The reason that lots of people call "it" GNU/Linux is that GNU is the name of the project to create a Free Unix-like OS. It doesn't really matter what licenses are used or whose projects are the biggest or most important, GNU was The Project that drove The System. That said, once you create your own project with its own goals you can call it whatever you want. Debian says, "Debian GNU/Linux," specifying themselves as a distributor of the GNU operating system with Linux as its kernel. Gentoo says, "Gentoo Linux," an operating system based on Linux. Ubuntu says, "Ubuntu." An operating system.
How people use the names often reflects their priorities and views. Debian defers significantly to GNU as a source of mission and values, and reflects that in its name by stating that they're packaging the GNU operating system. Gentoo either calls itself an OS based on Linux or a packaging of the "Linux OS" (I don't know which, I don't think the community would speak with a unified voice, and I doubt there was much consternation about self-definition when coming up with the name), framing it as continuing the work of Linus, in the spirit of the Linux kernel. Ubuntu is just Ubuntu because its goals and values are quite different from those of GNU, Linux or many of the other projects it borrows from. Ubuntu might someday drop GNU, Linux, X11 or GNOME for better alternatives and it would still be Ubuntu, its central mission would stay the same. Kubuntu, on the other hand, defines itself by its use of Ubuntu and KDE; both Ubuntu and KDE themselves are parts of its mission.
Yay. 1394 networking, as Beck might say, makes me wanna smoke crack. At my job I use 1394 for driver debugging; if you boot into 1394-debug mode and 1394 networking comes on it kills your debug connection. So I disable the 1394 network adapter, but every time I move the HD to a different system (very frequently) it becomes re-enabled again (even when I use the same damn 1394 card). So there's always at least one wasted boot, or hangs because a breakpoint is hit after the debug connection has been killed. And I've yet to find a way to disable it entirely across any and all 1394 adapters that might get plugged in. Except, apparently, by moving to Vista.
I'm just amazed that TFA(uthor) misses it. 1394 networking seems to me to be the definition of a solution in search of a problem. When I read in the article that the author had a 1394 network up I did a double-take. I've never even seen hubs or repeaters for 1394, do such things exist?
It depends on how you define adware, but... Windows Media Player is part of Windows, and last time I used WMP (quite a while ago, admittedly) its main screen was a bunch of ads. I think the default home page in IE is or once was some silly MSN lowest-common-denominator gossip-news page with ads on it (I might be wrong about that, but it is the default IE home page on lots of computers I've worked on). And from what I gather the guy that was named an MVP here originally wrote a program to remove a banner ad from Windows Messenger, which means that Windows Messenger is adware. I don't know of any common GNU/Linux software that acts like that. Maybe Firefox, which has a Google page as its home page. Though there aren't any ads directly on it...
For everyone to really win the interest the bank pays you must also beat inflation. Typical flexible savings/checking accounts don't have very good interest rates. You still win over stuffing it under your bed, of course, but typically if you really want to get a good return rate on savings you have to have enough money to make it worth it to pay the fees necessary for the kind of accounts/investments that will yield you a good return. Otherwise it's a big win for the bank and nothing for you. Takes money to make money, blah, blah, blah.
I thought the interchangeability was one of the things Microsoft was running away from with the Zune. Not allowing any other players to play its songs, not allowing PlaysForSure content on the Zune. They explicitly wanted a vertical solution like Apple has, thought that's what they thought they could sell. Well, even more vertical than Apple, since Apple can't ignore Windows. Time will tell.
Microsoft can't bring a device with *iPod/iTunes* interchangeability; they couldn't if they wanted to, because Apple wouldn't let them. Apple and Microsoft, both making our lives complicated by trying to control every aspect of a market; who'da thunk it? The only reason Apple's solution as it is doesn't make people's lives more complicated is that most people pre-iTunes didn't have any DRM'ed music files that they couldn't move to other players. Microsoft in that sense has a big disadvantage starting second, even more so now than when they launched PlaysForSure, but PlaysForSure seemed to be aimed more at the techie-types that would appreciate the choice in players. Unfortunately many of them already were invested in iTunes songs. It seems like now they're trying to go after the large group of people that don't yet have a large investment in DRM'ed music, focusing away from the aspect of technical choice and entirely on the social aspects of the player. And for the early-adopters with lots of iTunes music (I think of them as "the suckers" but that's just me), I heard (early on) that MS was planning to offer free Zune versions of songs they had bought on iTunes. How they would obtain that information reliably without Apple's cooperation is a mystery to me, but that's their pitch.
I think that having two companies trying hard to push their fully-vertical digital music solutions will show us that it's not Apple or Microsoft that make the whole thing so complicated, it's the DRM itself. And if DRM is necessary to prevent copyright from being shat upon then the cause is trying to combine the entrenched idea of copyright with the emerging idea of a social (read peer-to-peer, bazaar, grass-roots, as opposed to top-down, cathedral, marketing-driven) way of spreading musical tastes and computers, which excel at copying things. Zune seems to have an interesting idea about how to do that, but for it really to work well as they envision it they have to completely take over the market with their super-vertical system. Yay, interesting idea, boo, vertical monopoly.
I've never tried this add-on, but a friend tells me it's totally half-assed. Not half-assed as in "it can't do everything FVWM can do", half-assed as in, "you can crash it by closing the GUI widget and then using the keybindings". Haven't tested it myself, but it's about what I'd expect after trying their mouse-focus add-on, which had race conditions in it (as of about a year ago). The Windows UI works OK; it would be better (for me) with multiple desktops and mouse-focus if they were done right, but they apparently aren't ready for serious use now and probably never will be.
It's very simple unless your car has components with non-standard shapes. I've done it twice; the first one, an old-ish minivan, was very easy and looked fine because the console was just a bunch of flat rectangles stacked on eachother anyway. The second, a more recent Ford Focus, wasn't exactly rocket science, but because of the shape of the console we had to take a hacksaw to the mounting kit and get a bit creative with some of the parts. And it sticks out like a sore thumb because the color is off, the face doesn't curve along with the rest of the dash, and the corners are completely squared off where the hole in the dash has rounded corners. We didn't care. We just wanted a cheap CD player.
I don't know what the situation is in these Mazdas, but I can see image-conscious folk balking at an hack job like my Focus. And the Mazda might even be worse, impairing the ability to get anything in there at all. Carmakers are really jazzing up those center consoles these days...
Does IE exist for Mac or Unix anymore? It existed for Unix for a short while, Mac for a longer while, and now both are gone. Whether intentional or not (I can certainly think of less devious reasons for discontinuing the IE-Unix and IE-Mac lines), this has an "embrace, extend, extinguish" type effect. They had to initially release to all platforms to credibly compete with Netscape and eventually beat them. Once they'd beaten Netscape and gained dominant market share *then* they could really tie web apps to Windows.
I'm pretty sure that DirectX never existed for Mac or Unix anyway, so even while those versions of IE existed there still were webapps tied to Windows. And of course Mac IE was way behind Win IE for a long time.
But Linux (along with just about any Unix system) does allow non-root users to modify their.profile, which runs every time you log in. Desktop users don't frequently start their computers without logging in. The things that are really important on single-user desktop systems are the things that aren't owned by root. OS and programs can be easily reinstalled.
It's called a buffer. The decrypted data is written into this buffer. As long as the data makes it into the buffer fast enough to stay ahead of the DAC (this is not difficult, audio rates are very slow compared to CPU speeds these days) there won't be any "jitter" caused by varying amounts of time to decrypt things. At any rate, in a computer system there would always be varying lengths of time involved to get a chunk of audio data into the buffer, because of disk accesses and other processes running on the system. Other than buffer underflows, which are far from subtle, there are no "jitter" effects.
As for the CPU introducing noise, I can buy that, especially when audio hardware and CPU are physically close to eachother. On my computer when I record with my onboard sound card you can hear noise in the recording whenever there is CPU activity. It's not a problem during playback, but it could be on some boards.
Just to clarify, you're saying that in order for it to be "genuine" Italian food it has to be made in Italy, right? Meaning that a dude from Italy cooking a delicious lasagna in his kitchen in Canada wouldn't be making genuine Italian food either. But a dude from China making scrumptious blueberry pancakes in Sicily would be? Or as a French woman making Channa Masala in Torino?
Yeah, lots of Linux kernel developers say the unstable kernel interface is a good thing, because they feel it's more productive and ultimately leads to a better kernel and drivers to change kernel interfaces when change is warranted and change the drivers along with, instead of writing a new kernel interface and having to maintain an old one. If you get your driver in the Linux kernel tree people will fix your driver for you if they break compatibility with it.
The downside is that if you have a driver, with source open or not, that isn't in the kernel tree it's hard to keep up with the changes. For a system as popular as Linux, you'll find that there will be many drivers that exist outside the kernel tree, for various reasons. Some people don't want to GPL their drivers, some drivers aren't mature enough, sometimes there are wierd political or "code style" issues (like with ReiserFS). The fact that it's difficult to maintain an out-of-kernel driver for Linux encourages people to make their drivers part of the kernel tree, and that's generally nice: a very wide variety of devices are supported in official kernel sources. I don't have to use any out-of-kernel drivers right now. My drivers are all part of the kernel, and not some assorted bunch of packages I have to chase down. From where I sit it serves me well.
Torvalds and Tannenbaum may have different opinions, but I think that if either was charged with writing an encyclopedic article on the subject he could write an article bearing little resemblance to the series of Usenet arguments they engaged in many years ago. If nothing else, Torvalds is certainly more mature and experienced these days, and he probably wouldn't have been invited as an "expert" to contribute while he was still an undergrad. But there's a difference between how he might write when trying to write a pure factual article than when he was defending his kernel against someone claiming it was obsolete.
I don't have a Windows box within reach right now... can anyone tell if that (hosanna1.com) renders into anything remotely legible in IE? In FF it looks like a Jackson Pollack painting...
If your highway traffic-blocking religion grew from its humble roots to one day have a number of followers substantial enough to rewrite the rules of society such that standing in the middle of the highway blocking traffic was accepted, encouraged, and considered a Fundamental Right of Man, surely your far-future followers would condemn the actions of the present-day police as persecution.
OK, sorry for this blatant troll post, I need some sleep.
There's a difference between records/tapes and DRM music files. For one thing, the industry standardized around records and tapes. I don't know what the story was with 8-tracks, I doubt they got too popular before failing, though. But the changes from one format to another were reasonably slow. The computing world changes very quickly, and these portable music players don't exactly have a reputation for longevity. And DRM'ed music is tied to computers, so choosing a DRM music format locks me into a particular range of computing platforms for any computer I want to listen on. Often DRM'ed music depends on one company that has to keep supporting you. But with records/tapes many companies built record players and tape players, many of those companies left the market or went under, and yet some still remain. In that sense, a DRM system like HDCP is much better for me than iTunes is. I can depend on at least some of the many companies making HDCP-compliant devices staying in the market for a while. I think that eventually we'll see a new music format based on this type of DRM that offers advantages over CDs compelling enough to make people buy. I'd consider using it, if I had confidence that it wouldn't leave me dry, and if CDs were dead.
That doesn't mean I think iTunes should be forced to change. It just means I'll never buy songs from it. Apple had an idea first and developed a nice product but I won't reward them because they're not giving me what I want. *That* is capitalism. Capitalism is people like me demanding with our dollars that we are able to take advantage of the technology that theoretically allows media to be more durable; if the technology theoretically allows this but we still have to constantly replace our media then what are we being offered that gives us a compelling reason to switch away from records and tapes?
Anyhow, I was just responding to parent of my original post about iTunes-style DRM in general. I agree with you for the most part about the European iTunes law, and I imagine we'd probably agree that most of the EU's lawsuits against Microsoft are ridiculous, and that security companies crying about Vista should quit their bitchin'.
I personally buy all my music on CD. It's the best deal out there: I'm basically guaranteed that I'll be able to play the CD or play compressed versions of its tracks on a device of my choosing for a long, long time. I don't get that with a DRM scheme. DRM is a bad deal for me, so I won't buy it.
One problem is that the prevalence of CDs forces the record companies to put a lot of trust in their customers not to rip them off. Trust that the customers, frankly, haven't earned. But there's another problem. Buying from, say, iTMS involves the customer putting a lot of trust in Apple. They have to trust that Apple will continue to let them play their tunes. But Apple could be marginalized in the market, and stop releasing iPods and iTunes because they're not profitable. They could even go out of business altogether. Then when the next big OS comes around and breaks compatibility with Apple's previous-gen products, all their users are stuck with either an old OS or a library of useless encrypted tunes. And I tend to think that, more likely than not, eventually Apple will for some reason find it more expensive than it's worth to support every last tune ever downloaded on the latest platforms. Even if playback of the songs remains possible for a long time, market dominance of DRM formats is likely to change many times in the future, meaning that you'd be at some times struggling to find devices to play your old tunes or tunes that work on your old device.
I know a lot of people are happy with iTunes or whatever now, but they haven't had to live with it for very long. The music business knows it can't trust its customers but the customers don't know just how much they can't trust the providers. They're blinded by how well it works in the short term. The customer and seller have equal power in the transaction, but the sellers are getting together and speaking with a unified voice. The customers are scattering around like fools. And we'll be forced to trust the media companies forever because of it, because I do not believe there will ever be a solution that forces neither side to trust the other.
Yeah, I responded to your post because it was clearly a joke but had this relavent idea in it. The best part of your idea in my opinion is that the color changes were gradual. And it wouldn't have to be grayscale... a continium of colors can be defined that follow a clear pattern, such as the so-called "heat-scale" (I can't seem to find any references to it on Google, I heard of it in an image processing class); in computer graphics we usually define colorspaces as three-dimensional, and any continuous path taken through the 3-d space could be a usable continium in this way.
The difference between Go and WP pages is that Go games end. WP pages aren't finished evolving, and there are at any time many very young pages that are likely to have undergone very similar patterns of edits. Sort of like how no two Go games may ever have played exactly the same way, but that certain opening sequences have probably been repeated very often. That said, there are probably certain short Go games that have been repeated, even though the overall possible number of games is overwhealming and there are certainly possible games that haven't been played. But I'm no Go expert, so I may be wrong.
So in other words... you've been locked in. You're disappointed by Apple's portable players and would give others a chance, but there's too much to lose. Microsoft might even offer a better end-to-end solution, but lots of people are too tightly locked-in to Apple to switch. I might call it poetic justice for this to happen to Microsoft, except that I have no interest in portable music or downloadable DRM-laden music, so I have no reason to care about any of the companies involved. And I'm sure Microsoft will do fine (they usually do). The real losers are consumers; you're stuck with Apple and only Apple and you've just started to realize it now.
I have never bought anything from iTunes and I won't buy anything from Microsoft's upcoming music service. Even if I was OK with the general idea of not being trusted to respect copyright but at the same time forced to trust some corporation for my continued ability to use media I've paid for, I still think there's too much risk of any one company being marginalized in the market to the extent that their media files are useless.
But not only will new text be nearly invisible under this scheme: text slightly more than 1/3 and 2/3 the way to undeletability will be nearly invisible. You'd need to trace a smoother path through the colorspace to make such an idea like that work: a gradient of grays (straight line from white to black) would be boring, but something like the heat scale might work.
And as far as the wise man goes, he is trivially proven a fool. Every page has the same color pattern just after its creation! Besides, certain patterns of editing early in an article's life could be common, such as appending sections onto the end of a new article without touching the original entry.
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The reason that lots of people call "it" GNU/Linux is that GNU is the name of the project to create a Free Unix-like OS. It doesn't really matter what licenses are used or whose projects are the biggest or most important, GNU was The Project that drove The System. That said, once you create your own project with its own goals you can call it whatever you want. Debian says, "Debian GNU/Linux," specifying themselves as a distributor of the GNU operating system with Linux as its kernel. Gentoo says, "Gentoo Linux," an operating system based on Linux. Ubuntu says, "Ubuntu." An operating system.
How people use the names often reflects their priorities and views. Debian defers significantly to GNU as a source of mission and values, and reflects that in its name by stating that they're packaging the GNU operating system. Gentoo either calls itself an OS based on Linux or a packaging of the "Linux OS" (I don't know which, I don't think the community would speak with a unified voice, and I doubt there was much consternation about self-definition when coming up with the name), framing it as continuing the work of Linus, in the spirit of the Linux kernel. Ubuntu is just Ubuntu because its goals and values are quite different from those of GNU, Linux or many of the other projects it borrows from. Ubuntu might someday drop GNU, Linux, X11 or GNOME for better alternatives and it would still be Ubuntu, its central mission would stay the same. Kubuntu, on the other hand, defines itself by its use of Ubuntu and KDE; both Ubuntu and KDE themselves are parts of its mission.
Yay. 1394 networking, as Beck might say, makes me wanna smoke crack. At my job I use 1394 for driver debugging; if you boot into 1394-debug mode and 1394 networking comes on it kills your debug connection. So I disable the 1394 network adapter, but every time I move the HD to a different system (very frequently) it becomes re-enabled again (even when I use the same damn 1394 card). So there's always at least one wasted boot, or hangs because a breakpoint is hit after the debug connection has been killed. And I've yet to find a way to disable it entirely across any and all 1394 adapters that might get plugged in. Except, apparently, by moving to Vista.
I'm just amazed that TFA(uthor) misses it. 1394 networking seems to me to be the definition of a solution in search of a problem. When I read in the article that the author had a 1394 network up I did a double-take. I've never even seen hubs or repeaters for 1394, do such things exist?
It depends on how you define adware, but... Windows Media Player is part of Windows, and last time I used WMP (quite a while ago, admittedly) its main screen was a bunch of ads. I think the default home page in IE is or once was some silly MSN lowest-common-denominator gossip-news page with ads on it (I might be wrong about that, but it is the default IE home page on lots of computers I've worked on). And from what I gather the guy that was named an MVP here originally wrote a program to remove a banner ad from Windows Messenger, which means that Windows Messenger is adware. I don't know of any common GNU/Linux software that acts like that. Maybe Firefox, which has a Google page as its home page. Though there aren't any ads directly on it...
For everyone to really win the interest the bank pays you must also beat inflation. Typical flexible savings/checking accounts don't have very good interest rates. You still win over stuffing it under your bed, of course, but typically if you really want to get a good return rate on savings you have to have enough money to make it worth it to pay the fees necessary for the kind of accounts/investments that will yield you a good return. Otherwise it's a big win for the bank and nothing for you. Takes money to make money, blah, blah, blah.
I thought the interchangeability was one of the things Microsoft was running away from with the Zune. Not allowing any other players to play its songs, not allowing PlaysForSure content on the Zune. They explicitly wanted a vertical solution like Apple has, thought that's what they thought they could sell. Well, even more vertical than Apple, since Apple can't ignore Windows. Time will tell.
Microsoft can't bring a device with *iPod/iTunes* interchangeability; they couldn't if they wanted to, because Apple wouldn't let them. Apple and Microsoft, both making our lives complicated by trying to control every aspect of a market; who'da thunk it? The only reason Apple's solution as it is doesn't make people's lives more complicated is that most people pre-iTunes didn't have any DRM'ed music files that they couldn't move to other players. Microsoft in that sense has a big disadvantage starting second, even more so now than when they launched PlaysForSure, but PlaysForSure seemed to be aimed more at the techie-types that would appreciate the choice in players. Unfortunately many of them already were invested in iTunes songs. It seems like now they're trying to go after the large group of people that don't yet have a large investment in DRM'ed music, focusing away from the aspect of technical choice and entirely on the social aspects of the player. And for the early-adopters with lots of iTunes music (I think of them as "the suckers" but that's just me), I heard (early on) that MS was planning to offer free Zune versions of songs they had bought on iTunes. How they would obtain that information reliably without Apple's cooperation is a mystery to me, but that's their pitch.
I think that having two companies trying hard to push their fully-vertical digital music solutions will show us that it's not Apple or Microsoft that make the whole thing so complicated, it's the DRM itself. And if DRM is necessary to prevent copyright from being shat upon then the cause is trying to combine the entrenched idea of copyright with the emerging idea of a social (read peer-to-peer, bazaar, grass-roots, as opposed to top-down, cathedral, marketing-driven) way of spreading musical tastes and computers, which excel at copying things. Zune seems to have an interesting idea about how to do that, but for it really to work well as they envision it they have to completely take over the market with their super-vertical system. Yay, interesting idea, boo, vertical monopoly.
I've never tried this add-on, but a friend tells me it's totally half-assed. Not half-assed as in "it can't do everything FVWM can do", half-assed as in, "you can crash it by closing the GUI widget and then using the keybindings". Haven't tested it myself, but it's about what I'd expect after trying their mouse-focus add-on, which had race conditions in it (as of about a year ago). The Windows UI works OK; it would be better (for me) with multiple desktops and mouse-focus if they were done right, but they apparently aren't ready for serious use now and probably never will be.
It's very simple unless your car has components with non-standard shapes. I've done it twice; the first one, an old-ish minivan, was very easy and looked fine because the console was just a bunch of flat rectangles stacked on eachother anyway. The second, a more recent Ford Focus, wasn't exactly rocket science, but because of the shape of the console we had to take a hacksaw to the mounting kit and get a bit creative with some of the parts. And it sticks out like a sore thumb because the color is off, the face doesn't curve along with the rest of the dash, and the corners are completely squared off where the hole in the dash has rounded corners. We didn't care. We just wanted a cheap CD player.
I don't know what the situation is in these Mazdas, but I can see image-conscious folk balking at an hack job like my Focus. And the Mazda might even be worse, impairing the ability to get anything in there at all. Carmakers are really jazzing up those center consoles these days...
We all know this. It doesn't change the fact that the jokes are getting old.
Does IE exist for Mac or Unix anymore? It existed for Unix for a short while, Mac for a longer while, and now both are gone. Whether intentional or not (I can certainly think of less devious reasons for discontinuing the IE-Unix and IE-Mac lines), this has an "embrace, extend, extinguish" type effect. They had to initially release to all platforms to credibly compete with Netscape and eventually beat them. Once they'd beaten Netscape and gained dominant market share *then* they could really tie web apps to Windows.
I'm pretty sure that DirectX never existed for Mac or Unix anyway, so even while those versions of IE existed there still were webapps tied to Windows. And of course Mac IE was way behind Win IE for a long time.
When I grew up, everyone listened to either punk and metal, or hippie music and reggae, and not too much overlap between the groups.
I hope none of them ever heard The Clash doing reggae and punk at the same time. Hehe.
But Linux (along with just about any Unix system) does allow non-root users to modify their .profile, which runs every time you log in. Desktop users don't frequently start their computers without logging in. The things that are really important on single-user desktop systems are the things that aren't owned by root. OS and programs can be easily reinstalled.
It's called a buffer. The decrypted data is written into this buffer. As long as the data makes it into the buffer fast enough to stay ahead of the DAC (this is not difficult, audio rates are very slow compared to CPU speeds these days) there won't be any "jitter" caused by varying amounts of time to decrypt things. At any rate, in a computer system there would always be varying lengths of time involved to get a chunk of audio data into the buffer, because of disk accesses and other processes running on the system. Other than buffer underflows, which are far from subtle, there are no "jitter" effects.
As for the CPU introducing noise, I can buy that, especially when audio hardware and CPU are physically close to eachother. On my computer when I record with my onboard sound card you can hear noise in the recording whenever there is CPU activity. It's not a problem during playback, but it could be on some boards.
The "17-year-exp" guy is probably not even 17 years old. He was trolling all of you, and he got you good.
Just to clarify, you're saying that in order for it to be "genuine" Italian food it has to be made in Italy, right? Meaning that a dude from Italy cooking a delicious lasagna in his kitchen in Canada wouldn't be making genuine Italian food either. But a dude from China making scrumptious blueberry pancakes in Sicily would be? Or as a French woman making Channa Masala in Torino?
Excuse me, I have to go eat something now.
Yeah, lots of Linux kernel developers say the unstable kernel interface is a good thing, because they feel it's more productive and ultimately leads to a better kernel and drivers to change kernel interfaces when change is warranted and change the drivers along with, instead of writing a new kernel interface and having to maintain an old one. If you get your driver in the Linux kernel tree people will fix your driver for you if they break compatibility with it.
The downside is that if you have a driver, with source open or not, that isn't in the kernel tree it's hard to keep up with the changes. For a system as popular as Linux, you'll find that there will be many drivers that exist outside the kernel tree, for various reasons. Some people don't want to GPL their drivers, some drivers aren't mature enough, sometimes there are wierd political or "code style" issues (like with ReiserFS). The fact that it's difficult to maintain an out-of-kernel driver for Linux encourages people to make their drivers part of the kernel tree, and that's generally nice: a very wide variety of devices are supported in official kernel sources. I don't have to use any out-of-kernel drivers right now. My drivers are all part of the kernel, and not some assorted bunch of packages I have to chase down. From where I sit it serves me well.
Torvalds and Tannenbaum may have different opinions, but I think that if either was charged with writing an encyclopedic article on the subject he could write an article bearing little resemblance to the series of Usenet arguments they engaged in many years ago. If nothing else, Torvalds is certainly more mature and experienced these days, and he probably wouldn't have been invited as an "expert" to contribute while he was still an undergrad. But there's a difference between how he might write when trying to write a pure factual article than when he was defending his kernel against someone claiming it was obsolete.
I don't have a Windows box within reach right now... can anyone tell if that (hosanna1.com) renders into anything remotely legible in IE? In FF it looks like a Jackson Pollack painting...
If your highway traffic-blocking religion grew from its humble roots to one day have a number of followers substantial enough to rewrite the rules of society such that standing in the middle of the highway blocking traffic was accepted, encouraged, and considered a Fundamental Right of Man, surely your far-future followers would condemn the actions of the present-day police as persecution.
OK, sorry for this blatant troll post, I need some sleep.
If you read even a little bit of TFA you'd know that the passive cooler is large enough that the card takes the space of two slots.
There's a difference between records/tapes and DRM music files. For one thing, the industry standardized around records and tapes. I don't know what the story was with 8-tracks, I doubt they got too popular before failing, though. But the changes from one format to another were reasonably slow. The computing world changes very quickly, and these portable music players don't exactly have a reputation for longevity. And DRM'ed music is tied to computers, so choosing a DRM music format locks me into a particular range of computing platforms for any computer I want to listen on. Often DRM'ed music depends on one company that has to keep supporting you. But with records/tapes many companies built record players and tape players, many of those companies left the market or went under, and yet some still remain. In that sense, a DRM system like HDCP is much better for me than iTunes is. I can depend on at least some of the many companies making HDCP-compliant devices staying in the market for a while. I think that eventually we'll see a new music format based on this type of DRM that offers advantages over CDs compelling enough to make people buy. I'd consider using it, if I had confidence that it wouldn't leave me dry, and if CDs were dead.
That doesn't mean I think iTunes should be forced to change. It just means I'll never buy songs from it. Apple had an idea first and developed a nice product but I won't reward them because they're not giving me what I want. *That* is capitalism. Capitalism is people like me demanding with our dollars that we are able to take advantage of the technology that theoretically allows media to be more durable; if the technology theoretically allows this but we still have to constantly replace our media then what are we being offered that gives us a compelling reason to switch away from records and tapes?
Anyhow, I was just responding to parent of my original post about iTunes-style DRM in general. I agree with you for the most part about the European iTunes law, and I imagine we'd probably agree that most of the EU's lawsuits against Microsoft are ridiculous, and that security companies crying about Vista should quit their bitchin'.
I personally buy all my music on CD. It's the best deal out there: I'm basically guaranteed that I'll be able to play the CD or play compressed versions of its tracks on a device of my choosing for a long, long time. I don't get that with a DRM scheme. DRM is a bad deal for me, so I won't buy it.
One problem is that the prevalence of CDs forces the record companies to put a lot of trust in their customers not to rip them off. Trust that the customers, frankly, haven't earned. But there's another problem. Buying from, say, iTMS involves the customer putting a lot of trust in Apple. They have to trust that Apple will continue to let them play their tunes. But Apple could be marginalized in the market, and stop releasing iPods and iTunes because they're not profitable. They could even go out of business altogether. Then when the next big OS comes around and breaks compatibility with Apple's previous-gen products, all their users are stuck with either an old OS or a library of useless encrypted tunes. And I tend to think that, more likely than not, eventually Apple will for some reason find it more expensive than it's worth to support every last tune ever downloaded on the latest platforms. Even if playback of the songs remains possible for a long time, market dominance of DRM formats is likely to change many times in the future, meaning that you'd be at some times struggling to find devices to play your old tunes or tunes that work on your old device.
I know a lot of people are happy with iTunes or whatever now, but they haven't had to live with it for very long. The music business knows it can't trust its customers but the customers don't know just how much they can't trust the providers. They're blinded by how well it works in the short term. The customer and seller have equal power in the transaction, but the sellers are getting together and speaking with a unified voice. The customers are scattering around like fools. And we'll be forced to trust the media companies forever because of it, because I do not believe there will ever be a solution that forces neither side to trust the other.
Yeah, I responded to your post because it was clearly a joke but had this relavent idea in it. The best part of your idea in my opinion is that the color changes were gradual. And it wouldn't have to be grayscale... a continium of colors can be defined that follow a clear pattern, such as the so-called "heat-scale" (I can't seem to find any references to it on Google, I heard of it in an image processing class); in computer graphics we usually define colorspaces as three-dimensional, and any continuous path taken through the 3-d space could be a usable continium in this way.
The difference between Go and WP pages is that Go games end. WP pages aren't finished evolving, and there are at any time many very young pages that are likely to have undergone very similar patterns of edits. Sort of like how no two Go games may ever have played exactly the same way, but that certain opening sequences have probably been repeated very often. That said, there are probably certain short Go games that have been repeated, even though the overall possible number of games is overwhealming and there are certainly possible games that haven't been played. But I'm no Go expert, so I may be wrong.
So in other words... you've been locked in. You're disappointed by Apple's portable players and would give others a chance, but there's too much to lose. Microsoft might even offer a better end-to-end solution, but lots of people are too tightly locked-in to Apple to switch. I might call it poetic justice for this to happen to Microsoft, except that I have no interest in portable music or downloadable DRM-laden music, so I have no reason to care about any of the companies involved. And I'm sure Microsoft will do fine (they usually do). The real losers are consumers; you're stuck with Apple and only Apple and you've just started to realize it now.
I have never bought anything from iTunes and I won't buy anything from Microsoft's upcoming music service. Even if I was OK with the general idea of not being trusted to respect copyright but at the same time forced to trust some corporation for my continued ability to use media I've paid for, I still think there's too much risk of any one company being marginalized in the market to the extent that their media files are useless.
s/use a language/perform tasks
(and for grammar's sake, s/fits/fit)
But not only will new text be nearly invisible under this scheme: text slightly more than 1/3 and 2/3 the way to undeletability will be nearly invisible. You'd need to trace a smoother path through the colorspace to make such an idea like that work: a gradient of grays (straight line from white to black) would be boring, but something like the heat scale might work.
And as far as the wise man goes, he is trivially proven a fool. Every page has the same color pattern just after its creation! Besides, certain patterns of editing early in an article's life could be common, such as appending sections onto the end of a new article without touching the original entry.