Long ago, Slashdot used the official Java logo for stories relating to the technology. Then Sun, in their infinate wisdom, decided this was trademark infringement, and asked Rob to remove it, which he did.
Funny, I don't see IBM, Red Hat, or Corel complaining when news articles about them contain their logos, do you?
Ah, thanks for the reply. Actually, I use Debian.:)
Yeah, the G2 Alpha was what I downloaded. I don't think I'll bother with it again, at least until they come out with a new release. Given the stuff I've been hearing about Real's privacy policies (or lack thereof), I'm not terribly eager to be using their software again anyway. And since I don't watch streaming video all that often these days anyway, it's not that high a priority.
It's just that every once in a while, I run across something that looks really cool, and it sucks to not be able to watch it. Oh well. Such is life.:(
Wouldn't it be ironic if Microsoft came off as the hero for once?
"No! This can't be happening!"
The minds of Slashdotters will spontaneously combust as they try to grok the notion of the Evil Empire fighting for the cause of goodness. Is Emperor Palpatine suddenly deciding to give the rebels aid, or is it just a trick to lure them in?
Nooo, I can't take it anymore. Losing mind. Must... get... back... to the ship. Scotty, Beam me up. I said energize, dammit!
It certainly has the appearence of an attempt to generate a bias from the ignorant public in favor of Etoys. If they can get people to buy into the "corporate = good; independent thought = bad" mindset early on, people will be much less likely to sympathize with etoy even when they do learn all the facts.
While the article is correct in what it does say, omitting important info about the case leaves people people with the implicit assumption that etoy, and by extension "art groups" and "Internet activists", are automatically untrustworthy.
What I wonder is whether CNN has some vested interest in seeing Etoys win (Do they receive advertising revenue? Do they own stock in the company?), or it could just be old fashioned promotion of the money-making-above-all-else doctrine.
Speaking as a Linux user, I totally agree. Last week, I tried downloading the "latest" version, and was sadly disappointed. It would stop repeatedly in the middle of playback, crashed frequently, and kept giving the mysterious "Error 1", which, according to their docs, could be just about anything.
A couple years ago, I remember it working relatively well even with video on my old 133. You'd think they'd at least maintain the same level of stability, much less make improvements. Don't you just hate when software gets worse with each new version?
Another possibility I just thouht of: When a post is submitted, have the system check whether it exactly matches previous posts. Reject it if it's a repeat. Of course, then they'd probably just change one character each time, or something equally inane.
But I don't think there's too much risk of my karma getting hit, since the moderators would do much better to mark down the idiot I'm replying to. So here goes...
This is the kind of nonsense that -1 is for. If I could just block out this kind of flooding, I'd be happy to just lower my threshold and let the moderators take care of it (assuming they have enough points, which looks to be a bit of a problem in this case).
Unfortunately, interesting posts like those from grits boy, the naked and petrified troll, and other totally irrelevant comedy posts would be filtered as well. So, I surf at -1 and put up with it.
It would be cool if there was some way to ditch the blatently redundant flooding, but still be able to read the oddballs. I don't even mind reading first posts, as they're kind of a Slashdot tradition of sorts. A selective filter based on moderation category would be way cool, assuming the moderators were trustworthy. Also, maybe add another reason for marking down. Call it "flooding" situations specificly such as what we have here.
Well, now that I've added to wasted bandwidth, I think I'll quit. Carry on.
Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking when I saw the previews. Haven't seen the movie itself yet, so I can't comment on its quality.
But, to quote Tori Amos, "There are only ten ideas under the sun. What makes the difference is how you spice them." After all, it's the execution of the idea that counts. (Witness The Matrix. The points brought up in its plot have been around in scifi novels for years, but the movie worked because it did such a good job instantiating them.)
I usually see eye to eye with Ebert when it comes to dramas and serious movies, but I swear the man has no sense of humor. When it comes to comedies, he's an idiot.
I usually like Robin Williams movies though (What Dreams May Come was soooo underrated IMO, while his lesser achievement last year, Patch Adams, got tons of attention). Anyway, I'll probably go see Bicentennial Man too. If Katz gives it the nod, it must have something going for it.
I should have the same rights not to see anything I choose not to see in the library or in the home. They're my eyes, and they don't belong to any damn advertiser or web master.
Well, the obvious answer here would be that you are in no way required to go to the library to do your web surfing. If you do, you can choose not to visit sites which advertise Micros~1, or whatever else you don't like.
Children do not have a natural urge to look at stuff that has no meaning or relevence to their age.
You bring up a very good point here. A common argument used by the pro-censorship crowd is that a child will be permanently "scarred" by a single accidental click on a link which features adults having sex. (Horror of horrors!)
But of course, it would be far too much to ask of our government (and many parents) to have a little faith in the kids' ability to deal with reality. The children do not have nearly as much trouble handling such information as many adults do. (I know this from experience, having spent quite a bit of time working around preschool aged tots, bless their hearts.)
Adults project their insecurities onto their kids, who, unfortunately, often grow up to have the same problems.
You've poisoned all your children to camouflage your scars -- Marilyn Manson
We support standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from them when that becomes more useful to users.
Alright, I like RMS and his teachings as much as anyone, and even agree with the sentiment of this statement. If standards aren't serving users in the best way possible, what good are they?
But if it were someone from Microsoft making this statement, let's admit it. We would be jumping all over their throats and making accusations about "embrace and extend". Obviously, since GNU makes free software, there's less worry about them subverting the standards process, but where do you draw the line?
BTW, the POSIX_ME_HARDER part was hilarious. Made my morning.:)
They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken).
This is not a fair comparison. With DVD, the method to decode the signal must be somewhere on the user's (hence the potential pirate's) device in order to watch the movie. No such restriction is required when transmitting movies to theaters. The key does not have to be made available in any way, shape or form to potential line sniffers.
You simply give the theaters the decryption key, and send everything through the encrypted pipe. In the unlikely event that somebody does crack the key, simply switch keys and issue all the theaters a new one. (In fact, it would probably be a good idea to switch keys from time to time anyway, just to be safe. Not possible with DVD, cause that would break all the current players.)
Of course, he still has a valid point when it comes to bribing projectionists. Depending on how much access they have, that could present a risk of the key getting out too. But assuming they can trust the theaters to keep the keys safe, there is virtually no risk of piracy.
To be even more secure, give each theater a different key and encode a custom stream for each one. If one key gets compromised, the rest are still secure. The cost would be more processor time to encrypt a new stream for each target, and increased bandwidth usage because multicasting becomes impossible with this method. Probably overkill, but you know how paranoid the movie industry gets.
The problem with mandatory boycotts if it is under investigation for antitrust, is that we begin assuming that you are guilty until proved innocent.
True. Perhaps just a boycott of companies that have been found at fault by a judge. This would implicate Microsoft under the FoF, would it not? Of course, the deals in question probably took place before the FoF came out.
Besides, what if the M$ (gasp) product is better than Corel WP?
Given that, according to the article, most of the workstations had already licensed WordPerfect, it would seem that the people actually using the software thought differently. Otherwise, they would have installed Microsoft software in the first place, right?
If the government wants to curb Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior, the first, and most obvious, measure to take would be to refrain from encouraging these practices by patronizing the monster. It is hypocracy to for the DOJ to put Microsoft on trial, while another branch rewards the very behavior that is to be stemmed.
Perhaps what is needed is a boycott by all government institutions of companies under investigation for antitrust violations. At the very least, they shouldn't be making exclusive deals with them.
Of course, implementing and enforcing consistancy of moral purpose with such an enormous bureaucracy is probably asking too much anyway.
In Microsoft's case, it's especially easy to suspect foul play, due to the inferior nature of their products. Why would any halfway intelligent entity sign away their productivity if some shady deal making weren't going on under the table? But then again, this is the government we're talking about.
Here's a script that can be run from a cron job or each time you start/stop Netscape.
Basicly, you just need to create a.cookies.allow file in your home directory containing the names of hosts (e.g. slashdot.org) for which cookies are ok. Cookies from anywhere else gets deleted each time the program is run. Makes it nice and easy to automate, since you don't have to go in and manually delete nasty cookies.
If you have any questions about setting it up, email me.
So whose shoulders would it fall on to enforce the license, when push comes to shove? I suppose since the Free Software Foundation owns a lot of the code, they could press the issue, but I don't see someone like Linus (or any small time developer) wanting to spend time in a lengthy court battle over this stuff. I certainly wouldn't.
Why didn't you just go get the right version of glibc?! Blaming Sun for you mistake is infantile.
Getting the right version of glibc would have required downgrading my whole distro, since all my installed packages were linked against glibc 2.1. Even if I had been willing to wreak havoc on my system in such a manner, the time required to do it would have taken too long to do any good. Spend all night messing with reverting to old versions of everything, and there's no time left to program.
I do not blame Sun for my mistake. I blame myself. So I learn from it, move on, and (hopefully) not do same thing again.
Perhaps I should clarify. While I do not hold Sun responsible for my problem, the experience gave me a very bad impression of the company. In the future, given the choice between using closed, unreliable, and buggy software released under terms which greatly hinder potential improvement (needlessly, I would add), and using a truly open alternative, I'll go with the open version any day. As long as Sun releases proprietary junk which tries to masquerade as being open, I shall avoid them, and advise others to do the same.
I agree. The Sun licenses are a joke. Earlier this year, when I was working on a Java project, I discovered (surprise, surprise!) a bug which made the JDK unusable (It was spitting out errors about missing symbols). After discovering that the only problem was that it had been linked against an old version of glibc, I went to blackdown's page in search of the source tarball so I could compile it myself and be on my merry way. Such a tarball was no where to be found.
After some poking around, deep within one of the FAQ's, I found a question about getting the source. "At last!" I thought. But it was not to be. The doc only had a link to a form deep within Sun's web page, which required you to fill out a whole ton of crap, and promised they would review your application and send snail mail sometime in the near future. Unfortunately, I needed to get working on things ASAP. Waiting for a pointless beauracracy was not on the agenda.
In fairness, I should also state that I had procrastinated the project (it was for a class) far longer than I should have. It was one of those night-before-the-assignment-is-due things. Had I been able to get the JDK working, I would have been able to finish it though. As it was, my grade took a big hit.
So, I guess the moral of the story is: don't rely on Sun, use a REAL Open Source alternative whenever possible, and get going on projects before the last second.;)
BTW, Sun has the right to release things under whatever crappy license from hell they want, but I wouldn't recommend encouraging it by patronizing them.
That's a Netscape bug. If you do a nslookup of evolt.org and put the numerical ip address in its place, you'll get a Connection Refused error. (Which is what is actually happening)
See, whenever you try to access a site and Netscape can't connect, it'll automaticlly prepend "www." to the address if it isn't already there. (Try accessing localhost when you don't have a web server running. It'll try localhost.com and www.localhost.com. Pretty stupid when you're trying to diagnose problems.)
To make this post almost on-topic, I am very much looking forward to Mozilla, so all this buggy, non-standard behavior will become a thing of the past.
Every time I see a story like this, it makes me less inclined to go and buy cds from mainstream sources. I love music, but to see the profits going to fund police state measures... It's just sickening.
The article actually says Megabit. This would actually equal something more along the lines of 200-300 kilobytes/sec. Either way, it's damn fast though.
I agree. Pointing out errors in the article might be considered offtopic (for those who don't care about proper punctuation or grammar), but it is certainly not "troll"-ish. Hopefully, justice will be done when it comes time to Meta Moderate.
Getting an amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified is not an easy task. If memory serves, it not only has to pass the House and Senate by a 2/3rds majority vote, but also be approved by 3/4 of the states. (Each state has its own process for approval. Some states might send it to the state legislature, while others could put it to a popular vote.) The few amendments that do make it go through years of debate, so a few rogue officials would have a great deal of difficulty getting something nasty passed. (Not that it couldn't ever happen, given the apathy shown by the populace lately regarding other issues such as the CDA.)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I don't see IBM, Red Hat, or Corel complaining when news articles about them contain their logos, do you?
Moderators: what's up? The post was both ontopic and funny, not a troll. Looks like AC discrimination at work again.
Yeah, the G2 Alpha was what I downloaded. I don't think I'll bother with it again, at least until they come out with a new release. Given the stuff I've been hearing about Real's privacy policies (or lack thereof), I'm not terribly eager to be using their software again anyway. And since I don't watch streaming video all that often these days anyway, it's not that high a priority.
It's just that every once in a while, I run across something that looks really cool, and it sucks to not be able to watch it. Oh well. Such is life. :(
"No! This can't be happening!"
The minds of Slashdotters will spontaneously combust as they try to grok the notion of the Evil Empire fighting for the cause of goodness. Is Emperor Palpatine suddenly deciding to give the rebels aid, or is it just a trick to lure them in?
Nooo, I can't take it anymore. Losing mind. Must... get... back... to the ship. Scotty, Beam me up. I said energize, dammit!
Ok, time to back off on the caffeine.
While the article is correct in what it does say, omitting important info about the case leaves people people with the implicit assumption that etoy, and by extension "art groups" and "Internet activists", are automatically untrustworthy.
What I wonder is whether CNN has some vested interest in seeing Etoys win (Do they receive advertising revenue? Do they own stock in the company?), or it could just be old fashioned promotion of the money-making-above-all-else doctrine.
A couple years ago, I remember it working relatively well even with video on my old 133. You'd think they'd at least maintain the same level of stability, much less make improvements. Don't you just hate when software gets worse with each new version?
Another possibility I just thouht of: When a post is submitted, have the system check whether it exactly matches previous posts. Reject it if it's a repeat. Of course, then they'd probably just change one character each time, or something equally inane.
This is the kind of nonsense that -1 is for. If I could just block out this kind of flooding, I'd be happy to just lower my threshold and let the moderators take care of it (assuming they have enough points, which looks to be a bit of a problem in this case).
Unfortunately, interesting posts like those from grits boy, the naked and petrified troll, and other totally irrelevant comedy posts would be filtered as well. So, I surf at -1 and put up with it.
It would be cool if there was some way to ditch the blatently redundant flooding, but still be able to read the oddballs. I don't even mind reading first posts, as they're kind of a Slashdot tradition of sorts. A selective filter based on moderation category would be way cool, assuming the moderators were trustworthy. Also, maybe add another reason for marking down. Call it "flooding" situations specificly such as what we have here.
Well, now that I've added to wasted bandwidth, I think I'll quit. Carry on.
But, to quote Tori Amos, "There are only ten ideas under the sun. What makes the difference is how you spice them." After all, it's the execution of the idea that counts. (Witness The Matrix. The points brought up in its plot have been around in scifi novels for years, but the movie worked because it did such a good job instantiating them.)
I usually like Robin Williams movies though (What Dreams May Come was soooo underrated IMO, while his lesser achievement last year, Patch Adams, got tons of attention). Anyway, I'll probably go see Bicentennial Man too. If Katz gives it the nod, it must have something going for it.
Well, the obvious answer here would be that you are in no way required to go to the library to do your web surfing. If you do, you can choose not to visit sites which advertise Micros~1, or whatever else you don't like.
You bring up a very good point here. A common argument used by the pro-censorship crowd is that a child will be permanently "scarred" by a single accidental click on a link which features adults having sex. (Horror of horrors!)
But of course, it would be far too much to ask of our government (and many parents) to have a little faith in the kids' ability to deal with reality. The children do not have nearly as much trouble handling such information as many adults do. (I know this from experience, having spent quite a bit of time working around preschool aged tots, bless their hearts.)
Adults project their insecurities onto their kids, who, unfortunately, often grow up to have the same problems.
You've poisoned all your children to camouflage your scars
-- Marilyn Manson
Alright, I like RMS and his teachings as much as anyone, and even agree with the sentiment of this statement. If standards aren't serving users in the best way possible, what good are they?
But if it were someone from Microsoft making this statement, let's admit it. We would be jumping all over their throats and making accusations about "embrace and extend". Obviously, since GNU makes free software, there's less worry about them subverting the standards process, but where do you draw the line?
BTW, the POSIX_ME_HARDER part was hilarious. Made my morning. :)
This is not a fair comparison. With DVD, the method to decode the signal must be somewhere on the user's (hence the potential pirate's) device in order to watch the movie. No such restriction is required when transmitting movies to theaters. The key does not have to be made available in any way, shape or form to potential line sniffers.
You simply give the theaters the decryption key, and send everything through the encrypted pipe. In the unlikely event that somebody does crack the key, simply switch keys and issue all the theaters a new one. (In fact, it would probably be a good idea to switch keys from time to time anyway, just to be safe. Not possible with DVD, cause that would break all the current players.)
Of course, he still has a valid point when it comes to bribing projectionists. Depending on how much access they have, that could present a risk of the key getting out too. But assuming they can trust the theaters to keep the keys safe, there is virtually no risk of piracy.
To be even more secure, give each theater a different key and encode a custom stream for each one. If one key gets compromised, the rest are still secure. The cost would be more processor time to encrypt a new stream for each target, and increased bandwidth usage because multicasting becomes impossible with this method. Probably overkill, but you know how paranoid the movie industry gets.
True. Perhaps just a boycott of companies that have been found at fault by a judge. This would implicate Microsoft under the FoF, would it not? Of course, the deals in question probably took place before the FoF came out.
Given that, according to the article, most of the workstations had already licensed WordPerfect, it would seem that the people actually using the software thought differently. Otherwise, they would have installed Microsoft software in the first place, right?
Perhaps what is needed is a boycott by all government institutions of companies under investigation for antitrust violations. At the very least, they shouldn't be making exclusive deals with them.
Of course, implementing and enforcing consistancy of moral purpose with such an enormous bureaucracy is probably asking too much anyway.
In Microsoft's case, it's especially easy to suspect foul play, due to the inferior nature of their products. Why would any halfway intelligent entity sign away their productivity if some shady deal making weren't going on under the table? But then again, this is the government we're talking about.
Ugggh. The corruption just makes me sick.
Basicly, you just need to create a .cookies.allow file in your home directory containing the names of hosts (e.g. slashdot.org) for which cookies are ok. Cookies from anywhere else gets deleted each time the program is run. Makes it nice and easy to automate, since you don't have to go in and manually delete nasty cookies.
If you have any questions about setting it up, email me.
Those annoying question marks in place of apostrophes, for starters.
Uh huh. Your sad little post about "standards" pretty much speaks for itself, doesn't it? How ironic.So whose shoulders would it fall on to enforce the license, when push comes to shove? I suppose since the Free Software Foundation owns a lot of the code, they could press the issue, but I don't see someone like Linus (or any small time developer) wanting to spend time in a lengthy court battle over this stuff. I certainly wouldn't.
Getting the right version of glibc would have required downgrading my whole distro, since all my installed packages were linked against glibc 2.1. Even if I had been willing to wreak havoc on my system in such a manner, the time required to do it would have taken too long to do any good. Spend all night messing with reverting to old versions of everything, and there's no time left to program.
I do not blame Sun for my mistake. I blame myself. So I learn from it, move on, and (hopefully) not do same thing again.
Perhaps I should clarify. While I do not hold Sun responsible for my problem, the experience gave me a very bad impression of the company. In the future, given the choice between using closed, unreliable, and buggy software released under terms which greatly hinder potential improvement (needlessly, I would add), and using a truly open alternative, I'll go with the open version any day. As long as Sun releases proprietary junk which tries to masquerade as being open, I shall avoid them, and advise others to do the same.
After some poking around, deep within one of the FAQ's, I found a question about getting the source. "At last!" I thought. But it was not to be. The doc only had a link to a form deep within Sun's web page, which required you to fill out a whole ton of crap, and promised they would review your application and send snail mail sometime in the near future. Unfortunately, I needed to get working on things ASAP. Waiting for a pointless beauracracy was not on the agenda.
In fairness, I should also state that I had procrastinated the project (it was for a class) far longer than I should have. It was one of those night-before-the-assignment-is-due things. Had I been able to get the JDK working, I would have been able to finish it though. As it was, my grade took a big hit.
So, I guess the moral of the story is: don't rely on Sun, use a REAL Open Source alternative whenever possible, and get going on projects before the last second. ;)
BTW, Sun has the right to release things under whatever crappy license from hell they want, but I wouldn't recommend encouraging it by patronizing them.
See, whenever you try to access a site and Netscape can't connect, it'll automaticlly prepend "www." to the address if it isn't already there. (Try accessing localhost when you don't have a web server running. It'll try localhost.com and www.localhost.com. Pretty stupid when you're trying to diagnose problems.)
To make this post almost on-topic, I am very much looking forward to Mozilla, so all this buggy, non-standard behavior will become a thing of the past.
Every time I see a story like this, it makes me less inclined to go and buy cds from mainstream sources. I love music, but to see the profits going to fund police state measures... It's just sickening.
The article actually says Megabit. This would actually equal something more along the lines of 200-300 kilobytes/sec. Either way, it's damn fast though.
I agree. Pointing out errors in the article might be considered offtopic (for those who don't care about proper punctuation or grammar), but it is certainly not "troll"-ish. Hopefully, justice will be done when it comes time to Meta Moderate.
Getting an amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified is not an easy task. If memory serves, it not only has to pass the House and Senate by a 2/3rds majority vote, but also be approved by 3/4 of the states. (Each state has its own process for approval. Some states might send it to the state legislature, while others could put it to a popular vote.) The few amendments that do make it go through years of debate, so a few rogue officials would have a great deal of difficulty getting something nasty passed. (Not that it couldn't ever happen, given the apathy shown by the populace lately regarding other issues such as the CDA.)