Unfortunately, not every household has someone "with a clue" to be that administator. I'm not disagreeing that you should keep standard user and root accounts seperate, but to pretend that everyone will be able to just figure it out is ridiculous.
My point wasn't that everyone should get a clue, or that there should be one clue per house. My point is that I don't want to have to sacrifice my computing experience because of some agenda to get everyone else to use the same system. Sure, it'd be great to share, but not at the expense of damaging the product. If a household doesn't have a sufficient administrator then Microsoft and Apple already make software for them.
Linux won't be really viable for home use until it's sold pre-installed on a lot of mass-market PCs and you can go to the store and see games and productivity software with penguin stickers, then go home and 99% of the time have it Just Work. That's a long way off, but I'm not losing any sleep over it, hopefully neither are most devs.
Linux doesn't have to be any more like Windows than it has to be like Mac OSX. If devs try to make consistant and logical interfaces for their applications, and make those applications useful, then people will use them. I don't think developers should change things to be more like Windows, because they should be trying to be better than Windows.
My opinion on home desktops: Microsoft can keep them. I don't want Linux to be screwed up by attempts to make it work like Windows. I don't think Linux needs to have any more of a userbase than it already has. If it gets it, then great. If it continues on the path it's been taking then it'll probably have a broader userbase anyway. Why should the FL/OSS community worry about rapid adoption? We know that we'll be around later. We just need a large enough userbase that it can't be ignored, we need it for interoperability and nothing more.
I don't agree with everything that the article says. I don't think that the desktop experience for a GNome or KDE user is so perplexing that they can't figure it out. More likely they'll have no problem at all with anything if whatever administrator that installs the OS shows them where a few apps are.
This all comes back to the user being separate from the administrator. I don't want to use an OS that confuses those two (like most Windows setups do). I'm happier using an OS where someone with a clue is the administrator and the user is kept out of those tasks.
I had to create an app for making internal surveys for the company. The initial survey was a survey of the IT Department's performance. After finishing the app and having done the survey myself some 200 times I decided that it was very bland looking and needed something to spice up the design.
I was using radio buttons for a 1 to 5 rating. So I decided that instead of just boring radio buttons I would use smiley faces with an increasing amount of happiness. I took the smilies from MSN Messenger (our official and only allowed IM, which sucks as much as it sounds). The radio for 1 gets replaced by a crying face, 2 with a frowning face, 3 looks a little confused, 4 is smiling, and 5 has a big grin.
The result was just enough pizzazz to make the form visually appealing as you filled it out. Oddly, I didn't stop to think of it at the time, being in a homogeneous environment, my solution is just as friendly to non-scripting browsers. I use a regular radio button and use the onlick event to put the image over top, a non-scripting browser just wouldn't overlay the image. The only side effect that I hadn't forseen: One employee put in the comments section that she loved the smilies so much she put one of each rating just to see them. She gave us inaccurate ratings (including bad ones) just to see the smilies, and didn't change them before submitting.
This is true. The thing is, with a floppy disk we didn't even care about penmanship. We just scribbled what it was on the label. Some people bothered to use printed labels, but it wasn't uncommon to see handwritten ones.
Perhaps it's because we're too used to seeing highly stylized labels on music CDs and movie DVDs? Perhaps it's just a lame excuse to support an agenda that makes little sense.
I only wish the director of my company's IT department saw eye to eye with you.
We outfit every computer with a floppy drive, and we only have one CD burner in each office. The main excuse for this is that if we allow CD burning then employees could leave the company with large amounts of data. When it's pointed out that they could use our FTP site towards the same results the excuses shift gears. "It's too complicated for our users" was next. I can counter that with stories about how my 4 year old nephew has burned CDs without help. Imagine 400 engineers outdone by a 4 year old. The only excuse remaining is how annoyingly difficult it is to print labels onto CDs. That one's not so easy, because peel and stick labels sometimes cause problems and there doesn't seem to be any affordable and reliable printers for printing directly on the CD. Thing is, should it be? I mean, hand written labels were commonly acceptable for floppies, so why not CDs.
I can't help but feel that I'm not alone here, stuck with floppies due to flawed logic applied to the prospect of allowing employees to burn CDs.
I'm much more inclined to think that if the hidden subject matter was extraordinarily different from the game content that it would merit a lawsuit. With the press this game is getting, and the press it's always gotten, I'm pretty sure there'll be some sort of lawsuit in Rockstar's future. The thing is that they should be able to claim that the rating indicated sexual content. Surely the argument will be that it did not indicate pornography, which some may take this as. (I don't have the game, but I *had* to go see the video to see what the fuss was about. Hilarious. A fifth grader's dream.)
I would potentially be in favor of a lawsuit against Rockstar if this were completely different subject matter than is claimed on the box. I mean, if this mini-game were in Mario Bros, and it had an E rating, then this being found in the game would be distrubing. Thing is, no one ever claimed that GTA was a children's game, and the content of the mini-game is sexual but hardly X-rated. There's nothing in that that couldn't be in an R-rated movie, and it wouldn't be blurry polygons in the movie.
It's a little more involved than that, for either the PS2 or PC version. Even after modders figured out how to do it for PS2 it's still more than "put memoty card in, turn on game, pause, take out memory card, unpause".
I downloaded the file linked in there to get the readme.txt and here's an exerpt:
[3] Usage for PS2 Owners:
Open your GTA San Andreas save using PS2 Save Builder (available from www.ps2savetools.com), right click on the file ending in.b (there may be several, if so repeat on each file you wish to alter the censor level for) and select Extract and save them somewhere. DO NOT CHANGE THE FILENAME!
Once you have extracted the files delete them from within the save by right clicking on them and choosing Delete (note: only the files you extracted earlier should be deleted).
Do not close PS2 Save Builder yet.
Now simply drop the files, ONE AT A TIME, onto this program, choose the new censorship status, uncensored obviously, and then simply hit the 'Set status' button.
Repeat for each file you extracted earlier.
Now simply drag and drop all your changed files onto PS2 Save Builder and they will be added back into the GTA save.
Save in your desired format and transfer back to your PS2.
Please note: this process will alter the timestamp of your save when you transfer it back and this affects the last saved date shown in GTA: SA and cannot be avoided.
IMPORTANT! PS2 owners cannot use the following devices/software for transfering the GTA saves: nPort, execFTPs, Xport (PS2 disc version 2.22 or below), Sharkport (PS2 disc version 2.22 and below), Action Replay (PS2 disc version 2.34 and below) - DO NOT USE THESE PRODUCTS WITH YOUR SAVE
Keep in mind that this is after someone figured out how to modify the saved game. It requires a saved game modifier. The PC version isn't much better. Someone had to figure out what to modify in the main.scm file, or use the same method as the above link to modify the saved game.
Again, I submit that I very highly doubt that anyone at the ESRB would've been able to do this without significant help. Help meaning that Rockstar would have to create the hacks for them to use and then provide similar instructions to the above. This is a ratings group, not a bunch of geeks like the/. crowd.
So, in that case, it would only be reasonable that a part of the game that was taken out before release - and is only accessible via modification - wouldn't be included in that video.
At least that's my opion.
As an aside, I thought it was kinda funny that Fox 5 news in NY had a piece on this story today. Looks like the media has decided to really take this mainstream.
Since the certification is a voluntary process, you'd expect Rockstar to volunteer that kind of information voluntarily. I think they're no blasting the ESRB, but Rockstar.
How technical do you think ESRB evaluators are? I don't personally know, but I would imagine that they're probably not technical enough to get directions on how to change the game (PC or PS2 versions) and actually follow through on it. Unless you think that Rockstar should've created the app to mod the game themselves, but if they did that then I could understand the criticism they're getting now, which is even more idiotic than the criticism they've gotten before.
The other countries benefit so why should the US pay all of it?
Their countries don't want the same regulations. Perhaps the way to force the issue is to allow medications to be purchased from overseas. Then we would share the financial burdon with the whole world, aside from any of the tariffs they'd be sure to impose as soon as their drug costs started to rise.
The other thing that happened is congress made it illegal for medicare to negotiate prices with the drug companies. Its all part of the Prescription Drug card scam that the "fiscal" conservatives forced through.
Much of the legislation regaurding pharmaceuticals has the public's best interest in mind. Test it to make sure it's not going to kill anyone... Document the side effects... Things like this are pawned off as having the public's best interest in mind: force an equal pricing structure for medication. Unfortunately, it's much more likely to be abused than it is to help. If everyone is getting it at too high of a price then the market has a harder time driving the price down (until demand wanes due to the tipped value scale).
Alas, the forum is on the topic of software patents. So I don't think it does us any good to talk about these things here. Pharmaceutical patents are actually a good model for how software patents should be treated. They're limited to a lifespan that gives the patent holder just long enough to complete testing and make a killing for a few years, then they have to license the formula to others for generics (or provide over the counter stuff, but we can ignore that for now). If software patents only lasted a couple years then you'd be able to get an idea off the ground and make money from it before your competitors could copy you, but then the world gets your idea to use and competition can thrive. I doubt that'll ever go over in a political venue, though.
an anyone in the USA honestly believe the pharmasutical companies advertising that drugs in Canada are dangerous for consumption in the USA? All the pharmasutical companies want to do is sell the exact same drugs in the USA at much higher prices. But when it comes to politics, there is no requirement that the truth is told.
I agree that the truth isn't being told about the pharmaceutical industry to the public. The thing is that they have tried telling the story in the past and the public doesn't want to listen. The US has some of the strictest drug testing policies in the world. Due to these policies it's very expensive to get a drug approved for use in the US. In response to this the pharmaceuticals charge US citizens the lions share of the research cost.
Other countries have far less constricting rules, and those countries get meds that can't be sold in the US and aren't forced to pay for US require research.
So what does buying drugs cheaper from Canada do? Well the net result should be that the US will inflate the cost of drugs for the entire world. The pharmaceuticals will be forced to start charging higher prices to the rest of the world to certify drugs in the US. Certifying drugs for use in the US will become an expensive and unneccessary task that most companies will pobably stop bothering to do.
Certainly there are problems with the pharmaceutical industry, but allowing US citizens to purchase drugs from countries more lenient is probably not the solution.
Before I get modded horribly off-topic...
The point is that sometimes there's not just the simple answer that it must be the rich trying to make themselves richer. Sometimes it really is people trying to do the right thing.
In this case, there's a good deal of people involved that want software patents in the EU because they just want to get richer. There's also bound to be those out there that are passionate that "intellectual property" should be strongly protected. There's a lot of people who see the abuses of the USPTO system as a good thing, morally and financially. Obviously we disagree, but it's hardly justification to paint them all as soulless overlords conspiring to commit crimes against humanity.
It isn't a question of Bram now having to look at every single download to see if it's legit and then removing it from the system. All he really has to do is look at the trackers he's linking to, take the two minutes necessary to figure out whether they're dealing in copyright violations, and then delist the tracker.
Just look at the success stories of file sharing technologies that tried to monitor the content being traded. Napster....ohh wait, nevermind.
The new ruling doesn't affect this quote. The ruling specifically applies to promotion of the enabling technology. This quote was never used in promoting BitTorrent, so it's totally worthless to the case. They had to dig just to find something he said two years before he created it.
He may end up being screwed in the end, but this isn't the smoking gun.
Slashdot Mirror
My point wasn't that everyone should get a clue, or that there should be one clue per house. My point is that I don't want to have to sacrifice my computing experience because of some agenda to get everyone else to use the same system. Sure, it'd be great to share, but not at the expense of damaging the product. If a household doesn't have a sufficient administrator then Microsoft and Apple already make software for them.
Linux won't be really viable for home use until it's sold pre-installed on a lot of mass-market PCs and you can go to the store and see games and productivity software with penguin stickers, then go home and 99% of the time have it Just Work. That's a long way off, but I'm not losing any sleep over it, hopefully neither are most devs.
My opinion on home desktops: Microsoft can keep them. I don't want Linux to be screwed up by attempts to make it work like Windows. I don't think Linux needs to have any more of a userbase than it already has. If it gets it, then great. If it continues on the path it's been taking then it'll probably have a broader userbase anyway. Why should the FL/OSS community worry about rapid adoption? We know that we'll be around later. We just need a large enough userbase that it can't be ignored, we need it for interoperability and nothing more.
I don't agree with everything that the article says. I don't think that the desktop experience for a GNome or KDE user is so perplexing that they can't figure it out. More likely they'll have no problem at all with anything if whatever administrator that installs the OS shows them where a few apps are.
This all comes back to the user being separate from the administrator. I don't want to use an OS that confuses those two (like most Windows setups do). I'm happier using an OS where someone with a clue is the administrator and the user is kept out of those tasks.
I'm just wondering, with all these "hacks" to Google Maps when they're going to unlock the hidden sex game in Southern California?
What choir? The choir that knows the history of LDAP? This article is just a brief intro to LDAP in *nix with nothing to backup what the title states.
I was using radio buttons for a 1 to 5 rating. So I decided that instead of just boring radio buttons I would use smiley faces with an increasing amount of happiness. I took the smilies from MSN Messenger (our official and only allowed IM, which sucks as much as it sounds). The radio for 1 gets replaced by a crying face, 2 with a frowning face, 3 looks a little confused, 4 is smiling, and 5 has a big grin.
The result was just enough pizzazz to make the form visually appealing as you filled it out. Oddly, I didn't stop to think of it at the time, being in a homogeneous environment, my solution is just as friendly to non-scripting browsers. I use a regular radio button and use the onlick event to put the image over top, a non-scripting browser just wouldn't overlay the image. The only side effect that I hadn't forseen: One employee put in the comments section that she loved the smilies so much she put one of each rating just to see them. She gave us inaccurate ratings (including bad ones) just to see the smilies, and didn't change them before submitting.
Perhaps it's because we're too used to seeing highly stylized labels on music CDs and movie DVDs? Perhaps it's just a lame excuse to support an agenda that makes little sense.
We outfit every computer with a floppy drive, and we only have one CD burner in each office. The main excuse for this is that if we allow CD burning then employees could leave the company with large amounts of data. When it's pointed out that they could use our FTP site towards the same results the excuses shift gears. "It's too complicated for our users" was next. I can counter that with stories about how my 4 year old nephew has burned CDs without help. Imagine 400 engineers outdone by a 4 year old. The only excuse remaining is how annoyingly difficult it is to print labels onto CDs. That one's not so easy, because peel and stick labels sometimes cause problems and there doesn't seem to be any affordable and reliable printers for printing directly on the CD. Thing is, should it be? I mean, hand written labels were commonly acceptable for floppies, so why not CDs.
I can't help but feel that I'm not alone here, stuck with floppies due to flawed logic applied to the prospect of allowing employees to burn CDs.
I'm much more inclined to think that if the hidden subject matter was extraordinarily different from the game content that it would merit a lawsuit. With the press this game is getting, and the press it's always gotten, I'm pretty sure there'll be some sort of lawsuit in Rockstar's future. The thing is that they should be able to claim that the rating indicated sexual content. Surely the argument will be that it did not indicate pornography, which some may take this as. (I don't have the game, but I *had* to go see the video to see what the fuss was about. Hilarious. A fifth grader's dream.)
I would potentially be in favor of a lawsuit against Rockstar if this were completely different subject matter than is claimed on the box. I mean, if this mini-game were in Mario Bros, and it had an E rating, then this being found in the game would be distrubing. Thing is, no one ever claimed that GTA was a children's game, and the content of the mini-game is sexual but hardly X-rated. There's nothing in that that couldn't be in an R-rated movie, and it wouldn't be blurry polygons in the movie.
I googled for the PS2 hack and found this (first hit):i ndex.php/t42730.html
http://www.gta-sanandreas.com/forums/lofiversion/
I downloaded the file linked in there to get the readme.txt and here's an exerpt:
Keep in mind that this is after someone figured out how to modify the saved game. It requires a saved game modifier. The PC version isn't much better. Someone had to figure out what to modify in the main.scm file, or use the same method as the above link to modify the saved game.
Again, I submit that I very highly doubt that anyone at the ESRB would've been able to do this without significant help. Help meaning that Rockstar would have to create the hacks for them to use and then provide similar instructions to the above. This is a ratings group, not a bunch of geeks like the /. crowd.
At least that's my opion.
As an aside, I thought it was kinda funny that Fox 5 news in NY had a piece on this story today. Looks like the media has decided to really take this mainstream.
How technical do you think ESRB evaluators are? I don't personally know, but I would imagine that they're probably not technical enough to get directions on how to change the game (PC or PS2 versions) and actually follow through on it. Unless you think that Rockstar should've created the app to mod the game themselves, but if they did that then I could understand the criticism they're getting now, which is even more idiotic than the criticism they've gotten before.
But it shouldn't take long.....considering that's the link from the original post.
Mixing Colt 45 with roman numerals.. isn't that an oxymoron?
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Stephanie Speck: You're a machine from that dumb war lab - I am so stupid!
Number 5: Stupid - foolish, gullible, doltish, dumbell.
This one's a little iffy..but, what the heck..
Raid 5: webbed feet
While we're at it: If you thought it was hard to type with one hand.. what'll you do when you've stored all your pr0n on your fingertips?
Add extra storage: don't cut your nails.
Data backup: save your clippings.
The new dumpster dive: behind the nail salon.
what jokes did I miss?
Their countries don't want the same regulations. Perhaps the way to force the issue is to allow medications to be purchased from overseas. Then we would share the financial burdon with the whole world, aside from any of the tariffs they'd be sure to impose as soon as their drug costs started to rise.
The other thing that happened is congress made it illegal for medicare to negotiate prices with the drug companies. Its all part of the Prescription Drug card scam that the "fiscal" conservatives forced through.
Much of the legislation regaurding pharmaceuticals has the public's best interest in mind. Test it to make sure it's not going to kill anyone... Document the side effects... Things like this are pawned off as having the public's best interest in mind: force an equal pricing structure for medication. Unfortunately, it's much more likely to be abused than it is to help. If everyone is getting it at too high of a price then the market has a harder time driving the price down (until demand wanes due to the tipped value scale).
Alas, the forum is on the topic of software patents. So I don't think it does us any good to talk about these things here. Pharmaceutical patents are actually a good model for how software patents should be treated. They're limited to a lifespan that gives the patent holder just long enough to complete testing and make a killing for a few years, then they have to license the formula to others for generics (or provide over the counter stuff, but we can ignore that for now). If software patents only lasted a couple years then you'd be able to get an idea off the ground and make money from it before your competitors could copy you, but then the world gets your idea to use and competition can thrive. I doubt that'll ever go over in a political venue, though.
I agree that the truth isn't being told about the pharmaceutical industry to the public. The thing is that they have tried telling the story in the past and the public doesn't want to listen. The US has some of the strictest drug testing policies in the world. Due to these policies it's very expensive to get a drug approved for use in the US. In response to this the pharmaceuticals charge US citizens the lions share of the research cost.
Other countries have far less constricting rules, and those countries get meds that can't be sold in the US and aren't forced to pay for US require research.
So what does buying drugs cheaper from Canada do? Well the net result should be that the US will inflate the cost of drugs for the entire world. The pharmaceuticals will be forced to start charging higher prices to the rest of the world to certify drugs in the US. Certifying drugs for use in the US will become an expensive and unneccessary task that most companies will pobably stop bothering to do.
Certainly there are problems with the pharmaceutical industry, but allowing US citizens to purchase drugs from countries more lenient is probably not the solution.
Before I get modded horribly off-topic...
The point is that sometimes there's not just the simple answer that it must be the rich trying to make themselves richer. Sometimes it really is people trying to do the right thing.
In this case, there's a good deal of people involved that want software patents in the EU because they just want to get richer. There's also bound to be those out there that are passionate that "intellectual property" should be strongly protected. There's a lot of people who see the abuses of the USPTO system as a good thing, morally and financially. Obviously we disagree, but it's hardly justification to paint them all as soulless overlords conspiring to commit crimes against humanity.
You could just call it "freed software". Then you're definitely using the transitive verb instead of the adjective.
* Dude, I'll totally hook you up with a copy.
Be careful, lest slashdot be found guilty of advertising as a file sharing service.
Yeah, think of the reading that could be saved if someone simply read my summary instead.
The only thing that makes this news is that a CIO actually recognized it.
Just look at the success stories of file sharing technologies that tried to monitor the content being traded. Napster....ohh wait, nevermind.
The new ruling doesn't affect this quote. The ruling specifically applies to promotion of the enabling technology. This quote was never used in promoting BitTorrent, so it's totally worthless to the case. They had to dig just to find something he said two years before he created it.
He may end up being screwed in the end, but this isn't the smoking gun.
or they'll just switch focus to make multi-platform FireFox spyware.