I know this is an unpopular position but I just can't stomach the use of Java, especially one that requires the Sun JVM (which is pretty much anything that uses Java)
Back when OpenOffice 2.x was being developed there was some controversy surrounding the Java requirement, then there was an announcement that the problem had been "solved" and that they were going to use GCJ or some other Java compiler. Apparently this never happened (maybe RMS was insisting that they call it "GNU/OpenOffice.org";-) ).
Hopefully once Java is finally open sourced there will be other real alternatives to the Sun JVM that don't suck quite as hard in the resource consumption department, until then OpenOffice is not something I'm going to consider.
I've got mixed feelings about this, I have no idea what my BMI is but I'm willing to assume it's well over 30, my weight is 100% my own doing OTOH my wife also has a weight problem and eats a relatively low fat diet with 1000-1500 calories daily.
For other issues like cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose, etc., diet doesn't have as much of an impact on those as many people think, for all that I eat terribly (stereotypical American diet) my cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose levels are all well within "normal" ranges. My father on the other hand exercises regularly (rides his bike to work for Pete's sake) eats extremely healthily (almost no fat, lots of hardcore vegetables, very little processed foods, etc. and his cholesterol and blood pressure are high enough that he's on medication for them (if that doesn't qualify as "not fair" I don't know what does).
Disclaimer: IANAD (I am not a developer) but for better or for worse, GPL3 is more restrictive than GPL2 (it's designed to be). I think at the very least this will cause people to re-evaluate the licenses they release their code under, some will switch to GPL3, some will stay with GPL2 (removing the "or any later version" from the license notice) and still others will opt for an altogether different open source license.
For a long time GPL has enjoyed it's position as the de-facto open source license, the development and controversy (FUD generated or not) surrounding GPL3 has made people a lot more aware of what was once taken for granted.
As for "brow beating" people into adopting GPL3, that of course remains to be seen, though RMS does arguably "brow beat" over the Linux naming issue so I could see how people could make the assumption (you know what they say about when you "assume") that he and the FSF will do the same over GPL3.
As for the grandparent's post, I don't think it's necessarily about people thriving on argument and chaos, I think it's about people not liking what they can, can't or have to do. And I agree with grandparent that the people who are open source developers are exactly those kind of people.
OK so your position is that all freezing of assets by the government is unconstitutional, an that it's unconstitutional no matter who is POTUS when it occurs?
Since this has been going on for so long, I would be surprised if the USSC hasn't already had to rule on the issue, be curious about that.
Back to my original point, the summary of the article (here on/.) specifically talks about seizing property, "By executive order, the Secretary of the Treasury may now seize the property of any person who undermines efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq" which isn't accurate. It also implies that George W. Bush came up with the idea, which is misleading.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily disagree, but to carry my previous analogy further you also can't carry on in society if you are locked up in jail waiting to go to trial no matter how innocent you may be.
What this summary and headline state is that the current president is doing something new that is in direct contravention to the US Constitution, but in reality this is nothing new at all and is no more or less constitutional than what the government has already been doing for many many decades.
I'm also not saying that this can't or won't be abused, I'm sure that it will like almost all of the other freedom eroding measures enacted since 9/11. But that simply doesn't change the fact that the title & summary are, without a doubt both inaccurate and misleading.
I disagree, when assets are frozen it means nobody can touch it, if it were seized it would be taken by the government and kept. After due process someone with frozen assets can get their assets back.
IMO it's no different than a murder suspect being held without bail while awaiting or during a trial, though it's true that "presumption of innocence" isn't specifically in the Constitution.
The US Government has been freezing the assets of those it determines to be "bad guys" for a long long time now, well before GWB was a twinkle in his mother eye. If this violates the 5th ammendment then we have been doing so for many decades.
This isn't about seizure of anything, it's about freezing of assets, something that has been going of for who knows how long (possibly since the 18th century)
The 100 song limit wasn't a carrier limitation it was an Apple limitation, enforced by iTunes. When Motorola came out with the ROKR E2 it eliminated iTunes and with it any arbitrary song limit, it was only limited by memory capacity.
Last year they (Apple) stopped supporting the ROKR altogether meaning ROKR users (all 10 of them) could no longer get new songs onto their phones.
The Motorla ROKR was designed to fail with the arbitrary 100 song capacity limit.
The last thing apple wanted was a successful ROKR that might have cannibalized sales from the iPOD and the Apple branded music phone that everybody knew would come out eventually.
If the ROKR were an Apple product, you could make a case that Apple "failed", in this case Apple succeeded, they held off the market until they could debut their own device that makes them money.
I know you are trying (successfully, I might add) to be funny but if you want to install an application that's not in the vast repository it's another story entirely.
The app developers often feel that everyone knows Linux like the back of their hand and uses the same distro that they do.
I had an issue last year I was playing with Ubuntu, I was trying to install some software but it was designed for Red Hat, after screwing around with "alien" and some other tools I finally gave up. Now granted this was more than a year ago so it could be much better now but for Linux to make it in the mainstream installing any app needs to be as easy as it is in Windows, either download a single file and "run it" or insert a CD and follow instructions. (Disclaimer: I despise autorun and disable it on my own system but most users have grown accustomed to it or have never known anything else).
At my last job my boss had an original HUMMER (AKA "H1") and he regularly (once a month or so) drove it on some hairy off-road treks. He even took a 2 week vacation to some godforsaken spot in Utah or Idaho or something for the off road trails they had there..
He had lots of pictures but it was quite rare for him to drive it to the office, maybe once a month or so, I think he mostly did it to keep everything working mechanics wise or if his regular car was in the shop.
Of course for every one of him there are probably 200 soccer moms using "HUMMER" H2s to drive to the mall and take little Timmy to the game.
If you are traveling 200KPH on the autobahn at least you are getting some sort of theoretically tangible benefit out of it, you are moving at a high rate of speed which means you spend less time traveling. Now granted unless your time is a whole lot more valuable than most people you don't gain enough saved time to offset to wasted resources but it's still better than the untold thousands of "HUMMER" drivers don't even have that, as the vehicles they drive (excluding the poor selling and now canceled original "H1" which had superior off-road vehicle capability) offer nothing in the way of tangible benefits or advantages over other, less costly and/or more capable vehicles.
Of course most of the people driving around 500HP sports cars don't need them and will never use them, but at least there are a few who will use them. For the "HUMMER" it's pure image and status and absolutely no substance.
Are you sure you were watching the same Firefly that I did? Because I don't understand your assessment.
I'm unaware of another show with even a remotely similar take on the space western theme. There were dozens of different sub-plots and twists that arced through the series that made it even more unique. Like BSG and very few others it had relatively realistic space physics and weapons.
Firefly was popular with a lot of people, especially the kind of people here on/. Since so many of us are fans of the show, and are still upset about the cancellation It's unlikely that we will stop talking about it anytime soon.
As for the reason for it's failure, I'd say the scheduling by Fox had more to do with that than anything else, they moved it at least twice and showed the episodes out of order, heck they showed the pilot last as the season/series finale! Personally I only saw the last show (the pilot) on Fox originally and didn't experience it fully until it was shown in order on SciFi a couple years ago. I mostly watched to see what the fuss was about but was very quickly hooked. Have you seen all (or more than a few) the episodes in order? If not perhaps that's why you don't appreciate it, or you could be just different than many of us.
Finally Consistently strong DVD sales indicate that there are more than a few geeks who like the show.
BTW I'm not going to criticize you for posting as AC, saying anything negative about Firefly here is frequently a recipe for loss of karma.
Heck your social security card says right non it not to laminate the darn thing. I doubt that any laws designed to prevent tampering with an ID document will have built into them exceptions for "protective film" or anything else. Laws like that aren't known for common sense or other kinds of exceptions.
You're forgetting that they would pass these kinds of laws for the children in which case all bets are off. If you are a dipsh*t state senator and it's and election year, you are trying to convince your constituents you are trying to stop the scourge of underage drinking it makes sense to authorize/order bartenders & the like to confiscate suspected fake IDs and only surrender them to the police. And who else is going to vote against it?
She is not citizen arresting anyone, she's simply confiscating their suspected fake ID, which is state or federal property, so she's not even confiscating their personal property. The person is free to leave anytime, if their ID is really legitimate they can simply request that the cops be called, she'd give the ID to the cops and they would give it back to the person if they deemed the ID to be legitimate.
Except if she calls the cops and waits for them to arrive to determine the validity of the ID, I don't think she'd be in trouble and there is probably some obscure law that says you can't "tamper" with an ID card (such as by putting lcd protector film on it).
The people with the actual fake IDs won't want the cops to come and inspect the fake ID, those with a wrongly confiscated legitimate ID will surely insist that the cops come so they can get their ID back.
IANAL and haven't done so much as one Google search to verify this but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some kind of safe harbor type provision in some law designed to curb underage drinking to protect people like bartenders or liquor store clerks from civil liability in case they mistakenly determine a legitimate ID to be fake.
I think Viacom is stating that YouTube should be pre-screening every video before allowing it to be accessed.
It's interesting because Google is one of the few companies who would have the ability to litigate this in court to set a precedent, where most companies would be forced to settle and probably shut themselves down because the cost of litigation and risk of damages can be so high.
So... they should just install them at big airports to protect all jets coming in or out.
Until a jet has an engine flame out on takeoff (already a dangerous situation where almost all planes have only two engines) and is targeted by the system thinking the engine failure is a missile.
In reality, as you already mentioned shoulder fired missiles don't have tremendous range, such a system, even if plane mounted would need to be disabled during takeoff & landing or it would risk targeting nearby aircraft. In reality at a lot of airports it would be pretty easy if one had something like that to just sit under the landing path and fire a missile from a few hundred feet below and the missile would hit in just a couple seconds.
IIRC Canada has a system like this, where part of the purchase price of blank media goes to royalties for stuff that is assumed to be copied to it.
If they charged a fee for each device and let us have free, legal file sharing (since we paid for the content with our device fee) it sounds semi reasonable.
Of course that's not what they are talking about so...
Not sure how effective that would be, can tell you my own experience.
A buddy of mine set up a Bayesian filter system so I decided to let him be the primary MX for my domains, I left my own (completely unfiltered) system online as the backup MX and was still getting tons of SPAM through the backup MX.
The SPAMmers were sending mail directly to the backup MX bypassing the primary (which accepts all mail, even sent to invalid E-Mail addresses) altogether. People (like me) often have their SPAM filtering on their primary mail system but don't have filtering (or as extensive filtering) on the backup path so the SPAMmers were targeting it.
The imperfect solution for me was to IP restrict my SMTP system to only accept mail from my buddy's mail server, in effect I have an invalid secondary MX record as it won't accept connections from other mail systems on the Internet. If my buddy's E-Mail systems has a problem I can just remove the IP restrictions without having to worry about waiting for DNS prorogation.
Almost all hotfixes released in the past few years have also been slipstreamable.
We use this for our XP and Windows 2003 media.
For XP you start with a clean (virgin) XP SP2 media, install it, then run Microsoft Update to determine what fixes Microsoft thinks that system needs. You manually download all those fixes and do a slipsream setup to integrate into your installation media.
The process is the same with Windows 2003 only we start with Windows 2003 R2 media.
The problem is that you pretty much have to start over from scratch every time you do it, because some hotfixes replace older hotfixes you are really best off repeating the process from the beginning.
We re-build our Windows 2003 media about every 6 months, it's been closer to a year since we did our XP build (we're overdue).
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is an unpopular position but I just can't stomach the use of Java, especially one that requires the Sun JVM (which is pretty much anything that uses Java)
Back when OpenOffice 2.x was being developed there was some controversy surrounding the Java requirement, then there was an announcement that the problem had been "solved" and that they were going to use GCJ or some other Java compiler. Apparently this never happened (maybe RMS was insisting that they call it "GNU/OpenOffice.org" ;-) ).
Hopefully once Java is finally open sourced there will be other real alternatives to the Sun JVM that don't suck quite as hard in the resource consumption department, until then OpenOffice is not something I'm going to consider.
Mark Goodman I think had one and was talking about how
"these are going to replace albums"
Damn I'm old.
I've got mixed feelings about this, I have no idea what my BMI is but I'm willing to assume it's well over 30, my weight is 100% my own doing OTOH my wife also has a weight problem and eats a relatively low fat diet with 1000-1500 calories daily.
For other issues like cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose, etc., diet doesn't have as much of an impact on those as many people think, for all that I eat terribly (stereotypical American diet) my cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose levels are all well within "normal" ranges. My father on the other hand exercises regularly (rides his bike to work for Pete's sake) eats extremely healthily (almost no fat, lots of hardcore vegetables, very little processed foods, etc. and his cholesterol and blood pressure are high enough that he's on medication for them (if that doesn't qualify as "not fair" I don't know what does).
Disclaimer: IANAD (I am not a developer) but for better or for worse, GPL3 is more restrictive than GPL2 (it's designed to be). I think at the very least this will cause people to re-evaluate the licenses they release their code under, some will switch to GPL3, some will stay with GPL2 (removing the "or any later version" from the license notice) and still others will opt for an altogether different open source license.
For a long time GPL has enjoyed it's position as the de-facto open source license, the development and controversy (FUD generated or not) surrounding GPL3 has made people a lot more aware of what was once taken for granted.
As for "brow beating" people into adopting GPL3, that of course remains to be seen, though RMS does arguably "brow beat" over the Linux naming issue so I could see how people could make the assumption (you know what they say about when you "assume") that he and the FSF will do the same over GPL3.
As for the grandparent's post, I don't think it's necessarily about people thriving on argument and chaos, I think it's about people not liking what they can, can't or have to do. And I agree with grandparent that the people who are open source developers are exactly those kind of people.
OK so your position is that all freezing of assets by the government is unconstitutional, an that it's unconstitutional no matter who is POTUS when it occurs?
Since this has been going on for so long, I would be surprised if the USSC hasn't already had to rule on the issue, be curious about that.
Back to my original point, the summary of the article (here on /.) specifically talks about seizing property, "By executive order, the Secretary of the Treasury may now seize the property of any person who undermines efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq" which isn't accurate. It also implies that George W. Bush came up with the idea, which is misleading.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily disagree, but to carry my previous analogy further you also can't carry on in society if you are locked up in jail waiting to go to trial no matter how innocent you may be.
What this summary and headline state is that the current president is doing something new that is in direct contravention to the US Constitution, but in reality this is nothing new at all and is no more or less constitutional than what the government has already been doing for many many decades.
I'm also not saying that this can't or won't be abused, I'm sure that it will like almost all of the other freedom eroding measures enacted since 9/11. But that simply doesn't change the fact that the title & summary are, without a doubt both inaccurate and misleading.
I disagree, when assets are frozen it means nobody can touch it, if it were seized it would be taken by the government and kept. After due process someone with frozen assets can get their assets back.
IMO it's no different than a murder suspect being held without bail while awaiting or during a trial, though it's true that "presumption of innocence" isn't specifically in the Constitution.
The US Government has been freezing the assets of those it determines to be "bad guys" for a long long time now, well before GWB was a twinkle in his mother eye. If this violates the 5th ammendment then we have been doing so for many decades.
This isn't about seizure of anything, it's about freezing of assets, something that has been going of for who knows how long (possibly since the 18th century)
The 100 song limit wasn't a carrier limitation it was an Apple limitation, enforced by iTunes. When Motorola came out with the ROKR E2 it eliminated iTunes and with it any arbitrary song limit, it was only limited by memory capacity.
Last year they (Apple) stopped supporting the ROKR altogether meaning ROKR users (all 10 of them) could no longer get new songs onto their phones.
The Motorla ROKR was designed to fail with the arbitrary 100 song capacity limit.
The last thing apple wanted was a successful ROKR that might have cannibalized sales from the iPOD and the Apple branded music phone that everybody knew would come out eventually.
If the ROKR were an Apple product, you could make a case that Apple "failed", in this case Apple succeeded, they held off the market until they could debut their own device that makes them money.
I know you are trying (successfully, I might add) to be funny but if you want to install an application that's not in the vast repository it's another story entirely.
The app developers often feel that everyone knows Linux like the back of their hand and uses the same distro that they do.
I had an issue last year I was playing with Ubuntu, I was trying to install some software but it was designed for Red Hat, after screwing around with "alien" and some other tools I finally gave up. Now granted this was more than a year ago so it could be much better now but for Linux to make it in the mainstream installing any app needs to be as easy as it is in Windows, either download a single file and "run it" or insert a CD and follow instructions. (Disclaimer: I despise autorun and disable it on my own system but most users have grown accustomed to it or have never known anything else).
At my last job my boss had an original HUMMER (AKA "H1") and he regularly (once a month or so) drove it on some hairy off-road treks. He even took a 2 week vacation to some godforsaken spot in Utah or Idaho or something for the off road trails they had there..
He had lots of pictures but it was quite rare for him to drive it to the office, maybe once a month or so, I think he mostly did it to keep everything working mechanics wise or if his regular car was in the shop.
Of course for every one of him there are probably 200 soccer moms using "HUMMER" H2s to drive to the mall and take little Timmy to the game.
If you are traveling 200KPH on the autobahn at least you are getting some sort of theoretically tangible benefit out of it, you are moving at a high rate of speed which means you spend less time traveling. Now granted unless your time is a whole lot more valuable than most people you don't gain enough saved time to offset to wasted resources but it's still better than the untold thousands of "HUMMER" drivers don't even have that, as the vehicles they drive (excluding the poor selling and now canceled original "H1" which had superior off-road vehicle capability) offer nothing in the way of tangible benefits or advantages over other, less costly and/or more capable vehicles.
Of course most of the people driving around 500HP sports cars don't need them and will never use them, but at least there are a few who will use them. For the "HUMMER" it's pure image and status and absolutely no substance.
Are you sure you were watching the same Firefly that I did? Because I don't understand your assessment.
I'm unaware of another show with even a remotely similar take on the space western theme. There were dozens of different sub-plots and twists that arced through the series that made it even more unique. Like BSG and very few others it had relatively realistic space physics and weapons.
Firefly was popular with a lot of people, especially the kind of people here on /. Since so many of us are fans of the show, and are still upset about the cancellation It's unlikely that we will stop talking about it anytime soon.
As for the reason for it's failure, I'd say the scheduling by Fox had more to do with that than anything else, they moved it at least twice and showed the episodes out of order, heck they showed the pilot last as the season/series finale! Personally I only saw the last show (the pilot) on Fox originally and didn't experience it fully until it was shown in order on SciFi a couple years ago. I mostly watched to see what the fuss was about but was very quickly hooked. Have you seen all (or more than a few) the episodes in order? If not perhaps that's why you don't appreciate it, or you could be just different than many of us.
Finally Consistently strong DVD sales indicate that there are more than a few geeks who like the show.
BTW I'm not going to criticize you for posting as AC, saying anything negative about Firefly here is frequently a recipe for loss of karma.
Heck your social security card says right non it not to laminate the darn thing. I doubt that any laws designed to prevent tampering with an ID document will have built into them exceptions for "protective film" or anything else. Laws like that aren't known for common sense or other kinds of exceptions.
You're forgetting that they would pass these kinds of laws for the children in which case all bets are off. If you are a dipsh*t state senator and it's and election year, you are trying to convince your constituents you are trying to stop the scourge of underage drinking it makes sense to authorize/order bartenders & the like to confiscate suspected fake IDs and only surrender them to the police. And who else is going to vote against it?
She is not citizen arresting anyone, she's simply confiscating their suspected fake ID, which is state or federal property, so she's not even confiscating their personal property. The person is free to leave anytime, if their ID is really legitimate they can simply request that the cops be called, she'd give the ID to the cops and they would give it back to the person if they deemed the ID to be legitimate.
Except if she calls the cops and waits for them to arrive to determine the validity of the ID, I don't think she'd be in trouble and there is probably some obscure law that says you can't "tamper" with an ID card (such as by putting lcd protector film on it).
The people with the actual fake IDs won't want the cops to come and inspect the fake ID, those with a wrongly confiscated legitimate ID will surely insist that the cops come so they can get their ID back.
IANAL and haven't done so much as one Google search to verify this but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some kind of safe harbor type provision in some law designed to curb underage drinking to protect people like bartenders or liquor store clerks from civil liability in case they mistakenly determine a legitimate ID to be fake.
I think Viacom is stating that YouTube should be pre-screening every video before allowing it to be accessed.
It's interesting because Google is one of the few companies who would have the ability to litigate this in court to set a precedent, where most companies would be forced to settle and probably shut themselves down because the cost of litigation and risk of damages can be so high.
So ... they should just install them at big airports to protect all jets coming in or out.
Until a jet has an engine flame out on takeoff (already a dangerous situation where almost all planes have only two engines) and is targeted by the system thinking the engine failure is a missile.
In reality, as you already mentioned shoulder fired missiles don't have tremendous range, such a system, even if plane mounted would need to be disabled during takeoff & landing or it would risk targeting nearby aircraft. In reality at a lot of airports it would be pretty easy if one had something like that to just sit under the landing path and fire a missile from a few hundred feet below and the missile would hit in just a couple seconds.
Because It's interesting, if I had mod points I'd make it a 5.
IIRC Canada has a system like this, where part of the purchase price of blank media goes to royalties for stuff that is assumed to be copied to it.
If they charged a fee for each device and let us have free, legal file sharing (since we paid for the content with our device fee) it sounds semi reasonable.
Of course that's not what they are talking about so...
He got an honorary doctorate in somethingorother a year or two ago. I'm too lazy to look up the specifics.
Just wait till it becomes fully operational.
Not sure how effective that would be, can tell you my own experience.
A buddy of mine set up a Bayesian filter system so I decided to let him be the primary MX for my domains, I left my own (completely unfiltered) system online as the backup MX and was still getting tons of SPAM through the backup MX.
The SPAMmers were sending mail directly to the backup MX bypassing the primary (which accepts all mail, even sent to invalid E-Mail addresses) altogether. People (like me) often have their SPAM filtering on their primary mail system but don't have filtering (or as extensive filtering) on the backup path so the SPAMmers were targeting it.
The imperfect solution for me was to IP restrict my SMTP system to only accept mail from my buddy's mail server, in effect I have an invalid secondary MX record as it won't accept connections from other mail systems on the Internet. If my buddy's E-Mail systems has a problem I can just remove the IP restrictions without having to worry about waiting for DNS prorogation.
Almost all hotfixes released in the past few years have also been slipstreamable.
We use this for our XP and Windows 2003 media.
For XP you start with a clean (virgin) XP SP2 media, install it, then run Microsoft Update to determine what fixes Microsoft thinks that system needs. You manually download all those fixes and do a slipsream setup to integrate into your installation media.
The process is the same with Windows 2003 only we start with Windows 2003 R2 media.
The problem is that you pretty much have to start over from scratch every time you do it, because some hotfixes replace older hotfixes you are really best off repeating the process from the beginning.
We re-build our Windows 2003 media about every 6 months, it's been closer to a year since we did our XP build (we're overdue).