This is the first I heard that you couldn't just get instant gratification when you decide to buy. That would suck. Probably even be a dealbreaker, if I made that big decision to buy my Macbook Pro (the only serious choice now), and then found out I couldn't have it within an hour. I sure as hell wouldn't wait a month.
So these ads are QuickTime. I can't find a QuickTime codec plugin for Xine. So how am I, the Linux user, supposed to see these ads? What's more important to Apple? That I see the ads, and thus stand a chance to get motivated to buy a Macbook Pro, or that the ads remain in a proprietary format that mainly Apple users can consume?
"General Motors makes a secret revision of a V8, 300 horsepower engine, so it's now a four-cylinder, 150 HP design."
It's off topic, but once while I was doing due diligence before buying a V6-powered Volkswagen, I was shopping at various lots. Ford dealer tried, with a straight face, to convince me a 4-cylinder Ford would be a more powerful vehicle than a V6 VW. BS-ing me wasn't the only mistake he made, of course. Based I suspect on my hair, shoes, and shirt that day, he bracketed me as a low-to-moderate income customer even though I told him I had been looking at VW Passats, Volvo 9's, and BMW 5's. Clueless, not that it helped or hurt him in this particular instance (I'd probably rip out all my toenails with a leatherman before buying a Ford.)
Nobody is offering money or anything else to the codec hoarders, because the simple fact of the matter is the content is not worth anything. The codecs and players and formats are shoved down the users' throats on other platforms, and people will consume the content because it is easy.
Look at it this way. If your website requires Shockwave, I'm not going to reboot, go find my old laptop, load VMWare, run WINE, or do anything else extraordinary -- I will just end up ignoring your product. Same goes for your content under RealPlayer. I'm simply not going to jump through the hoops. Your content is less valuable to me than my time and effort that would be spent locating and installing codecs to play it. I can play MPEG audio and video, and even various flavors of DIVx and numerous other A/V codecs without any trouble at all. You should have used one of those, if you had truly wanted my attention -- and certainly if my viewing of your media was of some value or importance to you.
Clerical error? Somewhere there is a typist, who, proud of his or her work, should be saying "this was no error, I was told by _NAME_ to remove it from the list."
The person should be saying to, oh, the Washington Post.
"Aside from a couple obvious examples, most vendors remain relatively consistent if you're referring to the correct product + hw_rev + version. Not sure what your problem is...."\
Right now my problem consists solely of the fact that you didn't list vendor and part numbers.
You have apparently never bought cards on the basis of it being, say, Prism2, and received Broadcom, same package, same part number.
Anyway, do you actually have a PCI 802.11g card that has a linux driver, and if so, can you give me enough information that I might obtain some of these for myself? The only one I know about is a particularly expensive 3Com card.
"what will it take for a manufacturer to admit to producing linux compatable hardware even usb memory sticks often will not say anywhere on the packaging linux compatable (LG does though)."
I'm satisfied when I can determine for myself that a product works. I am very dissatisfied when a product that works in one package, is of a completely different spec from another. This happened in a very bad way with Linksys. It was a huge embarrassment, and actually in part caused the workers at one shop to be forced to do without wi-fi as a matter of policy. (Not my workplace and not my decision. My own workplace doesn't do wireless to begin with, just out of security paranoia...)
It will be "time to upgrade" when the card manufacturers start being able to tell me which device to buy reliably for linux installations.
I have *never* been able to find an 802.11g PCI card that I could put on a purchase order by vendor and part number. The few devices I have found (b and g) that worked, have been changed by the vendors into incompatable devices without notice.
The linux wi-fi community routinely points questions on this matter to a compatability chart that doesn't answer the question. I know about NDISWrapper. I know to avoid Broadcom chips. That knowledge helps for my personal computing, but it doesn't help when the professional task involves making a purchase order for a device that can be reliably, consistently obtained, or even identified.
On the end of the spectrum we'd like to be on, several competing vendors would warranty the merchandise as being compatable with linux, and would provide source-code compatable drivers (for kernel independence). We're at the extreme far other end of that spectrum, as far as I can tell.
I have taken my car to the same place for oil changes and so on, for a long, long time.
Every time, it is pointed out to me that I am significantly overdue for various things.
Every time, I point out to them that the vehicle, being a European import, is calibrated in Kilometers.
Every time, they note the next service based on an assumption that the odometer reads in miles.
This was never a problem until one of them refused to honor a service warranty because of their misunderstanding.
It was also a problem at the DMV emissions check, since 30 km/h on my gauge didn't correspond to 30 mph on their meter. They were going to fail me and not explain why!
>This NSA wiretapping by telcos is not that kind of emergency.
They will argue that, since we're at war, everything is an emergency.
I hope Congress acts on this before the Supreme Court does.
Then again, I hope the situation gets worse, since I believe that things will have to get a whole lot worse before we start really seeing action. (So far, it's mostly talk.)
>Where's the law that says I have to obey a direct order?
If there were no law that requires law enforcement orders to be followed, then law enforcement would have no authority.
>I think that's just in Hollywood movies, where a cop commandeers a car for a chase scene.
It does happen, and people have been prosecuted for refusing to cooperate. Not nearly as often as in the movies, of course, but then, the place turns out to be a lot more peaceful than the movies tend to depict.
"I fully agree with the sentiment. Nixon resigned under the shadow of impeachment for illegally wiretapping a hotel. One single place."
It helped the impeachment movement that the "one single place" happened to be the Democratic Party's national headquarters office. The impeachment articles that were introduced in the House cited charges of Obstruction of Justice, Abuse of Power, and Contempt of Congress, and was never put to a vote. Nixon's most serious crime was probably when he called off the FBI investigation of Watergate. He actually may have been able to stay in office had he not done that, but it was the last straw that turned Congress so thoroughly against him.
Bush has now made it further into his second term than Nixon did, as a point of information...
>These telcos explicitly participated actively in surveillence that their lawyers should have told them was illegal.
It would not surprise me in the least to discover that their lawyers did tell them the activity was illegal, and even weighed the consequences of compliance versus noncompliance. When it comes time, they will doubtless show evidence that they knew they were not authorized to do what they did, but did so nonetheless on direct orders of [GOVERNMENT_AGENT_NAME].
Military men might not be allowed to fall back on the "only following orders" defense, but civilians have an absolute defense if they can show thier actions were taken upon the direct order (lawful or not) of a law enforcement authority or court order.
The government will not be able to make a case that the telcos came to them volunteering the information.
Telco execs are not going to prison over this (and neither are FBI agents or anyone else, I'm afraid.)
Breaking the law in order to protest the law, is simply breaking the law, if you are not willing to stand up against the injustice. Yes, that may mean sacrificing your freedom or your life, but if you simply break the law, that's all you're doing. You're not fighting injustice, you are simply operating outside the system of law and order on which soceity is based, for whatever selfish reasons you may have, and relying on the "ethical" argument to justify your actions.
"...simply because others like to run around passing 1000 laws per day, 999 of which are unjust."
I'm not going to entertain your absurd argument. I talked to the my district's member of my state's legislature today as a matter of fact. I find the legislative process very accessible, and quite accountable to the people who actually bother to participate in it. At the same time, I encounter no shortage of people who claim the process is something other than what I observe and experience.
I do not personally believe that 99.9% of laws passed are unjust.
>DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT, EVER put anything of any value in your luggage!!
If you can prove that you own it, and you can prove the purchase price, there is a straightforward way to get direct compensation for losses due to airport security. It works, I've done it. In fact, it works surprisingly well, because it falls in the category of "allowing a functionary to perform his function."
There is a form -- I'm sorry, but my copy is deep in the piles of papers on my desk -- which the TSA manager will give you. You fill it out with the description of your damaged or lost items, essentially swearing that you lost it. You provide the proof of its value, and the proof that you owned it (the only hard part). You mail it to DC. About the time you decide to give up on it, a check arrives from the US Treasury in the amount you claimed. Surprised the hell out of me, but the US Government paid for a belt (the buckle got broken on the conveyor belt) and paid the repair costs for my laptop screen, no questions asked (except for the questions on the form).
Never just walk away from a claim against the TSA. They will compensate you for your losses. Don't confront the people at the airport, just do the paperwork and be quietly paid off by the bureaucrats in DC.
>Why would a rancher know about corn field? wouldn't that be a farmers job?
A rancher who grows his own corn could have an economic advantage over one that buys corn. Makes perfect sense to me, if a ranch is in a climate that allows it. It's just a build-vs-buy decision. Corn's pretty easy. It makes a good fallow crop, since it holds the soil together very well, and the mulch you can make from the stalks is rich. Needs a lot of water though.
>I must admit some of that data (if it weren't tied to ID's) could make for good sociology/psychology papers.
And the data should be treated precisely the same as psych experiments on human subjects, because that is exactly what it is. If you have never tried to do a research project involving human subjects in your experiments, you probably don't realize the hoops you have to jump through or the accountability you are required to take.
By "experiments", I mean, even getting permission to present a slide show to a group and ask them questions, that sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
>Just because you use a Mac does not mean you are forced to watch the ads. It's not like the Mac ships with them included.
I thought the idea of these ads was to prompt me to switch from Linux and get my Macbook Pro.
But I have no codec that will render these ads.
>Thank goodness we're getting rid of the abomination that is PS2.
One thing that keeps me from switching, laugh if you want to, is the fact that I want to keep using the Model M keyboard.
I don't want to pay a fortune for a USB converted Model M. I want to use mine. The same one I've used since 1988.
>Basically every friend I have has switched to the Mac in the past 2 years.
When I go to conferences lately, I see Macbooks and Macbook Pros. Oceans of them. It has become the only serious choice for a professional notebook.
This is the first I heard that you couldn't just get instant gratification when you decide to buy.
That would suck. Probably even be a dealbreaker, if I made that big decision to buy my Macbook Pro (the only serious choice now), and then found out I couldn't have it within an hour. I sure as hell wouldn't wait a month.
>See, life really would be easier if you had a Mac. Kind of prooves the whole point.
Live improves inversely proportional to the amount of advertising I am exposed to.
So these ads are QuickTime. I can't find a QuickTime codec plugin for Xine.
So how am I, the Linux user, supposed to see these ads? What's more important to Apple?
That I see the ads, and thus stand a chance to get motivated to buy a Macbook Pro,
or that the ads remain in a proprietary format that mainly Apple users can consume?
"General Motors makes a secret revision of a V8, 300 horsepower engine, so it's now a four-cylinder, 150 HP design."
It's off topic, but once while I was doing due diligence before buying a V6-powered Volkswagen, I was shopping at various lots. Ford dealer tried, with a straight face, to convince me a 4-cylinder Ford would be a more powerful vehicle than a V6 VW. BS-ing me wasn't the only mistake he made, of course. Based I suspect on my hair, shoes, and shirt that day, he bracketed me as a low-to-moderate income customer even though I told him I had been looking at VW Passats, Volvo 9's, and BMW 5's. Clueless, not that it helped or hurt him in this particular instance (I'd probably rip out all my toenails with a leatherman before buying a Ford.)
Nobody is offering money or anything else to the codec hoarders, because the simple fact of the matter is the content is not worth anything. The codecs and players and formats are shoved down the users' throats on other platforms, and people will consume the content because it is easy.
Look at it this way. If your website requires Shockwave, I'm not going to reboot, go find my old laptop, load VMWare, run WINE, or do anything else extraordinary -- I will just end up ignoring your product. Same goes for your content under RealPlayer. I'm simply not going to jump through the hoops. Your content is less valuable to me than my time and effort that would be spent locating and installing codecs to play it. I can play MPEG audio and video, and even various flavors of DIVx and numerous other A/V codecs without any trouble at all. You should have used one of those, if you had truly wanted my attention -- and certainly if my viewing of your media was of some value or importance to you.
I'm not sure I actually see the problem here.
Clerical error? Somewhere there is a typist, who, proud of his or her work, should be saying "this was no error, I was told by _NAME_ to remove it from the list."
The person should be saying to, oh, the Washington Post.
>i think the latest version of the linux kernel includes broadcom wireless drivers.
Good to know, looking into it, and thanks!
"Aside from a couple obvious examples, most vendors remain relatively consistent
if you're referring to the correct product + hw_rev + version. Not sure what your problem is...."\
Right now my problem consists solely of the fact that you didn't list vendor and part numbers.
You have apparently never bought cards on the basis of it being, say, Prism2, and received Broadcom, same package, same part number.
Anyway, do you actually have a PCI 802.11g card that has a linux driver, and if so, can you give me enough information that I might obtain some of these for myself? The only one I know about is a particularly expensive 3Com card.
"what will it take for a manufacturer to admit to producing linux compatable hardware even usb memory sticks often will not say anywhere on the packaging linux compatable (LG does though)."
I'm satisfied when I can determine for myself that a product works. I am very dissatisfied when a product that works in one package, is of a completely different spec from another. This happened in a very bad way with Linksys. It was a huge embarrassment, and actually in part caused the workers at one shop to be forced to do without wi-fi as a matter of policy.
(Not my workplace and not my decision. My own workplace doesn't do wireless to begin with, just out of security paranoia...)
It will be "time to upgrade" when the card manufacturers start being able to tell me which device to buy reliably for linux installations.
I have *never* been able to find an 802.11g PCI card that I could put on a purchase order by vendor and part number. The few devices I have found (b and g) that worked, have been changed by the vendors into incompatable devices without notice.
The linux wi-fi community routinely points questions on this matter to a compatability chart that doesn't answer the question. I know about NDISWrapper. I know to avoid Broadcom chips. That knowledge helps for my personal computing, but it doesn't help when the professional task involves making a purchase order for a device that can be reliably, consistently obtained, or even identified.
On the end of the spectrum we'd like to be on, several competing vendors would warranty the merchandise as being compatable with linux, and would provide source-code compatable drivers (for kernel independence). We're at the extreme far other end of that spectrum, as far as I can tell.
Funny you give a car service analogy.
I have taken my car to the same place for oil changes and so on, for a long, long time.
Every time, it is pointed out to me that I am significantly overdue for various things.
Every time, I point out to them that the vehicle, being a European import, is calibrated in Kilometers.
Every time, they note the next service based on an assumption that the odometer reads in miles.
This was never a problem until one of them refused to honor a service warranty because of their misunderstanding.
It was also a problem at the DMV emissions check, since 30 km/h on my gauge didn't correspond to 30 mph on their meter.
They were going to fail me and not explain why!
>This NSA wiretapping by telcos is not that kind of emergency.
They will argue that, since we're at war, everything is an emergency.
I hope Congress acts on this before the Supreme Court does.
Then again, I hope the situation gets worse, since I believe that things will have to get a whole lot worse before we start really seeing action. (So far, it's mostly talk.)
>Where's the law that says I have to obey a direct order?
t ml
If there were no law that requires law enforcement orders to be followed, then law enforcement would have no authority.
>I think that's just in Hollywood movies, where a cop commandeers a car for a chase scene.
It does happen, and people have been prosecuted for refusing to cooperate. Not nearly as often as in the movies, of course, but then, the place turns out to be a lot more peaceful than the movies tend to depict.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mcommandeer.h
"I fully agree with the sentiment. Nixon resigned under the shadow of impeachment for illegally wiretapping a hotel. One single place."
It helped the impeachment movement that the "one single place" happened to be the Democratic Party's national headquarters office. The impeachment articles that were introduced in the House cited charges of Obstruction of Justice, Abuse of Power, and Contempt of Congress, and was never put to a vote. Nixon's most serious crime was probably when he called off the FBI investigation of Watergate. He actually may have been able to stay in office had he not done that, but it was the last straw that turned Congress so thoroughly against him.
Bush has now made it further into his second term than Nixon did, as a point of information...
>These telcos explicitly participated actively in surveillence that their lawyers should have told them was illegal.
It would not surprise me in the least to discover that their lawyers did tell them the activity was illegal, and even weighed the consequences of compliance versus noncompliance. When it comes time, they will doubtless show evidence that they knew they were not authorized to do what they did, but did so nonetheless on direct orders of [GOVERNMENT_AGENT_NAME].
Military men might not be allowed to fall back on the "only following orders" defense, but civilians have an absolute defense if they can show thier actions were taken upon the direct order (lawful or not) of a law enforcement authority or court order.
The government will not be able to make a case that the telcos came to them volunteering the information.
Telco execs are not going to prison over this (and neither are FBI agents or anyone else, I'm afraid.)
>The US is no deadbeat - it's doesn't fail to pay its debts.
It is interesting to hear another point of view besides the "US is bankrupt" one.
Look at it this way. If I owe you a trillion dollars, who has the bigger problem, me or you?
Shame on anyone who continues to make loans to a deadbeat, anyway.
Breaking the law in order to protest the law, is simply breaking the law, if you are not willing to stand up against the injustice. Yes, that may mean sacrificing your freedom or your life, but if you simply break the law, that's all you're doing. You're not fighting injustice, you are simply operating outside the system of law and order on which soceity is based, for whatever selfish reasons you may have, and relying on the "ethical" argument to justify your actions.
"...simply because others like to run around passing 1000 laws per day, 999 of which are unjust."
I'm not going to entertain your absurd argument. I talked to the my district's member of my state's legislature today as a matter of fact. I find the legislative process very accessible, and quite accountable to the people who actually bother to participate in it. At the same time, I encounter no shortage of people who claim the process is something other than what I observe and experience.
I do not personally believe that 99.9% of laws passed are unjust.
"How do you get a law overturned, without first breaking it and going to court?"
There is always the legislative approach, where you persuade Congress to act on your behalf.
"And what is unethical about breaking an unethical law?"
Nothing at all, provided you are willing to face the full consequences of your actions.
>DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT, EVER put anything of any value in your luggage!!
If you can prove that you own it, and you can prove the purchase price, there is a straightforward way to
get direct compensation for losses due to airport security. It works, I've done it. In fact, it works surprisingly well, because it falls in the category of "allowing a functionary to perform his function."
There is a form -- I'm sorry, but my copy is deep in the piles of papers on my desk -- which the TSA manager will give you. You fill it out with the description of your damaged or lost items, essentially swearing that you lost it. You provide the proof of its value, and the proof that you owned it (the only hard part). You mail it to DC. About the time you decide to give up on it, a check arrives from the US Treasury in the amount you claimed. Surprised the hell out of me, but the US Government paid for a belt (the buckle got broken on the conveyor belt) and paid the repair costs for my laptop screen, no questions asked (except for the questions on the form).
Never just walk away from a claim against the TSA. They will compensate you for your losses. Don't confront the people at the airport, just do the paperwork and be quietly paid off by the bureaucrats in DC.
>Why would a rancher know about corn field? wouldn't that be a farmers job?
A rancher who grows his own corn could have an economic advantage over one that buys corn.
Makes perfect sense to me, if a ranch is in a climate that allows it. It's just a build-vs-buy decision.
Corn's pretty easy. It makes a good fallow crop, since it holds the soil together very well, and the mulch you can make from the stalks is rich. Needs a lot of water though.
>I must admit some of that data (if it weren't tied to ID's) could make for good sociology/psychology papers.
And the data should be treated precisely the same as psych experiments on human subjects, because that is exactly what it is. If you have never tried to do a research project involving human subjects in your experiments, you probably don't realize the hoops you have to jump through or the accountability you are required to take.
By "experiments", I mean, even getting permission to present a slide show to a group and ask them questions, that sort of thing.