Would you be so outraged by this if she had commited some other crime and been fined for that?
A principle of a fair legal system (i.e. those we should have, instead of those we do have) is that the fine should fit the crime.
Hurting someone, or burning down his house, or a crime of similiar nature certainly asks for a high fine, possibly many thousands.
Copying a few.mp3 files? I very seriously doubt that you could show that the damage done to the record companies is actually even close to the ridiculous amounts they are asking. A couple hundred bucks would be more appropriate.
They aren't looking for compensation, not even for fines. They are looking for publicity stunts to intimidate the public into obedience.
you can still inform the *AA that what you're doing is, in fact, completely legal.
I could. But why should I? They are looking for something, it's their job to verify their search results. Why should I waste a second of my time pointing out to them what they should've checked themselves?
They're sending these messages out in the thousands. If we assume an error rate of 1%, and that is a very forgiving assumption, that's a hundred or so errors. If it takes 30 minutes to sort things out, that's 50 hours burnt on account of the **AA, 50 hours that they don't pay a dime for, but should.
I'm actually surprised that Gates is ranking so high.
While it's true that microsoft has a huge impact on technology (usually of the bad kind, but impact nevertheless), Gates himself hasn't had any worthwhile vision for the past 6 or 7 years. His first book was a laugh to anyone with a clue, his second book was a laugh to everyone with even a fraction of a clue. Nothing he has said during the past two years was not already said elsewhere at least a year before.
His influence is, of that there can be no doubt, in bringing those things onto the world media stage. If Gates says it, it's suddenly news, even if 50 other people said it 6, 12 and 18 months before.
While that does count as influence, does it warrant 7th place?
I mean, what has Gates done this year that has influenced technology in any way? All I've heard from him was marketing bullshit.
Lore is getting good marks everywhere. Unfortunately, the Linux client doesn't run on my new machine (it runs fine on the one at work, but obviously I couldn't do more than check whether it runs at all there:-) ).
Amen. Using XML is a brilliant idea that allows for interoperability that the designers never dreamed about.
Here's another example: Last year, I was speaking at a conference where some speakers had brought their slides in magicpoint format, while the organizers needed them in powerpoint. OpenOffice to the rescue. In about half an hour I hacked up a script that called magicpoint, exported the slides as graphics and created an OpenOffice impress presentation from them. One export to powerpoint format later and they got a CD with their stuff on it.
Sure, you could've importet the graphics into powerpoint manually. Not a fun job when you're talking close to a hundred pages.
The indy game scene is definitely to be watched. Two main reasons why I believe that it won't be long before the next big things come from there instead of one of the big studios:
One: The studios are producing ever more sequels. It just is commercially safer. You know for a fact that BigTitle 2 or HugeSeller 4 will sell at least a few ten-thousand copies to people who buy it because they liked the first, second or third part.
Two: With stuff like Torque and others, the indies are closer to the pros than ever since C64 and Amiga days. The big shots have todays ubercool engine, but the indies already have access to yesterdays engine, which runs better on most users machines anyways.
The critical part in all indie games I've seen (and I've seen many, beta-tested quite a few, and had my hand in the development of one or two) is the artwork. Good coders are rare, but average coders are a dime a dozen. Even average artists, however, with all the skills required to create textures, 3D models, music or sound-effects ready for use in a game - those guys are not that easy to find.
You would be surprised how many professional environments are run by a group of hackers.
The funny thing is: The hackers server room will usually work. The thoroughly-organized, everything structured, well-documented one will be bogged down in its own bureaucracy.
Where do I get the Firefox source? I need to compile it for a specific environment here where the builds don't work. But the only mention of source on the firefox page is "cvs". Not that I couldn't check it out, but they could at least tell me how the trunk and the 2 modules are CALLED instead of just vaguely referencing them. Argh.
Yes, it will. The majority of the Internet mail backbone still runs sendmail. Exchange may dominate the corporate office mail systems, but the invisible part of the world-wide mail structure is by far not dominated by that overblown seattle producer of sub-quality consumer software.
What exactly would microsoft gain from deploying a standard they can't use, because the other 70% or so of the world simply ignores it? They couldn't enforce it on their servers without dumping 80% or so of the legit mail coming in.
I know, it's a long way from downloading ISO's from bittorrent. But the business world does things differently (surprise).
Bullshit. I've been admin for a 1 billion euro company and their main servers were Suse Linux systems installed and customized by their own people.
A friend of me has been messing with the internal systems of a major bank. On the outside it's all "enterprise level" blabla. Inside, the admins make sure things work, and work their way.
Business cares for one thing: It's gotta work. If you need the server today to make some pointless deadline, then bittorrent gets preference over RedHat. If you need to impress a customer, then RedHat will get preference over Gentoo. If your software Xyz insists on Slackware, your admin better find an old Slackware or make it work on whatever else you have.
The moral of this story is that *most* sys admins are not capable of installing or using Linux (or any other OS) unless it's dumbed-down to the childish level of the current Windows OSes.
The problem is that that level of "competence" is accepted in the market place.
You would never even think about hiring a car mechanic, an architect or even a plumber whose knowledge of the field is equivalent to that displayed by the typical windos admin.
No surprise the IT landscape is as fucked as it is, whether you look at security, reliability or plain functionality.
So let's not dumb down what's left of real computing. I'd rather prefer Linux to not follow that disastrous trend, lest I'll be forced to move on to *BSD or whatever is then left in systems that still believe an admin is first and foremost someone who knows what the fuck he's doing.
"My opinion: the GUI changes look too much like Windows/Internet Explorer for my tastes; I guess it's not just KDE."
Couldn't agree more.
An important step for kids when growing up is learning how to do things differently from the way their parents did things, not for the sake of being different, but because the new way works better.
In that sense, the Linux GUIs need to grow up. They don't even have to invent new ways, there's an entire science of how to build a good user interface, and bunches of good examples. All microsoft products violate those guidelines left, right and center, even though they pay lip service to them.
Until we get a good GUI, I'll stick with WindowMaker and live without the 3 features it doesn't have that I would really love to have.
When you install XP (and I think when you first turn it on if it was an OEM install) you are asked to create a new user, which I believe does NOT default to admin equivalent.
You have been misinformed. I've had the "pleasure" of a new XP install (OEM, XP Home Edition) and the user account it creates most certainly is an admin account.
But Windows XP does in fact work as you are stating it should.
"Work" in conjunction with any windos is quite an oxymoron. If I were to work at my job the way windos "works", I'd be fired within the week.
If Microsoft changed it now, there would be an outcry (see grandparent)
Would there? I dare to say that grandma would most certainly not complain. She doesn't care about admin rights, she cares about writing her letters and surfing her senior citizen interest webpages.
I'm speaking from experience. I set my mother up with a Linux system some years back. She has never complained about not having root access.
The people who'd complain are the ones who are dangerous both to themselves and (if net-connected) the rest of the globe - those who believe they know a lot, but actually know very little. Frankly, I don't think they deserve any sympathy.
For those that will mention that Linux is so much better remember that these are the same people that wouldn't like to have to change to root (sudo, su, login, whatever) to install anything and would be opening themselves up to the same vulnerability level as if they had been running Windows.
You've not used KDE for the past two years or so, have you? While I'm definitely not a KDE fan, they got one thing right: Stuff runs as user and if something (say, a system configuration change from the control center) requires root privs, it switches to them temporarily and asks for the root pw.
"But most home users run as admins." [...] Well, that's not a Windows problem; that's a user problem.
You are oversimplifying. Ask yourself why most home users run as admins. May it be because that's the default? Because XP doesn't even offer another setup option, but hides it well? Or maybe because tons of things simply don't work if you run as a normal user?
Driving reckless is a user fault, yes. But driving reckless when that's how the manual told you to do it and that's what the car was designed for makes it a bit more tricky to properly place the blame.
For word-processing, LyX beats it with its hands tied behind its back and standing blindfolded on one leg. In fact, it beats the shit out of it if you consider the visual difference between a document printed out from word and a LaTeX document (which LyX creates). If you don't believe me, do the test - write the same text in LyX and in word, print it out and compare. You'll never look at word again, it just looks... cheap.
For layout, anything DTP crushes word like the worthless bug it is. Ever tried to layout anything but the most primitive document in word? Get Pagemaker and cry over all the time you wasted on word before.
For text editing, almost any $0 Linux text editor and most $25 shareware windos editors make word look like a badly written shell script from VMS times. It doesn't even have syntax highlighting!
Finally, in the self-created class of "word-like hybrids of text-editing-and-layouting-but-I-don't-really-know -what -I-want-and-so-I-do-neither-very-well-software", word loses to OpenOffice without the later even breaking a sweat. Cross-platform compatability and open document formats. I've once turned a few magic-point presentations into OpenOffice Impress slides using a few simple shell scripts. As for usability - word most definitely _is_ the worst piece of crap ever seen in that area, but others have written more than enough about that topic.
An enlightened court. The reasoning really is simple: If they claim that US law can hit you everywhere, like in the DVD case, where dozens of non-americans were sued, then quid pro quo and french laws apply to the US.
Of course, the other solution (every country's laws apply in that country and nowhere else) would make more sense, but there are these darn precedents and the US desire to rule the world...
Slashdot Mirror
Would you be so outraged by this if she had commited some other crime and been fined for that?
.mp3 files? I very seriously doubt that you could show that the damage done to the record companies is actually even close to the ridiculous amounts they are asking. A couple hundred bucks would be more appropriate.
A principle of a fair legal system (i.e. those we should have, instead of those we do have) is that the fine should fit the crime.
Hurting someone, or burning down his house, or a crime of similiar nature certainly asks for a high fine, possibly many thousands.
Copying a few
They aren't looking for compensation, not even for fines. They are looking for publicity stunts to intimidate the public into obedience.
you can still inform the *AA that what you're doing is, in fact, completely legal.
I could. But why should I? They are looking for something, it's their job to verify their search results. Why should I waste a second of my time pointing out to them what they should've checked themselves?
They're sending these messages out in the thousands. If we assume an error rate of 1%, and that is a very forgiving assumption, that's a hundred or so errors. If it takes 30 minutes to sort things out, that's 50 hours burnt on account of the **AA, 50 hours that they don't pay a dime for, but should.
I'm actually surprised that Gates is ranking so high.
While it's true that microsoft has a huge impact on technology (usually of the bad kind, but impact nevertheless), Gates himself hasn't had any worthwhile vision for the past 6 or 7 years. His first book was a laugh to anyone with a clue, his second book was a laugh to everyone with even a fraction of a clue. Nothing he has said during the past two years was not already said elsewhere at least a year before.
His influence is, of that there can be no doubt, in bringing those things onto the world media stage. If Gates says it, it's suddenly news, even if 50 other people said it 6, 12 and 18 months before.
While that does count as influence, does it warrant 7th place?
I mean, what has Gates done this year that has influenced technology in any way? All I've heard from him was marketing bullshit.
I was on your beta team a while ago, but I don't have the time, what with real life, my own game, and work.
But I'll be happy to wait for the update.
Lore is getting good marks everywhere. Unfortunately, the Linux client doesn't run on my new machine (it runs fine on the one at work, but obviously I couldn't do more than check whether it runs at all there :-) ).
Ob-Plug: Two of those games have Linux versions available:
Dark Horizons: Lore and eXtreme Demolitions.
Amen. Using XML is a brilliant idea that allows for interoperability that the designers never dreamed about.
Here's another example: Last year, I was speaking at a conference where some speakers had brought their slides in magicpoint format, while the organizers needed them in powerpoint.
OpenOffice to the rescue. In about half an hour I hacked up a script that called magicpoint, exported the slides as graphics and created an OpenOffice impress presentation from them. One export to powerpoint format later and they got a CD with their stuff on it.
Sure, you could've importet the graphics into powerpoint manually. Not a fun job when you're talking close to a hundred pages.
The indy game scene is definitely to be watched. Two main reasons why I believe that it won't be long before the next big things come from there instead of one of the big studios:
One: The studios are producing ever more sequels. It just is commercially safer. You know for a fact that BigTitle 2 or HugeSeller 4 will sell at least a few ten-thousand copies to people who buy it because they liked the first, second or third part.
Two: With stuff like Torque and others, the indies are closer to the pros than ever since C64 and Amiga days. The big shots have todays ubercool engine, but the indies already have access to yesterdays engine, which runs better on most users machines anyways.
The critical part in all indie games I've seen (and I've seen many, beta-tested quite a few, and had my hand in the development of one or two) is the artwork. Good coders are rare, but average coders are a dime a dozen. Even average artists, however, with all the skills required to create textures, 3D models, music or sound-effects ready for use in a game - those guys are not that easy to find.
We in Europe need all the help we can get competing in science, so Bush is our man.
But only until they find oil in the Netherlands.
That's nothing. I've got a Linux machine that has failed 50%(*) - all you bloody communist gays you got it all wrong with that windos hatred.
(*) exactly 50%. In 3 years, 4 months of service, it failed once, and was shut down properly once for relocation. That's 50% failure rate, right?
As the usage of Firefox goes up - so too does the interest from exploit kiddies.
Yes, and then you realize that the bugs already exist in the code. All the exploiters do is simply finding them.
Don't know about you, but I feel safer with known bugs than with unknown bugs.
Answering my own question, thanks to searching, random luck and a guy at the forums, the source is here:
r el eases/0.10/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/
You would be surprised how many professional environments are run by a group of hackers.
The funny thing is: The hackers server room will usually work. The thoroughly-organized, everything structured, well-documented one will be bogged down in its own bureaucracy.
There are exceptions in both camps.
Where do I get the Firefox source? I need to compile it for a specific environment here where the builds don't work. But the only mention of source on the firefox page is "cvs". Not that I couldn't check it out, but they could at least tell me how the trunk and the 2 modules are CALLED instead of just vaguely referencing them. Argh.
Interestingly, the MOND critical value for the acceleration (a0) turns out to be the speed of light divided by the age of the universe.
In what units? That'd be the bullshit test for me. You can get any result you want by using some approximation and the proper units.
Yes, it will. The majority of the Internet mail backbone still runs sendmail. Exchange may dominate the corporate office mail systems, but the invisible part of the world-wide mail structure is by far not dominated by that overblown seattle producer of sub-quality consumer software.
What exactly would microsoft gain from deploying a standard they can't use, because the other 70% or so of the world simply ignores it? They couldn't enforce it on their servers without dumping 80% or so of the legit mail coming in.
I know, it's a long way from downloading ISO's from bittorrent. But the business world does things differently (surprise).
Bullshit.
I've been admin for a 1 billion euro company and their main servers were Suse Linux systems installed and customized by their own people.
A friend of me has been messing with the internal systems of a major bank. On the outside it's all "enterprise level" blabla. Inside, the admins make sure things work, and work their way.
Business cares for one thing: It's gotta work. If you need the server today to make some pointless deadline, then bittorrent gets preference over RedHat. If you need to impress a customer, then RedHat will get preference over Gentoo. If your software Xyz insists on Slackware, your admin better find an old Slackware or make it work on whatever else you have.
The moral of this story is that *most* sys admins are not capable of installing or using Linux (or any other OS) unless it's dumbed-down to the childish level of the current Windows OSes.
The problem is that that level of "competence" is accepted in the market place.
You would never even think about hiring a car mechanic, an architect or even a plumber whose knowledge of the field is equivalent to that displayed by the typical windos admin.
No surprise the IT landscape is as fucked as it is, whether you look at security, reliability or plain functionality.
So let's not dumb down what's left of real computing. I'd rather prefer Linux to not follow that disastrous trend, lest I'll be forced to move on to *BSD or whatever is then left in systems that still believe an admin is first and foremost someone who knows what the fuck he's doing.
"My opinion: the GUI changes look too much like Windows/Internet Explorer for my tastes; I guess it's not just KDE."
Couldn't agree more.
An important step for kids when growing up is learning how to do things differently from the way their parents did things, not for the sake of being different, but because the new way works better.
In that sense, the Linux GUIs need to grow up. They don't even have to invent new ways, there's an entire science of how to build a good user interface, and bunches of good examples. All microsoft products violate those guidelines left, right and center, even though they pay lip service to them.
Until we get a good GUI, I'll stick with WindowMaker and live without the 3 features it doesn't have that I would really love to have.
When you install XP (and I think when you first turn it on if it was an OEM install) you are asked to create a new user, which I believe does NOT default to admin equivalent.
You have been misinformed. I've had the "pleasure" of a new XP install (OEM, XP Home Edition) and the user account it creates most certainly is an admin account.
But Windows XP does in fact work as you are stating it should.
"Work" in conjunction with any windos is quite an oxymoron. If I were to work at my job the way windos "works", I'd be fired within the week.
If Microsoft changed it now, there would be an outcry (see grandparent)
Would there? I dare to say that grandma would most certainly not complain. She doesn't care about admin rights, she cares about writing her letters and surfing her senior citizen interest webpages.
I'm speaking from experience. I set my mother up with a Linux system some years back. She has never complained about not having root access.
The people who'd complain are the ones who are dangerous both to themselves and (if net-connected) the rest of the globe - those who believe they know a lot, but actually know very little. Frankly, I don't think they deserve any sympathy.
For those that will mention that Linux is so much better remember that these are the same people that wouldn't like to have to change to root (sudo, su, login, whatever) to install anything and would be opening themselves up to the same vulnerability level as if they had been running Windows.
You've not used KDE for the past two years or so, have you? While I'm definitely not a KDE fan, they got one thing right: Stuff runs as user and if something (say, a system configuration change from the control center) requires root privs, it switches to them temporarily and asks for the root pw.
"But most home users run as admins." [...] Well, that's not a Windows problem; that's a user problem.
You are oversimplifying. Ask yourself why most home users run as admins. May it be because that's the default? Because XP doesn't even offer another setup option, but hides it well? Or maybe because tons of things simply don't work if you run as a normal user?
Driving reckless is a user fault, yes. But driving reckless when that's how the manual told you to do it and that's what the car was designed for makes it a bit more tricky to properly place the blame.
Word is the best product in its class.
... cheap.
w -what -I-want-and-so-I-do-neither-very-well-software", word loses to OpenOffice without the later even breaking a sweat. Cross-platform compatability and open document formats. I've once turned a few magic-point presentations into OpenOffice Impress slides using a few simple shell scripts.
Only in a class of one.
For word-processing, LyX beats it with its hands tied behind its back and standing blindfolded on one leg. In fact, it beats the shit out of it if you consider the visual difference between a document printed out from word and a LaTeX document (which LyX creates). If you don't believe me, do the test - write the same text in LyX and in word, print it out and compare. You'll never look at word again, it just looks
For layout, anything DTP crushes word like the worthless bug it is. Ever tried to layout anything but the most primitive document in word? Get Pagemaker and cry over all the time you wasted on word before.
For text editing, almost any $0 Linux text editor and most $25 shareware windos editors make word look like a badly written shell script from VMS times. It doesn't even have syntax highlighting!
Finally, in the self-created class of "word-like hybrids of text-editing-and-layouting-but-I-don't-really-kno
As for usability - word most definitely _is_ the worst piece of crap ever seen in that area, but others have written more than enough about that topic.
An enlightened court. The reasoning really is simple: If they claim that US law can hit you everywhere, like in the DVD case, where dozens of non-americans were sued, then quid pro quo and french laws apply to the US.
Of course, the other solution (every country's laws apply in that country and nowhere else) would make more sense, but there are these darn precedents and the US desire to rule the world...