Why not just make it let all mail through, i.e. turning itself off? Wouldn't that wake people up enough to stop using it? Or automate it to send an email notifying the user that the filter they are using is outdated and unsupported?
Blocking all incoming email seems a surefire way to get their asses sued, and doesn't even make the source of the problem all that obvious.
At this point if no Blu-Ray player is coming, I go out and buy a separate Blu-Ray player (or PS3) and rent movies than risk going over my limit. I already pay Rogers enough.
So once you go 12Gb-ish over your limit, they stop charging extra? Make it work for you and download 13Gb more porn per month.
I can find dozens of online map services. I'd say pretty much every single map service out there is free and ad-supported, and most were around long before Google even dreamed up Google Maps. Same with email, free banner-supported webmail has been around since long before Gmail was dreamed up.
Google aren't changing or manipulating any markets, they're simply providing an alternative. If a few for-pay map services or webmail providers went out of business, then the blame lies with them for not being competitive, and even if we are going to point the blame at other places willing to give their services away for free, the finger has to be pointed at Multimap, the RAC mapping service, Hotmail, Inbox.com and hundreds and hundreds more before it points at Google, because they were far, far from the first in either arena.
Let me explain this in a way we can all relate to: Slutty girls force prostitutes out of business by giving the same product away at no cost. Does that make slutty girls bad and requiring government intervention?
Personally, I hate how every time you upgrade Firefox it insists on starting up by loading the Firefox webpages. Same deal. Unwanted marketing that I have to counteract, and can't counteract until it's already done.
Erm... if you already have Firefox, what is being marketed at you by it loading up the Firefox page when you first install it? Do you bitch that the can of coke you just bought had 'Coca-Cola' written on the can?
Troll? No.
I love Ubuntu. I love what it's done for Linux - it's taken it beyond Windows in terms of 'an OS my mother can use to surf the net and check her email' and she also does accounts for several businesses in OpenOffice (I know OpenOffice isn't an Ubuntu product, but she wouldn't have learned it were it not for Ubuntu). The emergence of Ubuntu and the horror that is Vista - and, to a certain extent, XP - the reason I switched her over was the constant problems I had with her wifi under XP - mean Canonical have really made strides into the 'Linux on the Desktop' market - it's not there yet, but it could be with a manufacturer on their side.
The point of my original post was to say that Ubuntu should focus on it's own merits instead of getting into the pissing contest over features with Vista. Nobody I know who has Vista uses the per-application audio, they just turn their speakers up and down and have done with it. I'm pretty certain most people don't even know it's there, so it's obviously not a 'killer feature' for Vista that's going to make people choose it over Ubuntu, so why try to lever a product that many others have said is not ready for mainstream release, i.e. PulseAudio, just to 'catch up' to a feature nobody knows even exists? Yes it has more features than ESD and that's great, but ESD works just fine, and will do at least until PulseAudio is a little more mature: everything supports it, it's well maintained, and is in the 'good enough' sweet spot.
Thing is, including it seems to me like someone is concentrating too much on making Ubuntu (and Linux in general) tick all the boxes Vista ticks, regardless of how irrelevant they are. If that's a troll, then so be it. Me? I think Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular ticks more boxes for my needs and the needs of lots of others than Vista does, and they should concentrate on pulling away from Windows in those areas - speed, ease of use, etc - and not on matching every little feature Vista has just to be able to say "nyah nyah" when the Windows fans scream about the 'per-application audio' they have but nobody uses.
No, I'm just responding to different arguments people make to try and justify their stealing of movies.
Very well, but Tanktalus did mention paid-for movies. Fair use might not allow copying of discs for backup purposes, but it isn't stealing. (I'm not even getting involved in the semantics between 'stealing' and 'copyright infringement'). If I torrent a movie and you call me out for stealing, all I can do is engage in mealy-mouthed arguments about legal definitions. If you accuse me of stealing because I made a copy of my legally bought DVD, I'm not going to be happy.
No, I'm saying the opposite - there is no difference. People here seem to think that since the movie is digital it is then 'data' and can be copied at will. A movie is just a movie, independant of medium and subject to copyright laws.
Correct - copyright covers the content, not the medium. I don't think people think that just because a Blu-Ray disc is 'digital' that it's somehow different to VHS in terms of copyright, I think this is just a misunderstanding - I didn't see anyone suggesting that just because one is analog and one is digital that one is different to the other in terms of legality of copying.
I'm wondering what the justification for this decision was.
The feature-for-feature pissing contest they have with Vista. Vista says they have per-application sound support? Ubuntu has to slap in PulseAudio, despite it's obvious unreadiness for mainstream adoption, just to say "YEAH, WE HAVE THAT TOO!". It's just another checked box.
It's a shame, as I'd rather Ubuntu spent more time enhancing the features that make it better than Vista than getting involved in buggy tit-for-tat feature creep.
You keep shifting your goalposts. You started with a point about fair use and have now moved on to arguing dictionary definitions - you seem to have traded any sort of structured argument for a bid to be 'right'.
Stop trolling. What is the difference, other than squabbling about what definition of 'data' to use, between copying a DVD and copying a VHS tape? You seem to be implying that there is one.
I for one don't want people sharing my internet access. It's not because I want to hoard all my bandwidth for me, it's because I don't know what that guy parked across the street tapping into my open wifi is downloading - is he sharing child pornography? snuff videos? downloading terror training manuals? I don't know.
That's not a think-of-the-children outlook, it's a think-of-my-ass-that-will-be-nailed-to-the-wall-for-his-shit outlook. You, as the account holder, are going to be in a world of hurt if child porn or anything else is downloaded via your connection while the guy across the street gets off scot free - yeah I'm sure you could make the case that you have an open wifi and it might not have been you, but by that point, you've already had your computer equipment hauled off in black bags and your reputation left in tatters by as much as the accusation.
Tokul, from the perspective of the GP, Dmitri Galushkevich is Estonian, and so are the 400,000 other Slavs living in Estonia you mentioned.
The GP seems to be ignorant of the east European tradition of referring to people by ethnicity, rather than country or origin. See, in the UK or the US, as I'm sure you're aware, people are used to calling people from country X, 'Xians' or some other variation, regardless of ethnic origin - yes there are caveats like 'African-American' or 'Irish-American', but the are still grouped together under one large heading of 'American'. In the UK, there's no such thing as 'African-British' or 'Irish-British', there's just 'British' - everyone from the UK, regardless of ethnic origin, is British (though perhaps not for very longer, what with the Scots wanting to break away - perhaps this is a bad example, but I don't know how it works in other countries).
In countries like Estonia, you are your ethnicity. If you are ethnically Estonian, then you are an Estonian, but if you are ethnically Russian, then you are a Russian. A Russian living in Estonia, but a Russian, not a Russian-Estonian or anything else. The most prominent example of this in international politics today is in Kosovo, where you'd probably get attacked by any Serb living in Kosovo that you dared call a Kosovan. I'm an outsider so I'm not entirely sure of the reasoning behind it, I can only guess it is a side-effect of trying to preserve individual identity while Communist rule (either the USSR or the former Yugoslavia) is trying to tell everyone they're exactly the same.
Anyway, I've been talking for a while now and have gotten totally off the point: You are both correct from your own perspectives of what constitutes 'Estonian'.
Most of the time, I'm an OS X user. I love my MacBook, but when I use my PC at home, I run Ubuntu, and it's not because it's 'fun' - I use it for work, so it's not 'fun' by any stretch of the imagination - it's because of the same reason I like my Mac - because it just works. The computer came with Vista, and I genuinely tried to like it, and I will admit that, when it works properly, I do like Vista. I don't champion it, I don't think it's anything special, but I've nothing really against it either. It's never kicked in my door and raped my dog like the grudges some/.'ers have against it would suggest, it just doesn't 'just work':
* My Belkin wireless adapters never worked properly with it and required several reinstalls to work as they should.
* The Aero Glass effects make a perfectly servicable computer with 1Gb of RAM and a reasonably fast processor stutter if I dare have more than half a dozen windows open at once (I know it's Aero doing it, because it chugs along just fine if I run the same apps in the same state with the thing turned off).
* Niggly little 'features' like the Windows Sidebar reactivating itself whenever it damn well pleases and the 'You have disabled startup programs, would you like to view them?' (No I fucking wouldn't, that's why I disabled the bloody things!).
On the other hand, Linux (well, Ubuntu - your mileage with different distros may vary), when installed, automatically configured my wireless adapter and all I had to do was put in my network password and I was away. I don't know if it's using ndiswrapper to do that, because I'm not a techy and it never told me, it just worked. I'd assume it isn't seeing as I was never prompted to locate a Windows driver, but I couldn't tell you for sure - all I know is that my wifi works.
I can also have my computer look easily as good as Aero Glass with the automatically-installed-and-configured Desktop Effects and a swift set of clicks around gnome-look.org - the only qualm I have is that the default window decorations take up a few pixels' more room than the 'Windows Classic' ones, but with the resolution I have, that's not really an issue. I also don't get any annoying pop-ups whenever I start my machine asking if I want to start the programs I asked it not to start (I asked you not to for a reason, ffs) or re-activating 'Ubuntu Sidebar' modules.
In short, maybe I'm strange, maybe I'm not the typical Linux user, but I don't use Linux because I love tinkering with the command line - I don't. I use Linux because it's fast, does what I want it to, is shiny without compromising performance and doesn't bug me about things I've no intention of looking at. A couple of years ago when I first checked it out it didn't do that, and kicked up all sorts of hassles about all sorts of hardware issues, etc, but it's really come on since then. I'm not the 'granny wanting to surf the internet for pictures of the grandkids', I'm a twentysomething screenwriter, but I'm not the/. stereotype sysadmin or guru programmer either, and I'd take Linux over Windows all day long.
Point 1: 'Taking' is not the same as 'Making a copy of'. You want to come to my house and steal my CDs while I'm in the bathroom, I'm going to be pissed off, but if you want to whip out a USB stick and copy an album or two from my MP3 directory while you're waiting for me to shake off the drips, I'm not going to care.
Point 2: Many people unfortunately consider racism a good thing. So in that definition, racism is a good thing. That's why we have these things called laws that trump the definitions of 'many people', and the law says copyright infringement is not stealing.
The correlation is this: Ericsson are a dealer in mobile internet devices. It is in their interest for people to move to mobile internet devices as people who buy mobile internet devices might by an Ericsson one. Ericsson don't do wifi hotspots, so there is no way using wifi hotspots puts money from your wallet into Ericsson's pocket. This displeases Ericsson, so they will now crow from the rooftops that wifi hotspots are dead, in a bid to drum up business for their absurdly-tariffed mobile internet devices.
Does anybody seriously listen when companies come out with this sort of self-serving 'analyses'? Do they think these companies make these statements out of the goodness of their hearts? If one person switches to a mobile internet device because of this, they're an idiot. Doublly so if they buy an Ericsson.
10 PRINT Gamers don't switch to Linux because there aren't enough games.
20 PRINT Games companies don't switch for Linux because they aren't enough gamers.
GOTO 10
So I can come and sit in your doorway swearing at passers-by, can I? No? Oh.
It's easy to be all sensitive and understanding when your doorstep doesn't stink of piss.
'The first hit is free' is an urban myth. Think about it.
Say there are 20 drug dealers operating in a town. Most towns won't have this amount, but some will have more, and we'll assume that if the illegal drug market in this particular town has gotten to the point where dealers are having to give their wares away free to anyone (why give something away for free when you know you have X number of junkies willing to pay for it?), there must be a fair bit of competition.
If all these 20 drug dealers are operating on their policy of 'first hit is free', that means that a guy can get 20 hits of drugs, completely free, unless all the drug dealers in town are operating some sort of database, which is something I seriously doubt goes on. Also, by the time the junkie has had their 20 hits from every drug dealer in the town, it's highly likely that the first dealer (Dealer A, if you will) will have forgotten our addicted friend, and he can get another free hit. Repeat with Dealer B, Dealer C, etc - people in dark alleyways all tend to look much the same, and you've got to be doing a lot of business to be able to take the risk of giving away a very valuable product - which you have likely bought from some very shady people insisting on a very profitable return - on the off chance that the people you give away to come back to you, and not one of the other 19 drug dealers in town, for their next hit - they found one drug dealer, they can find another.
It's OK for Scrabulous to essentially copy Scrabble because you can't copyright or patent game rules, but it's not OK to copy this game?
You are looking at two different uses of the word 'copy', or rather, at two different levels of copying. Scrabulous copies the rules of Scrabble in a game developed by different people, and if there was a lawsuit for every internet game that - to put it mildly - took a great deal of inspiration from another, none of us would be able to move for the boxes full of litigation papers. This, on the other hand, is different, because it copies actual code and graphics from the original. You cannot legally protect game rules, but you can legally protect code and artwork.
There is also an irony issue here, in that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always gone after people even vaguely infringing *it's* copyright with all the teeth-baring viciousness of a rabid attack dog, so to have a website associated with them involved in blatant copyright infringement is more than a little amusing, but that takes a back seat to the difference between the actual legal issues of the two.
The fear (for the sensible people, anyway) isn't that we are *currently* just like China, it's that the difference between ourselves and China is slowly but surely being diminished. No sensible person would argue that Britain, the US or Australia are 'just like China' but, by the same token, nobody would argue that we are more free than we were ten years ago either.
The attitude of "oh, we aren't as bad as China, so we're doing just fine" is a poisonous and pervasive one; China should not be the measuring stick for civil rights, or a media boogieman so they can tell us how free we are while slowly eroding our personal freedoms; China should be a looming spectre of what we could, if current trends continue, very well become.
The thing with Apple apps with Apple aesthetics is they look good and work well... with other Apple apps with Apple aesthetics. As an Apple user who isn't part of the fanboi crowd (I need Final Cut Pro for my job) who also loves Ubuntu and uses Vista on a daily basis, I can say that Apple does not care about the Windows environment, or any environment other than OS X. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you, but they just don't.
iTunes for Windows is basically just a gateway to tap into the wallets of all the Windows users who want to use iPods and the iTunes store, and uses that as it's selling point, not it's speed or it's aesthetics in terms of the Windows desktop. If you want a media player that fits into the Vista desktop and uses system APIs to minimise memory footprint, use Windows Media Player. If you want to go crazy and use as little memory as possible, use Foobar2000, and if you want your media player to fit into any desktop you can possibly think of, use Winamp and a skin database. That's what those apps are designed for. iTunes for Windows is really ported as casually as possible without really caring about memory usage or how it integrates into the Windows desktop (it doesn't), because it's just there so Windows iPod users can buy iTunes songs.
On OS X, it's a different story. iTunes really doesn't hog a great deal of memory on my MacBook, and it integrates into the desktop beautifully. That's no great feat by the Apple devs, they've just made all the apps stick to the same theme, and iTunes looks a lot sleeker without the badly tacked-on menu bar that the Windows version has. It's widgets are native, which means they're faster and take up less space in memory. I've used iTunes on Windows and have noticed how much of a hog it is, and how dog slow it is when scrolling through a large (10,000+ track) library, but that doesn't mean that Apple can't make good applications, it just means that, when I'm on Windows, Apple doesn't really care about you or me, unless we're somehow giving them money via the iTunes Store. On OS X, iTunes scrolls just fine through the same library, so it's just a lazy port, not bad programming across the board.
a) MS does not dominate the server world, as far as I know. They do have a large chunk, but they are hardly dominant by any means. b) You have a definition of the word 'capture' that differs from everyone else. I've used IE7 and, while it is crap, it didn't throw a net over me and hold me hostage until I promised to use it forever.
There is a difference between a mention of sex on the front of a magazine cover, and a group of people talking explicitly about group sex. I suggest you go away and think about what it is before you make any more posts, because at the moment your argument is like comparing the front page of every newspaper in the country to these theoretical guys in a rental store machine-gunning other patrons in front of your child.
Sorry, you appear to have fallen into the trap of 'Now I am a parent, I demand that all sexual material of any sort be removed from the face of the planet, because it might lead to my child wanting to have sex'. Which is honourable, but overprotective and an unfeasible overreaction.
Sexuality is and always has been 'always on the mind', and the prescence of it in magazines is proof of this. If nobody wanted to read about how to 'Have Hot Sex Tonight', the magazines wouldn't sell, but they do, because people _do_ have sex on the mind pretty much all the time. It's in music videos, it's in magazines, and I don't know about America, but over here in the UK you'd be hard pressed to find a news broadcast without at least a mildly attractive anchor. Sex sells because it's a base human thought. When it comes down to it, we are just vessels, a mass of cells designed to survive long enough to get to reproductive age, reproduce and then die to replenish the ground with nutrients, so claiming sexual behaviour isn't normal is rediculous; pretty much anything _other_ than sexual 'mating' behaviour is a societal construct.
If your child has no interest in sex, which they won't until they're pushing into their teens, they won't know and won't care what the headlines on the magazines say, and when they get to that age and start becoming interested in sex, you'd better be the one to explain the details of it to them, or they're going to be getting it from the magazines you loathe so much, and with the way you seem so squeamish about the idea of sexualisation, I sincerely doubt you will. I fully understand your desire to keep your kids away from the really nasty stuff, and I'd understand your point completely if your grocery store was selling hardcore pornography next to the pick 'n' mix, but they aren't. Children aren't being exposed to anything more than words, words about something that, even if they understand them, they won't care about. Well, unless they're interested in how to 'Have Hot Sex Tonight', in which case your problems as a parent just got a lot bigger than a 'dirty' word on the front of a glossy mag.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just make it let all mail through, i.e. turning itself off? Wouldn't that wake people up enough to stop using it? Or automate it to send an email notifying the user that the filter they are using is outdated and unsupported?
Blocking all incoming email seems a surefire way to get their asses sued, and doesn't even make the source of the problem all that obvious.
At this point if no Blu-Ray player is coming, I go out and buy a separate Blu-Ray player (or PS3) and rent movies than risk going over my limit. I already pay Rogers enough.
So once you go 12Gb-ish over your limit, they stop charging extra? Make it work for you and download 13Gb more porn per month.
I can find dozens of online map services. I'd say pretty much every single map service out there is free and ad-supported, and most were around long before Google even dreamed up Google Maps. Same with email, free banner-supported webmail has been around since long before Gmail was dreamed up.
Google aren't changing or manipulating any markets, they're simply providing an alternative. If a few for-pay map services or webmail providers went out of business, then the blame lies with them for not being competitive, and even if we are going to point the blame at other places willing to give their services away for free, the finger has to be pointed at Multimap, the RAC mapping service, Hotmail, Inbox.com and hundreds and hundreds more before it points at Google, because they were far, far from the first in either arena.
Let me explain this in a way we can all relate to: Slutty girls force prostitutes out of business by giving the same product away at no cost. Does that make slutty girls bad and requiring government intervention?
Personally, I hate how every time you upgrade Firefox it insists on starting up by loading the Firefox webpages. Same deal. Unwanted marketing that I have to counteract, and can't counteract until it's already done.
Erm... if you already have Firefox, what is being marketed at you by it loading up the Firefox page when you first install it? Do you bitch that the can of coke you just bought had 'Coca-Cola' written on the can?
I read the title as 'Army-Based Memory May Put a Terabyte on a Chip'.
I guess you need a lot of porn to keep you entertained on a long tour.
Troll? No. I love Ubuntu. I love what it's done for Linux - it's taken it beyond Windows in terms of 'an OS my mother can use to surf the net and check her email' and she also does accounts for several businesses in OpenOffice (I know OpenOffice isn't an Ubuntu product, but she wouldn't have learned it were it not for Ubuntu). The emergence of Ubuntu and the horror that is Vista - and, to a certain extent, XP - the reason I switched her over was the constant problems I had with her wifi under XP - mean Canonical have really made strides into the 'Linux on the Desktop' market - it's not there yet, but it could be with a manufacturer on their side.
The point of my original post was to say that Ubuntu should focus on it's own merits instead of getting into the pissing contest over features with Vista. Nobody I know who has Vista uses the per-application audio, they just turn their speakers up and down and have done with it. I'm pretty certain most people don't even know it's there, so it's obviously not a 'killer feature' for Vista that's going to make people choose it over Ubuntu, so why try to lever a product that many others have said is not ready for mainstream release, i.e. PulseAudio, just to 'catch up' to a feature nobody knows even exists? Yes it has more features than ESD and that's great, but ESD works just fine, and will do at least until PulseAudio is a little more mature: everything supports it, it's well maintained, and is in the 'good enough' sweet spot.
Thing is, including it seems to me like someone is concentrating too much on making Ubuntu (and Linux in general) tick all the boxes Vista ticks, regardless of how irrelevant they are. If that's a troll, then so be it. Me? I think Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular ticks more boxes for my needs and the needs of lots of others than Vista does, and they should concentrate on pulling away from Windows in those areas - speed, ease of use, etc - and not on matching every little feature Vista has just to be able to say "nyah nyah" when the Windows fans scream about the 'per-application audio' they have but nobody uses.
No, I'm just responding to different arguments people make to try and justify their stealing of movies.
Very well, but Tanktalus did mention paid-for movies. Fair use might not allow copying of discs for backup purposes, but it isn't stealing. (I'm not even getting involved in the semantics between 'stealing' and 'copyright infringement'). If I torrent a movie and you call me out for stealing, all I can do is engage in mealy-mouthed arguments about legal definitions. If you accuse me of stealing because I made a copy of my legally bought DVD, I'm not going to be happy.
No, I'm saying the opposite - there is no difference. People here seem to think that since the movie is digital it is then 'data' and can be copied at will. A movie is just a movie, independant of medium and subject to copyright laws.
Correct - copyright covers the content, not the medium. I don't think people think that just because a Blu-Ray disc is 'digital' that it's somehow different to VHS in terms of copyright, I think this is just a misunderstanding - I didn't see anyone suggesting that just because one is analog and one is digital that one is different to the other in terms of legality of copying.
I'm wondering what the justification for this decision was.
The feature-for-feature pissing contest they have with Vista. Vista says they have per-application sound support? Ubuntu has to slap in PulseAudio, despite it's obvious unreadiness for mainstream adoption, just to say "YEAH, WE HAVE THAT TOO!". It's just another checked box.
It's a shame, as I'd rather Ubuntu spent more time enhancing the features that make it better than Vista than getting involved in buggy tit-for-tat feature creep.
You keep shifting your goalposts. You started with a point about fair use and have now moved on to arguing dictionary definitions - you seem to have traded any sort of structured argument for a bid to be 'right'.
Stop trolling. What is the difference, other than squabbling about what definition of 'data' to use, between copying a DVD and copying a VHS tape? You seem to be implying that there is one.
I for one don't want people sharing my internet access. It's not because I want to hoard all my bandwidth for me, it's because I don't know what that guy parked across the street tapping into my open wifi is downloading - is he sharing child pornography? snuff videos? downloading terror training manuals? I don't know.
That's not a think-of-the-children outlook, it's a think-of-my-ass-that-will-be-nailed-to-the-wall-for-his-shit outlook. You, as the account holder, are going to be in a world of hurt if child porn or anything else is downloaded via your connection while the guy across the street gets off scot free - yeah I'm sure you could make the case that you have an open wifi and it might not have been you, but by that point, you've already had your computer equipment hauled off in black bags and your reputation left in tatters by as much as the accusation.
Tokul, from the perspective of the GP, Dmitri Galushkevich is Estonian, and so are the 400,000 other Slavs living in Estonia you mentioned. The GP seems to be ignorant of the east European tradition of referring to people by ethnicity, rather than country or origin. See, in the UK or the US, as I'm sure you're aware, people are used to calling people from country X, 'Xians' or some other variation, regardless of ethnic origin - yes there are caveats like 'African-American' or 'Irish-American', but the are still grouped together under one large heading of 'American'. In the UK, there's no such thing as 'African-British' or 'Irish-British', there's just 'British' - everyone from the UK, regardless of ethnic origin, is British (though perhaps not for very longer, what with the Scots wanting to break away - perhaps this is a bad example, but I don't know how it works in other countries). In countries like Estonia, you are your ethnicity. If you are ethnically Estonian, then you are an Estonian, but if you are ethnically Russian, then you are a Russian. A Russian living in Estonia, but a Russian, not a Russian-Estonian or anything else. The most prominent example of this in international politics today is in Kosovo, where you'd probably get attacked by any Serb living in Kosovo that you dared call a Kosovan. I'm an outsider so I'm not entirely sure of the reasoning behind it, I can only guess it is a side-effect of trying to preserve individual identity while Communist rule (either the USSR or the former Yugoslavia) is trying to tell everyone they're exactly the same. Anyway, I've been talking for a while now and have gotten totally off the point: You are both correct from your own perspectives of what constitutes 'Estonian'.
Most of the time, I'm an OS X user. I love my MacBook, but when I use my PC at home, I run Ubuntu, and it's not because it's 'fun' - I use it for work, so it's not 'fun' by any stretch of the imagination - it's because of the same reason I like my Mac - because it just works. The computer came with Vista, and I genuinely tried to like it, and I will admit that, when it works properly, I do like Vista. I don't champion it, I don't think it's anything special, but I've nothing really against it either. It's never kicked in my door and raped my dog like the grudges some /.'ers have against it would suggest, it just doesn't 'just work':
/. stereotype sysadmin or guru programmer either, and I'd take Linux over Windows all day long.
* My Belkin wireless adapters never worked properly with it and required several reinstalls to work as they should.
* The Aero Glass effects make a perfectly servicable computer with 1Gb of RAM and a reasonably fast processor stutter if I dare have more than half a dozen windows open at once (I know it's Aero doing it, because it chugs along just fine if I run the same apps in the same state with the thing turned off).
* Niggly little 'features' like the Windows Sidebar reactivating itself whenever it damn well pleases and the 'You have disabled startup programs, would you like to view them?' (No I fucking wouldn't, that's why I disabled the bloody things!).
On the other hand, Linux (well, Ubuntu - your mileage with different distros may vary), when installed, automatically configured my wireless adapter and all I had to do was put in my network password and I was away. I don't know if it's using ndiswrapper to do that, because I'm not a techy and it never told me, it just worked. I'd assume it isn't seeing as I was never prompted to locate a Windows driver, but I couldn't tell you for sure - all I know is that my wifi works.
I can also have my computer look easily as good as Aero Glass with the automatically-installed-and-configured Desktop Effects and a swift set of clicks around gnome-look.org - the only qualm I have is that the default window decorations take up a few pixels' more room than the 'Windows Classic' ones, but with the resolution I have, that's not really an issue. I also don't get any annoying pop-ups whenever I start my machine asking if I want to start the programs I asked it not to start (I asked you not to for a reason, ffs) or re-activating 'Ubuntu Sidebar' modules.
In short, maybe I'm strange, maybe I'm not the typical Linux user, but I don't use Linux because I love tinkering with the command line - I don't. I use Linux because it's fast, does what I want it to, is shiny without compromising performance and doesn't bug me about things I've no intention of looking at. A couple of years ago when I first checked it out it didn't do that, and kicked up all sorts of hassles about all sorts of hardware issues, etc, but it's really come on since then. I'm not the 'granny wanting to surf the internet for pictures of the grandkids', I'm a twentysomething screenwriter, but I'm not the
Point 1: 'Taking' is not the same as 'Making a copy of'. You want to come to my house and steal my CDs while I'm in the bathroom, I'm going to be pissed off, but if you want to whip out a USB stick and copy an album or two from my MP3 directory while you're waiting for me to shake off the drips, I'm not going to care.
Point 2: Many people unfortunately consider racism a good thing. So in that definition, racism is a good thing. That's why we have these things called laws that trump the definitions of 'many people', and the law says copyright infringement is not stealing.
The correlation is this: Ericsson are a dealer in mobile internet devices. It is in their interest for people to move to mobile internet devices as people who buy mobile internet devices might by an Ericsson one. Ericsson don't do wifi hotspots, so there is no way using wifi hotspots puts money from your wallet into Ericsson's pocket. This displeases Ericsson, so they will now crow from the rooftops that wifi hotspots are dead, in a bid to drum up business for their absurdly-tariffed mobile internet devices.
Does anybody seriously listen when companies come out with this sort of self-serving 'analyses'? Do they think these companies make these statements out of the goodness of their hearts? If one person switches to a mobile internet device because of this, they're an idiot. Doublly so if they buy an Ericsson.
(Posted from a wifi hotspot).
10 PRINT Gamers don't switch to Linux because there aren't enough games.
20 PRINT Games companies don't switch for Linux because they aren't enough gamers.
GOTO 10
So I can come and sit in your doorway swearing at passers-by, can I? No? Oh.
It's easy to be all sensitive and understanding when your doorstep doesn't stink of piss.
'The first hit is free' is an urban myth. Think about it.
Say there are 20 drug dealers operating in a town. Most towns won't have this amount, but some will have more, and we'll assume that if the illegal drug market in this particular town has gotten to the point where dealers are having to give their wares away free to anyone (why give something away for free when you know you have X number of junkies willing to pay for it?), there must be a fair bit of competition.
If all these 20 drug dealers are operating on their policy of 'first hit is free', that means that a guy can get 20 hits of drugs, completely free, unless all the drug dealers in town are operating some sort of database, which is something I seriously doubt goes on. Also, by the time the junkie has had their 20 hits from every drug dealer in the town, it's highly likely that the first dealer (Dealer A, if you will) will have forgotten our addicted friend, and he can get another free hit. Repeat with Dealer B, Dealer C, etc - people in dark alleyways all tend to look much the same, and you've got to be doing a lot of business to be able to take the risk of giving away a very valuable product - which you have likely bought from some very shady people insisting on a very profitable return - on the off chance that the people you give away to come back to you, and not one of the other 19 drug dealers in town, for their next hit - they found one drug dealer, they can find another.
It's OK for Scrabulous to essentially copy Scrabble because you can't copyright or patent game rules, but it's not OK to copy this game?
You are looking at two different uses of the word 'copy', or rather, at two different levels of copying. Scrabulous copies the rules of Scrabble in a game developed by different people, and if there was a lawsuit for every internet game that - to put it mildly - took a great deal of inspiration from another, none of us would be able to move for the boxes full of litigation papers. This, on the other hand, is different, because it copies actual code and graphics from the original. You cannot legally protect game rules, but you can legally protect code and artwork.
There is also an irony issue here, in that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always gone after people even vaguely infringing *it's* copyright with all the teeth-baring viciousness of a rabid attack dog, so to have a website associated with them involved in blatant copyright infringement is more than a little amusing, but that takes a back seat to the difference between the actual legal issues of the two.
The fear (for the sensible people, anyway) isn't that we are *currently* just like China, it's that the difference between ourselves and China is slowly but surely being diminished. No sensible person would argue that Britain, the US or Australia are 'just like China' but, by the same token, nobody would argue that we are more free than we were ten years ago either.
The attitude of "oh, we aren't as bad as China, so we're doing just fine" is a poisonous and pervasive one; China should not be the measuring stick for civil rights, or a media boogieman so they can tell us how free we are while slowly eroding our personal freedoms; China should be a looming spectre of what we could, if current trends continue, very well become.
Geographical ignorance.
How do you play mp3s on one of these Linux "computers"?
I use Ubuntu. I opened Banshee, pressed a button, waited for it to rip then double-clicked. What, you expectd more?
The thing with Apple apps with Apple aesthetics is they look good and work well... with other Apple apps with Apple aesthetics. As an Apple user who isn't part of the fanboi crowd (I need Final Cut Pro for my job) who also loves Ubuntu and uses Vista on a daily basis, I can say that Apple does not care about the Windows environment, or any environment other than OS X. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you, but they just don't.
iTunes for Windows is basically just a gateway to tap into the wallets of all the Windows users who want to use iPods and the iTunes store, and uses that as it's selling point, not it's speed or it's aesthetics in terms of the Windows desktop. If you want a media player that fits into the Vista desktop and uses system APIs to minimise memory footprint, use Windows Media Player. If you want to go crazy and use as little memory as possible, use Foobar2000, and if you want your media player to fit into any desktop you can possibly think of, use Winamp and a skin database. That's what those apps are designed for. iTunes for Windows is really ported as casually as possible without really caring about memory usage or how it integrates into the Windows desktop (it doesn't), because it's just there so Windows iPod users can buy iTunes songs.
On OS X, it's a different story. iTunes really doesn't hog a great deal of memory on my MacBook, and it integrates into the desktop beautifully. That's no great feat by the Apple devs, they've just made all the apps stick to the same theme, and iTunes looks a lot sleeker without the badly tacked-on menu bar that the Windows version has. It's widgets are native, which means they're faster and take up less space in memory. I've used iTunes on Windows and have noticed how much of a hog it is, and how dog slow it is when scrolling through a large (10,000+ track) library, but that doesn't mean that Apple can't make good applications, it just means that, when I'm on Windows, Apple doesn't really care about you or me, unless we're somehow giving them money via the iTunes Store. On OS X, iTunes scrolls just fine through the same library, so it's just a lazy port, not bad programming across the board.
a) MS does not dominate the server world, as far as I know. They do have a large chunk, but they are hardly dominant by any means.
b) You have a definition of the word 'capture' that differs from everyone else. I've used IE7 and, while it is crap, it didn't throw a net over me and hold me hostage until I promised to use it forever.
There is a difference between a mention of sex on the front of a magazine cover, and a group of people talking explicitly about group sex. I suggest you go away and think about what it is before you make any more posts, because at the moment your argument is like comparing the front page of every newspaper in the country to these theoretical guys in a rental store machine-gunning other patrons in front of your child.
Sorry, you appear to have fallen into the trap of 'Now I am a parent, I demand that all sexual material of any sort be removed from the face of the planet, because it might lead to my child wanting to have sex'. Which is honourable, but overprotective and an unfeasible overreaction.
Sexuality is and always has been 'always on the mind', and the prescence of it in magazines is proof of this. If nobody wanted to read about how to 'Have Hot Sex Tonight', the magazines wouldn't sell, but they do, because people _do_ have sex on the mind pretty much all the time. It's in music videos, it's in magazines, and I don't know about America, but over here in the UK you'd be hard pressed to find a news broadcast without at least a mildly attractive anchor. Sex sells because it's a base human thought. When it comes down to it, we are just vessels, a mass of cells designed to survive long enough to get to reproductive age, reproduce and then die to replenish the ground with nutrients, so claiming sexual behaviour isn't normal is rediculous; pretty much anything _other_ than sexual 'mating' behaviour is a societal construct.
If your child has no interest in sex, which they won't until they're pushing into their teens, they won't know and won't care what the headlines on the magazines say, and when they get to that age and start becoming interested in sex, you'd better be the one to explain the details of it to them, or they're going to be getting it from the magazines you loathe so much, and with the way you seem so squeamish about the idea of sexualisation, I sincerely doubt you will. I fully understand your desire to keep your kids away from the really nasty stuff, and I'd understand your point completely if your grocery store was selling hardcore pornography next to the pick 'n' mix, but they aren't. Children aren't being exposed to anything more than words, words about something that, even if they understand them, they won't care about. Well, unless they're interested in how to 'Have Hot Sex Tonight', in which case your problems as a parent just got a lot bigger than a 'dirty' word on the front of a glossy mag.