so it's okay for american citizens to distrupt the business of american corporations? the p2p networks are what they are. Nodes are able misbehave. A properly built system would isolate misbehaving nodes. I think the most harmless thing they can do is mess with the p2p architecture by making "bad" nodes. Sharing music is illegal (in the US). By spoofing they are only messing up things for people trying to download songs that they own. Other activities are theoretically unaffected by these spoofs. I think it's fair game for the corporations to try and protect their copyrights using the same tools that people are using to pirate their wares. It's giving them an unfair advantage (the ability to mete out justice without a court) that's truly objectionable here....
remember, until you change the laws, it's still illegal to share music. They should reevaluate their business model, but they haven't. We should respect their copyrights because that is the law, or change the law.
And for those nuts saying that this is civil disobedience, would you be happy to go to jail for this and be made an example of? because that's what civil disobedience is about--letting people see the pointlessness of your incarceration/punishment for that little thing you did...no you'd cry foul play if you went to jail for it so stop trivializing what the people who have truly used civil disobedience to solve real social problems did by misusing the term when you really mean "rampant lawlessness"....If you want, I can turn you in so you can go to prison...then you'd be civily disobedient instead of just stupid....
y'all disgust me. either respect the government or change it. Don't do the stupid whiny thing in the middle.
This isn't true. Self taught people often have large holes in inconvenient areas (degree people's holes are more predictable at least). Granted, the vast majority of self taught people can fill them in a negligible amount of time when they come up, but they've not neccesarily ever seen the rhetorical solutions to problems and knowledge of certain more "academic" concepts that can usually be quick-and-dirtied around is often lacking.
They tend to be very fast, very full of lore, and very good code-writers, but that doesn't guarantee the familiarity of a variety of sorting routines or data structures the way a degree is supposed to. Likely they know a fewand can implement them very well.
Self teaching leads to depth without breadth cause there's noone to guide you to other areas that didn't occur to you, degree programs tend to yield the opposite. Taking someone who was motivated enough to teach themself all they could before college then putting them through a degree program at a distinguished school (cmu,mit,etc.) should yield the best results.
It didn't help that when the tech boom occurred, every little school in the mountains started a computer science program--a bad computer science program.
All degrees are not equal. Get a degree from MIT, CMU, UofR, RIT, Berkley, etc. and it's not the same as the degree from whatever little place just added the program. That's cause these programs actually have entrance requirements. CMU accepts less than 5% of applicants. Granted, they don't look for love of computers--but to get in you have to have done something already in the math/computer area (for me it was 22 credit hours of math at a local, but reputable univiersity, an 800 math sat, a 5 on the APCS-AB exam, and some work experience) Noone just in it for the money at the last minute would be able to distinguish themselves as prepared for the degree program like that.
Yes. The SAT Scaling is really quite inconsistent at the top end. I'm good at math, so chances are I will get zero, one, or two wrong on a given math section regardless of the difficulty of the test. The ones I get wrong will generally not be conceptual errors, but stupid mistakes. Therefore my math score is meaningless if the first few wrongs affect it (why you should be able to get one or two wrong without losing the 800--likely it's not a fluke that you happened to get the rest right). Getting two wrong the first time I took the test got me a 730, a friend who took the test at a later date received a 760 after getting three wrong. (All MC questions with the.25 penalty in both cases). Neither of us is neccesarily better at math--we just both understood all the material and made a few stupid mistakes.
Our scores SHOULD NOT have differentiated by thirty points because the people near the middle of the bell curve found the exam to be harder the second time. I found both tests to be equally difficult (though the second test is a bad example for me since I answered all questions correctly on the math, so I used a freind's score to make my point).
Statistically the second test was HARDER, yet my raw score was better for no apparent reason. More evidence that those mistakes on test #1 were not accurately represented in my score.
I'm not personally affected (I ended up with an 800 on the math anyways) but they should really work harder to scale at the top rather than creating arbitrary differentiations between equal students.
I don't like curves because in order for someone near the top to benefit, it has to be an unusually hard test--the easiness of the test hurts you if you're an outlier on the positive end of the curve, whereas people closer to the center get accurate and fair scaling fairly uniformly, since the top few will get about the same number wrong regardless of the difficulty of the test.
Even at that size, It's annoying to add yet something else to my pockets. Three of my four pockets are currently consumed by a cell phone, wallet, and keys. This needs a better place to go. It's annoying to have technology in my pocket, especially if it is in any way fragile. Furthermore, does this thing generate any heat (which would make pocket use more uncomfortable).
Granted, most women have a bag of some sort with them, but men tend to go without. I'm not for any kind of subcataneous form factor, but I'd tolerate an anklet or something (don't ask me how to get hard drives into an anklet, just a thought). Even better, put it in my watch--I'm more likely to have that than my cell, and it's fairly well accepted to wear one.
Form factor must be considered. A Hard drive for your pocket isn't sexy, a normal enough looking watch that holds 80gigs whenever you're in 802.11/bluetooth range is--noone has to know.
This device will really depend on ubiquitous terminals that can use it...at airports, on traincars, etc. Terminals set up with the bare minimum that let you use your files everywhere.
Lots of reeplies are touting ethernet and wireless. Here's a few issues there--
First of all, ethernet wiring the entire building is expensive. There may already be an extra set of phone wires to each unit (my house happens to have seven pairs back to the nearest telco box, though it's a house) , and ADSL can share with phones. Distance wouldn't be an issue with the dsl hardware in the basement so speeds would be good and use existing wiring. DSL also gives a much better way to charge the users of the service. Disconnecting an ethernet jack could be made easy, sure, but DSL was made for this purpose and again, it uses existing wiring.
Wireless is messy with a lot of people and definitely subject to freeloading in a huge way. Remember the people have to *pay* for the T1 through their usage. 60 people might only work out to $10-20 a month which isn't bad at all, but still it needs to be enforced.
If Methods for reporting bugs were more easily accessible from runtime objects, rather than source packages, I'd do it a lot more.
Even with Gentoo and all the source packages sitting on my computer I rarely feel the need to unpack one just to find out the maintainer's email, though if there were an easy way (help:about is fine, except many people don't take advantage of it for this purpose) and maybe some sort of meta-information for a library. If every library exported a const char* "maintainer" string, then a simple utility could dlopen the library and spit out the data given a library name.
Even a centralized database somewhere that would connect a package name to bug reporting instructios would be better, though that's more steps for the user--bug reporting should be easy, not a chore, if you want it to be done.
Libraries are the toughest because everyone suspects the program they're running, not its silent dependencies.
I for one would be more likely to report and track down bugs if A: I saw them more, and B: It was only ever a few clicks away.
Automated systems make me feel distanced from the bug reports. I'd rather have an email address and a checklist of information than a fill-in form and a "click to send" button so I could at least anticipate interaction with the maintainer.
The DMCA is a law. It is not evil, it is merely a tool by which evil (and good) can be accomplished. There is nothing wrong with using the law to maintain your rights--he wouldn't be infringing on that man's rights since that man is acing outside the realm of his rights.
In this case, the physics prof is acting more in defense of the people who pay for the CDs than himself--he wants them to be aware of a license that gives them rights they wouldn't otherwise have, effectively increasing the value of their purchase.
He should be able to do whatever is neccesary to seek recourse--just because a law has been used for evil doesn't mean that it shouldn't be invoked when it can be used for good.
Who (even in the media field) wants to juggle five pcmcia cards? Obviously there's nothing too standard about them if they're made by panasonic for this and only this. Sure, the laptop reading capability is nice, but you could accomplish that with a larger solid state memory module that acted like a USB2/Firewire hard disk and probably accomplish faster datarates than pcmcia anyways without sacrificing the convenience of connectivity. Breaking up the video over cards sounds like a recipe for disaster since presumably they will have to be organized in order in and out of the camera.
I like the idea of a solid state data module, but five PCMCIA cards sounds like a horrible horrible mistake. Make it bigger and do the USB2/ieee1394 thing and have happier customers.
When you control the object file format and the loader and the executable format, that kind of stuff is trivial, at the expense of storage space...Though probably not even that much space, since only code segments would be doubled, maybe increasing binary size by 50%. Not a huge deal at all with today's 200Gig drives...Even 300% would be quite tolerable, though it would probably effect load times without a good precache or intelligent loader (Again, no problem).
I've considered plans like this, though with varying qualities of hard drives.
What got annoying to me was that the cheap-o massive drive for the mp3s was loud...and then it failed...whereas the nice 80g WD/Maxtor (fluid bearing) discs i otherwise use are still going strong..Of course if you've got a nice disc (since those are relatively cheap) plus a solid state solution, you still win....
of course who cares about bootup time for a workstation so long as it's under a minute or so (mine is about 45 sec right now...)...it's servers where this matters...I'd say people like google could use this technology but i haven't noticed a speed problem yet so obviously they've got it figured out....
Anyone with any intelligence would have picked a better time than now to involve oneself in the stock market. If $800 could do that now, think what it could have done in 1999 or 1928.
If there was enough intelligence to execute such a plan, shouldn't there have been enough intelligence to do a good job of it?
She's a technical writer and on the first page states "I'm not a very good typist"
Maybe it's tome for some serious career reconsideration?
The claims that "root was getting locked out of files" were also somewhat false since AFAIK unless you've got that NSA-secure Linux or something, this is not possible (you can -r the file perms, but this doesn't happen by accident or automatically in my experience).
I don't claim that Linux is right for anyone and everyone--even if it is right for me. Unfortunately, she didn't give it a fair chance. Consider the following points:
1. She was attempting a dual boot--not something that it's usually reccomended for newbies to attempt, especially if you're mixing win/lin partitions on a given drive at any point. To really compare it, installabilitywise, it should be installed much as you'd install windows--on a new computer, or one about to be wiped. The defaults can't deal with dual and single boot since everyone has such different views as to how to do it. To be fair to the "click and go" nature of the installers, this should be attempted on a system that doesn't have a rpeexisting OS.
2) She's using old hardware--If you put Windows XP on old hardware, it falls flat on its face...so why should she expect 1 year old copies of Linux to do much better (in general they do, from my experience, but still, it's not a fair comparison).
3) Some hardware is not supported through no fault of a Linux distribution--modem/video/sound problems are often the result of closed spec. She should compare to how well a windows box works only using drivers with the "microsoft" vendor tag, not how well a computer that has been vendor-drivered up works.
4) The hardware she was using sounds flakey--especially if she had to keep switching things to make it work. It was a poor testbed.
The comparison she made wasn't fair to the Linux distros at all--it was merely anecdotal, and she formatted it like a scientific review. This is poor journalism and from a technical writer I'd expect at least a small bit of sense.
You make the assumption that because all your music has lyrics, everyone's does.
This is an even larger problem for those who listen to non-vocal music--jazz, contemporary, classical, etc.
I *wish* there was a search engine by which I could enter in a snippet of notes (say in a finale-like interface) and search for it in all music, but we're not this advanced yet. Would be great for when you get a song stuck in your head...of course it would be contingent on your ability to read/write music and figure out intervallic relationships, but at least it would be something. Possible some of that "wav-to-midi" stuff could deal with the voice--I've seen some software do not-half-bad at that, definitely good enough to do a search, given a broad database and some good fuzzy logic.
Does it occurr to ANY of you that you are doing something wrong and illegal here--Life isn't always fair...the music industry certainly isn't fair, but that doesn't give you legal right to screw them...
and it's not civil disobedience unless you allow an example to be made of yourself and passively protest by allowing yourself to be arrested to expose the stupidity of your detention.
It's AGAINST THE LAW. period. End of story. If you don't break the law then you don't have trouble. If you don't like the law then change it--with enough momentum and active support, this is possible...if you don't like the government then I'd like to see you try and change it--because the system has survived an awful lot more than you have.
The solution is not to arrogantly steal music (it is stealing, yes--theft is defined by the law. if you don't like this, see above)
Brian
Instead of GNU/Linux...
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 2
Why don't we call it
(drumroll please)
GNU/Linux/X11/Gnome/KDE/Apache/Sendmail/MySql/PH P
to recognise only a few of the other open source projects that helped the Linux kernel get to where it is today (and only a few)
Arguably the GNU tools weere one of the first big steps for Linux...but LAMP and KDE have certainly had just as much to do with it's long-term viability...
It's easy to see that this story is goign to make for more religious debate. Let me make something clear. (And these are my beliefs and not neccesarily yours and thats ok)
The purpose of Christian life is to bring glory to God.
I know no Christians who'd disagree with me on that...even some of the more fringe groups...Without quoting verses on this and that that seem to specifically address this issue, does viewing porn bring glory to God? not if it's done lustily--if it's done out of appreciation for the female body or whatever (that's a fine line, and one i'd rather not approach) then that could be different, but lust=bad (according to the Bible which I believe in and you may not neccesarily and that's ok). Generally a litmus test is whether you're masturbating in conjunction with the porn. If you are, it's probably (though not neccesarily) lust oriented.
This isn't to keep your kids off of porn. This is for people who desire to stop viewing it and need help--This is a filter for your own computer. It's not a bad thing to help people who want to develop self control develop it.
I'm not suggesting that y'all change your lives to think like me. For the record there was no indoctrination in my case--My parents do not believe what I do. I was not brought up in faith, but found it later (how I believe it should be found--one appreciates where they are more when they had to get there on their own) after THINKING OBJECTIVELY...something many Christians regrettably do not know how to do.
Okay. back to the pissing match. I hate it when that happens.
This is one of the first "slashdot response" 404 pages I've seen that actually attempts to turn a profit via click-throughs. I wonder if we can slashdot the click-through site too?
Also, this is some pretty sick stuff--killing small animals and inserting web servers into their corpses? uh...Not exactly the fruits of a healthy mind, imho...
so now we will have open relays taking their sweet time to send the spammer's mail. Of course, it will get there still--will just take longer.
Think about it--a spammer will not take the time to mess with a tarpitted server. they'll find another server (open relay) (or several) to send all the mail to that will cache it and relay it to the tarpitted server, therefore changing nothing for them (except that they have to choose their servers more wisely).
They don't care if it takes 2 minutes or 2 hours to get there...just that it does.
My nokia 3360 lived in a puddle for three days. I dropped it in the driveway and it got plowed into the street and soaked by the side of the road. It was wet and snowy and everything...dried it out for 36 ours or so, worked perfectly...
emusic.com is $9.99 a month for unlimited downloads.
the fine print is that they don't have the greatest selection of the big stuff.
Of course, with listening preferences like mine (jazz) it's wonderful. I don't often need "recording x" so much as i need "a recording of song x" and the standard jazz rep is recorded so much that it's usually trivial to find any song even if it's not performed by a particular artist.
The service is nice and though there was a billing discrepancy with them last month, they cleared it up within three days and credited me a free month for it so they seem to be honorable and responsive enough. It's a good service (with some unknown connection to mp3.com that crops up at times in URLs).
Slashdot Mirror
so it's okay for american citizens to distrupt the business of american corporations? the p2p networks are what they are. Nodes are able misbehave. A properly built system would isolate misbehaving nodes. I think the most harmless thing they can do is mess with the p2p architecture by making "bad" nodes. Sharing music is illegal (in the US). By spoofing they are only messing up things for people trying to download songs that they own. Other activities are theoretically unaffected by these spoofs. I think it's fair game for the corporations to try and protect their copyrights using the same tools that people are using to pirate their wares. It's giving them an unfair advantage (the ability to mete out justice without a court) that's truly objectionable here....
remember, until you change the laws, it's still illegal to share music. They should reevaluate their business model, but they haven't. We should respect their copyrights because that is the law, or change the law.
And for those nuts saying that this is civil disobedience, would you be happy to go to jail for this and be made an example of? because that's what civil disobedience is about--letting people see the pointlessness of your incarceration/punishment for that little thing you did...no you'd cry foul play if you went to jail for it so stop trivializing what the people who have truly used civil disobedience to solve real social problems did by misusing the term when you really mean "rampant lawlessness"....If you want, I can turn you in so you can go to prison...then you'd be civily disobedient instead of just stupid....
y'all disgust me. either respect the government or change it. Don't do the stupid whiny thing in the middle.
Brian
This isn't true. Self taught people often have large holes in inconvenient areas (degree people's holes are more predictable at least). Granted, the vast majority of self taught people can fill them in a negligible amount of time when they come up, but they've not neccesarily ever seen the rhetorical solutions to problems and knowledge of certain more "academic" concepts that can usually be quick-and-dirtied around is often lacking.
They tend to be very fast, very full of lore, and very good code-writers, but that doesn't guarantee the familiarity of a variety of sorting routines or data structures the way a degree is supposed to. Likely they know a fewand can implement them very well.
Self teaching leads to depth without breadth cause there's noone to guide you to other areas that didn't occur to you, degree programs tend to yield the opposite. Taking someone who was motivated enough to teach themself all they could before college then putting them through a degree program at a distinguished school (cmu,mit,etc.) should yield the best results.
Brian
It didn't help that when the tech boom occurred, every little school in the mountains started a computer science program--a bad computer science program.
All degrees are not equal. Get a degree from MIT, CMU, UofR, RIT, Berkley, etc. and it's not the same as the degree from whatever little place just added the program. That's cause these programs actually have entrance requirements. CMU accepts less than 5% of applicants. Granted, they don't look for love of computers--but to get in you have to have done something already in the math/computer area (for me it was 22 credit hours of math at a local, but reputable univiersity, an 800 math sat, a 5 on the APCS-AB exam, and some work experience) Noone just in it for the money at the last minute would be able to distinguish themselves as prepared for the degree program like that.
Brian
Yes. The SAT Scaling is really quite inconsistent at the top end. I'm good at math, so chances are I will get zero, one, or two wrong on a given math section regardless of the difficulty of the test. The ones I get wrong will generally not be conceptual errors, but stupid mistakes. Therefore my math score is meaningless if the first few wrongs affect it (why you should be able to get one or two wrong without losing the 800--likely it's not a fluke that you happened to get the rest right). Getting two wrong the first time I took the test got me a 730, a friend who took the test at a later date received a 760 after getting three wrong. (All MC questions with the .25 penalty in both cases). Neither of us is neccesarily better at math--we just both understood all the material and made a few stupid mistakes.
Our scores SHOULD NOT have differentiated by thirty points because the people near the middle of the bell curve found the exam to be harder the second time. I found both tests to be equally difficult (though the second test is a bad example for me since I answered all questions correctly on the math, so I used a freind's score to make my point).
Statistically the second test was HARDER, yet my raw score was better for no apparent reason. More evidence that those mistakes on test #1 were not accurately represented in my score.
I'm not personally affected (I ended up with an 800 on the math anyways) but they should really work harder to scale at the top rather than creating arbitrary differentiations between equal students.
I don't like curves because in order for someone near the top to benefit, it has to be an unusually hard test--the easiness of the test hurts you if you're an outlier on the positive end of the curve, whereas people closer to the center get accurate and fair scaling fairly uniformly, since the top few will get about the same number wrong regardless of the difficulty of the test.
Brian
Even at that size, It's annoying to add yet something else to my pockets. Three of my four pockets are currently consumed by a cell phone, wallet, and keys. This needs a better place to go. It's annoying to have technology in my pocket, especially if it is in any way fragile. Furthermore, does this thing generate any heat (which would make pocket use more uncomfortable).
Granted, most women have a bag of some sort with them, but men tend to go without. I'm not for any kind of subcataneous form factor, but I'd tolerate an anklet or something (don't ask me how to get hard drives into an anklet, just a thought). Even better, put it in my watch--I'm more likely to have that than my cell, and it's fairly well accepted to wear one.
Form factor must be considered. A Hard drive for your pocket isn't sexy, a normal enough looking watch that holds 80gigs whenever you're in 802.11/bluetooth range is--noone has to know.
Brian
This device will really depend on ubiquitous terminals that can use it...at airports, on traincars, etc. Terminals set up with the bare minimum that let you use your files everywhere.
Brian
Lots of reeplies are touting ethernet and wireless. Here's a few issues there--
First of all, ethernet wiring the entire building is expensive. There may already be an extra set of phone wires to each unit (my house happens to have seven pairs back to the nearest telco box, though it's a house) , and ADSL can share with phones. Distance wouldn't be an issue with the dsl hardware in the basement so speeds would be good and use existing wiring. DSL also gives a much better way to charge the users of the service. Disconnecting an ethernet jack could be made easy, sure, but DSL was made for this purpose and again, it uses existing wiring.
Wireless is messy with a lot of people and definitely subject to freeloading in a huge way. Remember the people have to *pay* for the T1 through their usage. 60 people might only work out to $10-20 a month which isn't bad at all, but still it needs to be enforced.
DSL could be the right choice here...
Brian
If Methods for reporting bugs were more easily accessible from runtime objects, rather than source packages, I'd do it a lot more.
Even with Gentoo and all the source packages sitting on my computer I rarely feel the need to unpack one just to find out the maintainer's email, though if there were an easy way (help:about is fine, except many people don't take advantage of it for this purpose) and maybe some sort of meta-information for a library. If every library exported a const char* "maintainer" string, then a simple utility could dlopen the library and spit out the data given a library name.
Even a centralized database somewhere that would connect a package name to bug reporting instructios would be better, though that's more steps for the user--bug reporting should be easy, not a chore, if you want it to be done.
Libraries are the toughest because everyone suspects the program they're running, not its silent dependencies.
I for one would be more likely to report and track down bugs if A: I saw them more, and B: It was only ever a few clicks away.
Automated systems make me feel distanced from the bug reports. I'd rather have an email address and a checklist of information than a fill-in form and a "click to send" button so I could at least anticipate interaction with the maintainer.
Brian
The DMCA is a law. It is not evil, it is merely a tool by which evil (and good) can be accomplished. There is nothing wrong with using the law to maintain your rights--he wouldn't be infringing on that man's rights since that man is acing outside the realm of his rights.
In this case, the physics prof is acting more in defense of the people who pay for the CDs than himself--he wants them to be aware of a license that gives them rights they wouldn't otherwise have, effectively increasing the value of their purchase.
He should be able to do whatever is neccesary to seek recourse--just because a law has been used for evil doesn't mean that it shouldn't be invoked when it can be used for good.
Brian
Who (even in the media field) wants to juggle five pcmcia cards? Obviously there's nothing too standard about them if they're made by panasonic for this and only this. Sure, the laptop reading capability is nice, but you could accomplish that with a larger solid state memory module that acted like a USB2/Firewire hard disk and probably accomplish faster datarates than pcmcia anyways without sacrificing the convenience of connectivity. Breaking up the video over cards sounds like a recipe for disaster since presumably they will have to be organized in order in and out of the camera.
I like the idea of a solid state data module, but five PCMCIA cards sounds like a horrible horrible mistake. Make it bigger and do the USB2/ieee1394 thing and have happier customers.
Brian
Short answer yes...
When you control the object file format and the loader and the executable format, that kind of stuff is trivial, at the expense of storage space...Though probably not even that much space, since only code segments would be doubled, maybe increasing binary size by 50%. Not a huge deal at all with today's 200Gig drives...Even 300% would be quite tolerable, though it would probably effect load times without a good precache or intelligent loader (Again, no problem).
Brian
I've considered plans like this, though with varying qualities of hard drives.
What got annoying to me was that the cheap-o massive drive for the mp3s was loud...and then it failed...whereas the nice 80g WD/Maxtor (fluid bearing) discs i otherwise use are still going strong..Of course if you've got a nice disc (since those are relatively cheap) plus a solid state solution, you still win....
of course who cares about bootup time for a workstation so long as it's under a minute or so (mine is about 45 sec right now...)...it's servers where this matters...I'd say people like google could use this technology but i haven't noticed a speed problem yet so obviously they've got it figured out....
Brian
Anyone with any intelligence would have picked a better time than now to involve oneself in the stock market. If $800 could do that now, think what it could have done in 1999 or 1928.
If there was enough intelligence to execute such a plan, shouldn't there have been enough intelligence to do a good job of it?
oh yeah..and that whole wwn thing...
Brian
She's a technical writer and on the first page states "I'm not a very good typist"
Maybe it's tome for some serious career reconsideration?
The claims that "root was getting locked out of files" were also somewhat false since AFAIK unless you've got that NSA-secure Linux or something, this is not possible (you can -r the file perms, but this doesn't happen by accident or automatically in my experience).
I don't claim that Linux is right for anyone and everyone--even if it is right for me. Unfortunately, she didn't give it a fair chance. Consider the following points:
1. She was attempting a dual boot--not something that it's usually reccomended for newbies to attempt, especially if you're mixing win/lin partitions on a given drive at any point. To really compare it, installabilitywise, it should be installed much as you'd install windows--on a new computer, or one about to be wiped. The defaults can't deal with dual and single boot since everyone has such different views as to how to do it. To be fair to the "click and go" nature of the installers, this should be attempted on a system that doesn't have a rpeexisting OS.
2) She's using old hardware--If you put Windows XP on old hardware, it falls flat on its face...so why should she expect 1 year old copies of Linux to do much better (in general they do, from my experience, but still, it's not a fair comparison).
3) Some hardware is not supported through no fault of a Linux distribution--modem/video/sound problems are often the result of closed spec. She should compare to how well a windows box works only using drivers with the "microsoft" vendor tag, not how well a computer that has been vendor-drivered up works.
4) The hardware she was using sounds flakey--especially if she had to keep switching things to make it work. It was a poor testbed.
The comparison she made wasn't fair to the Linux distros at all--it was merely anecdotal, and she formatted it like a scientific review. This is poor journalism and from a technical writer I'd expect at least a small bit of sense.
Brian
Lets give everyone in the world one more reason to spent hour-long periods of time on the crapper.
Next thing you know, cube farms will be installing docking bays and telephones in the stalls so the cows can keep on workin.
Brian
You make the assumption that because all your music has lyrics, everyone's does.
This is an even larger problem for those who listen to non-vocal music--jazz, contemporary, classical, etc.
I *wish* there was a search engine by which I could enter in a snippet of notes (say in a finale-like interface) and search for it in all music, but we're not this advanced yet. Would be great for when you get a song stuck in your head...of course it would be contingent on your ability to read/write music and figure out intervallic relationships, but at least it would be something. Possible some of that "wav-to-midi" stuff could deal with the voice--I've seen some software do not-half-bad at that, definitely good enough to do a search, given a broad database and some good fuzzy logic.
Brian
It's foolish to bring forth statistics without citations.
If you can give me some, I'll be more likely to take your spouting of numbers seriously.
Brian
Does it occurr to ANY of you that you are doing something wrong and illegal here--Life isn't always fair...the music industry certainly isn't fair, but that doesn't give you legal right to screw them...
and it's not civil disobedience unless you allow an example to be made of yourself and passively protest by allowing yourself to be arrested to expose the stupidity of your detention.
It's AGAINST THE LAW. period. End of story. If you don't break the law then you don't have trouble. If you don't like the law then change it--with enough momentum and active support, this is possible...if you don't like the government then I'd like to see you try and change it--because the system has survived an awful lot more than you have.
The solution is not to arrogantly steal music (it is stealing, yes--theft is defined by the law. if you don't like this, see above)
Brian
Why don't we call it
H P
(drumroll please)
GNU/Linux/X11/Gnome/KDE/Apache/Sendmail/MySql/P
to recognise only a few of the other open source projects that helped the Linux kernel get to where it is today (and only a few)
Arguably the GNU tools weere one of the first big steps for Linux...but LAMP and KDE have certainly had just as much to do with it's long-term viability...
Brian
It's easy to see that this story is goign to make for more religious debate. Let me make something clear. (And these are my beliefs and not neccesarily yours and thats ok)
The purpose of Christian life is to bring glory to God.
I know no Christians who'd disagree with me on that...even some of the more fringe groups...Without quoting verses on this and that that seem to specifically address this issue, does viewing porn bring glory to God? not if it's done lustily--if it's done out of appreciation for the female body or whatever (that's a fine line, and one i'd rather not approach) then that could be different, but lust=bad (according to the Bible which I believe in and you may not neccesarily and that's ok). Generally a litmus test is whether you're masturbating in conjunction with the porn. If you are, it's probably (though not neccesarily) lust oriented.
This isn't to keep your kids off of porn. This is for people who desire to stop viewing it and need help--This is a filter for your own computer. It's not a bad thing to help people who want to develop self control develop it.
I'm not suggesting that y'all change your lives to think like me. For the record there was no indoctrination in my case--My parents do not believe what I do. I was not brought up in faith, but found it later (how I believe it should be found--one appreciates where they are more when they had to get there on their own) after THINKING OBJECTIVELY...something many Christians regrettably do not know how to do.
Okay. back to the pissing match. I hate it when that happens.
Brian
This is one of the first "slashdot response" 404 pages I've seen that actually attempts to turn a profit via click-throughs. I wonder if we can slashdot the click-through site too?
Also, this is some pretty sick stuff--killing small animals and inserting web servers into their corpses? uh...Not exactly the fruits of a healthy mind, imho...
Brian
so now we will have open relays taking their sweet time to send the spammer's mail. Of course, it will get there still--will just take longer.
Think about it--a spammer will not take the time to mess with a tarpitted server. they'll find another server (open relay) (or several) to send all the mail to that will cache it and relay it to the tarpitted server, therefore changing nothing for them (except that they have to choose their servers more wisely).
They don't care if it takes 2 minutes or 2 hours to get there...just that it does.
Brian
My nokia 3360 lived in a puddle for three days. I dropped it in the driveway and it got plowed into the street and soaked by the side of the road. It was wet and snowy and everything...dried it out for 36 ours or so, worked perfectly...
Brian
emusic.com is $9.99 a month for unlimited downloads.
the fine print is that they don't have the greatest selection of the big stuff.
Of course, with listening preferences like mine (jazz) it's wonderful. I don't often need "recording x" so much as i need "a recording of song x" and the standard jazz rep is recorded so much that it's usually trivial to find any song even if it's not performed by a particular artist.
The service is nice and though there was a billing discrepancy with them last month, they cleared it up within three days and credited me a free month for it so they seem to be honorable and responsive enough. It's a good service (with some unknown connection to mp3.com that crops up at times in URLs).
Brian
So _that's_ why there's all this controversy over partial-birth abortion...
what else can you do when the baby disagrees?