Doesn't it say more about the GIMP's interface than Photoshop's that the discovery of a single user who prefers the former's interface warrants a +3, Interesting?
Inside a locked box, in a safe, in a bunker, which is inside another, bigger bunker, deep inside my secret volcano lair guarded by sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.
This reminds me of my first year of college, studying Computing as one of my subjects. Now my teacher for this was Welsh, and had absolutely no clue about anything not contained within the pages of his hideously out-of-date textbook. He even forced us to learn Pascal when there was C/C++ availible as a 'preferred equivalent' in the curriculum. One long year of being baby-walked through coding and compiling command-line apps with Borland TurboPascal 5.5 for Windows. Sheer Hell. So after wasting countless hours posting to/., reading bash.org and spending as little time as possible coding the crappy database app we were forced to make in probably the worst language I've ever had to code in, we decided to play a little trick on our Welsh tormen^H^H^H^H^H^Htutor - We'd pop a Knoppix CD into one of the few boxes in the room with a CD-ROM drive and wait for him to do his usual rounds. We expected him to go ballistic, but he didnt - He just stared open-jawed at the screen.
Why? Had he just experienced a sort of open-source epiphany? Was he mesmerised by the dubious beauty of the the KDE backgrounds? No - the reason he was gazing in quiet awe at the contents of the battered, flickering screen in the corner of the computing lab was he thought we'd made it ourselves. In Pascal.
Well, football fans, I hope you liked Madden 2005, because you're going to get that same game shoved down your throats with updated rosters for the next five years.
EA used to be like this with the FIFA Football (soccer to you Americans) licence - I'm pretty sure every FIFA game from 1996 to 2001 was the same damn game with just the rosters updated - they've got better since, though, and have been genuinely adding new features to every release since 2002 (mostly because a large section of the market began to realise that International Superstar Soccer, while not having the official licences, gave a superior gaming experience provided you didn't mind the names being a bit off). They saw the market was no longer stagnant and they had a serious competitor, so they started adding interesting features.
Provided one of the competitors takes it upon themselves to make a game that's more realistic than EA's offering gameplay-wise, a large chunk of the market will start to switch, official licence and rosters or not. Provided a competitor comes in with a worthy product, EA won't risk letting their marketshare slide, so don't bet too strongly on them letting this one stagnate. Let's call it a wait-and-see, shall we?
What is it the tinfoil-hat brigade don't understand? Even if this program did report back to Yahoo, you could just block it at the firewall (if you run Windows without a firewall, you deserve everything you get) - even the most rudimentary firewall offers application-level permissions, and any program that doesn't have a valid reason for accessing the outside world doesn't get permission. Simple as that.
The BBC over here in the UK are already trying to implement a solution like this. I had a reasonably formal conversation with Matt Locke, the director of their creative R&D department, when he visited my college to give the kids a talk on careers in the BBC. We got onto the subject of online distribution - we discussed a closed online distribution method they were developing solely because Younger people are watching less TV and are spending an increasing amount of time on computers. Move the media to where people want to view it.
The plan is to have people pay a weekly flat fee (much like you would a cable bill) and have access to all the shows broadcast on the BBC-owned channels over the past seven days, as well as previews of new shows before they made it to the BBC's own channels. They, of course, would come with DRM - the shows would become unwatchable after seven days - but I thought this was a fairly reasonable trade-off. He also suggested (in an official BBC capacity, just for the record) that a distributed 'BitTorrent-like' download system could be used to take the load off the corporation's servers - he went to great pains to reinforce that 'the BBC did not support illegal downloading or filesharing' and that they would lock down their transfer method rather than just using BitTorrent, but he did say that 'the BBC supports the idea of using distributed downloads of legal material'.
I think this fills all four of your points, and it's nice to see a guy with a big position at a major broadcast corporation start seeing sense - not all people in corporations are evil, and Matt Locke is genuinely nice guy - if the BBC's idea works out it'd be nice to see some of the American networks follow a similar pattern, but to be honest I can't see it happening - you guys always seem to be a lot more 'closed' when it comes to distributable content, and I expect most broadcasters would still be too scared about people cracking into the system... I expect the BBC have less to lose financially if people do still get material illegally, as anyone with a TV is already paying them with our TV licence fees whereas most Americans could just ditch cable altogether if someone cracked a system like this, but that's no reason for a few not to maybe try it if the BBC gets this plan up and running.
And as for a similar style to iTunes, I got to see a mock-up of the client - brushed metal everywhere - seems everyone's taking a leaf out of Apple's style book;)
"The case has broad implications for the internet"???? Is IE the only browser out there?!?! Go to Mozilla.com!!
1) For most people (93% as a rough estimate based on the stats for non-techy sites I've run) still think IE is the only browser out there, and if 93% of the web clients out there use IE, then 100% of the websites out there have to be compatible if they're going to be accepted. If Microsoft has to strip certain things out of IE, expect 99% of the sites out there on the web to strip those things out of their content very quickly indeed, and seeing as things such as Flash and Java are seemingly covered by this patent, not to mention things like QuickTime, etc, expect a lot of the web's content to be changed if these guys win. I'd call that a pretty broad implication.
2) Do you really think these people are going to leave it at Microsoft? How long before they go after Mozilla.org? or Opera? How long before Firefox, with it's rising profile and easy and overt plugin system, becomes their next target? If they get a legal precedent by smiting Microsoft, don't expect them to turn around and say 'thank you, OSS', expect them to use it as a very big stick to beat Moz and Opera down with. If the Mozilla Foundation have enough money to pay for a New York Times ad, they've got enough money to be sued by a greedy guy with a dumb patent.
Seriously, this is a Really Bad Thing(tm) and no matter how much these guys say they're doing it for OSS, you'd better be rooting for Redmond on this one...
For what it's worth, I have a Presario 2500 series that up until a few weeks ago was running Debian - I switched back to Windows for games and Photoshop as CS runs like crap under CrossOver, and I've never had a single problem with the Compaq hardware.
I know all the scare-stories to do with Compaq laptops, but I've had mine for well over a year now and it's survived more than enough for me to be able to recommend it to anyone out there who wants a solid notebook. This thing's taken falls off of tables two or three times and shown no ill-effects when my old Toshiba would fall apart if you looked at it funny. The real problem with Compaq laptops is the software, and the way they seem intent on looping functions that could be dealt with perfectly well by the hardware back through annoying, buggy software apps, and their customised OEM version of XP SP1 has always been very prone to crashing (I know it can't be the hardware as Debian and Windows 2000 both ran fine on it). Seriously, if you're scared off of Compaq laptops by scare-stories, they're out of date, and I'd seriously suggest you try one, provided you're not going to keep the pre-installed XP - that thing's more trouble than it's worth.
I thought 'good triumphs over evil' was supposed to be a good thing.
Can someone explain to me the objections Christians would have to Doom? I just don't understand it - guy goes a military base killing the forces of Hell. Jeez, give the Doom guy a dog-collar and it's basically an exorcism with energy weapons. As far as I can assume, killing demons is portrayed as a good thing, is it not? So where's the blasphemy?
It's nothing to do with spammers modding up comments favourable to their situation, it's simply a case of extended logic - taking the possibilities that could result from Lycos's idea and realising what could come from it. Realistically, spammers were never going to shut down because Lycos decided to DDoS them, we know that, the spammers know that, and Lycos probably knows it, too, or they wouldn't have pulled this campaign. It appears/.'ers realised the same things I did - No matter how bad the spam problem is, aggrivating an enemy you cannot kill is a very, very bad move to make - a bad move of George Bush proportions (in a similar vein, him going after Islamic extremists by blowing up Muslims is only going to create more Islamic extremists - while DDoS'ing spammers isn't going to create more spammers, it's going to cause more attacks in retaliation, slowing down the 'net even more).
What good could possibly have come from Lycos's attempt? In the best case scenario, a few spam sites out of the hundreds out there would stop traffic for a few hours, then carried on as normal. In the worst case, Lycos would get it's ass handed to it in court, spammers would retaliate by DDoS'ing Lycos and other sites (Suprnova had a torrent for the screensaver and got swamped - coincidence, or something more sinister?, and maybe even the MakeLoveNotSpam servers would be compromised and the army of zombie machines turned into one grand botnet for the spammers.
No-one's trying to control the attitude of anyone, Lycos just made a stupid move and most people are looking at the big picture and realising it. Believe me, I'd like to see spam stomped out as much as the next guy, but I realise that 'fighting fire with fire' when you're dealing with a foe you can't directly kill is rediculous.
Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.
It's still unnecessary. Why on earth should you have to restart the whole WM (no matter how easy it is to do so) just to change the background? There has to be an easier way. (and no, I don't care for 'the source is there, go fix it yourself' type attitudes).
The government does not get Windows shipped to them from Microsoft for free. The whole reason Microsoft can afford to offer 'amnesty' to pirates and do not crack down on Windows piracy is because their bread and butter is government and business contracts.
Trust me, that's where the money is - and lock-in means they're going to keep paying. Microsoft certainly aren't going to start giving it away for free.
Terrorism has been ruled out as a possible motive.
Please, someone tell me you haven't all been indoctrined into the Bush Family Groupthink that every single crime that goes on anywhere in the whole damn country has some sort of terrorist motive? The homeless guy stealing apples from the grocery store isn't a terrorist sleeper agent, the guy behind the counter that short-changes you in Wal-Mart is not an Islamic fundamentalist hell-bent on destroying the West, and two bungling jackasses stealing computer equipment are not committing an act of jihad - if Osama bin Laden was going to get at America again, you really think he'd do it by stealing circuit panels? You don't seem to understand that Al-Queda chooses it's targets to make a statement - hence the targetting of the military and financial hearts of America on 9/11. They're not going to waste their time disrupting a few 911 calls in some little county in southern NY. Trust me, they've got more important things to do.
Americans, please, a little note from the rest of the world - there are some people out there that are more than capable of being anti-social without being part of some Islamic doctrine to convert you all to Sharia. Stop screaming 'terrorist' anytime anything kicks off, it's called 'crying wolf'. How many of you out there now automatically think 'terrorism' when something you don't like happens? I've nothing against Americans, but there does seem to be a rich vein of groupthink running through you guys just at the moment...
I hate attitudes like that of the grandparent so much - why is a child more important than an adult? What has the theoretical child done to warrant extra care and protection than the theoretical adult?
Sorry, just being a kid doesn't cut it for me, especially if the adult is someone as technically adroit as Patrick Volkerding. In any case, let's leave the morbid comparisons out of this, shall we? If he's reading this, we want him to see well-wishers and, hopefully, ideas on ways to cure his condition - not some jackass weighing his life up against some theoretical kid with leukemia.
It's true. I don't even make the effort to watch shows at their designated times anymore. I'll go and download the latest episode of CSI in about 15 minutes and watch it with much higher quality video and sound, and no commercial breaks. How will the industry adapt?
The director of the BBC's 'research into new technologies', a certain Matt Locke, came to speak at my college a few weeks back and we spoke about this very thing. The BBC are apparently looking into ways of distributing their programming via the internet, using a service like iTunes (the interface they had in the mock-up even looked like iTunes) to do so. He talked the talk very much of a man who knew that illegal downloading of media, including TV shows, was not something that was going to be stamped out, and that it was foolish and frivolous to even try. I like the system he demonstrated a lot, and I think it has a lot of promise - He proposed a system where you paid a flat subscription fee (as you would a television licence fee) and you have access to the BBC database of programmes, where you could download an (admittedly DRM-encumbered) official media file of any show from the past week, which would expire after seven days. There were plenty of other details, but I forget them as I was fairly out of it at the time.
Best of all, I needled him a little more and got it out of him that the system would use a BitTorrent-like (though not the BitTorrent we know and love) system to spread the load away from the BBC servers, and even got him to state, in his capacity as a BBC department director, that he was in full support of the legal uses of BitTorrent-style P2P filesharing, So that's how they'll adapt - Once a big corporation like the BBC switch I'm sure plenty of others will follow - and we can add another big name to the list of corporations that accept and support the legal use of BitTorrent (et al) technology.
Looking like that, her career will probably just sink into the ground much like the beached whale Michelle McManus did over here in the UK.
Google for a pic, I don't wanna look at it...
The anti-spyware game is a real case of horses for courses - one tool will detect some spyware and miss others, while another will find all the bits the other missed, but miss off a couple it didn't. There really is no 'definitive' spyware removal tool and it's foolish to say there is. I advise people to run both Ad-Aware and Spybot with latest updates at least once a week to ensure almost all spyware is found and removed, as I've had too many instances of one of the two missing out five or six items on every sweep that the other one found straight away.
You could probably get even better performance by running more than those two, but I'm not going to harrass my clients to start running half a dozen programs just to remove spyware and it's a pretty rare thing to come across a piece of spyware, even a humble cookie, that both of those two miss. Anyway, my point is this; You can't just run Ad-Aware or Spybot and think you're protected. Until an anti-spyware tool has a 100% record against all known spyware, I won't consider them anything near a definitive tool, or a licence to behave recklessly on the net, something which too many naive people seem to do.
The problem with anti-spyware tools is three-fold;
a) They are made by private companies and individuals who's credentials and/or decency cannot be guaranteed. They could easily take kickbacks from spyware companies in exchange for 'excluding' their programs from the scan list. Sure, it might not be happening now, but what's to stop Lavasoft suddenly to start taking kickbacks to let the less insiduous spyware through? Unless you're on the inside of a company like that, you can never be sure. I'm sure Lavasoft aren't doing anything like that, as these results prove, I'm merely using them as an example - any anti-spyware app people trust is in an immensely powerful position on the user's computer, and any money-seeking company can theoretically be bought out.
c) When they remove a spyware.dll that a program the user makes use of hooks into, the program may stop working, and who would get blamed? the anti-spyware vendor. Hey presto, Spybot looks like pure evil because they just killed off Joe User's cool new P2P app because keylog32.dll got wiped. This happened a lot when Kazaa was big - naive users getting told by techy types to run Spybot every now and then to clear spyware ended up bitching because it nuked the spyware that Kazaa checked for before starting up. They didn't seem to care about privacy when protecting it stopped them getting their MP3s and porn.
c) People do, as I mentioned above, use them as an excuse to behave recklessly on the internet - they will install random.exes, they will visit dodgy sites and they will do all manner of things because they believe they are safe. They don't understand that spyware blockers only work against known types of spyware, not all spyware in total. Naive users seem to think it's an agreement between spyware vendors and anti-spyware companies when it is, to all intents and purposes, an arms race which the anti-spyware groups will always in second place.
Anyway, what was my point again? Oh yes, that these statistics are misleading for naive users. Ad-Aware and the others are now going to start shouting from the rooftops about how they're one of the top 3 anti-spyware apps on the market, and thousands of lusers will trust themselves to it implicitly solely because of that blurb, while the reality is Ad-Aware still misses stuff, and it is more than fallible. That 'lowly' Spybot has turned up half a dozen items Ad-Aware failed to find at least three times for me, but I wouldn't run that on it's own either - Everybodyb knows it's a good idea to get a second opinion, especially when it's free.
Also, does anybody else find it funny that/. are now serving ads to the Microsoft 'Get the Facts' campaign? Is this Slashdot putting one over on Microsoft by taking the money they throw at them when they know no-one here will believe it, or have they reached a new low, actually showing not just Microsoft ads, but ones that feature blatant FUD against FOSS?
I don't know about you, but I consider anything on my computer that isn't static data 'software'. This isn't static data. A file which drops it's settings to the registry is not static data. Like the grandparent states, it's not an executable, but it's still software, at least by my definition.
Valve hasn't actually taken anyone to court, though. So long as they just stick to banning people from Steam and not actually dragging them to court, I don't see any real legal complications here.
Disabling access to Steam means disabling access to Valve games the pirate has puchased legally. That's tantamount to a Valve heavy going round to the pirate's house and smashing his Half-Life 1 CDs, i.e. something they just can't do. If I were to pirate this game (I won't, I don't like the look of it enough), I'd be in the wrong, definately, but I'd sure take Valve to court if they stopped me using something I had a legal right to use. That's as much or more theft as the original piracy is.
Yes, people did have lower expectations of effects - they obviously didn't have all the fancy tricks the Enterprise guys have, they had to make do with what they had. Even the TNG guys had vastly more options in terms of effects than TOS.
And as for the story, you have to appreciate the era it was made for and filmed in - Americans wanted a tough, strong character who killed the baddie and got the girl, and Kirk was that. In TNG, culture and diplomacy was the buzzwords around at the time, and that's what Picard is the epitome of.
The thing with television classics is you can't hold old TV shows up to the standards and sensibilities we have now, but appreciate them for what they were at the time.
/. have been going in pretty heavy on the HL2 ad saturation recently, with more often than not both the top and side banners being some sort of ad for Valve's finest. It's just scattergun saturation rather than targetted specifically at this page.
Tinfoil hat off, please - it doesn't go with your eyes...
A HL2 torrent released so they can monitor and ban IPs that connect to it? I doubt it, as that's a legal minefield - you don't even need to be a lawyer to see how a smart pirate is going to make Valve look like fools in court by arguing that by connecting to the torrent and, by the nature of bittorrent, sending just one byte of the game down his pipe, they were displaying conscious intent to give him the whole game for free, thus whipping their case out from under them.
Or, as someone else suggested, a.zip full of large junk files with an.exe that just 'calls home' and gets your Steam ID banned? I doubt this too, as all it would take would be for one vindictive hax0r who just got his Steam account wiped to rename the home-calling.exe as something perfectly legal and start serving it up over Kazaa and bam!, anyone who downloads it gets their Steam IDs hosed. I can't see Valve being stupid enough to run the risk of being liable for something like that, even if it's not likely they would be the ones in the wrong in the eyes of the law in that situation - they'd definately at least be seen as irresponsible for making such a move so easy to perform.
Or there's option C. That this is bullshit scaremongering. My money's on the latter.
And since when did rumours in jumped-up forum posts become news, anyway?
Bad Slashdot.
Ah, I didn't see that at the first skim-read, I was just reading through the symptoms - I must have spelt it wrong when I ctrl+F'ed for it, too. That serves me right for posting on Slashdot after two days of work with practically no sleep, doesn't it?
Thoughts still go out to Patrick and his family, and I hope he keeps us updated as much as he can - I'd like to keep an eye on thisfor a while to see how it develops...
If he's been doing his research, and judging by the amount of specialists he's seen, I'm surprised he hasn't mentioned pulmonary actinomycosis. The lack of stringent dental hygeine is significant, as that does increase the chances of contracting it by quite a large measure - the condition also causes 'lung nodules' like he describes.
Those pressure release's he's getting could be a sign of severe/agitated pleural effusion, where the collections of fluid are forming pockets and perhaps 'popping' into the pleura itself, though if he did indeed get one 'inside his head' then I would be gravely concerned - as I would be with anything to do with any release of pressure inside the head. What that could mean is beyond the range of my knowledge, I'm afraid, but the one thing I do know is that anything like that going on should be treated immediately, not when it's convenient for the nearest ID Doc. As for the releases of pressure in the chest cavity, I think he'll probably be OK until his appointment if he doesn't try to do anything drastic between now and his appointment, though don't take that in any way as a qualified medical opinion. Other than that all I can offer in the way of advice is that he should ensure he always has someone nearby who can call 911 if something major does kick off before Friday.
I'd also like to wish you the best of luck, Patrick - and it can't hurt to have a whole community behind you, now can it?
Oh, and what's it like for a Linux guru being stuck on AOL dialup?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't it say more about the GIMP's interface than Photoshop's that the discovery of a single user who prefers the former's interface warrants a +3, Interesting?
Going by that, entering 'B' would bring up Brittney Spears, while in reality, it brings up Best Buy...
you made a misspelling in your post. There's only one T in 'Odious Fame Slut'.
Preferably in another building
In another city.
Inside a locked box, in a safe, in a bunker, which is inside another, bigger bunker, deep inside my secret volcano lair guarded by sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.
This reminds me of my first year of college, studying Computing as one of my subjects. Now my teacher for this was Welsh, and had absolutely no clue about anything not contained within the pages of his hideously out-of-date textbook. He even forced us to learn Pascal when there was C/C++ availible as a 'preferred equivalent' in the curriculum. One long year of being baby-walked through coding and compiling command-line apps with Borland TurboPascal 5.5 for Windows. Sheer Hell. So after wasting countless hours posting to /., reading bash.org and spending as little time as possible coding the crappy database app we were forced to make in probably the worst language I've ever had to code in, we decided to play a little trick on our Welsh tormen^H^H^H^H^H^Htutor - We'd pop a Knoppix CD into one of the few boxes in the room with a CD-ROM drive and wait for him to do his usual rounds. We expected him to go ballistic, but he didnt - He just stared open-jawed at the screen.
Why? Had he just experienced a sort of open-source epiphany? Was he mesmerised by the dubious beauty of the the KDE backgrounds? No - the reason he was gazing in quiet awe at the contents of the battered, flickering screen in the corner of the computing lab was he thought we'd made it ourselves. In Pascal.
Well, football fans, I hope you liked Madden 2005, because you're going to get that same game shoved down your throats with updated rosters for the next five years.
EA used to be like this with the FIFA Football (soccer to you Americans) licence - I'm pretty sure every FIFA game from 1996 to 2001 was the same damn game with just the rosters updated - they've got better since, though, and have been genuinely adding new features to every release since 2002 (mostly because a large section of the market began to realise that International Superstar Soccer, while not having the official licences, gave a superior gaming experience provided you didn't mind the names being a bit off). They saw the market was no longer stagnant and they had a serious competitor, so they started adding interesting features.
Provided one of the competitors takes it upon themselves to make a game that's more realistic than EA's offering gameplay-wise, a large chunk of the market will start to switch, official licence and rosters or not. Provided a competitor comes in with a worthy product, EA won't risk letting their marketshare slide, so don't bet too strongly on them letting this one stagnate. Let's call it a wait-and-see, shall we?
What is it the tinfoil-hat brigade don't understand? Even if this program did report back to Yahoo, you could just block it at the firewall (if you run Windows without a firewall, you deserve everything you get) - even the most rudimentary firewall offers application-level permissions, and any program that doesn't have a valid reason for accessing the outside world doesn't get permission. Simple as that.
The BBC over here in the UK are already trying to implement a solution like this. I had a reasonably formal conversation with Matt Locke, the director of their creative R&D department, when he visited my college to give the kids a talk on careers in the BBC. We got onto the subject of online distribution - we discussed a closed online distribution method they were developing solely because Younger people are watching less TV and are spending an increasing amount of time on computers. Move the media to where people want to view it.
;)
The plan is to have people pay a weekly flat fee (much like you would a cable bill) and have access to all the shows broadcast on the BBC-owned channels over the past seven days, as well as previews of new shows before they made it to the BBC's own channels. They, of course, would come with DRM - the shows would become unwatchable after seven days - but I thought this was a fairly reasonable trade-off. He also suggested (in an official BBC capacity, just for the record) that a distributed 'BitTorrent-like' download system could be used to take the load off the corporation's servers - he went to great pains to reinforce that 'the BBC did not support illegal downloading or filesharing' and that they would lock down their transfer method rather than just using BitTorrent, but he did say that 'the BBC supports the idea of using distributed downloads of legal material'.
I think this fills all four of your points, and it's nice to see a guy with a big position at a major broadcast corporation start seeing sense - not all people in corporations are evil, and Matt Locke is genuinely nice guy - if the BBC's idea works out it'd be nice to see some of the American networks follow a similar pattern, but to be honest I can't see it happening - you guys always seem to be a lot more 'closed' when it comes to distributable content, and I expect most broadcasters would still be too scared about people cracking into the system... I expect the BBC have less to lose financially if people do still get material illegally, as anyone with a TV is already paying them with our TV licence fees whereas most Americans could just ditch cable altogether if someone cracked a system like this, but that's no reason for a few not to maybe try it if the BBC gets this plan up and running.
And as for a similar style to iTunes, I got to see a mock-up of the client - brushed metal everywhere - seems everyone's taking a leaf out of Apple's style book
"The case has broad implications for the internet"???? Is IE the only browser out there?!?! Go to Mozilla.com!!
1) For most people (93% as a rough estimate based on the stats for non-techy sites I've run) still think IE is the only browser out there, and if 93% of the web clients out there use IE, then 100% of the websites out there have to be compatible if they're going to be accepted. If Microsoft has to strip certain things out of IE, expect 99% of the sites out there on the web to strip those things out of their content very quickly indeed, and seeing as things such as Flash and Java are seemingly covered by this patent, not to mention things like QuickTime, etc, expect a lot of the web's content to be changed if these guys win. I'd call that a pretty broad implication.
2) Do you really think these people are going to leave it at Microsoft? How long before they go after Mozilla.org? or Opera? How long before Firefox, with it's rising profile and easy and overt plugin system, becomes their next target? If they get a legal precedent by smiting Microsoft, don't expect them to turn around and say 'thank you, OSS', expect them to use it as a very big stick to beat Moz and Opera down with. If the Mozilla Foundation have enough money to pay for a New York Times ad, they've got enough money to be sued by a greedy guy with a dumb patent.
Seriously, this is a Really Bad Thing(tm) and no matter how much these guys say they're doing it for OSS, you'd better be rooting for Redmond on this one...
For what it's worth, I have a Presario 2500 series that up until a few weeks ago was running Debian - I switched back to Windows for games and Photoshop as CS runs like crap under CrossOver, and I've never had a single problem with the Compaq hardware.
I know all the scare-stories to do with Compaq laptops, but I've had mine for well over a year now and it's survived more than enough for me to be able to recommend it to anyone out there who wants a solid notebook. This thing's taken falls off of tables two or three times and shown no ill-effects when my old Toshiba would fall apart if you looked at it funny. The real problem with Compaq laptops is the software, and the way they seem intent on looping functions that could be dealt with perfectly well by the hardware back through annoying, buggy software apps, and their customised OEM version of XP SP1 has always been very prone to crashing (I know it can't be the hardware as Debian and Windows 2000 both ran fine on it). Seriously, if you're scared off of Compaq laptops by scare-stories, they're out of date, and I'd seriously suggest you try one, provided you're not going to keep the pre-installed XP - that thing's more trouble than it's worth.
I thought 'good triumphs over evil' was supposed to be a good thing.
Can someone explain to me the objections Christians would have to Doom? I just don't understand it - guy goes a military base killing the forces of Hell. Jeez, give the Doom guy a dog-collar and it's basically an exorcism with energy weapons. As far as I can assume, killing demons is portrayed as a good thing, is it not? So where's the blasphemy?
It's nothing to do with spammers modding up comments favourable to their situation, it's simply a case of extended logic - taking the possibilities that could result from Lycos's idea and realising what could come from it. Realistically, spammers were never going to shut down because Lycos decided to DDoS them, we know that, the spammers know that, and Lycos probably knows it, too, or they wouldn't have pulled this campaign. It appears /.'ers realised the same things I did - No matter how bad the spam problem is, aggrivating an enemy you cannot kill is a very, very bad move to make - a bad move of George Bush proportions (in a similar vein, him going after Islamic extremists by blowing up Muslims is only going to create more Islamic extremists - while DDoS'ing spammers isn't going to create more spammers, it's going to cause more attacks in retaliation, slowing down the 'net even more).
What good could possibly have come from Lycos's attempt? In the best case scenario, a few spam sites out of the hundreds out there would stop traffic for a few hours, then carried on as normal. In the worst case, Lycos would get it's ass handed to it in court, spammers would retaliate by DDoS'ing Lycos and other sites (Suprnova had a torrent for the screensaver and got swamped - coincidence, or something more sinister?, and maybe even the MakeLoveNotSpam servers would be compromised and the army of zombie machines turned into one grand botnet for the spammers. No-one's trying to control the attitude of anyone, Lycos just made a stupid move and most people are looking at the big picture and realising it. Believe me, I'd like to see spam stomped out as much as the next guy, but I realise that 'fighting fire with fire' when you're dealing with a foe you can't directly kill is rediculous.
Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.
It's still unnecessary. Why on earth should you have to restart the whole WM (no matter how easy it is to do so) just to change the background? There has to be an easier way. (and no, I don't care for 'the source is there, go fix it yourself' type attitudes).
The government does not get Windows shipped to them from Microsoft for free. The whole reason Microsoft can afford to offer 'amnesty' to pirates and do not crack down on Windows piracy is because their bread and butter is government and business contracts. Trust me, that's where the money is - and lock-in means they're going to keep paying. Microsoft certainly aren't going to start giving it away for free.
Terrorism has been ruled out as a possible motive.
Please, someone tell me you haven't all been indoctrined into the Bush Family Groupthink that every single crime that goes on anywhere in the whole damn country has some sort of terrorist motive? The homeless guy stealing apples from the grocery store isn't a terrorist sleeper agent, the guy behind the counter that short-changes you in Wal-Mart is not an Islamic fundamentalist hell-bent on destroying the West, and two bungling jackasses stealing computer equipment are not committing an act of jihad - if Osama bin Laden was going to get at America again, you really think he'd do it by stealing circuit panels? You don't seem to understand that Al-Queda chooses it's targets to make a statement - hence the targetting of the military and financial hearts of America on 9/11. They're not going to waste their time disrupting a few 911 calls in some little county in southern NY. Trust me, they've got more important things to do.
Americans, please, a little note from the rest of the world - there are some people out there that are more than capable of being anti-social without being part of some Islamic doctrine to convert you all to Sharia. Stop screaming 'terrorist' anytime anything kicks off, it's called 'crying wolf'. How many of you out there now automatically think 'terrorism' when something you don't like happens? I've nothing against Americans, but there does seem to be a rich vein of groupthink running through you guys just at the moment...
I hate attitudes like that of the grandparent so much - why is a child more important than an adult? What has the theoretical child done to warrant extra care and protection than the theoretical adult?
Sorry, just being a kid doesn't cut it for me, especially if the adult is someone as technically adroit as Patrick Volkerding. In any case, let's leave the morbid comparisons out of this, shall we? If he's reading this, we want him to see well-wishers and, hopefully, ideas on ways to cure his condition - not some jackass weighing his life up against some theoretical kid with leukemia.
It's true. I don't even make the effort to watch shows at their designated times anymore. I'll go and download the latest episode of CSI in about 15 minutes and watch it with much higher quality video and sound, and no commercial breaks. How will the industry adapt?
The director of the BBC's 'research into new technologies', a certain Matt Locke, came to speak at my college a few weeks back and we spoke about this very thing. The BBC are apparently looking into ways of distributing their programming via the internet, using a service like iTunes (the interface they had in the mock-up even looked like iTunes) to do so. He talked the talk very much of a man who knew that illegal downloading of media, including TV shows, was not something that was going to be stamped out, and that it was foolish and frivolous to even try. I like the system he demonstrated a lot, and I think it has a lot of promise - He proposed a system where you paid a flat subscription fee (as you would a television licence fee) and you have access to the BBC database of programmes, where you could download an (admittedly DRM-encumbered) official media file of any show from the past week, which would expire after seven days. There were plenty of other details, but I forget them as I was fairly out of it at the time.
Best of all, I needled him a little more and got it out of him that the system would use a BitTorrent-like (though not the BitTorrent we know and love) system to spread the load away from the BBC servers, and even got him to state, in his capacity as a BBC department director, that he was in full support of the legal uses of BitTorrent-style P2P filesharing, So that's how they'll adapt - Once a big corporation like the BBC switch I'm sure plenty of others will follow - and we can add another big name to the list of corporations that accept and support the legal use of BitTorrent (et al) technology.
Looking like that, her career will probably just sink into the ground much like the beached whale Michelle McManus did over here in the UK. Google for a pic, I don't wanna look at it...
The anti-spyware game is a real case of horses for courses - one tool will detect some spyware and miss others, while another will find all the bits the other missed, but miss off a couple it didn't. There really is no 'definitive' spyware removal tool and it's foolish to say there is. I advise people to run both Ad-Aware and Spybot with latest updates at least once a week to ensure almost all spyware is found and removed, as I've had too many instances of one of the two missing out five or six items on every sweep that the other one found straight away.
.dll that a program the user makes use of hooks into, the program may stop working, and who would get blamed? the anti-spyware vendor. Hey presto, Spybot looks like pure evil because they just killed off Joe User's cool new P2P app because keylog32.dll got wiped. This happened a lot when Kazaa was big - naive users getting told by techy types to run Spybot every now and then to clear spyware ended up bitching because it nuked the spyware that Kazaa checked for before starting up. They didn't seem to care about privacy when protecting it stopped them getting their MP3s and porn.
.exes, they will visit dodgy sites and they will do all manner of things because they believe they are safe. They don't understand that spyware blockers only work against known types of spyware, not all spyware in total. Naive users seem to think it's an agreement between spyware vendors and anti-spyware companies when it is, to all intents and purposes, an arms race which the anti-spyware groups will always in second place.
/. are now serving ads to the Microsoft 'Get the Facts' campaign? Is this Slashdot putting one over on Microsoft by taking the money they throw at them when they know no-one here will believe it, or have they reached a new low, actually showing not just Microsoft ads, but ones that feature blatant FUD against FOSS?
You could probably get even better performance by running more than those two, but I'm not going to harrass my clients to start running half a dozen programs just to remove spyware and it's a pretty rare thing to come across a piece of spyware, even a humble cookie, that both of those two miss. Anyway, my point is this; You can't just run Ad-Aware or Spybot and think you're protected. Until an anti-spyware tool has a 100% record against all known spyware, I won't consider them anything near a definitive tool, or a licence to behave recklessly on the net, something which too many naive people seem to do.
The problem with anti-spyware tools is three-fold;
a) They are made by private companies and individuals who's credentials and/or decency cannot be guaranteed. They could easily take kickbacks from spyware companies in exchange for 'excluding' their programs from the scan list. Sure, it might not be happening now, but what's to stop Lavasoft suddenly to start taking kickbacks to let the less insiduous spyware through? Unless you're on the inside of a company like that, you can never be sure. I'm sure Lavasoft aren't doing anything like that, as these results prove, I'm merely using them as an example - any anti-spyware app people trust is in an immensely powerful position on the user's computer, and any money-seeking company can theoretically be bought out.
c) When they remove a spyware
c) People do, as I mentioned above, use them as an excuse to behave recklessly on the internet - they will install random
Anyway, what was my point again? Oh yes, that these statistics are misleading for naive users. Ad-Aware and the others are now going to start shouting from the rooftops about how they're one of the top 3 anti-spyware apps on the market, and thousands of lusers will trust themselves to it implicitly solely because of that blurb, while the reality is Ad-Aware still misses stuff, and it is more than fallible. That 'lowly' Spybot has turned up half a dozen items Ad-Aware failed to find at least three times for me, but I wouldn't run that on it's own either - Everybodyb knows it's a good idea to get a second opinion, especially when it's free.
Also, does anybody else find it funny that
I don't know about you, but I consider anything on my computer that isn't static data 'software'. This isn't static data. A file which drops it's settings to the registry is not static data. Like the grandparent states, it's not an executable, but it's still software, at least by my definition.
Valve hasn't actually taken anyone to court, though. So long as they just stick to banning people from Steam and not actually dragging them to court, I don't see any real legal complications here.
Disabling access to Steam means disabling access to Valve games the pirate has puchased legally. That's tantamount to a Valve heavy going round to the pirate's house and smashing his Half-Life 1 CDs, i.e. something they just can't do. If I were to pirate this game (I won't, I don't like the look of it enough), I'd be in the wrong, definately, but I'd sure take Valve to court if they stopped me using something I had a legal right to use. That's as much or more theft as the original piracy is.
Yes, people did have lower expectations of effects - they obviously didn't have all the fancy tricks the Enterprise guys have, they had to make do with what they had. Even the TNG guys had vastly more options in terms of effects than TOS.
And as for the story, you have to appreciate the era it was made for and filmed in - Americans wanted a tough, strong character who killed the baddie and got the girl, and Kirk was that. In TNG, culture and diplomacy was the buzzwords around at the time, and that's what Picard is the epitome of.
The thing with television classics is you can't hold old TV shows up to the standards and sensibilities we have now, but appreciate them for what they were at the time.
/. have been going in pretty heavy on the HL2 ad saturation recently, with more often than not both the top and side banners being some sort of ad for Valve's finest. It's just scattergun saturation rather than targetted specifically at this page.
Tinfoil hat off, please - it doesn't go with your eyes...
A HL2 torrent released so they can monitor and ban IPs that connect to it? I doubt it, as that's a legal minefield - you don't even need to be a lawyer to see how a smart pirate is going to make Valve look like fools in court by arguing that by connecting to the torrent and, by the nature of bittorrent, sending just one byte of the game down his pipe, they were displaying conscious intent to give him the whole game for free, thus whipping their case out from under them.
.zip full of large junk files with an .exe that just 'calls home' and gets your Steam ID banned? I doubt this too, as all it would take would be for one vindictive hax0r who just got his Steam account wiped to rename the home-calling .exe as something perfectly legal and start serving it up over Kazaa and bam!, anyone who downloads it gets their Steam IDs hosed. I can't see Valve being stupid enough to run the risk of being liable for something like that, even if it's not likely they would be the ones in the wrong in the eyes of the law in that situation - they'd definately at least be seen as irresponsible for making such a move so easy to perform.
Or, as someone else suggested, a
Or there's option C. That this is bullshit scaremongering. My money's on the latter.
And since when did rumours in jumped-up forum posts become news, anyway?
Bad Slashdot.
Ah, I didn't see that at the first skim-read, I was just reading through the symptoms - I must have spelt it wrong when I ctrl+F'ed for it, too. That serves me right for posting on Slashdot after two days of work with practically no sleep, doesn't it?
Thoughts still go out to Patrick and his family, and I hope he keeps us updated as much as he can - I'd like to keep an eye on thisfor a while to see how it develops...
If he's been doing his research, and judging by the amount of specialists he's seen, I'm surprised he hasn't mentioned pulmonary actinomycosis. The lack of stringent dental hygeine is significant, as that does increase the chances of contracting it by quite a large measure - the condition also causes 'lung nodules' like he describes.
;)
Those pressure release's he's getting could be a sign of severe/agitated pleural effusion, where the collections of fluid are forming pockets and perhaps 'popping' into the pleura itself, though if he did indeed get one 'inside his head' then I would be gravely concerned - as I would be with anything to do with any release of pressure inside the head. What that could mean is beyond the range of my knowledge, I'm afraid, but the one thing I do know is that anything like that going on should be treated immediately, not when it's convenient for the nearest ID Doc. As for the releases of pressure in the chest cavity, I think he'll probably be OK until his appointment if he doesn't try to do anything drastic between now and his appointment, though don't take that in any way as a qualified medical opinion. Other than that all I can offer in the way of advice is that he should ensure he always has someone nearby who can call 911 if something major does kick off before Friday.
I'd also like to wish you the best of luck, Patrick - and it can't hurt to have a whole community behind you, now can it?
Oh, and what's it like for a Linux guru being stuck on AOL dialup?