I mean, I didn't really see any mafia similarities mentioned that are particularily BAD.
No extortion, blackmail, etc.
Though I'm sure it could happen to someone who's far too attached to their characters, I doubt it could ever be as widespread as these other "symptoms".
I don't know about the article, but the various reports of teens in asian countries killing one another in the real world for damage/death inflicted in MMORPGs disturbs me to no end. Sounds mafia-ish to me, especially since it's usually a group of people that show up at an internet cafe and whack someone then leave.
not even goddamn openbsd that proclaims proudly 'only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years' on its front page. Only one hole that has been found. The chances are that, somewhere, there is an obscure security hole that nobody has discovered. It would become the second.
I dunno, two remote holes in 7 years is pretty good. If you want to use slashdot as a forum for anti-OpenBSD trolling, point out that the default install does pretty much nothing, and it's the services that people install anyway that are usually abused (telnet, ftp, etc.). That's more of a point than 'Only one? They probably have two!' which is just blatant trolling.
22million ips? How much of ther population have even seen a computer?
Well, if you'd read the article, you'd know:
With IPv4, China has only 22 million IP addresses for its population of 1.3 billion people. Last year, it had about 17 million Internet subscribers, and the figure will hit 62.5 million in 2007. Japan and Korea will also run out of addresses soon, she said.
So at least 17 million people have not only seen a computer, but in fact own one and use the internet. I'd wager that many millions beyond that use internet cafes and the like.
Throw away your stupid preconceptions about what the rest of the world is like. Human rights violations or not, China isn't a third-world despotic slum, it's a real nation with a thriving economy. Why else would Bush be pursuing trade relations with communists if there weren't money in it for him?
Look at the mess in Florida in the last US presidential elections. The system there worked as everything was on paper, so they just needed to go through all the ballot notes and re-count and re-evaluate them. After the extensive re-counts and press and public auditing of the result, it was found to be correct.
After the extensive re-counts and press and public misunderstanding of the problem, a judge friend of Bush's ordered that they stop bothering and declare Bush the winner, ignoring overwhelming public evidence that the Bush team had used every underhanded (and illegal) trick in the book to get elected.
However based on what I read about many contries[sic], it's been established that you don't own a copy of the song to do with as you please, but rather you own the media but not the contents, making it illegal to make a copy (aka a backup) for use in other media players.
Just as point of note: in Canada, it is legal under the Copyright Act to not only make copies of your own music for personal use, but also to borrow and make copies of a friend's music for your personal use.
Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):
selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;
distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;
communicating to the public by telecommunication; or
performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
Just for anyone who still doubts (there are a few), I think it's important to know what rights you have in this age of 'land of liberty' rights being stripped away. Incidentally, this is one of the things the levy on writable media funds, so next time you feel like complaining about $0.29 on your CD-R, just go out and rip a friend's music collection in 'protest'.
You're missing the one key point about the whole Apple iTunes vs. MS Bagware issue: there are no good music management for Windows. I've tried every popular media-related program, like Sonique (absurd Winamp ripoff), Winamp 2 (player only, no management), Winamp 3 (horribly horribly broken player with hacked-on 'management'), and my current preference, WMP 9 (clumsy, often blatantly stupid, interface, but some of the features are there).
If Apple releases iTunes for Windows, and it looks, feels, and works the same as it does on the Mac, it will be a better player. If it's still free on Windows, or is at least Quicktime-style trialware (but preferably not nagware), people will download it, and they will like it. The interface is simple and intuitive, and things work the way they should. It will very quickly take the music playing market away from Media Player, Winamp, and the like. Of this I have no doubt.
Then, people will sign up for accounts with this service, because it's free to do so. Then, when they want to get some song, they'll think to themselves 'Hey, let's see if this really works', and they will. Maybe they'll buy, maybe they won't, but if they do, they'll enjoy the fact that they can move the songs around and everything. Copy here, move there, and if they stop wanting to pay, they stop paying. No loss of music at all.
If there is a superior product for a similar price that does what people want, all you have to do is show it to them, and they'll switch.
There haven't been any posts yet, but I look forward to getting home and reading quite a lot of FUD posts about how they're taking away our rights and the government is coming to get you, and how having an ID card is one step away from martial law and taking away your homes. Fun.
Let's look at some facts. Some countries which currently have national ID cards are Israel, Germany, Austria, Norway, France, Sweden, and Finland. How many of these are police states?
Only one, and that's justified when people are trying to blow you up. Still, even in Israel, there's no loss of privacy. Security guards are posted at the entrance to every mall, and military personnel are on every corner, but none of them ever asked me for ID. They'll search your bags, sure, but not in depth. If you looked suspicious, they'd probably wave you over to check you out, but I don't know of anyone who's been unfairly hassled for their ID card. Not saying it doesn't happen, but it doesn't seem to happen often enough.
Norway, Sweden, and Finland, very socialist countries, people-oriented. (Relatively) strong economies, technologically sound, and very 'european'. France, Germany, and Austria, say what you will, but Germany isn't 'like that' anymore. Well, some people are, but not the country as a whole. Police states? Not hardly. In fact, in the EU, it's largely trivial to cross borders between countries compared to elsewhere in the world. That doesn't seem suspicious.
In Israel, you use your national ID number for such things as military service, but you don't have to use the ID card as ID - you can use a passport. Doesn't matter though, since either way, the point is to prove who you are. In Germany, you can use official documents, but the ID card is popular. In Austria, paper birth certificates are used commonly, in France the ID card or passport is used. Sweden can use a multitude of cards with your civil number, and in Finland, an ID card, passport, driver's license, or social security card.
In the US, there is no 'national ID card', but you can't drive without a license, and in most US cities, public transportation isn't practical, so cars are very important to most people. There is a Social Security Number, which you do not have to show people that aren't the IRS or your employer, but everyone asks for it anyway, and most people give it up because they don't care, or don't want to deal with the hassle. Plus, most Americans use credit cards, so if the government wanted to track you for terrorism, they could court-order VISA or your bank and find out where you spend your money anyway.
In Canada, there is also no national ID card, but no one asks for your Social Insurance Number either. It's usually very easy to get around middling-to-large cities using public transportation, but for any degree of travel outside of the major metropolitan areas, a car is needed. This results in dozens of disparate licenses, which don't all follow the same patterns, and therefore I could forge an old (4 years, I haven't seen them recently) Alberta driver's license, then go to BC and use it as ID, since it's plastic with pictures printed on it, basically. If I went to Nova Scotia, it could be the most horrible fake on the planet, and most police wouldn't know the difference. I understand the same is true in the US.
What would a National ID card do? It would provide one card, which could be identified by everyone, and would be harder to fake (laser-engraved holograms, like on BCID, would be effective, when combined with other methods). It would let all stores ask for one specific piece of ID, and thus remove barriers - for example, in British Columbia, both President's Choice Financial and Roger's Video - very large national chains - would not give me an account without a BCID or BC driver's license. I had a birth certificate, an Alberta driver's license, my Social Insurance Card, two pieces of student ID, a library card, and a passport, but still, they needed BCID. Thus, to have the privilege of doing b
ATI has both closed-source drivers that really expose the abilities of the hardware, and open-source drivers which are quite reliable and not problematic at all (in my experience). Radeon support for DRI comes standard in the kernel too, as does framebuffer text console support.
I don't know about you, but every password I have, I have to re-type one time in ten anyway, because of mis=hits, double lettters, lrunpstf=djogy*, or whatever else. This goes too for most people I know. Heck, half the users I know forget their username anyway.
Still, I think this would be an interesting idea, as long as it re-learned as time went on (people get faster at typing their password - and what about when passwords change? There are several trivial but important issues. Still, a cool idea. I wish I could implement it on my systems, just for fun.
A former IBM employee I once knew told me a story once that sort of made me think. It's not an interesting story, but it made me think about this same issue.
Where he worked in IBM, he was a sysadmin. His team worked on a pair of IBM's largest systems, with multi-terabyte fibre-channel RAID arrays, as many processors and as much ram as they could handle, and with IBM, that's a lot of power. The systems were almost always 'idle' in a relative term, except when the processor design guys decided to test their new designs. They'd dump the data to the server, start their tests, and the server would clog up, choke, and die. The second server would then take over from the first, get the full brunt of what the first died from, and then die as well. It would then take hours to start back up again.
I asked him why it took so long? fsck? Was there no journalling FS back then? He said no, there was a journalling FS, though it took forever on such large and busy disks, but the reason they took so long to boot up was that they weren't designed to.
When you buy a PC, it boots up fast, does whatever, then dies, and reboots fast. When you pay multi-millions for one of the big toys, you get a system that was engineered to stay up for good.
Ever wonder why IBM's Power4 chips ran at only a few hundred megahertz at a time when pentium chips were getting up into the hundreds? Why they stayed in the same range when we hit a gigahertz? three gigahertz? Because the chips are designed to be stable. It's not just the software, people, it's the hardware too. IBM isn't pushing their clock rates up because that would destabilize the chips. They're not moving to a smaller process because that would destabilize the chips. Speed does not matter. If it takes a million dollar system a hundred days to balance a bank's client records at the end of the month, then they'll buy a hundred of them; however, if it takes a $40,000 system 10 minutes but there might be a glitch (*cough*intel*cough*), or the system might crash halfway through and lose data, then a million dollars it is.
'Why do computers still crash?' It's an interesting question, when there are systems out there with 20 or 30 *year* uptimes. *Computers* don't crash. $320 Wal-mart PCs crash. $1600 Dell PowerEdge servers crash. Big iron doesn't crash.
Computers that crash crash because it wasn't worth the developers' time to make sure every molecule of a processor or every letter of code was justified and correct. Computers that crash crash because they can. Computers that can't possibly ever crash in a million years might crash, but when it does, it's an event, make no mistake.
Why don't the people notice the lack of advancement in the Matrix? Over a hundred years of 1999-ness... no stunning advances in CGI, or science, or anything!
Because the new tech is always hyped on Slashdot, then everyone forgets about it for years until an 'Ask Slashdot' is posted wondering where all this cool shit went.
That sounds pretty absurd, but when I came back from a day trip I made to New Glasgow, I checked my e-mail, as I tend to do. Instead of the 56 or so wastes of my time that I just mass-delete, there were 8. This is odd.
--Dan
Re:nmap used for hax0ry in Matrix: Reloaded!!
on
Review: Matrix: Reloaded
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Here are those same screenshots: non-temp site. No popup. The site will last indefinitely.
I don't mean to troll - some of my best friends are FreeBSD users - but somehow, this sort of thing doesn't surprise me. In every circumstance I've ever tried (and believe me, I've tried), I've found FreeBSD coders to be somewhat... elitest. The assumption that anyone who makes a mistake is a 'doofus' doens't surprise me much at all. Oddly enough, though, this is exactly the sort of childishness that many lead FreeBSD team members accuse Linux of.
Why not just change it? Why make it into an issue? Is this some kind of 'fight the man' issue? You'd think they'd have gotten an ego boost from Apple using their code - repeatedly - and by trying to work *with* the community instead of just taking and leaving.
I tried FreeBSD because I thought it would be neat, and it was, until I had to ask someone for help. Then I went back to Linux. Unfortunately, they don't seem to realize that people are people too. Help is more useful than insults.
I remember the good old days of IRC opering. It was the wild west, there were no rules back then. Or, well, there were, but I never followed them.
I remember one time, we had a channel that filled itself up with gibberish bots, several hundred of them. All they did was sit there though. Didn't talk, not even to each other. Didn't join other channels. Rejoined if you/killed them, they were all from random hosts. We couldn't figure it out. Someone had just parked a few hundred bots on our network for no apparant reason. IRC kiddies are sure some strange lot.
The one thing they did do is spit out text into channel if you/msg'ed them. The text was encoded somehow, I never did figure out how. A mexican friend brought one of his friends into the channel once, though, and when I came back a few hours later, he had one of the bots talking. Problem was, they all encoded the text differently, so once he lost that one (when it disconnected and reconnected with a different name), he had to start over again.
Anyway, the netadmin, myself, and every other competant oper sat around for a while, experimenting, trying to figure out what they were about, but in the end, we just gave up. We used services to rename some of them into furniture, and the opers used the rest for target practice (kill, masskill, whatever we could think of), and just sort of hung out in the channel until they dwindled off and stopped coming altogether.
Here are some of the things I ended up doing all the various times I've been unemployed:
After high school was over, I didn't have a job (well, didn't have one beforehand either). I spent a lot of time coding (PHP, learning MySQL, etc), and studying for my CCNA. Then I decided to go to Israel for a few weeks, so I got a job in Montreal, moved there (from Vancouver area), and worked.
When I was in Jerusalem (kind of jobless, I guess), I relaxed, spent quality time with my friends, and went for walks for the sake of going for walks.
After I got back, I was jobless again, so I did some casual work for my parents' company, and went back to programming and studying in my spare time.
I moved to Fredericton to study at UNB, and went from jobful to jobless a few times. In my off hours, I'd visit Chapters and read random books (why buy? and there's a Starbucks there too). When I moved in with a new roommate, I spent a lot of time playing computer games until I realized that not only was I not accomplishing anything with my time off, I wasn't very good at most games either.
I started getting involved with some friends, working on various programming, webhosting, and application development projects. Right now, I have a half dozen things on my plate right now, but since we're all doing things in our non-spare time, I can work on it without feeling like I have to work on it.
I'm spending my summer in The Middle of Nowhere, NS (about two and a half hours from Halifax). I'm staying with a friend who's staying with his parents, so there's no bills to pay, or rent, or food, or anything. Since they're early risers, I get up early too, because hey, why not. After breakfast, maybe around 9 or 10 AM, we'll go get soemthing accomplished. A few days ago, we tore down an old shed that was falling apart. Before that, it was moving a bunch of split wood from where it was to where it should be. Before that, it was splitting it (for those in the know, there was about ten cord or so, maybe a little more, before we split it).
The most important thing that I've been doing, and I've been doing it the whole time, is self-improvement. Learning trades, getting better at things, getting in shape, things like that. Aside from splitting/piling all that wood, I've been doing chinups whenever I walk through a doorway which has been adequately equipped for them, lifting weights when a particularly energetic song comes on, and working on my website (I find that every time I redesign my website, my design skills get better - practice, I guess).
Basically, the unifying trend I've found in what I do when I have more spare time than I'd planned on is self-improvement. That way, when I get a job, or when a prospect comes up, I'll be more attractive to possible employers, I'll be a nicer person to be around for my coworkers, and I'll feel better about myself as well.
Bash Microsoft in general - this is a perfect example of a general - and common - Windows problem, as well as a problem with Windows application development.
Problem: Dialog buttons are improperly labelled. Programmers tend to use OK/Cancel dialogs in every situation where there are two options, just because it's easy. Same with Yes/No/Cancel. The problem rears its ugly head most in save dialogs.
In the Mac OS, the standard is to use a Save/Don't Save/Cancel dialog. You tell the user that the document isn't saved, and they have these three options. If the user has never used the program before, or is the sort of user who forgets things immediately after learning them, or, in the case of several people I know, is visually disabled, they will not know (at a glance) what the dialog is for. They will, however, see the three buttons, which are clearly labelled with what they do, and if they know they don't want to save, or if they know they did something they didn't want to, they can click their preferred option.
On Windows, Linux, and pretty much every other platform I've used, there is preferred the 'Yes/No/Cancel' dialog. The problem with this is that it isn't descriptive, and the user has to read the entire dialog to know what exactly is being asked. This wouldn't be a problem, except that some of the questions are 'Would you like to save?', some are 'Quit without saving?', and some don't even ask you about saving, but ask about something entirely different. I can't count how many documents I've lost because I click 'Yes' that I want to abandon changes, or 'No' I don't want to save them.
The 'OK to Terminate, Cancel to Debug' issue is another hideous example, but you can find an unlimited number of them just built-in to Windows and Microsoft's programs. Besides that all, it also provides far more information than the average user cares about.
Wrong way:
'Application has generated an instruction that cannot be handled. *bunch of garbage*. Click OK to terminate the application. Click CANCEL to debug.'
[OK] [Cancel]
Right way:
'An error has occured with program {programname}, and it will be closed.' (or something to that effect)
[Close]
If the user has a debugger installed (Dr. Watson is not a debugger), then provide a better interface, but as it is, Windows is a major pain to use for many users, for this exact reason: too much information that most users will never be able to use, and will never care enough to try to use. Keep it simple, stupids.
Telephone service is considered a necessary service, and is regulated by the CRTC. If you ever have a problem, call the CRTC and get them to speak to Telus on your behalf. This should solve any problems you have.
As for any of the other problems you mention, I've had nothing but good experiences with Telus. I live in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and get cell service with them, about which I have no complaints, but when we lived in Abbotsford and Mission, (an hour west of Vancouver, for anyone not from the area), we had no complaints either. We went with Shaw for broadband, because it's just simply a better service (they didn't seem to have any hard cap on bandwidth), but the phone service was exactly as advertised.
My bills are always simple, and if I ever have a problem with my service, I usually go into the Telus kiosk in the mall here, since they don't tend to get put on hold (I don't know what hold times are normally). My parents, living in Saskatchewan, also have a Telus phone, though it's always in analog, I assume because Sasktel's network out there is pathetic at the best of times.
Also, I don't know what it's like now, but when I was in Alberta, the tech support would always give me straight answers - as in, when I asked what kind of servers they used, the tech actually told me (Sun Ultrasparc blah blah running Solaris whatever), and when I asked a tech why my mailbox was messed up after doing some changes to my account, the tech (who had called bright and early the day after I called them) said it was a permissions problem, that my user didn't have permissions to the mailbox, and that it happens sometimes. I haven't dealt with any other companies that would actually answer these questions in a way that was worth hearing, and I've always been a fan.
Finally, if you don't want your name in the phonebook, but Telus wins, make up a name (like 'Rock Hardslab' or 'Dirk Diggler', absurd but easy to remember) and get them to put that in the phonebook as your name. It's free, friends who forget your number but remember your 'name' can look you up, and you always know if someone calling is a telemarketer ('Hello, is Mr. Hardslab at home?').
My question is, why didn't they update the other stores - the Canada store for example? I would've thought that they would have one 'store' with different ways of getting to it, and based on which you used (Canada, US, UK, etc.) you'd get different prices, products, and some different links. How odd.
Still, it's more usable for software, but less usable for hardware. Perhaps Apple's noticed a trend towards buying software from the Apple store? It's the logical place for it, since it can be hard to find a store that stocks decent selections of Mac software.
Maybe this is to help make way for their music downloading service thingie. Hmm, would that mean the service is US-only? Bad thing.
Here's a breakdown of my costs, just for fun. Keeping in mind I'm a student, my prices are pretty irrelevant, so I'll throw in some other costs from other places. All prices are in Canadian dollars, because I'm lazy and sleepy. All costs are shared with roommate except where specified.
Fredericton, New Brunswick
Telephone line: $20/month (required for DSL)
DSL: $40/month
Cable Internet (when we had that): $50/mo
Cellphone: #36/month per person
Rent: $600/month
Electricity between November and April: ~$130/month - note that all electronics are on outlets that we don't pay for; heat is electric
Food: Around $200/mo; I split this with a friend who lives up the street, and eat my roommate's food when I'm hungry and at home
Total: about $530/month per person
Compared to other places in Fredericton, I'm really getting shafted - $130/mo for heat is absurd when half the places in town include it, as is $600 for a two-bedroom when I could rent a one-bedroom all-included for $300. That being said, I can go from my front door to my furthest class last semester within fifteen minutes, which means I can get up a half hour before class starts, shower, eat, and still be on time, though out of breath. That's really what I'm paying for. Oh, and the hardwood floors, quiet neighbourhood, etc. I'm not paying for the extremely small hot water tank though. I don't pay for transit because I can't afford a car, and public transit isn't worth paying for.
I lived in Montreal with a friend of mine, but lost my job whle I was on vacation, denying me the satisfaction of quitting when I got back. We did a lot of exploring the city, but there's a lot of things to do in Montreal without spending money. Eating, however, is not one of those things.
Montreal, Quebec
Rent: $350, $375, $300 (we moved a lot in two months), which the roomie mostly paid for (see below)
Transit: ~$48/mo, except when I lose my god damned pass
Electricity: Don't know, we lived in a slum, and were never there, and we lived in two inclusive places
Water, etc.: see above
Cellphone: See Fredericton
Internet: Our office was down the block and had a 10 megabit fibre link
Heat: I lived there in August
Food: Probably upwards of $500/month per person (you don't keep food in your house in a slum, you eat out at the posh mall down from your office)
Trip to Israel for three weeks: $2000 (I was saving for this, so roomie paid for most little things)
Total: I probably shelled out about $3000 for the two months I was supposedly living in Montreal, but I'd do it again.
As for how this compares to other options in Montreal, as near as I could tell, it's fairly standard, give or take a hundred or two dollars, but keep in mind this is downtown Montreal we're talking about, not the West Island or anything like that.
I still recall most of my parents' finances when they lived in BC. Most notable is their place in Mission, rather expensive; nice, but you pay for it, and a bitch to heat.
Mission, British Columbia
Phone: $21
Cable package (digital, movie channels, internet, etc.): $100
Rent: $1300
Transit: $40
Heat: in the hundreds almost year-round, as I recall
Car Insurance: $300 plus something broke almost once a month, so add another $200 (but we ended up with a really nice 'old' car)
Various purchases of extra equipment and supplies for the business: probably about $6000 over the course of six months
Going to see a movie once in a blue moon: like a bajillion dollars
Total: Well over $2500 a month, as I recall, though I could be wrong
Mission is a small town about 20 minutes from Surrey, BC, making Vancouver rather accessible. Still, it's a small town, built into a hill pretty much, with only one Tim Hortons, one
I do the same thing in Neverwinter Nights, for similar reasons. Not only do I not want a big, muscular man prancing around my screen (not that there's anything wrong with that, I just find the female characters more aesthetically appealing), but the female voices, or at least three of them, are better than any of the stock male voices.
This is getting to be the case more and more lately. Now that games are including voice acting and more detailed graphics, the men are looking more like real men, and they never make real men that look like me anyway, so why not go with the cute chicks?
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, I didn't really see any mafia similarities mentioned that are particularily BAD.
No extortion, blackmail, etc.
Though I'm sure it could happen to someone who's far too attached to their characters, I doubt it could ever be as widespread as these other "symptoms".
I don't know about the article, but the various reports of teens in asian countries killing one another in the real world for damage/death inflicted in MMORPGs disturbs me to no end. Sounds mafia-ish to me, especially since it's usually a group of people that show up at an internet cafe and whack someone then leave.
--Dan
not even goddamn openbsd that proclaims proudly 'only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years' on its front page. Only one hole that has been found. The chances are that, somewhere, there is an obscure security hole that nobody has discovered. It would become the second.
I dunno, two remote holes in 7 years is pretty good. If you want to use slashdot as a forum for anti-OpenBSD trolling, point out that the default install does pretty much nothing, and it's the services that people install anyway that are usually abused (telnet, ftp, etc.). That's more of a point than 'Only one? They probably have two!' which is just blatant trolling.
--Dan
Well, if you'd read the article, you'd know:
So at least 17 million people have not only seen a computer, but in fact own one and use the internet. I'd wager that many millions beyond that use internet cafes and the like.
Throw away your stupid preconceptions about what the rest of the world is like. Human rights violations or not, China isn't a third-world despotic slum, it's a real nation with a thriving economy. Why else would Bush be pursuing trade relations with communists if there weren't money in it for him?
--Dan
Look at the mess in Florida in the last US presidential elections. The system there worked as everything was on paper, so they just needed to go through all the ballot notes and re-count and re-evaluate them. After the extensive re-counts and press and public auditing of the result, it was found to be correct.
After the extensive re-counts and press and public misunderstanding of the problem, a judge friend of Bush's ordered that they stop bothering and declare Bush the winner, ignoring overwhelming public evidence that the Bush team had used every underhanded (and illegal) trick in the book to get elected.
--Dan
However based on what I read about many contries[sic], it's been established that you don't own a copy of the song to do with as you please, but rather you own the media but not the contents, making it illegal to make a copy (aka a backup) for use in other media players.
Just as point of note: in Canada, it is legal under the Copyright Act to not only make copies of your own music for personal use, but also to borrow and make copies of a friend's music for your personal use.
From section 80 of the copyright act:
- a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
- a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
- a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.Just for anyone who still doubts (there are a few), I think it's important to know what rights you have in this age of 'land of liberty' rights being stripped away. Incidentally, this is one of the things the levy on writable media funds, so next time you feel like complaining about $0.29 on your CD-R, just go out and rip a friend's music collection in 'protest'.
--Dan
You're missing the one key point about the whole Apple iTunes vs. MS Bagware issue: there are no good music management for Windows. I've tried every popular media-related program, like Sonique (absurd Winamp ripoff), Winamp 2 (player only, no management), Winamp 3 (horribly horribly broken player with hacked-on 'management'), and my current preference, WMP 9 (clumsy, often blatantly stupid, interface, but some of the features are there).
If Apple releases iTunes for Windows, and it looks, feels, and works the same as it does on the Mac, it will be a better player. If it's still free on Windows, or is at least Quicktime-style trialware (but preferably not nagware), people will download it, and they will like it. The interface is simple and intuitive, and things work the way they should. It will very quickly take the music playing market away from Media Player, Winamp, and the like. Of this I have no doubt.
Then, people will sign up for accounts with this service, because it's free to do so. Then, when they want to get some song, they'll think to themselves 'Hey, let's see if this really works', and they will. Maybe they'll buy, maybe they won't, but if they do, they'll enjoy the fact that they can move the songs around and everything. Copy here, move there, and if they stop wanting to pay, they stop paying. No loss of music at all.
If there is a superior product for a similar price that does what people want, all you have to do is show it to them, and they'll switch.
--Dan
There haven't been any posts yet, but I look forward to getting home and reading quite a lot of FUD posts about how they're taking away our rights and the government is coming to get you, and how having an ID card is one step away from martial law and taking away your homes. Fun.
Let's look at some facts. Some countries which currently have national ID cards are Israel, Germany, Austria, Norway, France, Sweden, and Finland. How many of these are police states?
Only one, and that's justified when people are trying to blow you up. Still, even in Israel, there's no loss of privacy. Security guards are posted at the entrance to every mall, and military personnel are on every corner, but none of them ever asked me for ID. They'll search your bags, sure, but not in depth. If you looked suspicious, they'd probably wave you over to check you out, but I don't know of anyone who's been unfairly hassled for their ID card. Not saying it doesn't happen, but it doesn't seem to happen often enough.
Norway, Sweden, and Finland, very socialist countries, people-oriented. (Relatively) strong economies, technologically sound, and very 'european'. France, Germany, and Austria, say what you will, but Germany isn't 'like that' anymore. Well, some people are, but not the country as a whole. Police states? Not hardly. In fact, in the EU, it's largely trivial to cross borders between countries compared to elsewhere in the world. That doesn't seem suspicious.
In Israel, you use your national ID number for such things as military service, but you don't have to use the ID card as ID - you can use a passport. Doesn't matter though, since either way, the point is to prove who you are. In Germany, you can use official documents, but the ID card is popular. In Austria, paper birth certificates are used commonly, in France the ID card or passport is used. Sweden can use a multitude of cards with your civil number, and in Finland, an ID card, passport, driver's license, or social security card.
In the US, there is no 'national ID card', but you can't drive without a license, and in most US cities, public transportation isn't practical, so cars are very important to most people. There is a Social Security Number, which you do not have to show people that aren't the IRS or your employer, but everyone asks for it anyway, and most people give it up because they don't care, or don't want to deal with the hassle. Plus, most Americans use credit cards, so if the government wanted to track you for terrorism, they could court-order VISA or your bank and find out where you spend your money anyway.
In Canada, there is also no national ID card, but no one asks for your Social Insurance Number either. It's usually very easy to get around middling-to-large cities using public transportation, but for any degree of travel outside of the major metropolitan areas, a car is needed. This results in dozens of disparate licenses, which don't all follow the same patterns, and therefore I could forge an old (4 years, I haven't seen them recently) Alberta driver's license, then go to BC and use it as ID, since it's plastic with pictures printed on it, basically. If I went to Nova Scotia, it could be the most horrible fake on the planet, and most police wouldn't know the difference. I understand the same is true in the US.
What would a National ID card do? It would provide one card, which could be identified by everyone, and would be harder to fake (laser-engraved holograms, like on BCID, would be effective, when combined with other methods). It would let all stores ask for one specific piece of ID, and thus remove barriers - for example, in British Columbia, both President's Choice Financial and Roger's Video - very large national chains - would not give me an account without a BCID or BC driver's license. I had a birth certificate, an Alberta driver's license, my Social Insurance Card, two pieces of student ID, a library card, and a passport, but still, they needed BCID. Thus, to have the privilege of doing b
No, this is our second step in our secret agenda of world domination.
Step one was even cooler than this, but you'll find that out soon enough. You had just better hope that Ottawa wins the cup, or there'll be issues.
--Dan
Also, a 'whitey'.
--Dan
ATI has both closed-source drivers that really expose the abilities of the hardware, and open-source drivers which are quite reliable and not problematic at all (in my experience). Radeon support for DRI comes standard in the kernel too, as does framebuffer text console support.
So yeah, they do.
--Dan
I don't know about you, but every password I have, I have to re-type one time in ten anyway, because of mis=hits, double lettters, lrunpstf=djogy*, or whatever else. This goes too for most people I know. Heck, half the users I know forget their username anyway.
Still, I think this would be an interesting idea, as long as it re-learned as time went on (people get faster at typing their password - and what about when passwords change? There are several trivial but important issues. Still, a cool idea. I wish I could implement it on my systems, just for fun.
--Dan
* keyboard-shift
A former IBM employee I once knew told me a story once that sort of made me think. It's not an interesting story, but it made me think about this same issue.
Where he worked in IBM, he was a sysadmin. His team worked on a pair of IBM's largest systems, with multi-terabyte fibre-channel RAID arrays, as many processors and as much ram as they could handle, and with IBM, that's a lot of power. The systems were almost always 'idle' in a relative term, except when the processor design guys decided to test their new designs. They'd dump the data to the server, start their tests, and the server would clog up, choke, and die. The second server would then take over from the first, get the full brunt of what the first died from, and then die as well. It would then take hours to start back up again.
I asked him why it took so long? fsck? Was there no journalling FS back then? He said no, there was a journalling FS, though it took forever on such large and busy disks, but the reason they took so long to boot up was that they weren't designed to.
When you buy a PC, it boots up fast, does whatever, then dies, and reboots fast. When you pay multi-millions for one of the big toys, you get a system that was engineered to stay up for good.
Ever wonder why IBM's Power4 chips ran at only a few hundred megahertz at a time when pentium chips were getting up into the hundreds? Why they stayed in the same range when we hit a gigahertz? three gigahertz? Because the chips are designed to be stable. It's not just the software, people, it's the hardware too. IBM isn't pushing their clock rates up because that would destabilize the chips. They're not moving to a smaller process because that would destabilize the chips. Speed does not matter. If it takes a million dollar system a hundred days to balance a bank's client records at the end of the month, then they'll buy a hundred of them; however, if it takes a $40,000 system 10 minutes but there might be a glitch (*cough*intel*cough*), or the system might crash halfway through and lose data, then a million dollars it is.
'Why do computers still crash?' It's an interesting question, when there are systems out there with 20 or 30 *year* uptimes. *Computers* don't crash. $320 Wal-mart PCs crash. $1600 Dell PowerEdge servers crash. Big iron doesn't crash.
Computers that crash crash because it wasn't worth the developers' time to make sure every molecule of a processor or every letter of code was justified and correct. Computers that crash crash because they can. Computers that can't possibly ever crash in a million years might crash, but when it does, it's an event, make no mistake.
--Dan
Why don't the people notice the lack of advancement in the Matrix? Over a hundred years of 1999-ness... no stunning advances in CGI, or science, or anything!
Because the new tech is always hyped on Slashdot, then everyone forgets about it for years until an 'Ask Slashdot' is posted wondering where all this cool shit went.
That sounds pretty absurd, but when I came back from a day trip I made to New Glasgow, I checked my e-mail, as I tend to do. Instead of the 56 or so wastes of my time that I just mass-delete, there were 8. This is odd.
--Dan
Here are those same screenshots: non-temp site. No popup. The site will last indefinitely.
--Dan
I don't mean to troll - some of my best friends are FreeBSD users - but somehow, this sort of thing doesn't surprise me. In every circumstance I've ever tried (and believe me, I've tried), I've found FreeBSD coders to be somewhat... elitest. The assumption that anyone who makes a mistake is a 'doofus' doens't surprise me much at all. Oddly enough, though, this is exactly the sort of childishness that many lead FreeBSD team members accuse Linux of.
Why not just change it? Why make it into an issue? Is this some kind of 'fight the man' issue? You'd think they'd have gotten an ego boost from Apple using their code - repeatedly - and by trying to work *with* the community instead of just taking and leaving.
I tried FreeBSD because I thought it would be neat, and it was, until I had to ask someone for help. Then I went back to Linux. Unfortunately, they don't seem to realize that people are people too. Help is more useful than insults.
--Dan
I remember the good old days of IRC opering. It was the wild west, there were no rules back then. Or, well, there were, but I never followed them.
/killed them, they were all from random hosts. We couldn't figure it out. Someone had just parked a few hundred bots on our network for no apparant reason. IRC kiddies are sure some strange lot.
/msg'ed them. The text was encoded somehow, I never did figure out how. A mexican friend brought one of his friends into the channel once, though, and when I came back a few hours later, he had one of the bots talking. Problem was, they all encoded the text differently, so once he lost that one (when it disconnected and reconnected with a different name), he had to start over again.
I remember one time, we had a channel that filled itself up with gibberish bots, several hundred of them. All they did was sit there though. Didn't talk, not even to each other. Didn't join other channels. Rejoined if you
The one thing they did do is spit out text into channel if you
Anyway, the netadmin, myself, and every other competant oper sat around for a while, experimenting, trying to figure out what they were about, but in the end, we just gave up. We used services to rename some of them into furniture, and the opers used the rest for target practice (kill, masskill, whatever we could think of), and just sort of hung out in the channel until they dwindled off and stopped coming altogether.
Those really were good old days.
--Dan
Sadly, in Canada, the Jedis only really outnumber the Wiccans, of which we have 10,000. Muslims outnumber Jews though, almost two-to-one again.
What a strange country I live in.
--Dan
Here are some of the things I ended up doing all the various times I've been unemployed:
After high school was over, I didn't have a job (well, didn't have one beforehand either). I spent a lot of time coding (PHP, learning MySQL, etc), and studying for my CCNA. Then I decided to go to Israel for a few weeks, so I got a job in Montreal, moved there (from Vancouver area), and worked.
When I was in Jerusalem (kind of jobless, I guess), I relaxed, spent quality time with my friends, and went for walks for the sake of going for walks.
After I got back, I was jobless again, so I did some casual work for my parents' company, and went back to programming and studying in my spare time.
I moved to Fredericton to study at UNB, and went from jobful to jobless a few times. In my off hours, I'd visit Chapters and read random books (why buy? and there's a Starbucks there too). When I moved in with a new roommate, I spent a lot of time playing computer games until I realized that not only was I not accomplishing anything with my time off, I wasn't very good at most games either.
I started getting involved with some friends, working on various programming, webhosting, and application development projects. Right now, I have a half dozen things on my plate right now, but since we're all doing things in our non-spare time, I can work on it without feeling like I have to work on it.
I'm spending my summer in The Middle of Nowhere, NS (about two and a half hours from Halifax). I'm staying with a friend who's staying with his parents, so there's no bills to pay, or rent, or food, or anything. Since they're early risers, I get up early too, because hey, why not. After breakfast, maybe around 9 or 10 AM, we'll go get soemthing accomplished. A few days ago, we tore down an old shed that was falling apart. Before that, it was moving a bunch of split wood from where it was to where it should be. Before that, it was splitting it (for those in the know, there was about ten cord or so, maybe a little more, before we split it).
The most important thing that I've been doing, and I've been doing it the whole time, is self-improvement. Learning trades, getting better at things, getting in shape, things like that. Aside from splitting/piling all that wood, I've been doing chinups whenever I walk through a doorway which has been adequately equipped for them, lifting weights when a particularly energetic song comes on, and working on my website (I find that every time I redesign my website, my design skills get better - practice, I guess).
Basically, the unifying trend I've found in what I do when I have more spare time than I'd planned on is self-improvement. That way, when I get a job, or when a prospect comes up, I'll be more attractive to possible employers, I'll be a nicer person to be around for my coworkers, and I'll feel better about myself as well.
--Dan
Problem: Dialog buttons are improperly labelled. Programmers tend to use OK/Cancel dialogs in every situation where there are two options, just because it's easy. Same with Yes/No/Cancel. The problem rears its ugly head most in save dialogs.
In the Mac OS, the standard is to use a Save/Don't Save/Cancel dialog. You tell the user that the document isn't saved, and they have these three options. If the user has never used the program before, or is the sort of user who forgets things immediately after learning them, or, in the case of several people I know, is visually disabled, they will not know (at a glance) what the dialog is for. They will, however, see the three buttons, which are clearly labelled with what they do, and if they know they don't want to save, or if they know they did something they didn't want to, they can click their preferred option.
On Windows, Linux, and pretty much every other platform I've used, there is preferred the 'Yes/No/Cancel' dialog. The problem with this is that it isn't descriptive, and the user has to read the entire dialog to know what exactly is being asked. This wouldn't be a problem, except that some of the questions are 'Would you like to save?', some are 'Quit without saving?', and some don't even ask you about saving, but ask about something entirely different. I can't count how many documents I've lost because I click 'Yes' that I want to abandon changes, or 'No' I don't want to save them.
The 'OK to Terminate, Cancel to Debug' issue is another hideous example, but you can find an unlimited number of them just built-in to Windows and Microsoft's programs. Besides that all, it also provides far more information than the average user cares about.
Wrong way:
Right way:
If the user has a debugger installed (Dr. Watson is not a debugger), then provide a better interface, but as it is, Windows is a major pain to use for many users, for this exact reason: too much information that most users will never be able to use, and will never care enough to try to use. Keep it simple, stupids.
--Dan
Telephone service is considered a necessary service, and is regulated by the CRTC. If you ever have a problem, call the CRTC and get them to speak to Telus on your behalf. This should solve any problems you have.
As for any of the other problems you mention, I've had nothing but good experiences with Telus. I live in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and get cell service with them, about which I have no complaints, but when we lived in Abbotsford and Mission, (an hour west of Vancouver, for anyone not from the area), we had no complaints either. We went with Shaw for broadband, because it's just simply a better service (they didn't seem to have any hard cap on bandwidth), but the phone service was exactly as advertised.
My bills are always simple, and if I ever have a problem with my service, I usually go into the Telus kiosk in the mall here, since they don't tend to get put on hold (I don't know what hold times are normally). My parents, living in Saskatchewan, also have a Telus phone, though it's always in analog, I assume because Sasktel's network out there is pathetic at the best of times.
Also, I don't know what it's like now, but when I was in Alberta, the tech support would always give me straight answers - as in, when I asked what kind of servers they used, the tech actually told me (Sun Ultrasparc blah blah running Solaris whatever), and when I asked a tech why my mailbox was messed up after doing some changes to my account, the tech (who had called bright and early the day after I called them) said it was a permissions problem, that my user didn't have permissions to the mailbox, and that it happens sometimes. I haven't dealt with any other companies that would actually answer these questions in a way that was worth hearing, and I've always been a fan.
Finally, if you don't want your name in the phonebook, but Telus wins, make up a name (like 'Rock Hardslab' or 'Dirk Diggler', absurd but easy to remember) and get them to put that in the phonebook as your name. It's free, friends who forget your number but remember your 'name' can look you up, and you always know if someone calling is a telemarketer ('Hello, is Mr. Hardslab at home?').
--Dan
Ugh, that site makes my soul hurt.
My question is, why didn't they update the other stores - the Canada store for example? I would've thought that they would have one 'store' with different ways of getting to it, and based on which you used (Canada, US, UK, etc.) you'd get different prices, products, and some different links. How odd.
Still, it's more usable for software, but less usable for hardware. Perhaps Apple's noticed a trend towards buying software from the Apple store? It's the logical place for it, since it can be hard to find a store that stocks decent selections of Mac software.
Maybe this is to help make way for their music downloading service thingie. Hmm, would that mean the service is US-only? Bad thing.
--Dan
Here's a breakdown of my costs, just for fun. Keeping in mind I'm a student, my prices are pretty irrelevant, so I'll throw in some other costs from other places. All prices are in Canadian dollars, because I'm lazy and sleepy. All costs are shared with roommate except where specified.
Fredericton, New Brunswick
Compared to other places in Fredericton, I'm really getting shafted - $130/mo for heat is absurd when half the places in town include it, as is $600 for a two-bedroom when I could rent a one-bedroom all-included for $300. That being said, I can go from my front door to my furthest class last semester within fifteen minutes, which means I can get up a half hour before class starts, shower, eat, and still be on time, though out of breath. That's really what I'm paying for. Oh, and the hardwood floors, quiet neighbourhood, etc. I'm not paying for the extremely small hot water tank though. I don't pay for transit because I can't afford a car, and public transit isn't worth paying for.
I lived in Montreal with a friend of mine, but lost my job whle I was on vacation, denying me the satisfaction of quitting when I got back. We did a lot of exploring the city, but there's a lot of things to do in Montreal without spending money. Eating, however, is not one of those things.
Montreal, Quebec
As for how this compares to other options in Montreal, as near as I could tell, it's fairly standard, give or take a hundred or two dollars, but keep in mind this is downtown Montreal we're talking about, not the West Island or anything like that.
I still recall most of my parents' finances when they lived in BC. Most notable is their place in Mission, rather expensive; nice, but you pay for it, and a bitch to heat.
Mission, British Columbia
Mission is a small town about 20 minutes from Surrey, BC, making Vancouver rather accessible. Still, it's a small town, built into a hill pretty much, with only one Tim Hortons, one
Sheesh, that's whacked. Sounds like the title or subtitle of some kind of anime or something.
--Dan
I do the same thing in Neverwinter Nights, for similar reasons. Not only do I not want a big, muscular man prancing around my screen (not that there's anything wrong with that, I just find the female characters more aesthetically appealing), but the female voices, or at least three of them, are better than any of the stock male voices.
This is getting to be the case more and more lately. Now that games are including voice acting and more detailed graphics, the men are looking more like real men, and they never make real men that look like me anyway, so why not go with the cute chicks?
--Dan
--Dan