You are quite correct, I'm not sure what happened there. Try this one instead.
and if I recall correctly that settlement had to do with advertising in search results. Google's search technology is still its own
Again you are correct, but the parent was not referring specifically to search technology, it simply referred to the more generic "their technology" so in that respect your point is moot.
" A movie you say? What a great idea! Why didn't he think of that anytime in the past 30 odd years?"
I read somewhere once that during the late eighties/early nineties Doglas Adams was negotiating the movie rights with some knob-headed Hollywood movie exec. The talks were abandoned after the Hollywood exec told DA that he would have to change the ending becuase "The U.S. audience would want to leave the theatre knowing what the answer is to the Great Question"
Adams tried to point out to this idiot that not knowing the answer is the whole point of the story but it was to no avail. The exec insisted that "The Answer" must be given or else the movie would not be made.
"the article raises is whether automatic takedown notices based on blind keyword searches constitutes spam."
Spam? How about unwarranted and unprovoked legal harrassment? I say Linux Australia should contact the EFF or similar and look into suing the pants off those MPAA bastards.
"Up2date for RedHat automatically checks for any updates, and if there are any it will ask you to let it download and update them."
THAT is the first thing I turn off when I install a RH system. up2date will, without fail, screw things up royally. Broken dependancies abound, at the very best a package will refuse to unpack itself, at worst it will break a bunch of other apps. And don't get me started on how everything turns to custard when a kernel update comes along. If you are offering Redhat's up2date service as a panacea for the problem of automatically patching Linux systems then you need to rethink your position dude.
"Even when he tries to do something nice, he gets flamed. The man just donated 20 million to the school. give him a break
If he had "donated" the money we wouldn't know about it and we wouldn't be having this discussion now. What he is doing is trying to buy some goodwill in an attempt to offset all of the badwill that gravitates towards him normally.
Simply put, the man is karma whoring on the world stage.
As for giving him a break, I think it is safe to assume that BillG has had more breaks in his life than the combined total of the slashdot readership. I don't see why he needs any more.
"That reminds me of my driver's education teacher (many years ago) who shared his views with us that he doesn't drink anything unhealthy like beer or soda-pop. Of course I had to make the comment: "so that's a lemonade-belly you got there?"."
hehe. That reminds _me_ of a time I was eating a ham sandwich when some long haired alternative lifestyle type sat down and started lecturing me on how I was "poisoning my body by consuming dead animal flesh".
Of course, while he was sternly lecturing me about the evils of pork products, he was busy constructing a roll-your-own cigarette for himself.
The cognitive dissonance of some people is truly amazing.
"I think the people who buy $8 beer are likely to just drink a glass with dinner, as a replacement for wine. I believe a good beer can be just as good an accompaniment as wine. Just depends on the food, or your mood."
This is true. In fact, in Belgium they do use beer in place of wine. Belgium is a small country, yet it has 130 breweries and over 400 types of beer.
"I have a PC running Windows at home and it is NOT connected to the network. I've had few files from download that I opened with this machine. Since I got this Windows PC off the network, I have not experienced any virus attacks or malfunction caused by spy/malware. It's been two-three years since the last time my PC was damaged by a trojan, which made me decide to unhook the cable.
That's funny. I have a PC running Windows at home and I have it connected to the network all the time. True, I have it behind a linux firewall, and true again that I do 90% of my web browsing as well as 100% of my email reading on Linux, but funnily enough I have not had a virus/trojan/worm in the six years I've had broadband.
At work I only use Windows (for desktops). These are of course also behind a linux firewall and I have never been "attacked" there either.
I think you should take off your tinfoil hat for a moment and learn to secure your PCs and start using the appropriate software for all "risky" activities that you might undertake. For instance, you should *never* trawl for cracks and serialz at www.astalavista.com on anything but a Linux PC.
Have I gone too far to keep my sanity?
I certainly think so.
I use this machine as a video editing suite, and I simply cannot afford to lose video clips stored on the hard drives. When data you have in your computer is critical, the best defense might be to isolate the computer from outside world.
Errm no, you are dead wrong. The best defence for protecting critical data is to BACK IT UP, which is something that I assume you are NOT doing, because if you were all these paranoid-isolationist precautions you are employing would be entirely unecessary.
"You don't have depth perception from stereo vision past 20 feet or so"
I wasn't talking about that. I was referring to the fact that light travels in a straight line, so if you look *out* of a window from angle X you will see a different scene than you would if you were to look out from angle Y.
This is what I meant when I said "walk past the windows"
"You should find a way to suggest this idea to the show's creator/writers. It'd make for an amusing episode to it reconfigure or even not reconfigure and everyone is totally confused and can't find their way around. lol"
Yeah, it looks nice and all in a photo on a website.
I imagine it would look somewhat less impressive if you were there in person though. The lack of depth perspective would be painfully obvious as you walked past the "windows" and the static images would probably look a bit cheesy really.
They would look less like windows and more like pictures with window-like frames around them.
Huawei makes cheap knockoff copies of Cisco kit and bundles the IOS for free. They can afford to do this because they stole the documentation & the source code from Cisco and simply reproduce it for their own gear, software bugs, manual typos and all.
Having said all that though, I'd be the last person to stick up for Cisco anywhere, IMO they are every bit as bad as Microsoft and they use many of the same "business tactics" that MS use to maintain their own stranglehold on the router/voip market.
" The Beatles don't own all their music. Sony and Michael Jackson own some of it."
You are confusing the publishing rights of Beatles songs with the actual Beatles recordings of those songs. The publishing rights (owned by Whacko Jacko) provide control over (and royalties from) third party artists who want to perform/record songs that were written by The Beatles. They do not give Whacko ownership of the actual recordings made by The Beatles themselves and they do not provide him with royalties from the use of the songs by the (surviving) Beatles either.
" and people with legacy equipment. And once NTSC and PAL have been replaced by newer digital formats, that legacy equipment will become mostly useless."
All that will mean is that ppl will have even less reason to purchase the crapfest that Hollywood produces than they do already.
The only people to lose out of all this will be the Hollywood Execs. The stuff they produce is crap, and they are making it easier and easier for people to wean themselves off the teat.
Who knows, people might even get out of their lounge rooms and go and do stuff for a change!
" If they choose a standard PC architecture again"
Well, considering that the Xbox2 will have RISC CPUs and not x86, as well as FLASH memory rather than a HDD, then you can forget any thoughts you have about modding it like it is a PC.
"the entertainment industry scapegoat piracy and do nothing to actually woo buyers back"
I read somewhere recently that if you were to take away the massive box office sales made by Mel Gibsons very un-hollywoodish "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre" then box office sales overall would be down by 10%.
I doubt very much that box office sales are affected by DVD piracy, so the natural conclusion is that Hollywood are simply making crappier movies now than they have ever made before.
Movie making for dummies^h^h^h^h^h^hHollywood Executives;
1) Identify an as yet unrehashed TV show or movie from the 60's 70's or 80's.
2) Cast some generic stars for the lead roles and pay them huge amounts of money.
3) Obtain the cheapest, crappiest script possible.
4) Blow vast amounts of money producing an over-hyped piece of crap that has little or no resemblance to the original and absolutely none of its charm.
5) Complain that the internet is to blame when it tanks at the box office
6) Move onto next project, return to 1)
I can't wait for the big screen edition of The A-Team, starring Richard Dean Anderson as "Hannibal", Ashton Kutcher as "Murdoch", Owen Wilson as "Face", and special guest star Iron Mike Tyson as "Mr T"
Personally, I won't feel truly safe until the government has fitted video surveillance throughout my house so that if a nasty burglar breaks in the nice governemnt operatives will see what is happening and will be able to come quickly over to protect me.
"MSFT has been pretty honest about their past designs and it's security flaws as of late."
If by "honest" you mean they have admitted there is a problem and have offered up some near useless hand-waving gestures (XP-SP2) as a solution then you would be correct.
The real problem they have, a problem that they have been decidedly dishonest about (or pig-ignorant of, take your pick) is that their OS is insecure by design. This is all due to the monolithic design philosophy that their Windows OS is built around. The way they have enginneered it to have every goddamned bell and whistle tied directly into the base OS is just asking for trouble. All you need is a flaw in one of your applications, IE being the classic example, and the entire OS is compromised.
Cosnider this paragraph taken from an article at The Register, which was written by an engineer involved in the creation and deployment of Combat Management Systems for use in Royal Navy Warships. I think we can assume he has some clue about what he is talking about. He said this;
"In April 2002, Bill Gates, acting as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, gave extensive testimony under oath to the US Courts. Gates's testimony included description of the current structure of Microsoft Windows. Snubbing fifty years of progress in computer science, the current structure of Windows abandoned the accepted principles of modular design and reverted instead to the, much deprecated, entangled monolithic approach. Paragraphs 207 to 223 are particularly revealing about Microsoft's chosen approach (paragraph 216 is difficult to believe!).* Anyone with elementary knowledge of computer science can see that Microsoft Windows, as described here by Gates, is inherently insecure by design. If this is a flagship Operating System, then Dijkstra's life was in vain."
For Microsoft to get truly serious (and honest) about security, they will have to totally change their design philosophy, a philosophy that was chosen not based on it's technical mereits, but on its ability to stop the DoJ from breaking Windows up into it's seperate components.
This is the Great Lie that Microsoft is telling the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly your link doesn't work,
You are quite correct, I'm not sure what happened there. Try this one instead.and if I recall correctly that settlement had to do with advertising in search results. Google's search technology is still its own
Again you are correct, but the parent was not referring specifically to search technology, it simply referred to the more generic "their technology" so in that respect your point is moot.
"How about Google give its technology and source code up for grabs free to Yahoo! "
Whose technology? Google are already paying royalties to use Yahoo!s technology.
"Cisco routers suck at IPv6."
Actually, you could probably just shorten this to "Cisco routers suck."
" A movie you say? What a great idea! Why didn't he think of that anytime in the past 30 odd years?"
I read somewhere once that during the late eighties/early nineties Doglas Adams was negotiating the movie rights with some knob-headed Hollywood movie exec. The talks were abandoned after the Hollywood exec told DA that he would have to change the ending becuase "The U.S. audience would want to leave the theatre knowing what the answer is to the Great Question"
Adams tried to point out to this idiot that not knowing the answer is the whole point of the story but it was to no avail. The exec insisted that "The Answer" must be given or else the movie would not be made.
Of course the movie wasn't made.
"the article raises is whether automatic takedown notices based on blind keyword searches constitutes spam."
Spam? How about unwarranted and unprovoked legal harrassment? I say Linux Australia should contact the EFF or similar and look into suing the pants off those MPAA bastards.
"Up2date for RedHat automatically checks for any updates, and if there are any it will ask you to let it download and update them."
THAT is the first thing I turn off when I install a RH system. up2date will, without fail, screw things up royally. Broken dependancies abound, at the very best a package will refuse to unpack itself, at worst it will break a bunch of other apps. And don't get me started on how everything turns to custard when a kernel update comes along. If you are offering Redhat's up2date service as a panacea for the problem of automatically patching Linux systems then you need to rethink your position dude.
"Even when he tries to do something nice, he gets flamed. The man just donated 20 million to the school. give him a break
If he had "donated" the money we wouldn't know about it and we wouldn't be having this discussion now. What he is doing is trying to buy some goodwill in an attempt to offset all of the badwill that gravitates towards him normally.
Simply put, the man is karma whoring on the world stage.
As for giving him a break, I think it is safe to assume that BillG has had more breaks in his life than the combined total of the slashdot readership. I don't see why he needs any more.
"And, from what I've heard, beer is the preferred beverage with Indian food.
Ha! For some Indian restaurants, vase water is a preferred beverage.
"OMG! Get me a drink! NOW!"
;-)
" Or just posted the IP of the box... A good slashdotting would warm that puppy up."
Over a 2400 baud line? Somehow I doubt it. Sure, you'd /. the comms line OK, but the PC's CPU wouldn't be doing any extra work.
Yes, yes, I know it was a just a joke, but hey this is slashdot after all . . .
"That reminds me of my driver's education teacher (many years ago) who shared his views with us that he doesn't drink anything unhealthy like beer or soda-pop. Of course I had to make the comment: "so that's a lemonade-belly you got there?"."
hehe. That reminds _me_ of a time I was eating a ham sandwich when some long haired alternative lifestyle type sat down and started lecturing me on how I was "poisoning my body by consuming dead animal flesh".
Of course, while he was sternly lecturing me about the evils of pork products, he was busy constructing a roll-your-own cigarette for himself.
The cognitive dissonance of some people is truly amazing.
"I think the people who buy $8 beer are likely to just drink a glass with dinner, as a replacement for wine. I believe a good beer can be just as good an accompaniment as wine. Just depends on the food, or your mood."
This is true. In fact, in Belgium they do use beer in place of wine. Belgium is a small country, yet it has 130 breweries and over 400 types of beer.
mmmmmm, beer
"What makes you think that using a Linux PC is any safer?"
Are you suggesting that a Linux PC with Konquerer is just as unsafe as a Windows PC with IE?
"I have a PC running Windows at home and it is NOT connected to the network. I've had few files from download that I opened with this machine. Since I got this Windows PC off the network, I have not experienced any virus attacks or malfunction caused by spy/malware. It's been two-three years since the last time my PC was damaged by a trojan, which made me decide to unhook the cable.
That's funny. I have a PC running Windows at home and I have it connected to the network all the time. True, I have it behind a linux firewall, and true again that I do 90% of my web browsing as well as 100% of my email reading on Linux, but funnily enough I have not had a virus/trojan/worm in the six years I've had broadband.
At work I only use Windows (for desktops). These are of course also behind a linux firewall and I have never been "attacked" there either.
I think you should take off your tinfoil hat for a moment and learn to secure your PCs and start using the appropriate software for all "risky" activities that you might undertake. For instance, you should *never* trawl for cracks and serialz at www.astalavista.com on anything but a Linux PC.
Have I gone too far to keep my sanity?
I certainly think so.
I use this machine as a video editing suite, and I simply cannot afford to lose video clips stored on the hard drives. When data you have in your computer is critical, the best defense might be to isolate the computer from outside world.
Errm no, you are dead wrong. The best defence for protecting critical data is to BACK IT UP, which is something that I assume you are NOT doing, because if you were all these paranoid-isolationist precautions you are employing would be entirely unecessary.
"You don't have depth perception from stereo vision past 20 feet or so"
I wasn't talking about that. I was referring to the fact that light travels in a straight line, so if you look *out* of a window from angle X you will see a different scene than you would if you were to look out from angle Y.
This is what I meant when I said "walk past the windows"
"You should find a way to suggest this idea to the show's creator/writers. It'd make for an amusing episode to it reconfigure or even not reconfigure and everyone is totally confused and can't find their way around. lol"
Sort of like a Simpsons version of Dark City eh?
Yeah, it looks nice and all in a photo on a website.
I imagine it would look somewhat less impressive if you were there in person though. The lack of depth perspective would be painfully obvious as you walked past the "windows" and the static images would probably look a bit cheesy really.
They would look less like windows and more like pictures with window-like frames around them.
We have known about 3Com and their partnership with Huawei aka "Cisco of China" for almost two years now.
Huawei makes cheap knockoff copies of Cisco kit and bundles the IOS for free. They can afford to do this because they stole the documentation & the source code from Cisco and simply reproduce it for their own gear, software bugs, manual typos and all.
Cisco sued Huawei back in January 2003, but they pulled the software piracy suit 10 months later after Huawei agreed to "modify some of their products". I still don't understand why they did that. Come last July and they dropped their patent infringement suit as well.
Having said all that though, I'd be the last person to stick up for Cisco anywhere, IMO they are every bit as bad as Microsoft and they use many of the same "business tactics" that MS use to maintain their own stranglehold on the router/voip market.
" The Beatles don't own all their music. Sony and Michael Jackson own some of it."
You are confusing the publishing rights of Beatles songs with the actual Beatles recordings of those songs. The publishing rights (owned by Whacko Jacko) provide control over (and royalties from) third party artists who want to perform/record songs that were written by The Beatles. They do not give Whacko ownership of the actual recordings made by The Beatles themselves and they do not provide him with royalties from the use of the songs by the (surviving) Beatles either.
"onboard sound is no longer a poor substitute for a second card: it's now great"
Unfortunately, nVidia is dropping SoundStorm on the next nForce chipset.
It's a shame really, coz it is great.
" I'll never buy another VIA-based mobo due to all the problems I've had with audio."
Soooooo, , don't buy another Via based mobo then. It's quite simple really.
What has this to do with AMD CPU's again?
" and people with legacy equipment. And once NTSC and PAL have been replaced by newer digital formats, that legacy equipment will become mostly useless."
All that will mean is that ppl will have even less reason to purchase the crapfest that Hollywood produces than they do already.
The only people to lose out of all this will be the Hollywood Execs. The stuff they produce is crap, and they are making it easier and easier for people to wean themselves off the teat.
Who knows, people might even get out of their lounge rooms and go and do stuff for a change!
" If they choose a standard PC architecture again"
Well, considering that the Xbox2 will have RISC CPUs and not x86, as well as FLASH memory rather than a HDD, then you can forget any thoughts you have about modding it like it is a PC.
"the entertainment industry scapegoat piracy and do nothing to actually woo buyers back"
I read somewhere recently that if you were to take away the massive box office sales made by Mel Gibsons very un-hollywoodish "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre" then box office sales overall would be down by 10%.
I doubt very much that box office sales are affected by DVD piracy, so the natural conclusion is that Hollywood are simply making crappier movies now than they have ever made before.
Movie making for dummies^h^h^h^h^h^hHollywood Executives;
1) Identify an as yet unrehashed TV show or movie from the 60's 70's or 80's.
2) Cast some generic stars for the lead roles and pay them huge amounts of money.
3) Obtain the cheapest, crappiest script possible.
4) Blow vast amounts of money producing an over-hyped piece of crap that has little or no resemblance to the original and absolutely none of its charm.
5) Complain that the internet is to blame when it tanks at the box office
6) Move onto next project, return to 1)
I can't wait for the big screen edition of The A-Team, starring Richard Dean Anderson as "Hannibal", Ashton Kutcher as "Murdoch", Owen Wilson as "Face", and special guest star Iron Mike Tyson as "Mr T"
Oh god, it hurts already
" 1. privacy violated"
Personally, I won't feel truly safe until the government has fitted video surveillance throughout my house so that if a nasty burglar breaks in the nice governemnt operatives will see what is happening and will be able to come quickly over to protect me.
"MSFT has been pretty honest about their past designs and it's security flaws as of late."
If by "honest" you mean they have admitted there is a problem and have offered up some near useless hand-waving gestures (XP-SP2) as a solution then you would be correct.
The real problem they have, a problem that they have been decidedly dishonest about (or pig-ignorant of, take your pick) is that their OS is insecure by design. This is all due to the monolithic design philosophy that their Windows OS is built around. The way they have enginneered it to have every goddamned bell and whistle tied directly into the base OS is just asking for trouble. All you need is a flaw in one of your applications, IE being the classic example, and the entire OS is compromised.
Cosnider this paragraph taken from an article at The Register, which was written by an engineer involved in the creation and deployment of Combat Management Systems for use in Royal Navy Warships. I think we can assume he has some clue about what he is talking about. He said this;
"In April 2002, Bill Gates, acting as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, gave extensive testimony under oath to the US Courts. Gates's testimony included description of the current structure of Microsoft Windows. Snubbing fifty years of progress in computer science, the current structure of Windows abandoned the accepted principles of modular design and reverted instead to the, much deprecated, entangled monolithic approach. Paragraphs 207 to 223 are particularly revealing about Microsoft's chosen approach (paragraph 216 is difficult to believe!).* Anyone with elementary knowledge of computer science can see that Microsoft Windows, as described here by Gates, is inherently insecure by design. If this is a flagship Operating System, then Dijkstra's life was in vain."
For Microsoft to get truly serious (and honest) about security, they will have to totally change their design philosophy, a philosophy that was chosen not based on it's technical mereits, but on its ability to stop the DoJ from breaking Windows up into it's seperate components.
This is the Great Lie that Microsoft is telling the world.