Yeah. Fortunately, computers have the capability to print real letters, and I have no fear that we're big enough windbags to each type up 5 or 6. But that whole thing about running to the post office after it prints... I just don't think we could motivate the troops quite enough. Er, wait:
Hey! Linus Torvalds will be appearing in person at [insert name of your post office]!! Right now! Don't forget your letter!
Heh. That should do it. And it's posted on slashdot now, so you know it's right.
Hrmph. Maybe we should just send a million emails to mp3.com instead, telling them how stupid this campaign is and urging them to start a real letter writing campaign instead.
Come to think of it, why do we need a corporate sponsor for this? Let's just start the real letter writing petition. I'm sure slashdot readers can generate 10s of thousands of letters, anyway, if not a million.
A coworker of mine saw my post and told me that he's got DSL working fine where he is, which is kind of northwest, too. So maybe you're not out of luck:)
I live in Tucson, so I'll be watching these responses closely as well:) As of now, I've basically given up on DSL. PSN.net promised me they could do it, but USWest assured me that the phone lines in my building weren't good enough (I live in an apartment - doh!).
I was looking at alternatives, including cable modem, and one of the other things I came across was sprint wireless. The price looks about the same as DSL, and installation is free at the moment. However, the "details" section on their product page pretty much said "this is fast internet service." Thanks. Does anyone have any experience with this? What IS the service, actually? Does it depend on existing phone lines at all? If not, could be the way to go...
...and the prices as formulated so far are nothing
to write home about unless you think $20 for a CD is a fair deal.
Why should this part surprise anyone? This is kind of the point, after all. Encrypted media isn't meant as a discount alternative to non "protected" media, regardless of what they say to get you to adopt it.
The real point is to garauntee that you have to go through them to get your music. Then they can ramp up the preice however they want. New technologies that make media distribution cheaper and more efficient have never corresponded to cheaper media for consumers! At least not if you follow the rules.
Streaming
MP3s and video would sound like Star Trek to someone in the early 1980's!
Yeah. Streaming MP3s from the point of view of the early 1980s: "So, you mean it's like the radio, only it's bigger than a bread box and has a big-assed TV sitting on top? Good deal!"
Likewise, streaming video: "So it's like TV, only in a little teeny sub-section of a regular size TV, and the clips are a few seconds long and sometimes break up for no apparent reason."
Personally, I'm glad to be living in these enlightened times. I pity the poor saps from that primitive generation.
This is a very interesting discovery. As I understand it, one of the main "problems" with the linux driver (besides the fact that it was viciously stolen from DC:) was that it didn't send the ID, and therefore interfered with the user tracking. That's what DC had their pants in a knot about, right?
So, for implementing that, someone got a bunch of cease and desist letters and were threatened with lawsuits. Well, what if I tell you which wire to cut to have exactly the same effect? Is that a violation of their "intellectual property"? Is it an evil act of reverse engineering? Probably not; it seems like, once someone gives you a device, you're free to break it if you want. When will the justice system realize it's the same thing with software?
A ton of people are writing saying that mozilla should have started off as "just a browser" because "that's all I really want, a stable browser for UNIX." Unfortunately, that's not what there's a market for! These days most sites require javascript and/or java to run "correctly," and email and AIM are both really popular. So, saying that those things should wait until later is basically garaunteeing that mozilla doesn't gain any marketshare until later.
Of course, one could argue that hey, this is an OpenSource project, it's the platonic ideal of software development, we the hackers can have whatever we want. Well, yes. Go ahead and check out a mozilla build and roll your own. You can do that. The thing is, the people who actually ARE contributing to mozilla are still strongly tied to netscape (okay not all of 'em), and they have wide acceptance as a goal. Which means it needs all that stuff. I don't think they made a poor decision by including it.
/. has seen many articles about all the/stuff/ that gets thrown into Mozilla because it's "k3wl." Is there
any information on a Mozilla feature freeze? I don't see any on the site...
From an outside perspective, it's easy to say this. But, realistically, it's a lot more fun to code in new features than it is to fix bugs. I mean, anyone who develops professionally knows how much cooler it is when your manager says "hey, figure out a way to code in feature X" than when she says "could you take a look at bug A1.006 and check in the fixed code when you're done?" And then you have to sit there and stare at this stupid text box that sometimes pops up and sometimes doesn't for no apparent reason, and check out 4 modules you didn't even think were affected because they're not interacting properly... etc etc etc. Fixing bugs really sucks!
It kind of goes back to the theory that open source programmers are scratching their own itch when they contribute to a project. And most of the itches have been 90% scratched on this project. So who's still going to be contributing? Fortunately, there's a lot of effort still being put in by netscape; I don't think mozilla has really been depending much on huge fleets of independent developers. And we see how quickly it has gone so far. I wouldn't expect the pace to pick up now that the fun work is over.
Hmm. Someone has probably mentioned this while I was away reading the article:), but the real issue is that Sun's package compiles linux drivers into Solaris binaries [OT: if there wasn't the licensing issue, I would say 'nice hack'].
SO, it seems like it really should be the responsibility of the tool's users - who actually do the compiling of GPL code into Solaris binaries - to distribute driver source in their product. Which is their only legal obligation, right?
Here's the part that got me: "Neither Perens nor Becker has suggested how the GPL could, or should, be changed. But Becker knows one
thing - he wants Sun to stop peddling the kit, which he says includes 'explicit instructions on taking a copyrighted
work and converting it to unlicensed use with the Solaris operating system.'
"
Um... how? Does the Sun package say "Okay, now that you've compiled your drivers, zip them up real quick without source and rush it out the door! That'd be weird. Maybe just to play friendly, Sun could include a clause in their instructions about how to keep the output LEGAL under the GPL. Or am I missing the point? It seems like this is the real issue; Sun made a product that's legal, but not nice. Would it kill them to be nice, too?
Yeah, I guess this was bound to happen sooner or later. I was also thinking it would have been funny to distribute DeCSS in an ILOVEYOU sort of virus; then MPAA would have to sue everyone.
(BTW, why the heck is this under "movies?" I turned off movies stories months ago so I wouldn't have to see anymore Star Wars trailer links, now I'm missing out on DeCSS... wtf?)
I'm sick of stories that are all like "Intel vs. the overclockers" or "AMD vs. the overclockers" whenever a chip manufacturer changes their design like this. It's not some kind of conspiracy to take away your "freedom" to use your hardware however you want. It's about AMD releasing a stable product.
Remember, Intel just got burned a few weeks ago (remember the 1.13 G pIII recall?) by pretty much deliberately overclocking chips that couldn't take it. So, it really shouldn't come as any surprise that AMD would do some testing, figure out how fast these chips can run SAFELY, and then take steps to ensure that they run at those safe speeds.
Sure, they might lose a bit of favor with the geek crowd, but the money, especially concerning the Duron, is in run-of-the-mill discount PCs. Having them stay sturdy does a lot for AMD's bottom line. All hail the dollar!
Plasmic said: "Well, someone didn't read the article. Using the word "machine" in reference to this problem shows that your
clue level has dropped off the charts, as it has nothing to do with hardware."
Whoa, put away the flamethrower! I did indeed read the article. If I made a couple of mistakes, it doesn't mean I'm "off the charts." Because I wasn't entirely in error. Let's assume, for now, that it does indeed have nothing to do with hardware (caveat: keep reading). Even so, the 22 colors under discussion might not be right in your environment, because how many of us are using one of those browsers (NN, IE) on one of those platforms (Win, Mac)? Lots, but probably not all. So the color matching on your chosen platform (Linux, and HP like the parent post said) might be different yet again. Even without taking hardware into account, there are tons of variations that the article didn't account for. So, there's essentially no web-safe palette, at all. You could probably scope out your demographics, discover that ~50% of people are using some IE variant on win9x, and create a "web-safe-enough" palette.
But, if hardware makes no difference, then what about this (from page 5 of the article):
Admittedly, we got different
results in what would seem to be the same conditions: one Win9x
machine would fail for a color, and another such machine wouldn't.
We decided to play it safe. Really safe. We found that only 22 of the
216 colors we began with did not end up being shifted incorrectly in
at least one viewing environment...
And then they linked to the "reallysafe palette" from there. Why would windows machines with (presumably) similar software setups behave differently? Isn't it possible that it's somewhere in the video driver, and therefore at least partly hardware dependent?
I'm sorry. At my school, the labor and environmentalist activists were partying and getting all the girls. They
were the cool crowd. The professors liked them, and the administration lavished them with money. How
anyone can say that being a leftist activist in college is not cool is beyond me.
With all due respect, where the Hell did you go to school? Though my life, from Michigan to Arizona, it's always been the jocks and business majors who were "partying and getting all the girls." They would periodically stop ignoring activism in order to scoff at it.
And who are these english majors that are trendy activists for a living? I don't know any english majors who are making *shit* right now, except for me, who also majored in CS. Which is the only reason I have a job, BTW. I think maybe your rosy view of activism is the result of some strange upbringing... I can tell you it's not like that everywhere.
Right. I was wondering about that, too. Here's what they really did: run the 216-color palette on several different machines, each of which behaved differently. Whether because of disparate video card selection, or monitor selection, or whatever. Then they picked the 22 colors which happened to render correctly on all of their test systems.
But this doesn't mean they'll render correctly on your system! I'll bet if they'd picked a few more windows machines to test, they would've had even fewer "web safe" colors in the end. So what this article really does is destroy the concept of a web-safe palette altogether. The 22 colors are just arbitrary.
This gets really frustrating. I used the GIMP to design an old home page of mine using "Web-safe" GIFs. Then I took a look at it on a really nice monitor, and the colors were just horrible.
... adding that only the Mozilla project can save Netscape.
This is the kind of hyperbolic statement I wish would stop. I don't mean to troll, but isn't netscape pretty much dead anyway? Communicator 4.x is based on a years-old code base which has barely even been tweaked since 1998. And I saw some of this code before release (under NDA for a porting project) -- whoo-ee! It was a mess.
Which is why they switched codebases for the mozilla project. A bunch of netscape hackers couldn't even make the old netscape engine go. So they dumped it. It's gone. Le Netscape est mort; vive le Mozilla!
I don't want to use IE, either, even though it's been easier to develop for for the last couple of years (face it - DOM is a lot cleaner than the layer model). But let's stop clammoring for a netscape ressurection. In fact, since the Netscape brand is now just another AOL product, I don't think I'll use it at all. Straight up Mozilla for me, thanks, with a side order of hot-swappable skins.
Plus, how do they identify you to give you that different price? With a cookie on your hard drive! So, delete it. Hell, save a backup copy if you want.
Now go back to amazon as a new user. Are the newbie prices on your favorite items higher, or lower? My guess is your personalized prices will always be lower, because you're a good customer and they want you to come back.
If not, if they've been gouging you, sign up as a new user, get the good price, and send the evidence of rip-off to slashdot as a tell-all expose:)
The thing that bugs me about this letter is the way it keeps referring to the (alleged) offenders as "The Linux Community." Now, I never hacked any of those drivers; did you?
I'll bet most of us said "no." Now, while we might very well support the writers of that code, The suits at digital convergence shouldn't feel free to lump us all together as offenders. That lends itself to more anti-Linux FUD by the mainstream press who get ahold of this letter. I mean, imagine an article quoting this letter that said "Digital Convergence is upset by the actions of the Linux community..." instead of "Digital convergence is upset by the actions of several programmers..."
It's not that I think we should leave these guys high and dry; I think they deserve our support. But at the same time we must force Digital Convergence to say what they mean and not toss stereotypes around.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! Linus Torvalds will be appearing in person at [insert name of your post office]!! Right now! Don't forget your letter!
Heh. That should do it. And it's posted on slashdot now, so you know it's right.
Er, start a real letter writing campaign. How do you use that preview thingy again?
Come to think of it, why do we need a corporate sponsor for this? Let's just start the real letter writing petition. I'm sure slashdot readers can generate 10s of thousands of letters, anyway, if not a million.
A coworker of mine saw my post and told me that he's got DSL working fine where he is, which is kind of northwest, too. So maybe you're not out of luck :)
I was looking at alternatives, including cable modem, and one of the other things I came across was sprint wireless. The price looks about the same as DSL, and installation is free at the moment. However, the "details" section on their product page pretty much said "this is fast internet service." Thanks. Does anyone have any experience with this? What IS the service, actually? Does it depend on existing phone lines at all? If not, could be the way to go...
Why should this part surprise anyone? This is kind of the point, after all. Encrypted media isn't meant as a discount alternative to non "protected" media, regardless of what they say to get you to adopt it.
The real point is to garauntee that you have to go through them to get your music. Then they can ramp up the preice however they want. New technologies that make media distribution cheaper and more efficient have never corresponded to cheaper media for consumers! At least not if you follow the rules.
Streaming MP3s and video would sound like Star Trek to someone in the early 1980's!
Yeah. Streaming MP3s from the point of view of the early 1980s: "So, you mean it's like the radio, only it's bigger than a bread box and has a big-assed TV sitting on top? Good deal!"
Likewise, streaming video: "So it's like TV, only in a little teeny sub-section of a regular size TV, and the clips are a few seconds long and sometimes break up for no apparent reason."
Personally, I'm glad to be living in these enlightened times. I pity the poor saps from that primitive generation.
Oops, better not put it right ON the processor... that's where the 2000W, liquid nitrogen powered cooling unit goes.
Well, if mojo isn't cash, why does it need to be taxed? It's more of a barter system; I don't think there's tax on that.
So, for implementing that, someone got a bunch of cease and desist letters and were threatened with lawsuits. Well, what if I tell you which wire to cut to have exactly the same effect? Is that a violation of their "intellectual property"? Is it an evil act of reverse engineering? Probably not; it seems like, once someone gives you a device, you're free to break it if you want. When will the justice system realize it's the same thing with software?
Of course, one could argue that hey, this is an OpenSource project, it's the platonic ideal of software development, we the hackers can have whatever we want. Well, yes. Go ahead and check out a mozilla build and roll your own. You can do that. The thing is, the people who actually ARE contributing to mozilla are still strongly tied to netscape (okay not all of 'em), and they have wide acceptance as a goal. Which means it needs all that stuff. I don't think they made a poor decision by including it.
From an outside perspective, it's easy to say this. But, realistically, it's a lot more fun to code in new features than it is to fix bugs. I mean, anyone who develops professionally knows how much cooler it is when your manager says "hey, figure out a way to code in feature X" than when she says "could you take a look at bug A1.006 and check in the fixed code when you're done?" And then you have to sit there and stare at this stupid text box that sometimes pops up and sometimes doesn't for no apparent reason, and check out 4 modules you didn't even think were affected because they're not interacting properly... etc etc etc. Fixing bugs really sucks!
It kind of goes back to the theory that open source programmers are scratching their own itch when they contribute to a project. And most of the itches have been 90% scratched on this project. So who's still going to be contributing? Fortunately, there's a lot of effort still being put in by netscape; I don't think mozilla has really been depending much on huge fleets of independent developers. And we see how quickly it has gone so far. I wouldn't expect the pace to pick up now that the fun work is over.
SO, it seems like it really should be the responsibility of the tool's users - who actually do the compiling of GPL code into Solaris binaries - to distribute driver source in their product. Which is their only legal obligation, right?
Here's the part that got me: "Neither Perens nor Becker has suggested how the GPL could, or should, be changed. But Becker knows one thing - he wants Sun to stop peddling the kit, which he says includes 'explicit instructions on taking a copyrighted work and converting it to unlicensed use with the Solaris operating system.' "
Um... how? Does the Sun package say "Okay, now that you've compiled your drivers, zip them up real quick without source and rush it out the door! That'd be weird. Maybe just to play friendly, Sun could include a clause in their instructions about how to keep the output LEGAL under the GPL. Or am I missing the point? It seems like this is the real issue; Sun made a product that's legal, but not nice. Would it kill them to be nice, too?
Now announcing FlameGuard 1.0 for all Linux clients:
#!/usr/bin/perl
if(/(moron)|(cluestick)|(asshole)|(stupid)/gi)
{
&warn_user;
}
Oh, man! I think that's a fine name for a reliable fire extinguisher... A lot better than Microsoft Extinguish©, v1.0!!
;)
(BTW, why the heck is this under "movies?" I turned off movies stories months ago so I wouldn't have to see anymore Star Wars trailer links, now I'm missing out on DeCSS... wtf?)
Remember, Intel just got burned a few weeks ago (remember the 1.13 G pIII recall?) by pretty much deliberately overclocking chips that couldn't take it. So, it really shouldn't come as any surprise that AMD would do some testing, figure out how fast these chips can run SAFELY, and then take steps to ensure that they run at those safe speeds.
Sure, they might lose a bit of favor with the geek crowd, but the money, especially concerning the Duron, is in run-of-the-mill discount PCs. Having them stay sturdy does a lot for AMD's bottom line. All hail the dollar!
Whoa, put away the flamethrower! I did indeed read the article. If I made a couple of mistakes, it doesn't mean I'm "off the charts." Because I wasn't entirely in error. Let's assume, for now, that it does indeed have nothing to do with hardware (caveat: keep reading). Even so, the 22 colors under discussion might not be right in your environment, because how many of us are using one of those browsers (NN, IE) on one of those platforms (Win, Mac)? Lots, but probably not all. So the color matching on your chosen platform (Linux, and HP like the parent post said) might be different yet again. Even without taking hardware into account, there are tons of variations that the article didn't account for. So, there's essentially no web-safe palette, at all. You could probably scope out your demographics, discover that ~50% of people are using some IE variant on win9x, and create a "web-safe-enough" palette.
But, if hardware makes no difference, then what about this (from page 5 of the article):
Admittedly, we got different results in what would seem to be the same conditions: one Win9x machine would fail for a color, and another such machine wouldn't. We decided to play it safe. Really safe. We found that only 22 of the 216 colors we began with did not end up being shifted incorrectly in at least one viewing environment...
And then they linked to the "reallysafe palette" from there. Why would windows machines with (presumably) similar software setups behave differently? Isn't it possible that it's somewhere in the video driver, and therefore at least partly hardware dependent?
With all due respect, where the Hell did you go to school? Though my life, from Michigan to Arizona, it's always been the jocks and business majors who were "partying and getting all the girls." They would periodically stop ignoring activism in order to scoff at it.
And who are these english majors that are trendy activists for a living? I don't know any english majors who are making *shit* right now, except for me, who also majored in CS. Which is the only reason I have a job, BTW. I think maybe your rosy view of activism is the result of some strange upbringing... I can tell you it's not like that everywhere.
But this doesn't mean they'll render correctly on your system! I'll bet if they'd picked a few more windows machines to test, they would've had even fewer "web safe" colors in the end. So what this article really does is destroy the concept of a web-safe palette altogether. The 22 colors are just arbitrary.
This gets really frustrating. I used the GIMP to design an old home page of mine using "Web-safe" GIFs. Then I took a look at it on a really nice monitor, and the colors were just horrible.
... adding that only the Mozilla project can save Netscape.
This is the kind of hyperbolic statement I wish would stop. I don't mean to troll, but isn't netscape pretty much dead anyway? Communicator 4.x is based on a years-old code base which has barely even been tweaked since 1998. And I saw some of this code before release (under NDA for a porting project) -- whoo-ee! It was a mess.
Which is why they switched codebases for the mozilla project. A bunch of netscape hackers couldn't even make the old netscape engine go. So they dumped it. It's gone. Le Netscape est mort; vive le Mozilla!
I don't want to use IE, either, even though it's been easier to develop for for the last couple of years (face it - DOM is a lot cleaner than the layer model). But let's stop clammoring for a netscape ressurection. In fact, since the Netscape brand is now just another AOL product, I don't think I'll use it at all. Straight up Mozilla for me, thanks, with a side order of hot-swappable skins.
Now go back to amazon as a new user. Are the newbie prices on your favorite items higher, or lower? My guess is your personalized prices will always be lower, because you're a good customer and they want you to come back.
If not, if they've been gouging you, sign up as a new user, get the good price, and send the evidence of rip-off to slashdot as a tell-all expose :)
I'll bet most of us said "no." Now, while we might very well support the writers of that code, The suits at digital convergence shouldn't feel free to lump us all together as offenders. That lends itself to more anti-Linux FUD by the mainstream press who get ahold of this letter. I mean, imagine an article quoting this letter that said "Digital Convergence is upset by the actions of the Linux community..." instead of "Digital convergence is upset by the actions of several programmers..."
It's not that I think we should leave these guys high and dry; I think they deserve our support. But at the same time we must force Digital Convergence to say what they mean and not toss stereotypes around.
Yeah, and the funny part is that the CEO himself started forgetting to use it about halfway through the letter.