You're welcome. I hope you end up buying the tracks or the CD from the Werkshop. It would really send the message that they're doing the right thing, opposing and working around the DRM-addicted labels. They should be rewarded for it.
Plus "Train Wreck" is the best song I've heard in ages.;)
As a previous poster already pointed out, Nettwerk's own Werkshop sells unencumbered MP3s for $0.99 per track, or $9.99 per album. Lossless FLACs are also available for $10.99 per album and, in some cases, $1.09 per track.
They also sell the Canadian, Nettwerk releases of her CDs, which carry no DRM.
Seriously, is this article supposed be a joke? Quick summary:
Lenovo bought IBM's ThinkPad division. None of my friends buy ThinkPads anymore. No one wants to buy from a Chinese company. That's not sensible, but it's sensible. Lenovo doesn't command the brand premium like IBM could. Lenovo still has high prices, so they maybe might perhaps lose marketshare. Please lower prices, please?
I find it funny that you think that California law can't tell Blizzard what it's terms of service may be.
According to Lambda's letter to Blizzard, "Discrimination against LGBT individuals in the provision of public accommodations is clearly prohibited by California law. Id., see also, Cal. Civ. Code 51 et seq. It has been so for more than fifty years. Stouman v. Reilly, 234 P.2d 969 (Cal. 1951)."
It would appear that Blizzard's lawyers didn't find this particularly funny.
Did you read the article? IBM *is* encouraging users to use OpenOffice.org. More specificly, they're trying to sell Workplace Documents, which primarily (on the client side) consists of OO.o-based editors.
SmartSuite is, mercifully, dead. They don't even try to encourage IBMers to use it anymore.
Porting SmartSuite would be a considerable effort, which would yield what? A crappy, boken office suite on a platform where better alternatives are already available?
When's the last time someone flaunted their straightness?
10 minutes ago. It was near the end of the work day, and a colleague was helping me out with a problem. He said that he needed to leave, since he was picking up his wife on the way home.
His wife! Do I need to know that he's straight?!
Seriously, I'm just as tollerant as the next guy. If he wants to be straight in the privacy of his own home, that's fine. But why does he have to flaunt it like that?
Unfortunately, Sarah's albums are redistributed in the US by Arista, a (you guessed it!) Sony/BMG label. It's just speculation, but I'd guess that a contract has been signed and Nettwerk has no control over how Arista chooses to do so.
In Canada, they're released on the Nettwerk label, itself, and carry no copy protection. This, I can verify, as I have both releases.
Try ordering from Amazon.ca, eh. And while you're at it, drop a note to Arista, letting them know that you've done so.
Small correction: Bulte was not the Minister of Canadian Heritage, she was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister, and had chaired the committee that produced a report calling for anti-consumer copyright reforms.
I've had the Automatic Updates icons staring at me from my system tray for the last couple of days. The reason I haven't yet installed the latest security update (KB908519) is because I *know* from past experience that it will ask me to reboot afterwards. I use this machine for work, and like just about everyone else in the world, I've got many different tasks on the go, so I've got several programs open, and I don't want to close them, lose all their state, and spend several minutes rebooting. So, I'll say "no", and later forget that I was supposed to reboot.
I'll promptly install patches when doing so doesn't require unnecessary reboots. If the kernel isn't being patched, don't make me reboot!
what's the point of converting existing open formats into an xml representation of the same format?
I dunno about the XML Office format, but with the good old binary.doc format, pasting a picture into a document typically had the effect of bloating the document by about 10 times the size of the image, while actually reducing the quality of the image.
IBM has no "their" version of an open source operating system. The only open source operating system that IBM has committed significant resources to is Linux, which is GPL'ed, and of which they don't actually produce a distribution.
The typical example of the IBM-backed project with a "non-standard" license is Eclipse, which has nothing to do with DRM.
I really have no idea if your comments are fair to Sun or not, but if so, I think you're unfairly painting IBM with the same brush.
At least Gord's comment gave some indication of what the code was doing.
My pet peeve is a block of utterly inscrutable code, with nothing but the following comment:
// This is an ugly hack.
Seriously, commenting effectively is *so* simple. If a brief comment neatly sums many lines of code, it's useful. If it explains a subtle interraction with some other bit of code somewhere else, it's useful.
If it points out the blatantly obvious -- yes, ugly hacks are very easy to spot -- don't bother! I don't care that you realize your code is ugly, I just want to start understanding it without reading every line in the project!
Indeed, if you read a couple of paragraphs into the story, it clearly says, "the company claimed his use of the name was trademark infringement." But the first paragraph refers to copyright law.
I wish I hadn't missed the question-gathering story, but I'll post here anyway, in the hopes someone might be able to answer.
Will I ever be able to buy Ubuntu preinstalled on a p5/pSeries machine?
As a Debian user for more than 5 years, I've always wondered why anyone would want to run Red Hat or SUSE on a server, when Debian is so much nicer. It's so much easier to deploy just the components you want, to configure remotely, to keep things up to date...
I can only think that the reasons are the age of stable (bleeding edge is no good for a server, but years-old versions aren't ideal either, and you need recent kernels to keep pace with new hardware) and, more importantly, no obvious commercial choices for distribution and support.
It seems to me that this distribution solves the former problem, and could very solve the latter one, too. Between Canonical and the many organizations assembling in the Ubuntu Marketplace, it seems like someone should be able to offer something more appealing than Red Hat and SUSE.
My impressions have been that IBM is very interested in seeing different sources for Linux, and that having IBM on your side makes a big difference when it comes to selling to "the enterprise."
Has anyone talked to IBM? Are they interested in this software and this model? Or, are two distributions enough for them? Is this just *too* open for them?
I believe that CRTs have had a negative effect on my eyes.
I developed slight nearsightedness at around age 16. It took another two years before I needed correction in order to drive.
About two years after that, I started spending a *lot* of time in front of computers. It was my third year of university, and there were many long nights of coding in the lab. My eyes began getting worse at an alarming rate of -0.5 to -1.0 per year. My optometrist wasn't surprised when I told her how long I spending in front of a CRT.
That frightening slide lasted around four years, through the last two years of school and the first couple of my career. Then, I switched to using a laptop primarily, and it slowed dramatically. It's been over three years since then, and I've only changed my perscription once, by -0.25, I think.
Of course, this was just one person's experience, and there could have been other factors involved. But, obviously, it's convincing enough to keep me away from CRTs.
As people have pointed out. Eclipse is an integrated development environment. Sure,
you just want to edit a file, but editors in Eclipse are part of that integrated environment. As a simple example, you can select the name of class and ask to see its subtype hierarchy. For that to work, you need to build a model of a bounded set of classes. Hence, the workspace: a bound on the set of files to consider, and a convenient API for working with them.
Setting up projects in a workspace isn't terribly hard, and projects can refer to any physical location, so you don't have to actually copy or move your files around. But, it does slow you down a little when you want to get started, and that's a shame. Trade-offs are nothing new in the world of software design.
Eventually, the File->Open External File function was added. But, you only get a small amount of the functionality that's available when you do it the "proper" way. Probably some careful refactoring could make editors on external files more, though not fully,functional. But, in my opinion, that would be wasted effort.
The workspace/project model works well and supports the desired functionality. Yes, it imposes a little bit of learning on some people, but if that's such a hardship, why are you programming, anyway?
By the way, this whole topic really has nothing to do with the article, which is about the underlying pure plug-in architecture of Eclipse.
I don't know if you'll find his reassuring, or if you'll think it's propaganda, but this ad started running a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times:
ThinkPad Now. And ThinkPad Always.
To IBM ThinkPad customers everywhere:
ThinkPad has won more awards than any other PC in the world.
We're deeply proud of this, because it means that ThinkPad owners can get more done, be better protected, and keep a competitive edge - from air-bag-like technology, to protect against drops and falls, to biometric fingerprint security that means no password headaches.
Soon ThinkPad, and its sister brand - the ThinkCentre desktop - will become the flagship brands of Lenovo. Our commitment to you is firm"
ThinkPad innovation and quality will continue to lead the industry.
We know that you trust your ThinkPad to perform. We know you trust your ThinkPad dealer. And you trust the people of IBM to service your ThinkPad. You can keep that trust.
The people of ThinkPad and ThinkCentre are staying on the team. The award-winning engineers, the manufacturing teams, the sales representatives, the business partners. In short, the people you know. The ones you count on.
We're not just staying, we're excited about this new opportunity. We will be one of the top three PC companies in the world. We're focused. Our goal is clear:
We are dedicated to the success of every customer, and to innovation in PCs.
So what is Lenovo's commitment to you? Continued innovation in ThinkPads and ThinkCentre desktops. Relentless focus on quality. The products you know, made better with every innovation. Service from IBM, the world's leader in customer satisfaction, and from our business partners around the world. So whether you own a ThinkPad, or are ready to become a ThinkPad owner, know this:
ThinkPad now, and ThinkPad always. In quality. In innovation. In dedication to you.
Find out more at www.ibm.com/alwaysthinkpad, or from your authorized ThinkPad dealer.
If Canadians ever engaged in a peaceful protest in numbers comparable to an American protest, they'd be arrested for "inciting to riot".
If ever?
Quebec City? UBC? Sure, some people were pepper sprayed, and a few were arrested and released, but that's pretty much how these semi-violent protests go, whereever they are.
You see, Canada is a democracy with no real restraining constititution: the notwithstanding clause makes it possible for the government to pass a law overriding any judgement against it.
For five years. During which time an election will take place, and the government can be turfed. The clause has never even been used by the federal government.
All you need is a majority to enslave the minority, so safest is to "shut up, blend in, and go along".
Right. Ask an African American about enslaving the minority. Or, for that matter, ask a gay American about shutting up, blending in, and going along ("don't ask, don't tell", I believe they call it).
...We Canucks call this "Peace, Order, and Good Government."
Acutally, only those of us who are ignorant of the consitution do. POGG has nothing to do with the Notwithstanding Clause (in fact, it precedes it by 114 years!) or anything else involving the relationship between government and the people. It only involves the relationship between levels of government: it's the catch-all phrase by which residual powers (i.e. those not explicitly enumerated) are assigned to the federal government.
...few question the horrors behind a Canadian "Security Certificate".
That's funny, because the Security Certificate is actually a frequent topic of concern on that evil, commie government propaganda machine that is the CBC.
...and see how they've been royally fucked over by big government since socialism really took off in the late 1960s.
I'm sorry, did you say "big government"? Here on planet Earth, we might use that term to describe a government whose spending plans would add 1.6 TRILLION dollars to its debt over the next ten years...and that's before you count additional military spending or social security reform (which just happen to be its two primary policy concerns).
The US is a great country, but it's currently on a course towards disaster. Unfortunately, too many of its less sophisticated citizens (i.e. hicks) are too distracted by the scary brown "evildoers" to notice how badly Bush is screwing things up.
Slashdot Mirror
You're welcome. I hope you end up buying the tracks or the CD from the Werkshop. It would really send the message that they're doing the right thing, opposing and working around the DRM-addicted labels. They should be rewarded for it.
;)
Plus "Train Wreck" is the best song I've heard in ages.
As a previous poster already pointed out, Nettwerk's own Werkshop sells unencumbered MP3s for $0.99 per track, or $9.99 per album. Lossless FLACs are also available for $10.99 per album and, in some cases, $1.09 per track.
They also sell the Canadian, Nettwerk releases of her CDs, which carry no DRM.
Seriously, is this article supposed be a joke? Quick summary:
Lenovo bought IBM's ThinkPad division.
None of my friends buy ThinkPads anymore.
No one wants to buy from a Chinese company. That's not sensible, but it's sensible.
Lenovo doesn't command the brand premium like IBM could.
Lenovo still has high prices, so they maybe might perhaps lose marketshare.
Please lower prices, please?
I find it funny that you think that California law can't tell Blizzard what it's terms of service may be.
According to Lambda's letter to Blizzard, "Discrimination against LGBT individuals in the provision of public accommodations is clearly prohibited by California law. Id., see also, Cal. Civ. Code 51 et seq. It has been so for more than fifty years. Stouman v. Reilly, 234 P.2d 969 (Cal. 1951)."
It would appear that Blizzard's lawyers didn't find this particularly funny.
The terms of service say that players may not refer to the sexual orientation of others in an "insulting manner."
They misapplied it in the first place.
Did you read the article? IBM *is* encouraging users to use OpenOffice.org. More specificly, they're trying to sell Workplace Documents, which primarily (on the client side) consists of OO.o-based editors.
SmartSuite is, mercifully, dead. They don't even try to encourage IBMers to use it anymore.
Porting SmartSuite would be a considerable effort, which would yield what? A crappy, boken office suite on a platform where better alternatives are already available?
When's the last time someone flaunted their straightness?
10 minutes ago. It was near the end of the work day, and a colleague was helping me out with a problem. He said that he needed to leave, since he was picking up his wife on the way home.
His wife! Do I need to know that he's straight?!
Seriously, I'm just as tollerant as the next guy. If he wants to be straight in the privacy of his own home, that's fine. But why does he have to flaunt it like that?
Unfortunately, Sarah's albums are redistributed in the US by Arista, a (you guessed it!) Sony/BMG label. It's just speculation, but I'd guess that a contract has been signed and Nettwerk has no control over how Arista chooses to do so.
In Canada, they're released on the Nettwerk label, itself, and carry no copy protection. This, I can verify, as I have both releases.
Try ordering from Amazon.ca, eh. And while you're at it, drop a note to Arista, letting them know that you've done so.
Small correction: Bulte was not the Minister of Canadian Heritage, she was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister, and had chaired the committee that produced a report calling for anti-consumer copyright reforms.
I've had the Automatic Updates icons staring at me from my system tray for the last couple of days. The reason I haven't yet installed the latest security update (KB908519) is because I *know* from past experience that it will ask me to reboot afterwards. I use this machine for work, and like just about everyone else in the world, I've got many different tasks on the go, so I've got several programs open, and I don't want to close them, lose all their state, and spend several minutes rebooting. So, I'll say "no", and later forget that I was supposed to reboot.
I'll promptly install patches when doing so doesn't require unnecessary reboots. If the kernel isn't being patched, don't make me reboot!
Right, just like the conveniently disappearing menu items.
Yet, somehow, I keep having to answer the "such-and-such has disappeared from my menu!" question again and again.
IBM Workplace Messaging
I haven't actually used it yet, so I can't say if it's any better than Notes.
what's the point of converting existing open formats into an xml representation of the same format?
I dunno about the XML Office format, but with the good old binary .doc format, pasting a picture into a document typically had the effect of bloating the document by about 10 times the size of the image, while actually reducing the quality of the image.
Can OpenDocument do that?
IBM has no "their" version of an open source operating system. The only open source operating system that IBM has committed significant resources to is Linux, which is GPL'ed, and of which they don't actually produce a distribution.
The typical example of the IBM-backed project with a "non-standard" license is Eclipse, which has nothing to do with DRM.
I really have no idea if your comments are fair to Sun or not, but if so, I think you're unfairly painting IBM with the same brush.
At least Gord's comment gave some indication of what the code was doing.
My pet peeve is a block of utterly inscrutable code, with nothing but the following comment:
Seriously, commenting effectively is *so* simple. If a brief comment neatly sums many lines of code, it's useful. If it explains a subtle interraction with some other bit of code somewhere else, it's useful.
If it points out the blatantly obvious -- yes, ugly hacks are very easy to spot -- don't bother! I don't care that you realize your code is ugly, I just want to start understanding it without reading every line in the project!
ThinkPad now. ThinkPad always.
I work with 2500 other computer geeks. I wonder how many signatures I could gather.
Heck, how many could be collected in a day at any major Canadian university?
Indeed, if you read a couple of paragraphs into the story, it clearly says, "the company claimed his use of the name was trademark infringement." But the first paragraph refers to copyright law.
Yay for the media!
I wish I hadn't missed the question-gathering story, but I'll post here anyway, in the hopes someone might be able to answer.
Will I ever be able to buy Ubuntu preinstalled on a p5/pSeries machine?
As a Debian user for more than 5 years, I've always wondered why anyone would want to run Red Hat or SUSE on a server, when Debian is so much nicer. It's so much easier to deploy just the components you want, to configure remotely, to keep things up to date...
I can only think that the reasons are the age of stable (bleeding edge is no good for a server, but years-old versions aren't ideal either, and you need recent kernels to keep pace with new hardware) and, more importantly, no obvious commercial choices for distribution and support.
It seems to me that this distribution solves the former problem, and could very solve the latter one, too. Between Canonical and the many organizations assembling in the Ubuntu Marketplace, it seems like someone should be able to offer something more appealing than Red Hat and SUSE.
My impressions have been that IBM is very interested in seeing different sources for Linux, and that having IBM on your side makes a big difference when it comes to selling to "the enterprise."
Has anyone talked to IBM? Are they interested in this software and this model? Or, are two distributions enough for them? Is this just *too* open for them?
I believe that CRTs have had a negative effect on my eyes.
I developed slight nearsightedness at around age 16. It took another two years before I needed correction in order to drive.
About two years after that, I started spending a *lot* of time in front of computers. It was my third year of university, and there were many long nights of coding in the lab. My eyes began getting worse at an alarming rate of -0.5 to -1.0 per year. My optometrist wasn't surprised when I told her how long I spending in front of a CRT.
That frightening slide lasted around four years, through the last two years of school and the first couple of my career. Then, I switched to using a laptop primarily, and it slowed dramatically. It's been over three years since then, and I've only changed my perscription once, by -0.25, I think.
Of course, this was just one person's experience, and there could have been other factors involved. But, obviously, it's convincing enough to keep me away from CRTs.
As people have pointed out. Eclipse is an integrated development environment. Sure, you just want to edit a file, but editors in Eclipse are part of that integrated environment. As a simple example, you can select the name of class and ask to see its subtype hierarchy. For that to work, you need to build a model of a bounded set of classes. Hence, the workspace: a bound on the set of files to consider, and a convenient API for working with them.
Setting up projects in a workspace isn't terribly hard, and projects can refer to any physical location, so you don't have to actually copy or move your files around. But, it does slow you down a little when you want to get started, and that's a shame. Trade-offs are nothing new in the world of software design.
Eventually, the File->Open External File function was added. But, you only get a small amount of the functionality that's available when you do it the "proper" way. Probably some careful refactoring could make editors on external files more, though not fully,functional. But, in my opinion, that would be wasted effort.
The workspace/project model works well and supports the desired functionality. Yes, it imposes a little bit of learning on some people, but if that's such a hardship, why are you programming, anyway?
By the way, this whole topic really has nothing to do with the article, which is about the underlying pure plug-in architecture of Eclipse.
I don't know if you'll find his reassuring, or if you'll think it's propaganda, but this ad started running a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times:
If Canadians ever engaged in a peaceful protest in numbers comparable to an American protest, they'd be arrested for "inciting to riot".
If ever?
Quebec City? UBC? Sure, some people were pepper sprayed, and a few were arrested and released, but that's pretty much how these semi-violent protests go, whereever they are.
You see, Canada is a democracy with no real restraining constititution: the notwithstanding clause makes it possible for the government to pass a law overriding any judgement against it.
For five years. During which time an election will take place, and the government can be turfed. The clause has never even been used by the federal government.
All you need is a majority to enslave the minority, so safest is to "shut up, blend in, and go along".
Right. Ask an African American about enslaving the minority. Or, for that matter, ask a gay American about shutting up, blending in, and going along ("don't ask, don't tell", I believe they call it).
Acutally, only those of us who are ignorant of the consitution do. POGG has nothing to do with the Notwithstanding Clause (in fact, it precedes it by 114 years!) or anything else involving the relationship between government and the people. It only involves the relationship between levels of government: it's the catch-all phrase by which residual powers (i.e. those not explicitly enumerated) are assigned to the federal government.
That's funny, because the Security Certificate is actually a frequent topic of concern on that evil, commie government propaganda machine that is the CBC.
I'm sorry, did you say "big government"? Here on planet Earth, we might use that term to describe a government whose spending plans would add 1.6 TRILLION dollars to its debt over the next ten years...and that's before you count additional military spending or social security reform (which just happen to be its two primary policy concerns).
The US is a great country, but it's currently on a course towards disaster. Unfortunately, too many of its less sophisticated citizens (i.e. hicks) are too distracted by the scary brown "evildoers" to notice how badly Bush is screwing things up.
Just for the sake of accuracy, no, they previously said Linux, not any FOSS software.
One of the Gang of Four authors work on it, forgot which one.
Erich Gamma.