achieved by just making
changes to the Java VM, and not adding any new keywords or
constructs to the Java language."
Visual J++ 1.1 includes Wizards that allow you to use ActiveX objects as
Java classes and vice-versa.
However, COM objects are instantiated with native code, not
on a "platform-independent" Java Virtual Machine. Cross-platform
congruence or differentiation depends on the implementation
of the object on each platform, rather than on the implementation
of the Java Virtual Machine on each platform. In this aspect, one might
compare ActiveX objects to Netscape plug-ins, rather than Java classes.
Sure, you can disable the popups through javascript or a proxy, but a more longterm solution:
Don't click them.
They'll die on their own (as they are beginning to do, if you've noticed that dot-commers with business models based on page view ad sales...are in the outs investment-wise).
Another way: don't keep silent when your company uses them on its web sites -- complain loudly...
FWIW: i agree w/ the parent post.
just read slashdot at 0 and read all the rascist shit that ppl just post for fun, unrelated to whatever topic is being discussed.
all replies to this thread, and its moderation as flamebait show me that here are ppl who will argue all day that alewando is projecting his/her internal biases on cliff, but it's a fact. to say these kids as "inner-city" and assume that there is some inherent quality that they share (whether in terms of intelligence or economic status or whatever) is both classist and racist.
i wonder when most slashdotters will wake up to the fact that a lot of ppl have prefabricated notions of what it 'means' to be a certain race, and while not on the same scale as the KKK, it's still racism.
keep your opinions, but question what's being fed to you. last week in toronto, there was a front page story in the NATIONAL newspaper about government beureaucracy causing the deportation of a polish immigrant family that underpaid some immigration fee by $50.
ask yourself why that's front page news, when non-white families w/ similar or even more tragic stories are deported daily.
and at one point, yes, i would have argued it over and over like most of the replies to this thread, but at some point, you must recognize that not everybody even cares enough to think about motivations for people's behaviour, but that maybe you should.
so, all i'm saying is think about it. put that rational thought that everybody here seems to prize so much to good use and realize your own motivations and the realities that ppl can't be lumped into categories based on superficial similarities.
hopefully someone'll read this, as for how many years it'll take to be able to salvage the damage to my karma, that's another story...
I really fail to see how anyone can argue that age limits on violent and explicit material are anything other than a sane policy. It has been shown that children are more vulnerable to these things than adults, and so limiting their exposure to these kinds of materials is nothing more than caring for our future.
When violence becomes a part of society that is tolerated, then we must make sure that it does not become accepted. Currently American culture, such as it is, tolerates violence as being an inevitable consequcne of allowing firearms to be possessed by people, but it hasn't gotten to the stage yet where people accept violence as a tool for getting ahead in life. So, in order to make sure that people don't begin to perceive violence as a valid socio-economic tool of advancement, we need to make sure that children don't perceive violence as being "cool".
These kinds of laws, whilst perhaps not being strictly Constituional, are very necessary. We cannot let our children fall into the trap that violence is good, and nothing shouls be allowed to stand in the way of ensuring this. When the Constitution was drafted, if they'd have realised the threats that children face everyday, I'm sure they'd have realised that sometimes, freedom of speech is not an abolute concept.
while i tend to see pretty much constant complaining about HP hardware (printers, etc.) in linux, everyone seems to forget that Hewlett Packard has been a pretty good supporter of linux for a while now...
i recently picked up another computer for my house and got a great deal on a Kayak PII-450 w/ SCSI. At first I was scared about hardware support but there's extensive documentation about all elements of their boxes.
hp-linux.org was a great resource for me, as well as HP's own documentation on linux support for various models.
and in case you're wondering, that site also has info on making stuff like your printers work. so stop whining and check it out, or for christ's sake write your own!
one question: who is this David Desrosiers guy?
The Bottom Line is that, if this is true, no matter how many lawyers Sony has, they're violating the license on POSE. and they can fight it all day, but in the end, they'll have to release their additions to the source.
moral of the story: big companies don't get open source. see the apple article posted today...it's a paradigm so far removed from their culture that they ignore it.
so if the FSF has to take them to court to enforce it, then they will...take this opportunity to throw some $$ their way.
http://www.fsf.org/help/donate.html
OT: gpl violations aside, that was probably the _most_ obnoxious email i've ever read.
"So as I'm sitting here working and playing with my Palm, people
tend to whip theirs out and play with it, as if to say "Hey, I'm one of
you, look, I have a palm too..!"
ya. because everybody's so concerned with impressing this guy.
Compressed Data: Law Newsletter Has to Sneak Past Filters
There is nothing wrong with David Carney's spell-checker. It is on purpose that in his e-mail newsletter, Tech Law Journal, he misspells words like sex (sez) and pornography (pormography) and camouflages the names of computer viruses. If he did not, he explained last week in an editor's note, his journal would never get past the computers at readers' offices that screen incoming e-mail messages for references to sex or network security.
Mr. Carney's newsletter, which is sent daily to more than a thousand subscribers, covers legal and regulatory issues affecting the computer and Internet industries. Most of its readers are at law firms, universities or government agencies -- the institutions most likely to have powerful filtering software on their e- mail server computers.
The trouble is, these filters are dumb: they can't tell the difference between a sexual solicitation sent by e-mail and a news story about restrictions on online pornography or between a computer virus and a story about a computer virus. "I often advise my readers to get a free e-mail account at Yahoo or Hotmail, so they can get the newsletter at home," Mr. Carney said. "It's the only way to avoid these blocks."
Many readers of Tech Law Journal have accepted the misspellings as a necessary evil, but at least one sees a larger issue at stake.
"It's a sad day for journalism -- and for the American public -- when a news organization has to resort to consciously misspelling words in order to reach its readers," said Judith F. Krug, a journal subscriber and director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, in an interview via e-mail.
"This highlights the problem with filters," she wrote. "They're incapable of distinguishing between information that is innocuous and information that is objectionable, let alone making the fine distinction between information that is constitutionally protected and that which is not."
Online content filters that screen e-mail or restrict access to certain Web sites have inspired a variety of creative work-arounds -- some legal and some not. Last year, Beaver College in Glenside, Pa., decided to change its name to Arcadia University, in part because some filters intended to screen out sexually explicit material blocked access to its site. And recently, when the music file- sharing service Napster was ordered to block the access it provided to copyrighted music, some users began renaming titles in a form of pig Latin to confuse the filter.
Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and consultant who has studied filters, is well aware of their limitations. "Ironically," he said, "people are being forced to work around a computer's natural stupidity."
I haven't seen this system in action yet, but it's hard to believe that anything running on top of an OS like Linux is going to have satisfactory performance for Amiga end users.
Linux has a lot of neat things going for it, and x86 boxes are awefully fast these days, especially compared to 68k-based Amiga hardware. But put a 700 MHz Linux box right next to a 50 MHz Amiga (which is exactly the situation that I have at home) and then copy a few megabytes from a CD to hard disk. See how slow the GUI gets? Now try it on the Amiga. Ah, smooooooth.
People tell me that it's a good "feature" when a modern dynamic-scheduling OS keeps low-priority processes from starving even if it means that high-priority processes have to slow down a bit. Well, once you've used an Amiga, you know that "feature" is worse than useless. Maybe it makes sense for servers, but if you're running a GUI and there's a user sitting there who expects the machine to be snappy, it just doesn't work. (Low priority tasks are supposed to starve when the GUI needs to update! I don't give a rat's ass if copying a 20 Megabyte file takes an extra 400 milliseconds, but I sure as hell do care if the GUI ever makes me wait that long!)
This was one of the reasons that QNX Neutrino looked so promising. With a realtime kernel, you should be able to guarantee that the GUI keeps up with human perception. QNX Neutrino had the potention to meet (or even exceed!) Amiga users' expectations. With something like Linux, the GUI's responsiveness is held hostage by the machine's load. (And apparently even an I/O bound process is enough to screw things up?!)
Let's hope that Tao avoids the same technological mistake that Windows and Unix made. Otherwise, it seems unlikely that users of ten-year-old Amigas will be interested in downgrading to the "technology" of the 21st century.
You can find out more about OLED from the company working on it, Universal Display Corporation
steven seagal is almost 50 years old.
is anyone surprised he's beyond learning how to do a new type of movie?
whatever...yet another article on overclocking. but I'll take more CPU's and better components over a faster CPU any day.
I've had my Dual 466 Celeron for over a year and a half now, and it's absolutely fantastic, and rock-solid stable. Sure, I've upgraded the RAM over that time from 128MB to 512, but through it all I've felt no need to upgrade the processor(s)
The motherboard recently went south on me and I had to replace it. I got looking around and noticed that Asus now has a dual PIII board for ~$230CDN. I ended up just RMAing this board, but I know when I do eventually need to upgrade there's no WAY I'll be going back to a single processor board.
If you're running Linux, FreeBSD or Win2k (or even BeOS) an SMP system makes a world of difference under heavy load. Recompiling? Encoding MP3's? Running VMWare? These operations are sped up very noticeably.
For people looking for a new machine: Save your precious dollars on the fastest processor. Fill up on RAM, get a good video card, and get an SMP board. I'd rather have 2 800MHz chips than a 1.6GHz any day of the week.
AMD: I'd rather get an SMP chipset out of you than Yet Another "Fastest" Processor. I'd much rather own a Duron or Athalon than a crappy Celeron or PIII, but I'd take an SMP Celeron over a single Duron..
This has been said many times before, but since we can read the article 3 times, I'll say it again...
Many may argue, rightly or wrongly, that it was a terrible mistake for Corel to enter the Linux market. Personally, I think it was a good move at the wrong time. They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
But it was still a good idea. If they had stayed the course and shifted their base market of law firms over to Linux, they would have saved their base the unnecessary costs of Windows, while at the same time preventing Microsoft from pulling the OS API rug out from under them once they become a serious threat to MSOffice again. The shift to Linux was nothing more than self defense for Corel... they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
But Corel has been rudderless for far too long. They've attempted a Java office suite which went nowhere. And now, they attempted to enter the Linux market rather than use Linux to shift their own market to their own turf, and now they're back to square one. What a shame, since WordPerfect is still a damn good wordprocessor.
I've been using Applix Office at home, and I like it a lot. But moving files from home to work, where they have Windows, is tough.
It's a wonder that they existed this long without full compatibility with Office...not that Office is the best, but it's definitely the most common.
Actually, it's toughest in the other direction (work to home) because I have to remember to save files in earlier file formats; as usual, I am the weakest link in this chain. What I would really love is one of those programs that seem to grow up around the Mac ecosphere to translate PC files into other files -- even just to plain ol' text would be good if it would help me read it.
That said, one major flaw for me is the non-portability of spreadsheets with certain types of formulas in them between Applix's spreadsheet program and Excel.
Exactly...corporations (when they get big enough) tend towards keeping down the other companies that might steal a chunk of their market share
Multinational corporations essentially control governments - Once we had Standard Oil and United Fruit (United Fruit liked to send marines to Latin American republics when they got uppity), now we have Monsanto (destroying the agricultural viability of small farms in africa by trying to westernize their methods and force genetically engineered crops on people) or Shell (who don't flinch when governments exterminate indigenous peoples like the Ogoni of Nigeria to make room for their pipelines).
There have always been people on the fringes of society outside of easy control, be they the Hobo radicals of the IWW back in the day speading sarcastic activism or haX0rs today making things tough for AT&T or Earth First!ers utterly humiliating the IMF and World Bank when they assume they have everyone's tacit approval in industrialized nations because they're "creating markets".
Again, things have changed precious little in the past one hundred years - the technology has just changed. Instead of a dull, meanial job in front of a factory machine, we're given a dull, meanial job in a cubicle in a call center.
And just because today's biggest and most talked-about companies happen to be in the computer industry doesn't mean they're doing anything differently than the companies before them.
Rambus is a design for a memory system from Rambus Inc. It is extraordinarily fast on paper. Intel chose their design and decided to support it on a lot of their new products.
The implementation took a long time to get around to getting around. It is now here. Intel bet a LOT on Rambus, because it would give them significant control over a lot of markets. (IE: They own rambus designs)
Rambus is significantly different from the DRAM used commonly today. It requires changes to how stuff is laid out on the motherboard. And it is manufactured differently, to very demanding tolerances.
It is now in production and is competing with DDR-DRAM, which uses existing manufacturing processes, generally works with existing chipsets, and is easy to support. And it doesn't require a fan setup for the memory alone. And runs far cooler. And gives almost as good performance when set up correctly as a RAMBUS setup. And is also capable of being manufactured in quantity, whereas RDRAM is extremely difficult to manufacture. DDRDRAM is also about a fifth of the cost of a RDRAM setup.
You do the math, and read up on it a bit.. I think you will agree that for all intents and purposes (read: mainstream pcs, servers, et al), Rambus is DOA.
that's the greatest idea ever. the reason mp3 became so widespread in the first place is that it's sounds almost the same, but the size is so much smaller. if everyone had unlimited bandwidth, they'd have started trading .wav files from the start.
come on, ppl...what is the big deal here?
this is the same as the Napster issue, the same as the open source thing, and the fact that anyone can still muster any sort of enthusiasm against it surprises me.
as has been stated numerous times is numerous response threads, this company has to maintain control of their IP. they _have_ to. and it's entirely within their rights to do so. why does everyone start whining about it?
MP3s are not open source.
The Iron Chef is not open source.
Only open source is open source, and you cannot apply the GNU license to other things!
Besides, all true fans know that regardless of whether fansites are shut down, you're still a fan.
Oh, hogwash. If this was the main issue, then the money side of things wouldn't matter. But really, most of them are more interested in living in mansions, driving expensive cars, and boinking supermodels. Can't blame 'em for that...
then this says more about people producing the music you choose to listen to than anything else.
you know what? sisqo (for example) probably is more interested in a mansion/car/supermodel. so don't buy/listen to his music
everyone's missing the point: artists recieve no compensation when people distribute ripped mp3s of their music. i'm not talking about ripping your collection to your hd to make a huge playlist. i'm not against mp3 as a format. but the way people have latched onto it and justify it over and over again to avoid admitting they don't like to pay for music is sickening.
not all music is over commercialized.
there are bands who have contracts with major labels who still invest effort, talent and time into their albums...buy those instead.
because while you're pirating your mp3s to send "a message of discontent to huge record labels worldwide", smaller bands are getting dropped all over the place because they're not selling 15 billion singles a second.
here i go, replying to a signal11 post...sigh.
the main issue here is theft...the fact is music is not like software. too many people, katz included, are viewing music as a commodity. and yes, that's the way it's been fed to people, but at the same time, there's a reason why artists create albums. well-crafted songs are one thing, but an album represents a hour-ish long attempt to create a coherent/cohesive mood and statement. by pirating mp3s, ppl create a situation that debases all artists, bringing (insert your favorite band here) down to the level of a sisqo or christina aguilera.
just because the law can't keep up with looters during a riot, doesn't mean that guy carrying away a tv on his shoulder is remotely morally or ethically right to do so.
i believe www.copyleft.net is selling t-shirts w/ the actual source written on the back. www.copyleft.net
I left out nothing!
your line's the exact same except with a pipe to less...
it is however interesting that you can use dns records to transmit information.
for those to lazy to cut and paste that line into an x-term, it will print out the source of deCSS...anywhere, anytime.
kinda crazy.
as well, the login 'cypherpunk', password 'cypherpunk' has worked more me many times on many sites...