I really love these "axe to grind" kind of posts. You've really captured the feeling and the flavor of a spurned member of a mailing list (I've seen numerous examples of that).
My suggestion: build your own site and post the kind of stories you want and see if anyone shows up. Hell when you're ready you could even advertise your new pro-MS, pro-RIAA, and dare I say it pro-SCO (your comments about their situation were profoundly amusing) site here and see if anyone joins you.
I went AMD for my new machine at home because it wasn't just cheaper, it was wayyy cheaper than Intel. In actuality, though, I have found that AMD chip/chipsets have more quirks (read bugs) than Intel chip/chipset combinations. However I am pretty happy with my AMD machine, since a similar Intel box would have cost at least $100 more.
An interesting sidenote: In the quest for a quieter PC (the one in question is a PVR) I ended up buying a heatsink that cost almost as much as the processor.
Centrally managed distributed systems can be great at providing secure configurations, without sacrificing the performance of systems by running them centrally from distributed sites.
Could you convince corporate IT at my company why this is a good thing, they've got it backwards.;-)
The masses might see it coming. MP3s are not traded only on-line by geeks. Devices that can play MP3s are not sold only to geeks. Lock-in for DRM will hit these people hard in the coming years.
Sure apple sold 70 million songs with DRM, but how many people haven't bough from apple because they only have devices that play mp3s?
DRM has to fail, market pressures against it will be enourmous. The only problem is that the RIAA hasen't even tried to sell mp3s on line yet. When they do there are people that will buy, lots and lots and lots of people, me included. Market forces (if allowed to) will destroy the DRM movement. The only thing stopping the market from making this right is ogolopies and monopolies refusing to change.
You know I love all this its the users' fault crap. Microsoft has everyone buying that line. Of course they always seem to get the patch out before the virus appears. What happens one day when they don't, when the virus comes first? Who will you blame then?
Also, if GM recalled my car every month, I think I'd be getting a little pissed off as a customer. But with Microsoft not only do they report defects almost monthly, you have to fix it yourself!
I'm sorry, but even companies that aren't getting hit by this still paid the price.
We ran around frantically patching every $#%@#^ windows box at the company after the patches came out. Installing patches wastes users time, administrators time, everyones time. I know it can be automated, but its still a pain and you have to check every system anyway.
And whether or not you get a worm on your systems should not be the deciding factor of whether you deserve the customers business. Are you really saying that a record company that effectively blocked this worm deserves my business? Please don't start an oftopic rant about the RIAA, its just an example.
The version of mmplayer I tried is really buggy, but it shows alot of promise for the future. The only thing I've been able to get to play with kinoma on my palm is quicktime based movies and regular mpeg movies. I've gotten divx with no sound, but the biggest disappointment is that kinoma refuses to handle mpeg 2 files, which kinda sucks when you have an mpeg 2 capture card in your PC.:-(
The answer: because everyone loves the "zero sum game".
You see it all over the place now. Someone must win, and the other guy loses. This is what so confounds all of the pundits when Apple comes out with things like the iPod and dominates that market. In their mind Apple was supposed to just give up since they couldn't "win" vs. PCs.
Its this kind of simplistic thinking that even made Microsofts monopoly come about. Its why we have two political parties who sometimes do not differ one iota with respect to certain policies (DMCA, government spending, easy treatment of big business,...), but are massively opposed to each other.
Everyone's got to be right nowdays, and that requires that someone else must be wrong.
Any pundit who makes his living predicting X will die, Y will go under, Z is now irrelevant, doesn't deserve to be listened to, they haven't thought hard enough to deserve it.
You realize that in actuallity you are calling mp3's a niche. I have a DVD player, computer (whatever OS I want), a PDA, and a boombox that can play mp3s. They can't all play aac, they can't all play windows media, or even ogg.
The standard they want is actually mp3. When they give up on their addiction to DRM and actually sell mp3s I will be in line to buy.
Thats because that while everyone moans and complains about how you can't live without office, its still just a word processor, spreadsheet... to most people.
I rebuilt a PC for my inlaws last year and when they asked about office, I said it would cost them about $300 (consumer version, no student discount.....), plus they are not willing to run an "unlicensed" version.
I installed openoffice and it worked like a charm. A couple of weeks getting used to it and then it was no trouble. The only extra help needed was instruction in importing and saving to office formats. I know the filters aren't perfect, but being that the machine was only being used for basic word processing and spreadsheets, it wasn't an issue.
What about offsite disaster recovery storage? I understand that disk is cheap, but I actually have more faith in a 2 year old CD (or DVD) in storage than a hard drive that's been in storage for two years.
As for archiving, where I work data needs to be kept for 7 years and then can be destroyed. If I could get the media to last for 7 years and then be unreadable, that would be ideal!!;-) But 2-5 years is out.
The 25th amendment says the president may resign, and in that case the VP takes over the office of president.
The president in no way is allowed to do anything but quit according to the constitution. True he picks the VP, but the VP is always either duly elected, or (as clarified by amentment) appointed if need be and then approved by the senate. This is the only way power can be transferred.
The point being discussed here is if the president should be allowed to point to his competitor and say, "I name him president." The precident set in that case would destroy the republic. The president would be allowed to pick anyone for the job (if the constitution is being ignored, why not just pick a foreigner).
It is a power the president doesn't have and shouldn't have. Sure the case presented here is a gracious handing over the job due to not winning the popular vote, but there are so many other cases that that kind of move would enable that are truly horriffic to contemplate (hence the choice of a strong word to describe them).
I'm not saying Gore is an enemy, or a traitor or anything like that. My use of the word treason is label for the action of a president who would hand over the office to another outside of the rules of the constitution. I don't care who the other person is, the action of a president doing this would be what is wrong.
My point was that arbitrairly handing the office of president to someone else (whether they be the opposing candidate or a general, or anyone else) is really, really bad and yes treasonous.
Think of it this way. The president in question here would be handing over the entire role of commander in chief to someone not duly elected by the rules of the constitution. All Benedict Arnold (defacto standard for an american traitor) did was try to had over one military installation, this action would be handing all military installitions over to a non-elected person at once.
The GPL only binds your ethical responsibility to teh CODE, it has nothing to do with what do while running that code. If you modify the code you are only ethically bound to tell people what you did.
All other ethical considerations are outside the scope of the GPL and are supposed to be that way.
First, I happen to agree with the people who view Bush's election as flawed because of the supreme court desision. Here's the catch though, it would be just as flawed if Gore had won by the decision of the supreme court to support his cherry picked recounts of only a part of a state. That is the essence of the issue. What really pisses me off is when Gore supporters assume that him winning would have been "right", nope the supreme court's decision's only constant is that almost half of the people wouldn't like it.
As far as handing over the office because of a popular vote loss to the other candidate. A president who did that would be in my mind guilty of treason. The constitution must be followed, if it is allowed to be disregarded you start your way on the path to ignoring more and more of it and losing intent and ability for it to act as the charter by which we are governed. It has already been eroded on too many fronts. Blatant handing over of political offices by candidates to other candidates is a recipie for disaster.
The only thing the president can do and should be able to do is resign leaving the VP to assume the role of president, who can resign and give the role to the speaker of the house. Any other way is just plain wrong.
Oh and btw the LA LUG president is an idiot. If you believe in GPL software, you must BELIVE in GPL software. That means anyone can use it, even people you don't like.
Sure, the majority of the audience will be stymied, seeing the error message on their VCR/PVR/DVR and giving up
I dont't think they'll give up, I think they'll get really angry.
I'm beginning to wonder whether all of this crap (broadcast flag, forced HDTV switchover, various flavors of DRM) is all part of some huge experience to see just how much consumers of entertainment will take.
On a personal note, I've already given up on the recording industry and will never buy another CD again. The day my Myth box can no longer timeshift TV shows is the day I take a baseball bat to my TV and throw it out on the curb.
I think a lot of effort is being expended to speak to "slashdot demographics" as defined by the editors.
While I would agree that Linux, Technology News are of core demographic interest to almost every slashdotter. Being politically liberal is not common across the audience. Its nowhere near as common as the editors think even.
If I really wanted a liberal discussion about purely political news, I'd go to Kurh5hin. K5 is worthless purley because of all the political noise found there.
The punishment is really not that out of line. There was a story recently about a women convicted of driving drunk and killing someone who appealed because the judge forced her to carry a picture of her victim and the family gave them a picture of him in his casket. She lost that part of the appeal, but getting back your post, her total jail time in that case was 30 days.
I didn't know it got that wide of play nationally. I only saw in on national news twice.
Now local news.... that was another story entirely, you couldn't miss the story locally.
What really makes me wonder
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In reading the article I couldn't help but wonder if this kind of exclusion of choices in business is covered elsewhere in business classes.
I would bet it would be highly unlikely that a business course on selecting vendors for materials and services contains absolute adherence to a "single source" philosophy. In fact just the opposite is taught. Single source vendors for materials an services are heavily frowned upon in business. A major point of controlling business costs is tied up in pitting vendors for the same or similar materials against one another.
Yet in the absolutely worthless world of MIS, a single source of supply for operating systems on which to run your business is seemingly extolled as a VIRTUE!! All of the textbooks mentioned in this story are worthless drivel, with no critical critique of true use of software in business. No other aspect of a business would be allowed to be beholden to one supplier the way business IT is. And the peopld in charge of business IT don't just accept it, they demand it.
Where are you from? I didn't know of anyone outside of South Dakota, who even knows about Janklow.
But you are correct, he even got a large number of "warnings" while in office. Once he got elected to the house he should have gotten a driver to drive him around (espically if the health concerns he used in his defense were vaild).
Oh, and to stay on topic. Yes, I do believe that one day MicroSofts flouting of anti-trust laws will actually get them in trouble. But, it took Janklow almost 30 years to get in trouble driving, so it might be a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you here?
I really love these "axe to grind" kind of posts. You've really captured the feeling and the flavor of a spurned member of a mailing list (I've seen numerous examples of that).
My suggestion: build your own site and post the kind of stories you want and see if anyone shows up. Hell when you're ready you could even advertise your new pro-MS, pro-RIAA, and dare I say it pro-SCO (your comments about their situation were profoundly amusing) site here and see if anyone joins you.
Otherwise, just save your breath....
I went AMD for my new machine at home because it wasn't just cheaper, it was wayyy cheaper than Intel. In actuality, though, I have found that AMD chip/chipsets have more quirks (read bugs) than Intel chip/chipset combinations. However I am pretty happy with my AMD machine, since a similar Intel box would have cost at least $100 more.
An interesting sidenote: In the quest for a quieter PC (the one in question is a PVR) I ended up buying a heatsink that cost almost as much as the processor.
Nice sounding setup.
;-)
Centrally managed distributed systems can be great at providing secure configurations, without sacrificing the performance of systems by running them centrally from distributed sites.
Could you convince corporate IT at my company why this is a good thing, they've got it backwards.
The masses might see it coming. MP3s are not traded only on-line by geeks. Devices that can play MP3s are not sold only to geeks. Lock-in for DRM will hit these people hard in the coming years.
Sure apple sold 70 million songs with DRM, but how many people haven't bough from apple because they only have devices that play mp3s?
DRM has to fail, market pressures against it will be enourmous. The only problem is that the RIAA hasen't even tried to sell mp3s on line yet. When they do there are people that will buy, lots and lots and lots of people, me included. Market forces (if allowed to) will destroy the DRM movement. The only thing stopping the market from making this right is ogolopies and monopolies refusing to change.
You know I love all this its the users' fault crap. Microsoft has everyone buying that line. Of course they always seem to get the patch out before the virus appears. What happens one day when they don't, when the virus comes first? Who will you blame then?
Also, if GM recalled my car every month, I think I'd be getting a little pissed off as a customer. But with Microsoft not only do they report defects almost monthly, you have to fix it yourself!
I'm sorry, but even companies that aren't getting hit by this still paid the price.
We ran around frantically patching every $#%@#^ windows box at the company after the patches came out. Installing patches wastes users time, administrators time, everyones time. I know it can be automated, but its still a pain and you have to check every system anyway.
And whether or not you get a worm on your systems should not be the deciding factor of whether you deserve the customers business. Are you really saying that a record company that effectively blocked this worm deserves my business? Please don't start an oftopic rant about the RIAA, its just an example.
The version of mmplayer I tried is really buggy, but it shows alot of promise for the future. The only thing I've been able to get to play with kinoma on my palm is quicktime based movies and regular mpeg movies. I've gotten divx with no sound, but the biggest disappointment is that kinoma refuses to handle mpeg 2 files, which kinda sucks when you have an mpeg 2 capture card in your PC. :-(
The answer: because everyone loves the "zero sum game".
...), but are massively opposed to each other.
You see it all over the place now. Someone must win, and the other guy loses. This is what so confounds all of the pundits when Apple comes out with things like the iPod and dominates that market. In their mind Apple was supposed to just give up since they couldn't "win" vs. PCs.
Its this kind of simplistic thinking that even made Microsofts monopoly come about. Its why we have two political parties who sometimes do not differ one iota with respect to certain policies (DMCA, government spending, easy treatment of big business,
Everyone's got to be right nowdays, and that requires that someone else must be wrong.
Any pundit who makes his living predicting X will die, Y will go under, Z is now irrelevant, doesn't deserve to be listened to, they haven't thought hard enough to deserve it.
What kind of PDA do you have? I'm wonering specifically because of that divx thing. I can't get kinoma to get divx to work right on my Tungsten C.
You realize that in actuallity you are calling mp3's a niche. I have a DVD player, computer (whatever OS I want), a PDA, and a boombox that can play mp3s. They can't all play aac, they can't all play windows media, or even ogg.
The standard they want is actually mp3. When they give up on their addiction to DRM and actually sell mp3s I will be in line to buy.
Thats because that while everyone moans and complains about how you can't live without office, its still just a word processor, spreadsheet ... to most people.
.....), plus they are not willing to run an "unlicensed" version.
I rebuilt a PC for my inlaws last year and when they asked about office, I said it would cost them about $300 (consumer version, no student discount
I installed openoffice and it worked like a charm. A couple of weeks getting used to it and then it was no trouble. The only extra help needed was instruction in importing and saving to office formats. I know the filters aren't perfect, but being that the machine was only being used for basic word processing and spreadsheets, it wasn't an issue.
What about offsite disaster recovery storage? I understand that disk is cheap, but I actually have more faith in a 2 year old CD (or DVD) in storage than a hard drive that's been in storage for two years.
;-) But 2-5 years is out.
As for archiving, where I work data needs to be kept for 7 years and then can be destroyed. If I could get the media to last for 7 years and then be unreadable, that would be ideal!!
The recording industry has already lost all the revenue they would have ever gotten from me, whether I download music or not.
The 25th amendment says the president may resign, and in that case the VP takes over the office of president.
The president in no way is allowed to do anything but quit according to the constitution. True he picks the VP, but the VP is always either duly elected, or (as clarified by amentment) appointed if need be and then approved by the senate. This is the only way power can be transferred.
The point being discussed here is if the president should be allowed to point to his competitor and say, "I name him president." The precident set in that case would destroy the republic. The president would be allowed to pick anyone for the job (if the constitution is being ignored, why not just pick a foreigner).
It is a power the president doesn't have and shouldn't have. Sure the case presented here is a gracious handing over the job due to not winning the popular vote, but there are so many other cases that that kind of move would enable that are truly horriffic to contemplate (hence the choice of a strong word to describe them).
I'm not saying Gore is an enemy, or a traitor or anything like that. My use of the word treason is label for the action of a president who would hand over the office to another outside of the rules of the constitution. I don't care who the other person is, the action of a president doing this would be what is wrong.
My point was that arbitrairly handing the office of president to someone else (whether they be the opposing candidate or a general, or anyone else) is really, really bad and yes treasonous.
Think of it this way. The president in question here would be handing over the entire role of commander in chief to someone not duly elected by the rules of the constitution. All Benedict Arnold (defacto standard for an american traitor) did was try to had over one military installation, this action would be handing all military installitions over to a non-elected person at once.
I stand by my definition.
The GPL only binds your ethical responsibility to teh CODE, it has nothing to do with what do while running that code. If you modify the code you are only ethically bound to tell people what you did.
All other ethical considerations are outside the scope of the GPL and are supposed to be that way.
Wow, where to start.
First, I happen to agree with the people who view Bush's election as flawed because of the supreme court desision. Here's the catch though, it would be just as flawed if Gore had won by the decision of the supreme court to support his cherry picked recounts of only a part of a state. That is the essence of the issue. What really pisses me off is when Gore supporters assume that him winning would have been "right", nope the supreme court's decision's only constant is that almost half of the people wouldn't like it.
As far as handing over the office because of a popular vote loss to the other candidate. A president who did that would be in my mind guilty of treason. The constitution must be followed, if it is allowed to be disregarded you start your way on the path to ignoring more and more of it and losing intent and ability for it to act as the charter by which we are governed. It has already been eroded on too many fronts. Blatant handing over of political offices by candidates to other candidates is a recipie for disaster.
The only thing the president can do and should be able to do is resign leaving the VP to assume the role of president, who can resign and give the role to the speaker of the house. Any other way is just plain wrong.
Oh and btw the LA LUG president is an idiot. If you believe in GPL software, you must BELIVE in GPL software. That means anyone can use it, even people you don't like.
What suprised me about that is there wasn't an entry for water, which just happend to be the most likely thing to get hit.
Sure, the majority of the audience will be stymied, seeing the error message on their VCR/PVR/DVR and giving up
I dont't think they'll give up, I think they'll get really angry.
I'm beginning to wonder whether all of this crap (broadcast flag, forced HDTV switchover, various flavors of DRM) is all part of some huge experience to see just how much consumers of entertainment will take.
On a personal note, I've already given up on the recording industry and will never buy another CD again. The day my Myth box can no longer timeshift TV shows is the day I take a baseball bat to my TV and throw it out on the curb.
Exactly!!
There isn't one site out there that lets me buy music online that works in Linux!!
When there is one, I will start spending my money.
Now if there were sites that sold mp3's I wouldn't have a problem.....
I agree wholdheartedly with you.
I think a lot of effort is being expended to speak to "slashdot demographics" as defined by the editors.
While I would agree that Linux, Technology News are of core demographic interest to almost every slashdotter. Being politically liberal is not common across the audience. Its nowhere near as common as the editors think even.
If I really wanted a liberal discussion about purely political news, I'd go to Kurh5hin. K5 is worthless purley because of all the political noise found there.
The punishment is really not that out of line. There was a story recently about a women convicted of driving drunk and killing someone who appealed because the judge forced her to carry a picture of her victim and the family gave them a picture of him in his casket. She lost that part of the appeal, but getting back your post, her total jail time in that case was 30 days.
I didn't know it got that wide of play nationally. I only saw in on national news twice.
.... that was another story entirely, you couldn't miss the story locally.
Now local news
In reading the article I couldn't help but wonder if this kind of exclusion of choices in business is covered elsewhere in business classes.
I would bet it would be highly unlikely that a business course on selecting vendors for materials and services contains absolute adherence to a "single source" philosophy. In fact just the opposite is taught. Single source vendors for materials an services are heavily frowned upon in business. A major point of controlling business costs is tied up in pitting vendors for the same or similar materials against one another.
Yet in the absolutely worthless world of MIS, a single source of supply for operating systems on which to run your business is seemingly extolled as a VIRTUE!! All of the textbooks mentioned in this story are worthless drivel, with no critical critique of true use of software in business. No other aspect of a business would be allowed to be beholden to one supplier the way business IT is. And the peopld in charge of business IT don't just accept it, they demand it.
MIS degrees should be banned.
Where are you from? I didn't know of anyone outside of South Dakota, who even knows about Janklow.
But you are correct, he even got a large number of "warnings" while in office. Once he got elected to the house he should have gotten a driver to drive him around (espically if the health concerns he used in his defense were vaild).
Oh, and to stay on topic. Yes, I do believe that one day MicroSofts flouting of anti-trust laws will actually get them in trouble. But, it took Janklow almost 30 years to get in trouble driving, so it might be a while.