I don't blame Google for China's censorhip. I blame Google for doing business in China and thus adhereing to their policy of censorship. "China is a large, powerful country and one must obey their laws to do business there" isn't a good excuse any more than it would be when obeying the laws of some murderous warlord in Africa in order to do business there. And yes, the same applies to Yahoo and Microsoft. Greed is no excuse.
This raises a question I've been asking for a while: Do we need an alternative to PDF? Or do we need an alternative to Acrobat? I would love to see an open source alternative to Acrobat Pro; Foxit Reader is great as freeware goes (once you get rid of the advertisement), but it can't do everything Acrobat Pro can, such as rearranging/deleting/adding pages. Plus it's definitely not as good at copying text. The same applies to GPL PDF-readers on Linux, such as xpdf.
Unfortunately, it seems there aren't any open source developers interested in making an alternative to Acrobat Pro. All too many are apparently more interested in making alternatives to open source software that already exists and does a fine job, such as new media players and text editors.
(Seriously, I do have fairly good writing skills. I've been insulted more than once by a person asking if I was an English teacher! But that raises a point - it is a skill, and it's a skill many do not have. Is this a new problem? I actually don't think so myself. There have always been numerous people who didn't have good writing skills, but it is far more noticeable now because our modern technology - especially the internet - has made us more dependent on written communication.)
I call bullshit and don't tell me that I'm not a moral person. People often shock and disgust me by how selfish and downright malicious so many of them are - even "decent" people seem uncaring and compassionless at best to me. Frankly, I'm the sort of person other peeople take advantage of. So am I worried that some rich company is going to get their feelings hurt if I use their OS on the hardware of my choice? 'Course not. If I pay for it I am entitled to use it on my hardware. They are just trying to force you to buy their over-priced plastic too. Sorry, but although I do care about many things (and people, despite themselves) catering to corporate geed is something I care absolutely nothing about.
Y'know, Microsft makes some hardware too. What if they made it so their hardware peripherals (keyboards, joysticks, mice, etc.) were the only hardware peripherals that work with Windows Vista? Why, then that would be an anti-trust issue. Another example of them trying to enlarge their monopoly! But... it's okay if Apple is even worse, right?
That's not a good reason to leave out the term civilization. The ancient Greeks called any people who didn't have Greek culture barbarians unless they were obviously even more sophisticated in many ways, such as the ancient Egyptians.
On a similar note, what compatibility will you get that you don't already have in XP as far as games go? Lots of games are still designed to run on Windows 98 and most run on Windows 2000. It's a small percentage that run only on XP and most of those are from Microsoft. Are the game companies going to switch to Vista only en masse? If not, why upgrade, especially considering how hard Microsft worked to put such limits on the system under the presumption that you're a criminal even if you paid for your copy?
IE only sites... yeah they're still out there but the use of altnerative browsers is on the rise. You know what a lot of people do when faced with an IE only site when they're not using IE? Simply don't go there again. Oh, sure, if it's important enough they fire up IE, but if it's not they just go elsewhere. And few users of FF/Opera/whatever don't know that IE is less secure than their browser of choice, so they're suspicious when faced with a site that requires IE anyway. "Oh, you need IE so you can give me all that spyware, huh? Fuck you!" is one phrase I heard a friend say just three days ago.
Hardware and apps are always a problem for users of other OSes, but with regard to the latter Wine has come a long way... and then there's Crossover and cedega. When I used Crossover more than a year ago it could already run tons of Windows apps. How long do you think it'll be before Windows apps that can't be run on Crossover & cedega are in the minority?
Ah, I see that one of the latest crop of mods struck while I was typing. The modding here has gone to Hell in a handbasket lately. Too bad, dude.
The issue isn't about porn. It's about them thinking they have the right to tell us we can't view something on a computer they don't approve of, which is way overstepping their legal authority. And haven't you been paying attention to the problems with Google refusing to turn over search records to the government? The goevernment claims they're doing this to see how easy it is for children to access porn on the internet, as if theat weren't the job of the children's parents. Before long it may be illegal to view porn of any kind on your computer in your own home.
I partially agree with this. I know a guy who uses IE even though I've told him over and over again how insecure it is and how much more secure practically every other browser out there is. I've recommened Opera to him again and again - I prefer FF but his machine has only 128 mb RAM. But just yesterday I cleaned off spyware on another person's computer and they didn't even understand the difference between spyware and viruses. They were also complaining about pop-ups because they didn't have a pop-up blocker. They didn't know anything about other browsers or even what I was referring to when I said "browser".
Is ignorance entirely their fault? I don't think so. They buy a computer and everybody essentially expects them to just firure it all out by themselves. We need to educate these people because it simply doesn't come intuitively to them how to operate computers safely. MS loves to blame everybody else for all the security problems with Windows, but are they helping teach people to run their computers safer? Doesn't look like it to me. It would be nice if there were a spyware-free web site I could refer them to that would explain all this. Anybody here know of one?
Humane attitude you got there. To save even more money, let's never treat anyone - including you if you happen to catch something. It's too expensive. Honestly, tell me, if you catch a disease why should we bother treating you if it's too expensive to treat others? I sure can't think of a reason.
A clue for you, friend: when you're dying of a disease you don't give a damn about how much the cure costs. And believe it or not, some people in the world aren't as selfish and tight as you and actually want to help prevent others from dying of terrible diseases. Thank God there are some of them left since the kind of selfishness like you've displayed is becoming more normal in our society.
Jesus, how did this get modded up? Next thing neo-Nazis proclaiming we should kill all the Jews will get modded up as well.
That's how musicians made their money for, well, always before music could be recorded. Before then, the only thing resembling a copyright was the right to be acknowledged as the author of the music - if someone else claimed to be the author and wasn't, and the country in question didn't have any laws rearding such theft, then the person's reputation was still ruined. Ruined reputation = no on ewants to see you perform.
This is part of why modern music fans seem to more-or-less brianwashed nowadays. You can prove that so-and-so stole the music for his song (there are popular rappers accused of that right now) but their fans still want to see them perform. I truly don't unederstand that.
Copyrights on songs by the Beatles are about to run out but Robert Jonhsnon's lyrics are still copyrighted? Robert Johnson died during the 1930s and his works should be public domain but apparenlty aren't. And who owns the copyright anyhow? It damn well can't be his heirs because he didn't have any (legitimately that is... you know how bluesmen are). Is Robert Johnson's work relevant now? Ask Eric Clapton. And since they aren't RJ's heirs why should they have the copyrights anyway? I mean, I can understand Janie Hendrix having the copyright to Jimi's work but someone unrelated to him decades from now?
As to the Beatles copyright holder being terrified... too bad. Want to make money? Do something! I haven't been living comfortably off something someone else did for decades, why should you? Why should anyone be able to do something like write a song or a book and live off it their whole lives when the rest of us can't live off a few months of work our whole lives? That's why the entire system is completely screwed. I don't know how many times every day it's pounded into our heads "think of the artists" but if they've made plenty of money off of something already why should I care? Not only that but some corporation can apparently just take the copyright to a dead man's work and keep it out of the public domain decades after it should've passed into that as well. The original 14 years is plenty of time and no one but the heirs of someone should be able to have the copyright after their death. It may be legal but as far as I'm concerned this is just copyright theft.
Think about that the next time someone calls file-sharers thieves. Legally, a corporation can own the copyright long after the person who made the work is dead. They can legally steal from us, the people, but we can't legally steal anything back.
I suggest you and the mods that modded you informative read wikipedia and find out WHY China has the government it has now, and why they see stability as more important than democracy. (Not that I see it that way, just why many Chinese people do)
That's how the Germans felt after World War I; you should review their history too.
Hmmm..... isn't Korea an Anglicization of Koryo to begin with? I remember reading that Korea was derived from Koryo and that during the Korean War most Koreans considered Koryo to be the proper name for their country, merely accepting the name Korea from Westerners.
Somehow, I don't think the Greeks who came up with this whole "Olympics" thing cared too much about how the athletes got there, only how well they did once they were there.
Yes and no. Actually, most of them were slaves. They literally wore a leash on their penises that their masters would lead them around by.
And don't forget that if you don't want to go without a GUI there are a bunch of Linux/BSD GUIs that use little RAM, such iceWM and (my favorite) fluxbox. Aqua may be very stylish but all that eye candy does use a lot of memory. That's not an entirely anti-Mac staement either - the same can be said for KDE and any window manager that tries to be fancy (and I like KDE for it's customizaility).
Uh, no. They are not two totally different statements with totally different meanings. Trying to spin them as being totally different is, well, spin. The only difference is the OS referred to in each statement - they are otherwise identical. So tell us how the difference between the OSes referred to completely changes the meaning. It is an obvious example of a double standard and is more than a little hypocritical.
I remember reading somewhere that there had been about 500 such malware scripts in the wild that affected the Mac (no link, it's been a couple of years). I don't know if this is true or not, but if so, did Apple release patches to prevent them from affecting the Mac? Of course, as I understand it, these scripts wouldn't affect OSX because it's built over BSD anyway, but it's important to know if they will make a patch to protect against this one.
I'm glad this happned, but not in the anti-Apple way you might think. It proves one of my points I've posted before - that a system that requires a password to run such programs or otherwise modify the OS is much more secure. This trojan seems to have other effects though even without the password, judging from some of the posts here; kind of uncertain at this point. Fortunately for my business, it's quite apparent that Microsoft will never wise up in this regard.
I highly doubt that. There are viruses that were made when Windows ME was new that will still affect an unprotected installation of Windows XP. In other words, since Microsoft did not fix some vulnerabilities for XP what makes you think they would for Vista?
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I don't blame Google for China's censorhip. I blame Google for doing business in China and thus adhereing to their policy of censorship. "China is a large, powerful country and one must obey their laws to do business there" isn't a good excuse any more than it would be when obeying the laws of some murderous warlord in Africa in order to do business there. And yes, the same applies to Yahoo and Microsoft. Greed is no excuse.
This raises a question I've been asking for a while: Do we need an alternative to PDF? Or do we need an alternative to Acrobat? I would love to see an open source alternative to Acrobat Pro; Foxit Reader is great as freeware goes (once you get rid of the advertisement), but it can't do everything Acrobat Pro can, such as rearranging/deleting/adding pages. Plus it's definitely not as good at copying text. The same applies to GPL PDF-readers on Linux, such as xpdf.
Unfortunately, it seems there aren't any open source developers interested in making an alternative to Acrobat Pro. All too many are apparently more interested in making alternatives to open source software that already exists and does a fine job, such as new media players and text editors.
Which only proves that I'm not. And thank God for that.
I kan rite rill gud. Ware do i go to applie?
(Seriously, I do have fairly good writing skills. I've been insulted more than once by a person asking if I was an English teacher! But that raises a point - it is a skill, and it's a skill many do not have. Is this a new problem? I actually don't think so myself. There have always been numerous people who didn't have good writing skills, but it is far more noticeable now because our modern technology - especially the internet - has made us more dependent on written communication.)
Anything that might get you frigging humans off my planet is worth trying.
I call bullshit and don't tell me that I'm not a moral person. People often shock and disgust me by how selfish and downright malicious so many of them are - even "decent" people seem uncaring and compassionless at best to me. Frankly, I'm the sort of person other peeople take advantage of. So am I worried that some rich company is going to get their feelings hurt if I use their OS on the hardware of my choice? 'Course not. If I pay for it I am entitled to use it on my hardware. They are just trying to force you to buy their over-priced plastic too. Sorry, but although I do care about many things (and people, despite themselves) catering to corporate geed is something I care absolutely nothing about.
Y'know, Microsft makes some hardware too. What if they made it so their hardware peripherals (keyboards, joysticks, mice, etc.) were the only hardware peripherals that work with Windows Vista? Why, then that would be an anti-trust issue. Another example of them trying to enlarge their monopoly! But... it's okay if Apple is even worse, right?
That's not a good reason to leave out the term civilization. The ancient Greeks called any people who didn't have Greek culture barbarians unless they were obviously even more sophisticated in many ways, such as the ancient Egyptians.
On a similar note, what compatibility will you get that you don't already have in XP as far as games go? Lots of games are still designed to run on Windows 98 and most run on Windows 2000. It's a small percentage that run only on XP and most of those are from Microsoft. Are the game companies going to switch to Vista only en masse? If not, why upgrade, especially considering how hard Microsft worked to put such limits on the system under the presumption that you're a criminal even if you paid for your copy?
IE only sites... yeah they're still out there but the use of altnerative browsers is on the rise. You know what a lot of people do when faced with an IE only site when they're not using IE? Simply don't go there again. Oh, sure, if it's important enough they fire up IE, but if it's not they just go elsewhere. And few users of FF/Opera/whatever don't know that IE is less secure than their browser of choice, so they're suspicious when faced with a site that requires IE anyway. "Oh, you need IE so you can give me all that spyware, huh? Fuck you!" is one phrase I heard a friend say just three days ago.
Hardware and apps are always a problem for users of other OSes, but with regard to the latter Wine has come a long way... and then there's Crossover and cedega. When I used Crossover more than a year ago it could already run tons of Windows apps. How long do you think it'll be before Windows apps that can't be run on Crossover & cedega are in the minority?
Ah, I see that one of the latest crop of mods struck while I was typing. The modding here has gone to Hell in a handbasket lately. Too bad, dude.
How can you be a devotee of Cthulhu and not be an extremist? Seems like the two go hand-in-tentacle...
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
The issue isn't about porn. It's about them thinking they have the right to tell us we can't view something on a computer they don't approve of, which is way overstepping their legal authority. And haven't you been paying attention to the problems with Google refusing to turn over search records to the government? The goevernment claims they're doing this to see how easy it is for children to access porn on the internet, as if theat weren't the job of the children's parents. Before long it may be illegal to view porn of any kind on your computer in your own home.
I partially agree with this. I know a guy who uses IE even though I've told him over and over again how insecure it is and how much more secure practically every other browser out there is. I've recommened Opera to him again and again - I prefer FF but his machine has only 128 mb RAM. But just yesterday I cleaned off spyware on another person's computer and they didn't even understand the difference between spyware and viruses. They were also complaining about pop-ups because they didn't have a pop-up blocker. They didn't know anything about other browsers or even what I was referring to when I said "browser".
Is ignorance entirely their fault? I don't think so. They buy a computer and everybody essentially expects them to just firure it all out by themselves. We need to educate these people because it simply doesn't come intuitively to them how to operate computers safely. MS loves to blame everybody else for all the security problems with Windows, but are they helping teach people to run their computers safer? Doesn't look like it to me. It would be nice if there were a spyware-free web site I could refer them to that would explain all this. Anybody here know of one?
Humane attitude you got there. To save even more money, let's never treat anyone - including you if you happen to catch something. It's too expensive. Honestly, tell me, if you catch a disease why should we bother treating you if it's too expensive to treat others? I sure can't think of a reason.
A clue for you, friend: when you're dying of a disease you don't give a damn about how much the cure costs. And believe it or not, some people in the world aren't as selfish and tight as you and actually want to help prevent others from dying of terrible diseases. Thank God there are some of them left since the kind of selfishness like you've displayed is becoming more normal in our society.
Jesus, how did this get modded up? Next thing neo-Nazis proclaiming we should kill all the Jews will get modded up as well.
That's how musicians made their money for, well, always before music could be recorded. Before then, the only thing resembling a copyright was the right to be acknowledged as the author of the music - if someone else claimed to be the author and wasn't, and the country in question didn't have any laws rearding such theft, then the person's reputation was still ruined. Ruined reputation = no on ewants to see you perform.
This is part of why modern music fans seem to more-or-less brianwashed nowadays. You can prove that so-and-so stole the music for his song (there are popular rappers accused of that right now) but their fans still want to see them perform. I truly don't unederstand that.
Copyrights on songs by the Beatles are about to run out but Robert Jonhsnon's lyrics are still copyrighted? Robert Johnson died during the 1930s and his works should be public domain but apparenlty aren't. And who owns the copyright anyhow? It damn well can't be his heirs because he didn't have any (legitimately that is... you know how bluesmen are). Is Robert Johnson's work relevant now? Ask Eric Clapton. And since they aren't RJ's heirs why should they have the copyrights anyway? I mean, I can understand Janie Hendrix having the copyright to Jimi's work but someone unrelated to him decades from now?
As to the Beatles copyright holder being terrified... too bad. Want to make money? Do something! I haven't been living comfortably off something someone else did for decades, why should you? Why should anyone be able to do something like write a song or a book and live off it their whole lives when the rest of us can't live off a few months of work our whole lives? That's why the entire system is completely screwed. I don't know how many times every day it's pounded into our heads "think of the artists" but if they've made plenty of money off of something already why should I care? Not only that but some corporation can apparently just take the copyright to a dead man's work and keep it out of the public domain decades after it should've passed into that as well. The original 14 years is plenty of time and no one but the heirs of someone should be able to have the copyright after their death. It may be legal but as far as I'm concerned this is just copyright theft.
Think about that the next time someone calls file-sharers thieves. Legally, a corporation can own the copyright long after the person who made the work is dead. They can legally steal from us, the people, but we can't legally steal anything back.
Lol! Thanks for the new sig. :D
Not to mention that with a game pirated off the net you don't have worry about some copy protection fucking up your computer.
I suggest you and the mods that modded you informative read wikipedia and find out WHY China has the government it has now, and why they see stability as more important than democracy. (Not that I see it that way, just why many Chinese people do)
That's how the Germans felt after World War I; you should review their history too.
Hmmm..... isn't Korea an Anglicization of Koryo to begin with? I remember reading that Korea was derived from Koryo and that during the Korean War most Koreans considered Koryo to be the proper name for their country, merely accepting the name Korea from Westerners.
Somehow, I don't think the Greeks who came up with this whole "Olympics" thing cared too much about how the athletes got there, only how well they did once they were there.
Yes and no. Actually, most of them were slaves. They literally wore a leash on their penises that their masters would lead them around by.
Don't aske me why I know that.
And don't forget that if you don't want to go without a GUI there are a bunch of Linux/BSD GUIs that use little RAM, such iceWM and (my favorite) fluxbox. Aqua may be very stylish but all that eye candy does use a lot of memory. That's not an entirely anti-Mac staement either - the same can be said for KDE and any window manager that tries to be fancy (and I like KDE for it's customizaility).
Uh, no. They are not two totally different statements with totally different meanings. Trying to spin them as being totally different is, well, spin. The only difference is the OS referred to in each statement - they are otherwise identical. So tell us how the difference between the OSes referred to completely changes the meaning. It is an obvious example of a double standard and is more than a little hypocritical.
Bet it was for them. ;)
I remember reading somewhere that there had been about 500 such malware scripts in the wild that affected the Mac (no link, it's been a couple of years). I don't know if this is true or not, but if so, did Apple release patches to prevent them from affecting the Mac? Of course, as I understand it, these scripts wouldn't affect OSX because it's built over BSD anyway, but it's important to know if they will make a patch to protect against this one.
I'm glad this happned, but not in the anti-Apple way you might think. It proves one of my points I've posted before - that a system that requires a password to run such programs or otherwise modify the OS is much more secure. This trojan seems to have other effects though even without the password, judging from some of the posts here; kind of uncertain at this point. Fortunately for my business, it's quite apparent that Microsoft will never wise up in this regard.
Makes sense. After all, Mac users have been bragging for decades over how it was intelligently desinged....
I highly doubt that. There are viruses that were made when Windows ME was new that will still affect an unprotected installation of Windows XP. In other words, since Microsoft did not fix some vulnerabilities for XP what makes you think they would for Vista?