What I want is an all-inclusive Minidisc setup. I want a device that plays MP3, lets me xfer data, can record voice through a mic, and has a decent video stillcam. It needs a car audio interface, so I can slam it in the dash and play MP3. It needs a home stereo interface, so I can slam it in and play MP3. It needs a computer interface, so I can slam it in and record MP3 and xfer out the voice recordings, data, and images.
If it had a bit of PDA in it, so much the better. If it also had a reliable but slow and common connection, good: I can then stuff it onto any computer and xfer data.
I dunno. Sounds to me like Mosfet is a real weiner: he left the KDE team all in a huff, and strikes up a new working relationship where he also gets upset.
I kind of treat Katz like a horrific car accident: I know I'm going to be horrified by it, but I look at it anyway.
I'm always stunned that someone with such poor writing skills and no real insights or originality can get *paid* to be a reporter. My god, my skills are at least an order of magnitude more refined than his, and I'm pretty sure I beat him on intelligence, but no one's off paying me to write trite pap!
Dammit, maybe I should start sending out resumes. But, then... there wouldn't be any more car accidents to view on Slashdot.
I'm going to take the same attitude with Sony as I have with other abusers of patent and copyright law. If there's opportunity to put the shaft to 'em, I'm gonna.
Should I ever have an Aibo, I'll be doing my damnest to hack it.
Now you see, that is exactly why those nincompoops at Microsoft shouldn't have pulled off this jackass stunt. Only an imbecile would be simple as to think that removing words from a thesaurus is a good idea! The rest of us (and that doesn't include you, fool) know that in responding to a cretinous Usenet or Slashdot post, one needs to be able to flame the moron using offensive words of the highest quality!
What blows me away is that MS has the unmitigated gall to say that they're doing this "because the other browsers don't support the standards."
Bull-fucking-shit!
Opera has always had perfect standards compliance as a primary design goal. And, in fact, they'd *LOVE* everyone to get their shit together and run their webpages through a validator, because valid HTML is one helluva lot easier to parse than invalid HTML.
Indeed, MSIE's fuck-ugly mishandling of valid HTML and blind acceptance of botched HTML is the primary reason Opera has to have its parse engine jump through all sorts of stupid exceptions to deal with the crap that's out there... FrontPage being a prime offender.
The Mozilla team has also made standards compliance a primary goal. And, once again, they've got to deal with all sorts of stupid exceptions because MSIE fucks things up.
Microsoft has just recently started getting serious about supporting standard HTML and CSS. Used to be that you could trust MSIE to completely bollox-up perfectly legitimate code.
"Because other browsers don't support the standards." What a fucking liar. Please, someone walk over there and bitchslap that prick for me!
But what you will get is an endless flood of apologies that excuse the company's behaviour.
I find that quite remarkable: here is a country where the government would probably face an armed revolution if it were to attempt to take away Gun Rights...
...but where everyone rolls over and plays dead when their boss wants to perform a daily body cavity check just to make sure no one's stealing the little stubby pencils from the "How Are We Doing" customer feedback boxes.
My god! What happened to America? It was founded on principles of freedom and democracy, and a shitload of people died to defend those ideals. A revolutionary constitution was drafted that was supposed to secure those rights for all eternity, and which has subsequently served as the finest model on which other nations have based their own constitutions.
Over the past twenty years, America has become degenerate. The public has willfully bent over the barrel, all too eager to have their freedoms raped by big business, big government, and vocal minorities.
Wake up, America! Wipe the sleep from your eyes and give your collective heads a shake: your nation is rapidly becoming a corporate regime that is every bit as repressed and evil as your greatest international enemies were during the peak of the Cold War!
Demand better! Don't complacently accept the abuse you are taking. Demand change! Demand your rights! Stay alert and stay politically active!
Tell 'em you keep KY jelly with your lunch just in case they decide that lunchbox checks are no longer adequate, and start going for body cavity searches...
"Companies routinely censor employees, demand random drug checks, spy on you, and many other things."
This may be the norm in America, but it certainly isn't normal in Canada, and I doubt it's normal in many other free nations.
When will the American public wake up to the fact that their nation is no longer free? That nearly everything the founding fathers fought for (ooh, nice alliteration) has been decimated over the past couple decades?
Come the revolution, comrades. Wake up! Throw off your shackles etc. (Seriously, you all got a big problem, and seem to be mostly blind to it.)
"Unfortunately $400 is about twice as much as I'd want to pay for something the size of a pack of cards."
Damn straight! For four hundred smackaroos, I expect something at least as big and heavy as a brick!
Re:MS doesn't actually turn a profit.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
You can't fool investors?
Puh-leeze! I'll cite two instances, one old exapmle that you're surely familiar with, and one recent exmaple that you'll just have to take the responsibility for doing a Google search to learn more.
I don't think it's about software. It's about being right. And that's predicated on power.
Bill chose software because it's what he geeked on. In a different era, it would have been steam engines.
It absolutely kills Bill Gates to admit he was wrong. So much so that he will rewrite history to prove he was right: witness his ghostwritten book, in which the first edition had bupkiss to say about the net, and the second edition damn near claims he invented it.
Heck, witness his biography. He was a little power-hungry, gotta-be-right tyrant even as a kiddie.
If he'd been born a hundred-fifty years earlier, Bill could just as well have been a steam geek, and the patent-owner for the automatic pressure control valve. And he'd have made it his life's goal to eliminate competition from the internal combustion engine. [Humour: so today, we'd be heaving coal into our cars, and really hoping that the pressure valve didn't bluescreen in our faces...]
Anyway, my point is that Bill loves to be right. And in order for that to count for anything, he has to be right about something that matters. It needs to be something that affects everyone. For that, he needs power over everyone. He needs to control them.
In the end, he's nothing more or less than your typical tyrant. Thank god he's alive today, and only controls our desktops, instead of a couple hundred years ago, when he'd have been lord and liege master of some cruel fiefdom.
That, my anonymous coward, is an entirely different topic.
And I believe you're right on the money. Adobe gives its product to art schools, and makes it easy to copy, because that entrenches it in its target market.
It's kind of like drug dealers offering the first hit for free. Or, for that matter, Saturn dealers offering a money-back guarantee. Just try it, you'll like it well enough and certainly will develop the habits and skills that keep you tied to it.
It's not like there aren't competing products that aren't every bit as good as Photoshop; I'll wager that Corel PhotoPaint has far more functionality than Photoshop (real scripting, for starters), yet it certainly isn't the standard.
That's because Adobe was smart about marketing, and Corel isn't.
Oh, get honest. Just because they're bits on a disc doesn't make them any less a product than a laser printer.
In fact, a whole lot of the same work goes into either product: research, customer needs analysis, design, prototyping, production, fine-tuning, sales, post-sales support, documentation, etc.
Yes, yes, fuck, yes: when you steal software, you're not stealing physical product. Big fucking deal. The physical materials cost in almost any product is piss-all.
The investment in development is the costly bit, and is the bit the developer must gain back, be he developing printers, Porsches, or Photoshop.
Anyone who claims piracy "isn't really stealing" is a cowardly liar.
If you are using the product professionally -- that is, you plan to make money by using it as a tool -- you damn well should be ponying up the bucks for it.
You wouldn't steal a wrench set from Snap-On, you wouldn't steal a laser printer from Staples, and your sure as hell wouldn't be stealing your delivery van from the GM dealership.
So get some morals, and *DON'T* steal your professional software, either.
If you can't pay like the big boys, don't play like the big boys.
Again, Spherical Magnets
on
Magnetic Fluids
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Lee Valley Tools, besides being a generally cool place with some delightful woodworking tools, has spherical magnets.
And, no, to presuppose the silly question I was asked earlier, of course one of the poles isn't in the centre of the magnet. If it were, how the hell would the flux lines get to the outside?!
These would be the equivalent of a bar magnet lathed spherical, allowing them to roll around and do other neat shit.
FWIW, Lee Valley also has awesome rare-earth disc magnets. I've got a handful of them. They can suck through a good 2" of wood. Damn near impossible to get off the fridge door. Does nasty shit to any nearby wallets, too. And don't even think about letting them near your monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, really.
What I want is an all-inclusive Minidisc setup. I want a device that plays MP3, lets me xfer data, can record voice through a mic, and has a decent video stillcam. It needs a car audio interface, so I can slam it in the dash and play MP3. It needs a home stereo interface, so I can slam it in and play MP3. It needs a computer interface, so I can slam it in and record MP3 and xfer out the voice recordings, data, and images.
If it had a bit of PDA in it, so much the better. If it also had a reliable but slow and common connection, good: I can then stuff it onto any computer and xfer data.
"Why would any Slashdotter care about a proprietary language and its proprietary compiler that is far inferior to Perl?"
Hey, you misspelt "Python."
I dunno. Sounds to me like Mosfet is a real weiner: he left the KDE team all in a huff, and strikes up a new working relationship where he also gets upset.
Common factor in both cases is him.
I suspect we don't have the whole story.
I kind of treat Katz like a horrific car accident: I know I'm going to be horrified by it, but I look at it anyway.
I'm always stunned that someone with such poor writing skills and no real insights or originality can get *paid* to be a reporter. My god, my skills are at least an order of magnitude more refined than his, and I'm pretty sure I beat him on intelligence, but no one's off paying me to write trite pap!
Dammit, maybe I should start sending out resumes. But, then... there wouldn't be any more car accidents to view on Slashdot.
Myself, I prefer to use Uranian lightyears. It makes the stars so much closer!
That would make an interesting infinite loop test, now wouldn't it... ;-)
[wish I'd thought to do what AC did. damn!]
(er, not that the bit there where he's got Sony's files online. That, he shouldn't have. But the how-to-hack info? Fuck Sony.)
Mod ol' Lemmy up! He's so damn right.
I'm going to take the same attitude with Sony as I have with other abusers of patent and copyright law. If there's opportunity to put the shaft to 'em, I'm gonna.
Should I ever have an Aibo, I'll be doing my damnest to hack it.
He could have completed the circle by running a MacOS emu... and iterated again. :)
Now you see, that is exactly why those nincompoops at Microsoft shouldn't have pulled off this jackass stunt. Only an imbecile would be simple as to think that removing words from a thesaurus is a good idea! The rest of us (and that doesn't include you, fool) know that in responding to a cretinous Usenet or Slashdot post, one needs to be able to flame the moron using offensive words of the highest quality!
What blows me away is that MS has the unmitigated gall to say that they're doing this "because the other browsers don't support the standards."
Bull-fucking-shit!
Opera has always had perfect standards compliance as a primary design goal. And, in fact, they'd *LOVE* everyone to get their shit together and run their webpages through a validator, because valid HTML is one helluva lot easier to parse than invalid HTML.
Indeed, MSIE's fuck-ugly mishandling of valid HTML and blind acceptance of botched HTML is the primary reason Opera has to have its parse engine jump through all sorts of stupid exceptions to deal with the crap that's out there... FrontPage being a prime offender.
The Mozilla team has also made standards compliance a primary goal. And, once again, they've got to deal with all sorts of stupid exceptions because MSIE fucks things up.
Microsoft has just recently started getting serious about supporting standard HTML and CSS. Used to be that you could trust MSIE to completely bollox-up perfectly legitimate code.
"Because other browsers don't support the standards." What a fucking liar. Please, someone walk over there and bitchslap that prick for me!
Kosovo was about the world's richest resource: a humongous mine with an almost endless supply of incredibly valuable mineral wealth.
Not surprisingly, it's now being run by an American firm. Or perhaps an American board of directors. Either way, it ain't owned by the locals.
Dammit, I skimmed the press release and it didn't look that bad. Looks like the weasel-wording let it slide right on by my eyes.
Got a good site recommendation for where I can learn more?
But what you will get is an endless flood of apologies that excuse the company's behaviour.
I find that quite remarkable: here is a country where the government would probably face an armed revolution if it were to attempt to take away Gun Rights...
...but where everyone rolls over and plays dead when their boss wants to perform a daily body cavity check just to make sure no one's stealing the little stubby pencils from the "How Are We Doing" customer feedback boxes.
My god! What happened to America? It was founded on principles of freedom and democracy, and a shitload of people died to defend those ideals. A revolutionary constitution was drafted that was supposed to secure those rights for all eternity, and which has subsequently served as the finest model on which other nations have based their own constitutions.
Over the past twenty years, America has become degenerate. The public has willfully bent over the barrel, all too eager to have their freedoms raped by big business, big government, and vocal minorities.
Wake up, America! Wipe the sleep from your eyes and give your collective heads a shake: your nation is rapidly becoming a corporate regime that is every bit as repressed and evil as your greatest international enemies were during the peak of the Cold War!
Demand better! Don't complacently accept the abuse you are taking. Demand change! Demand your rights! Stay alert and stay politically active!
Tell 'em you keep KY jelly with your lunch just in case they decide that lunchbox checks are no longer adequate, and start going for body cavity searches...
"Companies routinely censor employees, demand random drug checks, spy on you, and many other things."
This may be the norm in America, but it certainly isn't normal in Canada, and I doubt it's normal in many other free nations.
When will the American public wake up to the fact that their nation is no longer free? That nearly everything the founding fathers fought for (ooh, nice alliteration) has been decimated over the past couple decades?
Come the revolution, comrades. Wake up! Throw off your shackles etc. (Seriously, you all got a big problem, and seem to be mostly blind to it.)
"Unfortunately $400 is about twice as much as I'd want to pay for something the size of a pack of cards."
Damn straight! For four hundred smackaroos, I expect something at least as big and heavy as a brick!
You can't fool investors?
Puh-leeze! I'll cite two instances, one old exapmle that you're surely familiar with, and one recent exmaple that you'll just have to take the responsibility for doing a Google search to learn more.
Example #1: Tulip bulb mania.
Example #2: Bre-X.
I don't think it's about software. It's about being right. And that's predicated on power.
Bill chose software because it's what he geeked on. In a different era, it would have been steam engines.
It absolutely kills Bill Gates to admit he was wrong. So much so that he will rewrite history to prove he was right: witness his ghostwritten book, in which the first edition had bupkiss to say about the net, and the second edition damn near claims he invented it.
Heck, witness his biography. He was a little power-hungry, gotta-be-right tyrant even as a kiddie.
If he'd been born a hundred-fifty years earlier, Bill could just as well have been a steam geek, and the patent-owner for the automatic pressure control valve. And he'd have made it his life's goal to eliminate competition from the internal combustion engine. [Humour: so today, we'd be heaving coal into our cars, and really hoping that the pressure valve didn't bluescreen in our faces...]
Anyway, my point is that Bill loves to be right. And in order for that to count for anything, he has to be right about something that matters. It needs to be something that affects everyone. For that, he needs power over everyone. He needs to control them.
In the end, he's nothing more or less than your typical tyrant. Thank god he's alive today, and only controls our desktops, instead of a couple hundred years ago, when he'd have been lord and liege master of some cruel fiefdom.
$3 to the artist? Is that really true?
I've been under the impression that the artists see S.F.A. on each sale; well under a half-buck per sale.
Am I wrong?
That, my anonymous coward, is an entirely different topic.
And I believe you're right on the money. Adobe gives its product to art schools, and makes it easy to copy, because that entrenches it in its target market.
It's kind of like drug dealers offering the first hit for free. Or, for that matter, Saturn dealers offering a money-back guarantee. Just try it, you'll like it well enough and certainly will develop the habits and skills that keep you tied to it.
It's not like there aren't competing products that aren't every bit as good as Photoshop; I'll wager that Corel PhotoPaint has far more functionality than Photoshop (real scripting, for starters), yet it certainly isn't the standard.
That's because Adobe was smart about marketing, and Corel isn't.
Oh, get honest. Just because they're bits on a disc doesn't make them any less a product than a laser printer.
In fact, a whole lot of the same work goes into either product: research, customer needs analysis, design, prototyping, production, fine-tuning, sales, post-sales support, documentation, etc.
Yes, yes, fuck, yes: when you steal software, you're not stealing physical product. Big fucking deal. The physical materials cost in almost any product is piss-all.
The investment in development is the costly bit, and is the bit the developer must gain back, be he developing printers, Porsches, or Photoshop.
Anyone who claims piracy "isn't really stealing" is a cowardly liar.
AFAIK, if you're not using the software professionally, then you don't need all the functionality of Photoshop...
...and for 1/10th the price, you can pick up PaintShop Pro, which is more than most non-professionals will ever need, too, but is still dirt cheap.
Pshaw!
If you are using the product professionally -- that is, you plan to make money by using it as a tool -- you damn well should be ponying up the bucks for it.
You wouldn't steal a wrench set from Snap-On, you wouldn't steal a laser printer from Staples, and your sure as hell wouldn't be stealing your delivery van from the GM dealership.
So get some morals, and *DON'T* steal your professional software, either.
If you can't pay like the big boys, don't play like the big boys.
Lee Valley Tools, besides being a generally cool place with some delightful woodworking tools, has spherical magnets.
And, no, to presuppose the silly question I was asked earlier, of course one of the poles isn't in the centre of the magnet. If it were, how the hell would the flux lines get to the outside?!
These would be the equivalent of a bar magnet lathed spherical, allowing them to roll around and do other neat shit.
FWIW, Lee Valley also has awesome rare-earth disc magnets. I've got a handful of them. They can suck through a good 2" of wood. Damn near impossible to get off the fridge door. Does nasty shit to any nearby wallets, too. And don't even think about letting them near your monitor.