Me and some of the people I know use Skype and we use Skype for mostly one reason: There's a mac version, and we need to have an application that both the PC and mac users in the circle can use.
Linux support probably doesn't hurt them either.
And I think they're pretty well on the way to taking over the world, I saw a massage parlor here in Jyväskylä, Finland (not a very big city) with a Skype address on the window... When they become widespread enough, even a clearly superior product will have some trouble taking them out.
If we could have a choice of more than one application to use for this purpose, that would be pretty cool.
I'm not even a very communicative person, but most of the time I have IRC (or SSH to a shell running IRC) open, then some new candy coloured multipurpose messenger (or just ICQ), then Skype for audio, and if the OS happens to be Windows then also MSN Messenger for video. And then maybe also one of those new programs that keep popping up all the time.
I guess a new killer app that would kill off a few of these old protocols would be nice, but most of the time all these new choices just keep piling up on top of each other, and even if they have overlapping purposes they rarely manage to make each other obsolete.
And of course the biggest problem with all the new choices is going to the relatives houses and installing the damn things and convincing them to click on this instead of that.
No no, that's another story. A city in Italy is looking to move away from proprietary vendors as well. Their official browser is based on Mozilla, and is called FIRENZEFOX.
I would have to shoot anyone who would try to steal one of our racks and put it on display.
After it's old and outdated (2-5 years?) it might well end up on display at your cafeteria or something. They'll roll in a brand new rack with a few more tera-FLOPS to make you and your department drop your guns.
You are moving in to more of what I call "bullshit art". It's real name is modern art and the last thing it is is art. Writing your name on an old toilet seat and a half eaten wax apple is not art.
I saw these old people outside the art museum once. The old ladies wanted to go in, but a grumpy old gentleman protested loudly: "This modern art has become so horrible, I don't understand it at all, I want to get away from here as fast as possible, blah blah"... So they went away. The exhibition was those centuries old religious Russian paintings of people with rings on their heads...
I doubt that old man would have liked the old paintings any better, but I found his comments about modern art in that context funny somehow. And yours too.
Sure, the art museum or some private gallery could be full of half-eaten apples, or dusty old paintings, or even routers and wires. Sometimes it's hard to understand, and sometimes it's just too plain obivious to be interesting or funny... But if you've already decided that you're not going to understand it and you're better off without it (which is how some people still feel about computers or the internet) then you should also accept that what you're ignoring might include something that someone might be able to enjoy.
A while ago in this town, a lady in the culture board tried to cut the funding from the computer museum association, because she completely fails to see old computers as anything other than old metal junk. On the other hand, at the computer museum, the way the old guys were talking about the art people was exactly the old-guy attitude ("they appreciate old bicycles when they're brought in by someone famous" etc)...
I don't know where I'm going with this.:-) People just don't understand people.
Yeah, some moron gets paid big bucks to do it, but that's because there are bigger morons out there who fall for it.
If they knew how much morons are paying for software, they would be jealous of us too.
Now I am not saying that someone can't do something artistic with a router and fiber, I am just saying, that's not what Bob does. It's beautiful because it is functional. Art has no real function but to be beautiful. Sounds like some of the girls I have dated.
Or "sounds like that TAC-2 joystick I keep on the shelf" or "sounds like that 386 motherboard I nailed to the wall".... I don't think collecting non-functional art is that much different from not throwing away the beautiful things in your life that used to be functional.:-)
Cell phones were created to talk to people. The idea of entering text with a numeric keypad was a wart they hung on the side of the phone when they realized that a full keyboard wouldn't work.
I think I've heard a story that SMS was indeed an accidental feature of the GSM protocol, like a single packet of speech data just happens to be big enough for those 160 characters... And they obiviously had the "text with numpad"-functions in the phones already, for typing names in the phonebook etc. But no-one dreamt of full keyboards at that point, and no-one expected people to start using SMS as an alternative for speech communication. But people just started doing that (despite the pricing), and that's when the keyboard kling-ons (and reasonably working solutions, like the Nokia Communicator?) started to show up...
Can I take it somewhere else and listen it? Can I pass it onto my friend?
From TFA:
"For $9.99 a month, users will get an unlimited number of songs each month. For another $5, they can transfer the tunes to selected portable music players."
If transfering to portables is $5 then passing to friends is probably out of the question.:-(
I wonder what those "selected portable music players" are. The whole huge variety of them that support.RA?
The 8-Bit Construction Set record is also the first ever use of the vinyl recording medium for software distribution - the inside tracks are audio data which can be dubbed to cassette tape and booted in your respective atari or commodore 8-bit computers (guinness world record for first-ever vinyl-to-software programming is currently pending)
I coded a small C64 demo and put it in a datatrack on my vinyl "Tero: Cracker's Revenge" on Rikos Records (http://www.rikosrecords.com/) a couple of years ago... Anyway, we already knew it was an old idea, I'm told there was an Apple 2 datatrack in 1981 on a record called "Kone kertoo" by a band called "Argon". I'm too lazy to read the full thread but there's probably earlier examples in the world as well... I'm pretty sure the Guinness record people will find out:-)
I guess the court case will show if the donate-button was crossing the line, but I bet it also helped that they had user registration and quotas. From the user stats the police could easily pick out the people who shared the most stuff, and aren't these probably the same 30 or so people, who's homes were invaded and computers confiscated (and some of whom were maybe also responsible for running the torrent-webpage)? So they CAN pin these people with actually illegally sharing copyrighted stuff, and not just "providing links to some kind of content"...
It doesn't say it was Microsoft that filed anything, maybe that was just one of the several fake news about this:-)... But anyway it says the infringement was first reported to the police in January 2003.
>>At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
>That's what the Finnish police themselves say.
IIRC the Finnish police said they acted because copyright holders (Microsoft) had filed some kind of complaint against the site (FinReactor) back in 2002...
Slashdot Mirror
If the main use of your computer is to surf porn at work, you will always hover your left pinky over 'Ctrl' and middle finger over 'W' out of habit.
And I think they're pretty well on the way to taking over the world, I saw a massage parlor here in Jyväskylä, Finland (not a very big city) with a Skype address on the window... When they become widespread enough, even a clearly superior product will have some trouble taking them out.
I'm not even a very communicative person, but most of the time I have IRC (or SSH to a shell running IRC) open, then some new candy coloured multipurpose messenger (or just ICQ), then Skype for audio, and if the OS happens to be Windows then also MSN Messenger for video. And then maybe also one of those new programs that keep popping up all the time.
I guess a new killer app that would kill off a few of these old protocols would be nice, but most of the time all these new choices just keep piling up on top of each other, and even if they have overlapping purposes they rarely manage to make each other obsolete.
And of course the biggest problem with all the new choices is going to the relatives houses and installing the damn things and convincing them to click on this instead of that.
No no, that's another story. A city in Italy is looking to move away from proprietary vendors as well. Their official browser is based on Mozilla, and is called FIRENZEFOX.
...is it art?
I saw these old people outside the art museum once. The old ladies wanted to go in, but a grumpy old gentleman protested loudly: "This modern art has become so horrible, I don't understand it at all, I want to get away from here as fast as possible, blah blah"... So they went away. The exhibition was those centuries old religious Russian paintings of people with rings on their heads...
I doubt that old man would have liked the old paintings any better, but I found his comments about modern art in that context funny somehow. And yours too.
Sure, the art museum or some private gallery could be full of half-eaten apples, or dusty old paintings, or even routers and wires. Sometimes it's hard to understand, and sometimes it's just too plain obivious to be interesting or funny... But if you've already decided that you're not going to understand it and you're better off without it (which is how some people still feel about computers or the internet) then you should also accept that what you're ignoring might include something that someone might be able to enjoy.
A while ago in this town, a lady in the culture board tried to cut the funding from the computer museum association, because she completely fails to see old computers as anything other than old metal junk. On the other hand, at the computer museum, the way the old guys were talking about the art people was exactly the old-guy attitude ("they appreciate old bicycles when they're brought in by someone famous" etc)...
I don't know where I'm going with this.
If they knew how much morons are paying for software, they would be jealous of us too.
Or "sounds like that TAC-2 joystick I keep on the shelf" or "sounds like that 386 motherboard I nailed to the wall".... I don't think collecting non-functional art is that much different from not throwing away the beautiful things in your life that used to be functional.
OK thanks, so does that mean that the 40,000th digit is "5"?
I'm Blender, baby! Please insert liquor
Shockingly, Microsoft has removed the anomaly from their shot, disguising it to look like just another house!
Maybe it will give a better view of this thing.
"lol you're all under arrest"
"omg what's the charge?"
"stfu, ianal"
My cock is much bigger than yours,
My cock can walk right through the door
With a feeling so pure..
It's got you screaming back for more!
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicms.gif
3 _120.jpg
http://i.timeinc.net/time/images/covers/110105052
If transfering to portables is $5 then passing to friends is probably out of the question.
I wonder what those "selected portable music players" are. The whole huge variety of them that support
I guess the court case will show if the donate-button was crossing the line, but I bet it also helped that they had user registration and quotas. From the user stats the police could easily pick out the people who shared the most stuff, and aren't these probably the same 30 or so people, who's homes were invaded and computers confiscated (and some of whom were maybe also responsible for running the torrent-webpage)? So they CAN pin these people with actually illegally sharing copyrighted stuff, and not just "providing links to some kind of content"...
Found a pretty good article about it in Finnish:
3 112086749679.html
:-)... But anyway it says the infringement was first reported to the police in January 2003.
http://www.dnainternet.fi/id/pelit/artikkelit/110
It doesn't say it was Microsoft that filed anything, maybe that was just one of the several fake news about this
>>At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
>That's what the Finnish police themselves say.
IIRC the Finnish police said they acted because copyright holders (Microsoft) had filed some kind of complaint against the site (FinReactor) back in 2002...
Those, and GNU Autotools