How about if it starts raining cows tomorrow? Not just a couple, but thousands and thousands of cows in the span of a few minutes.
Personally, in the event of Mass Bovine Precipitation, I plan to invest heavily in stocks of Gas BBQ makers along with those of my favourite condiment manufacturers.
If I buy a used computer with Windows 2000 Pro on it, am I not subject to the same license agreement as the original buyer?
Somehow I doubt it. If you aren't offered an opportunity to decline an agreement then you can hardly be said to have accepted an agreement, no?
IMHO, the whole shrinkwrap EULA situation is based on seriously dubious legal grounds as it is, even for new stuff that you buy. I mean, how many of us have "agreed" to a EULA just by busting open the shrinkwrap despite the fact that the Terms and Conditions you are agreeing to are contained within the shrinkwrap and not at all readable before the seal is broken?
How on earth can you contend in a court of law that a person has agreed to Terms and Conditions that they were unable to actually read until after they had already "agreed" to them by breaking the shrinkwrap?
Joseph Heller would be proud of how the software industry approaches this matter if he were still with us today.
I seem to recall a/. story from a few months ago where someone bought a Windows preloaded Dell computer with the intention of using Linux on it. When the person turned it on with his Linux install disk in the drive, he was presented with an un-circumventable software licence agreement screen, which basically stated that by agreeing, he was agreeing to the licenses of all the preloaded software on the machine. Presumably the only way to get past it to load Linux was by clicking OK.
What we all need to do is start buying hardware that carries this sort of draconian licencing, unpack it, set it up, and then return it again.
This will cost the companies money, and they cannot argue with you about wanting to return it if you simply tell them that you don't agree to their EULA."
Mass civil disobediance that costs companies money while strictly adhering to the letter of their own self written laws is a very satisfying way to stick it to the man I assure you.
Big deal. THX has to be the most boring Sci-Fi movie ever made. Its even more boring than watching a guy race robots on an empty ship in "Silent Running."
It's opinions like that which have turned sci-fi movies from being intellectual pursuits to lame exercises to create the most in-your-face assinine special effect orgy yet! with little to no inherant story value.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinions.
And don't forget, many movies of this era plodded along. Look at Xardoz, the original Rollerball, etc - all great films but of very deliberate pace.
I actually prefer this sort of sci-fi to the laser blasting, space-ship dogfighting "Space Opera" style of sci-fi that was essentially ushered in by Lucas with Star Wars.
Sure, I loved Star Wars when it first came out and I still do, but I would prefer to watch something like Rollerball, Planet of the Apes, Logans Run or Soylent Green if I were ever forced to choose.
You are quite right about the tendency to plod along in the sci-fi movies of that era however. Even the fantastic 2001: A Space Odyssey was very slow paced.
One of the ploddingest of them all must have been Silent Running with Bruce Dern. Still, it was an interesting movie despite that.
"They can be quite interesting, but how many people are interested in that motherboard from the 80's?"
I doubt very much that such a museum would be bothered about displaying old PC motherboards at all.
Most of the good stuff would be from the late seventies and really early eighties, PC's that are totally unlike the ubiquitous x86 compats we know these days.
I'm talking about things such as the old Trash 80's and Commodore PETs. Being an Aussie museum I'm sure they even have a good selection of "Australias Own Personal Computer", the venerable Z80 based "microbee".
Those were the true glory days of computer hacking. The very first microbee's came as a PCB and a box of components. It was up to the owner to solder all the resistors, caps and chips
into their proper places!
I saw a bloke once who wasn't quite clued up on the whole "solder" thing. He decided to superglue everything onto the PCB instead.
"The first Wolfenstein (Castle Wolfenstein) was released in 1983."
Gee I loved that game! If I recall correctly, it was the first PC game ever to have "digitized voice" served via the apple II's tiny single bit speaker no less!
However, XP came out in 2001, as did MSIE 6.0. I believe the current timetable is for Longhorn to come out in 2006. 5 years between releases is a long time in with regard to software.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft decided to introduce their "software assurance" licencing at about the same time that XP was released, a large part of which was pitched as entitling you to receive "free" OS upgrades. Now the businesses who jumped on board this scheme are finding that in this case there is nothing for them to upgrade to, which means they have basically paid money to MS and gotten nothing back in return.
I can't believe anyone thinks it's right to spend hundreds of dollars on this kind of crap when there are billions of people around the world living in poverty. This idiot should take his next pay packet and sponsor a child in Africa or something.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
How delightfully ironic. Do you have even the slightest clue what the word "liberty" means?
I believe times change. and sincerily hope that MS does get thier act together and release a system that is close/just as secure as any *nix based system.
The problem is, that they have set themselves an almost impossible task in this regard, due to their pigheaded insistance on "integration" of everything from browsers to multimedia apps into the core OS. This lack of a boundary between applications and the OS simply opens up a huge can of security worms and from that we all suffer.
They insist on this integration for legal and marketing reasons, despite the many and varied tradeoffs it, of necessity, produces in the technical and security areas.
*nix does not suffer the same inherant lack of security that plagues Windows, partly for this reason.
"They don't have many teaching hours, but the profession has the highest rate of diagnosed depressions."
That could just be because they have one of the highest levels of female participation too.
A recent UK study showed that 52% of women in the UK workforce are on anti-depressants. (source:El Reg)
These women can thank their feminist sisters for convincing them all that they would enjoy life as wage slaves more than raising and nurturing their own children. Talk about being sold a pup.
As for their pay rates, they get paid rather well if you calculate it on a per hourly basis and they are one of the very few remaining professions to enjoy what amounts in practice to a guaranteed tenure of employment. You have to be actually physically or sexually abusive towards children to lose a teaching job where I live (or simply accused of it if you are a man, which does indeed suck but this is another subject)
How many of you/.'ers don't worry about getting the punt from your jobs for no fault of your own from time to time? I bet there is more than a few of you out there.
I know I'd give up some of my paycheque for a guaranteed job for life. I'd also love to have 12 weeks a year worth of paid annual leave. Teachers need to spend some time looking at the *perks* of their profession before they worry so much about the *payrates*.
Teachers don't need to worry about being outsourced to India.
Go ahead, mod me troll for not joining the teachers pity party with all the other sheeple. The truth is, thay don't have it so bad, and work-life sucks for pretty much everybody really (if you believe the surveys that is).
I'm not kidding anyone here. I spent 8 years married to a school teacher.
I know exactly how many hours she worked a day. Usually about 6 hours per week outside "teaching" hours TOPS. It barely made a dent in her 12 weeks of annual leave.
She _never_ had to mark an assignment more than once. If somebody has to mark the same assignment thirty five times then there is somthing seriously wrong with that person or the school system itself.
You only have to look at who owns AOL to know why they support any and all attempts to legitamize DRM
Hint: Time/Warner, Warner as in "Warner Bros", geddit?
Slashdot Mirror
How about if it starts raining cows tomorrow? Not just a couple, but thousands and thousands of cows in the span of a few minutes.
Personally, in the event of Mass Bovine Precipitation, I plan to invest heavily in stocks of Gas BBQ makers along with those of my favourite condiment manufacturers.
If I buy a used computer with Windows 2000 Pro on it, am I not subject to the same license agreement as the original buyer?
Somehow I doubt it. If you aren't offered an opportunity to decline an agreement then you can hardly be said to have accepted an agreement, no?
IMHO, the whole shrinkwrap EULA situation is based on seriously dubious legal grounds as it is, even for new stuff that you buy. I mean, how many of us have "agreed" to a EULA just by busting open the shrinkwrap despite the fact that the Terms and Conditions you are agreeing to are contained within the shrinkwrap and not at all readable before the seal is broken?
How on earth can you contend in a court of law that a person has agreed to Terms and Conditions that they were unable to actually read until after they had already "agreed" to them by breaking the shrinkwrap?
Joseph Heller would be proud of how the software industry approaches this matter if he were still with us today.
I seem to recall a /. story from a few months ago where someone bought a Windows preloaded Dell computer with the intention of using Linux on it. When the person turned it on with his Linux install disk in the drive, he was presented with an un-circumventable software licence agreement screen, which basically stated that by agreeing, he was agreeing to the licenses of all the preloaded software on the machine. Presumably the only way to get past it to load Linux was by clicking OK.
What we all need to do is start buying hardware that carries this sort of draconian licencing, unpack it, set it up, and then return it again.
This will cost the companies money, and they cannot argue with you about wanting to return it if you simply tell them that you don't agree to their EULA."
Mass civil disobediance that costs companies money while strictly adhering to the letter of their own self written laws is a very satisfying way to stick it to the man I assure you.
Big deal. THX has to be the most boring Sci-Fi movie ever made. Its even more boring than watching a guy race robots on an empty ship in "Silent Running."
It's opinions like that which have turned sci-fi movies from being intellectual pursuits to lame exercises to create the most in-your-face assinine special effect orgy yet! with little to no inherant story value.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinions.
And don't forget, many movies of this era plodded along. Look at Xardoz, the original Rollerball, etc - all great films but of very deliberate pace.
I actually prefer this sort of sci-fi to the laser blasting, space-ship dogfighting "Space Opera" style of sci-fi that was essentially ushered in by Lucas with Star Wars.
Sure, I loved Star Wars when it first came out and I still do, but I would prefer to watch something like Rollerball, Planet of the Apes, Logans Run or Soylent Green if I were ever forced to choose.
You are quite right about the tendency to plod along in the sci-fi movies of that era however. Even the fantastic 2001: A Space Odyssey was very slow paced.
One of the ploddingest of them all must have been Silent Running with Bruce Dern. Still, it was an interesting movie despite that.
"Holy shit! I see a mouse wandering around inside the computer!"
Back in the mid 80's I had a job as a 'puter techo.
One day, I received a PC with the fault description "Dead"
It turned out that the PSU was shorting out when a mouse foolishly decided to take up shop inside.
I bagged the mouse, taped it to the top of the PC and filled out the repair sheet.
Under "Description of work" I wrote "Faulty mouse"
;-)
Well, that worked well, NOT
Try again
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.edskes/finalbuilds.htm
PS. How the hell do you embed urls on slashdot anayway?
Now if there were only a decoder component, I could toss Real Player for good.
If you are looking for a Windows media player that plays Real media based streams and files, then you should look no further than here;
If overpaid MS developers produce nothing but crap and clones of other people's ideas...
This is not exactly correct;
WordPerfect -> Word
This should read;
Wordstar(CP/M) => Wordperfect => WordLotus 123 -> Excel
VisiCalc (Apple) => MS Multiplan(CP/M) => Lotus123 => Excel
Borland also had their "Quattro" spreadsheet mixed in there with Multiplan & Lotus 123 IIRC
However, you're quite correct in pointing out that Microsoft was not the originator of any of these software concepts.
I've been using XP since it was released, and W2K before that. I have not seen a BSOD since Windows ME
That might be because Microsoft decided to "fix" the BSOD problem by replacing it with the "Instant reboot problem"
"They can be quite interesting, but how many people are interested in that motherboard from the 80's?"
I doubt very much that such a museum would be bothered about displaying old PC motherboards at all.
Most of the good stuff would be from the late seventies and really early eighties, PC's that are totally unlike the ubiquitous x86 compats we know these days.
I'm talking about things such as the old Trash 80's and Commodore PETs. Being an Aussie museum I'm sure they even have a good selection of "Australias Own Personal Computer", the venerable Z80 based "microbee".
Those were the true glory days of computer hacking. The very first microbee's came as a PCB and a box of components. It was up to the owner to solder all the resistors, caps and chips into their proper places!
I saw a bloke once who wasn't quite clued up on the whole "solder" thing. He decided to superglue everything onto the PCB instead.
"The first Wolfenstein (Castle Wolfenstein) was released in 1983."
Gee I loved that game! If I recall correctly, it was the first PC game ever to have "digitized voice" served via the apple II's tiny single bit speaker no less!
"Halt!"
"You're caught"
I feel sorry for this John Doe character, he's always getting picked on.
Yep, him and Bill Posters are constantly being harrassed.
obviously you're using a free-to-air-no-WEP-or-anything unprotected wireless setup!
Not necessarily. Could be using MAC address filtering on the AP. That's what I do, no extra config is necessary on the client PC at all.
Granted this is not the ultimate in wifi security, but then nor is WEP either.
However, XP came out in 2001, as did MSIE 6.0. I believe the current timetable is for Longhorn to come out in 2006. 5 years between releases is a long time in with regard to software.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft decided to introduce their "software assurance" licencing at about the same time that XP was released, a large part of which was pitched as entitling you to receive "free" OS upgrades. Now the businesses who jumped on board this scheme are finding that in this case there is nothing for them to upgrade to, which means they have basically paid money to MS and gotten nothing back in return.
I can't believe anyone thinks it's right to spend hundreds of dollars on this kind of crap when there are billions of people around the world living in poverty. This idiot should take his next pay packet and sponsor a child in Africa or something.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
How delightfully ironic. Do you have even the slightest clue what the word "liberty" means?
I believe times change. and sincerily hope that MS does get thier act together and release a system that is close/just as secure as any *nix based system.
The problem is, that they have set themselves an almost impossible task in this regard, due to their pigheaded insistance on "integration" of everything from browsers to multimedia apps into the core OS. This lack of a boundary between applications and the OS simply opens up a huge can of security worms and from that we all suffer.
They insist on this integration for legal and marketing reasons, despite the many and varied tradeoffs it, of necessity, produces in the technical and security areas.
*nix does not suffer the same inherant lack of security that plagues Windows, partly for this reason.
"That's what I want them to do. It's going to take years before it make a significant difference."
"Not really. Once Longhorn is released . . ."
In other words, it'll take years.
That could just be because they have one of the highest levels of female participation too.
A recent UK study showed that 52% of women in the UK workforce are on anti-depressants. (source:El Reg)
These women can thank their feminist sisters for convincing them all that they would enjoy life as wage slaves more than raising and nurturing their own children. Talk about being sold a pup.
As for their pay rates, they get paid rather well if you calculate it on a per hourly basis and they are one of the very few remaining professions to enjoy what amounts in practice to a guaranteed tenure of employment. You have to be actually physically or sexually abusive towards children to lose a teaching job where I live (or simply accused of it if you are a man, which does indeed suck but this is another subject)
How many of you /.'ers don't worry about getting the punt from your jobs for no fault of your own from time to time? I bet there is more than a few of you out there.
I know I'd give up some of my paycheque for a guaranteed job for life. I'd also love to have 12 weeks a year worth of paid annual leave. Teachers need to spend some time looking at the *perks* of their profession before they worry so much about the *payrates*.
Teachers don't need to worry about being outsourced to India.
Go ahead, mod me troll for not joining the teachers pity party with all the other sheeple. The truth is, thay don't have it so bad, and work-life sucks for pretty much everybody really (if you believe the surveys that is).
I'm not kidding anyone here. I spent 8 years married to a school teacher. I know exactly how many hours she worked a day. Usually about 6 hours per week outside "teaching" hours TOPS. It barely made a dent in her 12 weeks of annual leave. She _never_ had to mark an assignment more than once. If somebody has to mark the same assignment thirty five times then there is somthing seriously wrong with that person or the school system itself.
Yes. It is called "school teacher"
Except for the proprietary DRM'ed AAC format killing of your poor MP3 world.
Except on the iPod you can still use MP3. With the Sony (apparently) you can only use ATRAC format.
You only have to look at who owns AOL to know why they support any and all attempts to legitamize DRM Hint: Time/Warner, Warner as in "Warner Bros", geddit?
You could surf on over to www.bustpatents.com and take a look there . . .