I welcome the change. Call me cynical, but I just don't have confidence my Member of Parliament would be able to handle the pressure of managing detainees.
It's a cost vs. benefit situation. A user (such as the author of this article) of a new desktop environment may need to mess around some length of time just to figure out how to use the tools to properly adjust wifi. The user doesn't know if it's a hardware issue or a configuration issue. He can decide to spend hours learning a tool he is unfamiliar with (and has other issues with besides), when it might not even solve the problem. Or, he can install an environment he knows well, and with a few simple tests can tell if the problem is more basic.
Because it is a direct backtrack from the public position Microsoft has had on this issue in the past. Microsoft has now issued a press release echoing what many of us have been saying all along - the "open source boogeyman" of security many companies and governments have been made to believe lives under their beds, is in fact just a steaming pile of FUD. I have no love for M$ but that statement was a step in the right direction.
It was bafoons like this fellow that ever gave this ridiculous case any kind of credibility in the mainstream media. Even in admitting he was wrong he feels the need to disparage those who got it right. "The nerds got it right"? Anyone with half a brain got it right, Lyons. It wasn't about "amateur sleuths" or "nerds" or whatever other nonsense you feel you have to spout to make yourself look better. At least one part of what he said is true:
The truth, as is often the case, is far less exciting than the conspiracy theorists would like to believe The truth was, simply, that some people (like Lyons) were idiots with their heads up their asses, and some people actually knew what they were talking about. End of story.
From TFA:
On the other side of the issue is Edwards, whose campaign says: "Patent litigation reforms that may encourage innovation in some industries may hinder innovation in others," including alternative energy. "American competitiveness is too important for us to let our intellectual-property rules be skewed by lobbyists arguing for their own industries' narrow interests."
How disappointing. Based on the article, it seems John Edwards is the only major candidate (of those who have taken a position on the issue) that backs the patent system as it is. I haven't decided who to vote for (although after this article Obama is looking good), but John Edwards is now officially crossed off my list.
The small company I work for has about $1M in sales annually, and we spend almost $250,000 a year on Google Adwords. Roughly 85% of our sales come from Google. We're getting a conversion rate that is less then one percent and it's gotten worse over time. If it continues to drop, we'll have no choice but reduce our adwords cost-per-click limit and take our advertising dollars elsewhere. No matter how you spell it, that means problems for the G00Gmeister.
I use Amazon S3 through Jungle Disk. I can also access it directly with Perl, Python, and Ruby. At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is very affordable - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance. I like Amazon (in this case) - the cost is low and is dynamically obtained.
I'm actually thinking about starting a small hosting company. S3 is what I'll probably go with, but Facebook has definitely got my attention with this announcement (my kids are on the damn thing all the time). If they can indeed hit that "free" mark, or even just make it low, this could be a big success.
What do you want copyright industry, DRM or DMCA? Right now, we the consumers live in the worst of both worlds, and the RIAA and their cronies aren't getting what they want either. The system is obviously broken. DRM has been an unmitigated failure, there isn't a single DRM system that can't be bypassed, and customers hate it. But because of the DMCA anti-circumvention people are not able to publicly challenge crappy DRM by making tools for Joe Blow to break them.
So we have the worst of all possible worlds, the makers of DRM fool around pretending that their broken DRM still works and spread fear that if a publisher releases anything without their DRM it will be instantly stolen. But their DRM is already broken!
It's turned a simple clean purchase into a complicated 'license' where the user is getting totally screwed over.
It's caused a massive loss of sales. All the sales they could have had if they hadn't gone the DRM route are lost. It's going to take them a long time to recover.
It's led to fake claims, a person making a DMCA takedown claim does not need to show any evidence that they are the copyright owner and because the DMCA claim is made to a third party, there is no interest in that third party ensuring the claim has even the basics of legitimacy.
Dumb shit has been slotted in as copyright clauses, like the UK's no parallel imports, so I can't import Vista from the US (not that I have any desire to mess with that monster), even though it's a quarter the price, because it's been made an offence under a copyright statute! Now everyone if claiming copyright to block imports of their products from cheaper markets and UK consumer is getting screwed over paying inflated prices.
People who advocate this aren't necessarily stupid, just ignorant. The Linux kernel's flexibility is being taken to the limit, and people are forgetting the easiest way to improve performance for their particular rig: Customize your kernel! You can add all the code in the universe, and then you pick and choose the particular things you need or don't need! Say I run a 486/25 with 16 MB RAM as an IP Masq router. The hard drive is an old IDE with 600 megs of space. I have two network cards, and that's about it. Do I need SCSI support? Do I need to support joysticks, X, Pentiums, AX.25, or anything else? No! I compile a kernel specifically to run the IP Masq, and run it well. My P100 laptop, on the other hand needs a bit more. I use it for packet, so I need AX.25. It uses PCMCIA, so PCMCIA support needs to go in. I use Seamonkey and the GIMP, so I need graphics. But, my HD is not SCSI. I yank out SCSI. My CPU is subject to the 0xf00f bug, so that gets included. I brew a custom kernel, and boot time is a lot shorter. My big-rig is a AMD X2. I need just about everything, as I have a Nvidia card for Quake4; a SCSI scanner; and a connection to my Packet base station. I optimize compilation for the higher-end computers. I plan on getting a Mac Pro from Apple and putting SuSE on it. Again, by optimizing the options I optimize my system. Get the point? If you want a once-size-fits-all kernel, use Windows. If you want a kernel which can be adjusted for your particular and peculiar environment, use Linux and customize your kernel!
I applaud this person for taking a principled stand against spyware that has been forced upon him.
The fact it's made by Microsoft should be irrelevant, just analyze the behavior of the application and judge it on that.
WGA communicates unique information at any time to an American based advertising company (msn anybody?) with you the user having no idea of what data and what the implications are of giving this company that data.
Can your business really risk an application like this on your systems? Are you prepared for the consequences of letting this program run unchallenged inside your companies infrastructure?
Well, it's about time that some of this "scatter shot" technique being used by the media companies in their so called war on piracy starts backfiring. I'd like to see them become some of the collateral damage, and for the lawmakers to reign them in and make them have a higher evidentiary burden.
As it is, they basically get to threaten anyone without any justification or consequence. It's getting absurd, really.
No way I could otherwise watch unsynchronized TV shows (I live in Austria), there isn't even the option of e.g. watching the Simpsons in English here (except waiting a few years for the DVD release). So much subtle nuance is lost and so many glaring errors are made in translation it's not even funny. Very frustrating. My thanks to all Americans making their TV shows available via Bittorrent.
I'm certainly not a music industry fan or a member of the Mafiaa fan club, but come on, this is a very biased article (and summary). It isn't that bad of a deal, actually. You get three songs and a ringtone for $6. Works out to about $1.50 a piece. Take into account that you are actually getting physical media (the CD) and some printed album art/lyrics, and it's really not that terrible of an idea.
The RIAA et al is full of big, easy targets that can (and should) be gone after. This isn't one of them.
I'm not saying Apple need spend time to build support for 20 different formats Well I'll say it then. The improvement to the iPod video ("Classic" now I guess) is basically doubling the storage space. I'm not complaining, I mean you can never have too much disk space. But a much more welcome improvement would have been support for more audio and video formats. I want to be able to play ogg. I want divx and xvid video support so I don't have to spend forever converting my videos just to play them on my iPod. I want to be able to do more with my iPod, not just hold more of the old stuff.
Actually, considering the way traditional religions have been used to get, keep and justify power (and quite a few other things, think mormons) Out of curiosity, what specific experiences have you had that have given you this opinion? I'm most curious about your seemingly negative opinion of Mormons - all the ones I've known have been decent enough fellows.
I'm a gamer, and I'm opting for the Macbook Pro. The new ones come with an Nvidia 8600GT. I also was incredibly surprised to find that every PC game I play (and I play a lot) has a native Mac version. I figure if a new game comes out that is Windows only, big deal, I'll just use Boot Camp.
Points in the article about reps giving out wrong information (whether it be through ignorance or malice) are all too true. I bought a Toshiba laptop at Best Buy a couple of months ago. Of course, when talking to the salesperson about purchasing it, they gave me a sheet of paper to sign up for all kinds of extra services.
One service they (there ended up being like 3 reps talking to me about it all at once) tried to push was this one where I could get as many battery replacements as I needed for I think it was the next 2 years. I was interested until they said it was like $300 extra, but at that point they really wanted to sell me that thing. I decided to check their knowledge/honesty. Having done my homework and being armed with the knowledge that battery prices for that model were $100 - $150, I asked the salesperson how much a battery would run me.
"Oh wow for those Toshibas those things are expensive. Gosh I think they're about $300 bucks or so, I personally recommend this one since its such a good deal".
I politely declined the offer, bought the laptop (hey it was a great deal), and haven't walked back into Best Buy since.
Good points made, but I have to disagree with you about the Gamecube controller - it's the best Nintendo pad I've played with. Fits great in the hands, buttons are easy to get to, etc. Nothing really innovative or revolutionary, but that's not always a bad thing.
Maybe you haven't checked out FROST or FUQID? These tools access Freenet very much like the way you mentioned. HTML docs are just one type of content on the network, and a web browser is just one way of accessing the content. And of course it's all open source so you are free to write your own tools to access the network however you please:).
There are perfectly valid reasons for an organization to hold onto formal documents until ready to release, and any one who looked at them early is getting information they shouldn't have.
Sure there's perfectly valid reasons for them to hold on to them - have them written, put them in a filing cabinet, or stored on a local machine. But is there a valid reason for them to publish the documents electronically on an insecure system, especially if they had any intention of changing them in the future as you say might be the case? No.
I guess this is what I get for trying to have an intelligent argument with someone who wasn't even around when this stuff was going on. Look, there is more to computing history than tidbits you get out a book. I would recommend to you a thorough study of the Xerox PARC's early activities including Engelbart's collaboration at the time.
I would also recommend finding an knowledgeable elder who was in the industry at the time to sit you down and tell it to you how it is!;). Books are only giving you half the story my friend! By the way your AC troll was fun, isn't the internet so great that when you can't get your way and you know you're wrong, you can just anonymously blast people?
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I welcome the change. Call me cynical, but I just don't have confidence my Member of Parliament would be able to handle the pressure of managing detainees.
You're missing the point.
It's a cost vs. benefit situation. A user (such as the author of this article) of a new desktop environment may need to mess around some length of time just to figure out how to use the tools to properly adjust wifi. The user doesn't know if it's a hardware issue or a configuration issue. He can decide to spend hours learning a tool he is unfamiliar with (and has other issues with besides), when it might not even solve the problem. Or, he can install an environment he knows well, and with a few simple tests can tell if the problem is more basic.
Because it is a direct backtrack from the public position Microsoft has had on this issue in the past. Microsoft has now issued a press release echoing what many of us have been saying all along - the "open source boogeyman" of security many companies and governments have been made to believe lives under their beds, is in fact just a steaming pile of FUD. I have no love for M$ but that statement was a step in the right direction.
Packages are already in ubuntu feisty.
:-)
just do an apt-get update and then an apt-get dist-upgrade
It fits the pattern we've been seeing from them. Remember, this is the company that pillaged South Africa's economy, rewrote its privacy policy to give itself more leniency, lobbies against net neutrality, and fights open-access wireless.
And don't forget, they shut down the time service too. Bastards.
On the other side of the issue is Edwards, whose campaign says: "Patent litigation reforms that may encourage innovation in some industries may hinder innovation in others," including alternative energy. "American competitiveness is too important for us to let our intellectual-property rules be skewed by lobbyists arguing for their own industries' narrow interests."
How disappointing. Based on the article, it seems John Edwards is the only major candidate (of those who have taken a position on the issue) that backs the patent system as it is. I haven't decided who to vote for (although after this article Obama is looking good), but John Edwards is now officially crossed off my list.
The small company I work for has about $1M in sales annually, and we spend almost $250,000 a year on Google Adwords. Roughly 85% of our sales come from Google. We're getting a conversion rate that is less then one percent and it's gotten worse over time. If it continues to drop, we'll have no choice but reduce our adwords cost-per-click limit and take our advertising dollars elsewhere. No matter how you spell it, that means problems for the G00Gmeister.
I use Amazon S3 through Jungle Disk. I can also access it directly with Perl, Python, and Ruby. At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is very affordable - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance. I like Amazon (in this case) - the cost is low and is dynamically obtained.
I'm actually thinking about starting a small hosting company. S3 is what I'll probably go with, but Facebook has definitely got my attention with this announcement (my kids are on the damn thing all the time). If they can indeed hit that "free" mark, or even just make it low, this could be a big success.
What do you want copyright industry, DRM or DMCA? Right now, we the consumers live in the worst of both worlds, and the RIAA and their cronies aren't getting what they want either. The system is obviously broken. DRM has been an unmitigated failure, there isn't a single DRM system that can't be bypassed, and customers hate it. But because of the DMCA anti-circumvention people are not able to publicly challenge crappy DRM by making tools for Joe Blow to break them.
So we have the worst of all possible worlds, the makers of DRM fool around pretending that their broken DRM still works and spread fear that if a publisher releases anything without their DRM it will be instantly stolen. But their DRM is already broken!
It's turned a simple clean purchase into a complicated 'license' where the user is getting totally screwed over.
It's caused a massive loss of sales. All the sales they could have had if they hadn't gone the DRM route are lost. It's going to take them a long time to recover.
It's led to fake claims, a person making a DMCA takedown claim does not need to show any evidence that they are the copyright owner and because the DMCA claim is made to a third party, there is no interest in that third party ensuring the claim has even the basics of legitimacy.
Dumb shit has been slotted in as copyright clauses, like the UK's no parallel imports, so I can't import Vista from the US (not that I have any desire to mess with that monster), even though it's a quarter the price, because it's been made an offence under a copyright statute! Now everyone if claiming copyright to block imports of their products from cheaper markets and UK consumer is getting screwed over paying inflated prices.
People who advocate this aren't necessarily stupid, just ignorant. The Linux kernel's flexibility is being taken to the limit, and people are forgetting the easiest way to improve performance for their particular rig: Customize your kernel! You can add all the code in the universe, and then you pick and choose the particular things you need or don't need! Say I run a 486/25 with 16 MB RAM as an IP Masq router. The hard drive is an old IDE with 600 megs of space. I have two network cards, and that's about it. Do I need SCSI support? Do I need to support joysticks, X, Pentiums, AX.25, or anything else? No! I compile a kernel specifically to run the IP Masq, and run it well. My P100 laptop, on the other hand needs a bit more. I use it for packet, so I need AX.25. It uses PCMCIA, so PCMCIA support needs to go in. I use Seamonkey and the GIMP, so I need graphics. But, my HD is not SCSI. I yank out SCSI. My CPU is subject to the 0xf00f bug, so that gets included. I brew a custom kernel, and boot time is a lot shorter. My big-rig is a AMD X2. I need just about everything, as I have a Nvidia card for Quake4; a SCSI scanner; and a connection to my Packet base station. I optimize compilation for the higher-end computers. I plan on getting a Mac Pro from Apple and putting SuSE on it. Again, by optimizing the options I optimize my system. Get the point? If you want a once-size-fits-all kernel, use Windows. If you want a kernel which can be adjusted for your particular and peculiar environment, use Linux and customize your kernel!
I applaud this person for taking a principled stand against spyware that has been forced upon him.
The fact it's made by Microsoft should be irrelevant, just analyze the behavior of the application and judge it on that.
WGA communicates unique information at any time to an American based advertising company (msn anybody?) with you the user having no idea of what data and what the implications are of giving this company that data.
Can your business really risk an application like this on your systems? Are you prepared for the consequences of letting this program run unchallenged inside your companies infrastructure?
Well, it's about time that some of this "scatter shot" technique being used by the media companies in their so called war on piracy starts backfiring. I'd like to see them become some of the collateral damage, and for the lawmakers to reign them in and make them have a higher evidentiary burden.
As it is, they basically get to threaten anyone without any justification or consequence. It's getting absurd, really.
No way I could otherwise watch unsynchronized TV shows (I live in Austria), there isn't even the option of e.g. watching the Simpsons in English here (except waiting a few years for the DVD release). So much subtle nuance is lost and so many glaring errors are made in translation it's not even funny. Very frustrating. My thanks to all Americans making their TV shows available via Bittorrent.
I'm certainly not a music industry fan or a member of the Mafiaa fan club, but come on, this is a very biased article (and summary). It isn't that bad of a deal, actually. You get three songs and a ringtone for $6. Works out to about $1.50 a piece. Take into account that you are actually getting physical media (the CD) and some printed album art/lyrics, and it's really not that terrible of an idea. The RIAA et al is full of big, easy targets that can (and should) be gone after. This isn't one of them.
I'm a gamer, and I'm opting for the Macbook Pro. The new ones come with an Nvidia 8600GT. I also was incredibly surprised to find that every PC game I play (and I play a lot) has a native Mac version. I figure if a new game comes out that is Windows only, big deal, I'll just use Boot Camp.
Points in the article about reps giving out wrong information (whether it be through ignorance or malice) are all too true. I bought a Toshiba laptop at Best Buy a couple of months ago. Of course, when talking to the salesperson about purchasing it, they gave me a sheet of paper to sign up for all kinds of extra services.
One service they (there ended up being like 3 reps talking to me about it all at once) tried to push was this one where I could get as many battery replacements as I needed for I think it was the next 2 years. I was interested until they said it was like $300 extra, but at that point they really wanted to sell me that thing. I decided to check their knowledge/honesty. Having done my homework and being armed with the knowledge that battery prices for that model were $100 - $150, I asked the salesperson how much a battery would run me.
"Oh wow for those Toshibas those things are expensive. Gosh I think they're about $300 bucks or so, I personally recommend this one since its such a good deal".
I politely declined the offer, bought the laptop (hey it was a great deal), and haven't walked back into Best Buy since.
Good points made, but I have to disagree with you about the Gamecube controller - it's the best Nintendo pad I've played with. Fits great in the hands, buttons are easy to get to, etc. Nothing really innovative or revolutionary, but that's not always a bad thing.
Maybe you haven't checked out FROST or FUQID? These tools access Freenet very much like the way you mentioned. HTML docs are just one type of content on the network, and a web browser is just one way of accessing the content. And of course it's all open source so you are free to write your own tools to access the network however you please :).
That's an unsubstantiated anti-Microsoft troll.
You must be new here.
So, using an Emulator isnt pirating?
No, it's not.
I know that if you own it, but, who owns the thousands of NES games there are?
The only one who said anything about thousands of NES games was you. Go back to your cave troll.
There are perfectly valid reasons for an organization to hold onto formal documents until ready to release, and any one who looked at them early is getting information they shouldn't have.
Sure there's perfectly valid reasons for them to hold on to them - have them written, put them in a filing cabinet, or stored on a local machine. But is there a valid reason for them to publish the documents electronically on an insecure system, especially if they had any intention of changing them in the future as you say might be the case? No.
I guess this is what I get for trying to have an intelligent argument with someone who wasn't even around when this stuff was going on. Look, there is more to computing history than tidbits you get out a book. I would recommend to you a thorough study of the Xerox PARC's early activities including Engelbart's collaboration at the time.
;). Books are only giving you half the story my friend! By the way your AC troll was fun, isn't the internet so great that when you can't get your way and you know you're wrong, you can just anonymously blast people?
I would also recommend finding an knowledgeable elder who was in the industry at the time to sit you down and tell it to you how it is!