In the end I find myself more impressed with GNU/Linux.
This baffles me. Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about Linux. I don't know what "GNU/Linux" is. Is it something different?
a good example of the GNOME desktop integration
But the pieces only work with each other, not with other applications. There's no interoperability between, say, the piece of Evolution that stores your address book and your chat program.
I like Psi which is a great Jabber client
That's fine and all, but it's kind of like being the only person in town with a Home telephone when everybody else has switched to Bell. There's nobody to talk to.
AmaroK kicks iTunes' ass in my not so humble opinion
Okay, well, you've obviously got some criteria which would seem strange and silly to me. Because the Web site is so incredibly disorganized I can't find the list of features; the only thing I can find quickly is a set of screen shots... which are all incredibly hard to look at. So... you know. To each his own, I guess, but... wow. Horrible.
I don't think so much of the OS X desktop and feel your 1979 comment is a flamebait.
What does "flamebait" mean? Let me clarify so you don't misunderstand me: Looking at Linux, you'd think that it was created in 1979. It's based on very, VERY old ideas. Programs have bad user interfaces and don't work together. Major pieces of the puzzle are simply missing: There's no way to assemble movies into a DVD for example. It's like Linux was created back before we had DVDs, and never caught up. For that matter, it's like it was created back before we had human user interfaces, and never caught up.
That's what I meant: It looks like 1979. It's bad. Like, bad all by itself. It can still be less bad than other things, and I'm sure there are computer operating systems out there that are worse. But when you put it side-by-side with a Mac, well, it's just kind of embarrassing, isn't it? It's just kinda sad, I think. It wouldn't be as disappointing if Linux were some dusty relic that nobody's touched for twenty years, but it looks an awful lot like it's still in active development. Which means there are people out there who are working hard, every day, to make Linux bad. And that makes me depressed, to see all that labor just wasted on trash.
I'm having a very hard time taking your list seriously. It starts with this:
No SSH server.
Dude, what the hell do you think that "remote login" checkbox is in the Sharing preferences pane? That turns on ssh.
But really, the bottom line here is this one:
Image and font rendering isn't as good as pango/xorg.
That's just a big old heaping pile of crap. There is no better on-screen graphics system than Quartz 2D. There just isn't. Everything is antialiased, everything is color-calibrated... hell, the fonts are even optically kerned in real time! You're just out of your mind.
I don't know where you got "proprietary wireless driver." The AirPort Extreme card is a commercial-off-the-shelf miniPCI 802.11g card with an Apple logo on it.
Is it such an absurd concept for you that some people might actually prefer GNU/Linux to OS X for whatever reason?
Yes.
What's so special about OS X?
Um, slux? Have you ever used it? You can take a Mac out of the box, plug it in, and be on the Internet doing whatever you want to do in about five minutes. You don't have to dick around with settings, or fiddle with security stuff. It comes with great personal productivity software: Mail, Address Book, iCal, Keychain Access (for storing passwords and sensitive information), TextEdit (for word processing), Preview (for reading electronic documents), iChat (for audio, video and text chat). Some applications that are kinda sorta similar to those are available for Linux, but they've got three huge problems: First, they're laughably primitive by comparison. Second, they don't work together at all. Third, if they're bundled with the OS, they're bundled with a gazillion other programs of dubious value, making them nearly impossible to find.
Want examples of how these programs work together? The most obvious one is Address Book and Mail. They're two separate programs, as they should be. But all your contacts in Address Book show up in mail through address auto-completion. And you can add people to Address Book right from Mail. How about Mail and iChat? If you receive an e-mail from somebody on your iChat list, and that person is available to chat, a little light appears by the mail message. You can click the message, and up pops a video chat window with that person. Those are just two examples of how these programs all work together. It feels like you're using one big program with a lot of windows, even though you're not tied into using all of the pieces together.
And that's just the stuff that's included with the base OS. Every new Mac (as far as I know) comes with iLife, which gives you iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD, three programs that don't have even vague approximations on Linux.
Then, of course, there's iTunes. I can't imagine living without iTunes, frankly.
Given that Mac OS X does so much, it is, yes, a pretty absurd concept for me that people might want to throw all that functionality away and use an operating system that makes you feel like it's 1979 all over again.
64 bit support on the application level(photoshop, etc.) for Panther has no performance benefit because the operating system really just breaks the instructions in half.
Um. You really don't understand how 64-bit computing works, do you? When a program is compiled to a 64-bit ABI, the instructions are not, themselves, 64-bit words. Rather, the program just uses 64-bit pointers, allowing it to address more than 2 GB of virtual memory.
Besides, you can't even run Photoshop on Linux, so I don't understand how putting Linux on your 64-bit Mac could possibly improve your life.
I think everyone obsessing over that is being a bit silly, but the left rather enjoys the right being hypocrits.
Confused again. It was leftists who dug up and promoted the links to smut. How is it that the right is guilty of "hypocritisy?" Especially considering this story has not made the rounds on right-wing blogs, except in the form of commentary observing that while right-wingers take down Eason Jordan purely by reporting his story and doing top-shelf journalism (see Malkin, Michelle), left-wingers felt it necessary to go dumpster-diving to find trash to throw at Jeff Gannon. Is that the "hypocritisy" you were referring to?
the business, Bedrock Corp of Wilmington, that owns the domains was located at his home address.
You've been the victim of some misinformation, no doubt spread by a leftist who thought the smut angle was a big deal. And here you are spreading that misinformation, demonstrating that you think the smut angle is a big deal. And yet you claim that you think it isn't. Which is it?
through the shell domain of TalonNews, which is merely a place for the GOPUSA to get stories
Talon News is obviously a news service. The fact that you don't like it doesn't mean you get to declare that it's not a news service. If it were up to me, al-Jazeera would be regarded as the propaganda arm of global Islamofascism and disbanded. But I don't get to make that call. Because we live in a plural society, and even those with whom we disagree get to speak.
Gannon is not a journalist
Reports the news = journalist. Employed by a news service + reports the news = professional journalist.
Gannon is working for a PR firm employed by Republicans.
So only Democrats get to report the news? Do I have that right? Only vocal opponents of the administration in power get to write the news of the day?
I'm pretty sure if you just take a minute you'll realize how insane you're being.
As for 'gay baiting' and whatnot, I really don't have time to look up and read all his gibberish.
Then howzabout you quit slandering the man, huh? If you don't know what you're talking about, please stop talking about it.
But he did defend Santorum's rather offensive comment that you copied.
There was nothing even remotely offensive about Santorum's comment. Hell, I'll defend Santorum's comment. Do you think that that disqualifies me from reporting the news?
You'd have to exclude some American societies for that to work. (e.g, Boston marriage)
Um, no. The acts of judges who legislate from the bench are the problem. See why it's so important for people like Santorum to give voice to the conservative point of view? Because people like yourself don't even understand it. How can you disagree with something when you don't even understand it?
He's defining marriage as a (presumably sexual) 'relationship not between homosexuals'
No, he's not defining marriage at all. He's merely saying that for thousands of years, marriage has had a definition, and that definition has been between a man and a woman. See what I mean? How can you disagree when you don't even understand?
quite a few societies have never distinguished between a relationship with a man and a woman and two women
That's a false statement. There are many cultures in which polygamy (or even polyamory) is accepted, but in those cultures the marriage is between one man and one woman. The fact that the man in question gets to marry another woman at the same time doesn't mean the union is among three people. The union is between two people, and two of those unions exist and overlap at the same time.
See why Gannon's work was important, even if you don't agree with him? Because there are people like you out there who are so confused about the subject that they don't
Siber Systems' Pass2Go is a USB key with integrated RoboForm form-filler software.
No. Bullshit third-party hacks are not the answer. The solution needs to be integrated at the OS level, into the Mac OS X keychain for example.
In order to bring Windows into the conversation, of course, we first have to drag it into the 21st century by equipping it with something comparable to the keychain.
I'm a bit puzzled by your increasingly combative tone.
Then let me explain: You're talking out your ass. By your own admission, you've never used iTunes. By your own admission, you have neither read nor understood the law you're trying to invoke. You don't know what you're talking about. I have very little patience for people who spout nonsense because they are incapable of recognizing the limits of their own knowledge.
I'm not complaining about the fact that AAC is a lossy format
I really don't care what your specific gripe is; it boils down to, "The quality isn't high enough for me." That's entirely your personal decision, but it's not unique to iTunes. You can say the same thing about any other form of recorded music, because they're all "lossy" to one extent or another. You're trying to say "this is a problem with iTunes" when the truth is that it's just a simple matter of personal preference.
my point is that you have to damage the product in order make full use of it
Sigh. That's just silly. Because you've never bought a song from iTunes, you've never burned one to CD. You don't know that when you do so, you end up with an uncompressed, unencrypted CD. You also don't know that re-encoding that CD in MP3 format produces no audible differences, as long as you use enough bits to hold all the details that the more efficient AAC format was able to record. Say, 256 kilobits per second to encode what started out as a 128-kilobit-per-second AAC file. That's because the MP3 format is demonstrably inferior to the AAC format; it's got nothing to do with iTunes, and it completely fallacious to refer to the process as "damaging the product." That's just crap, and I think you know it.
I spoke about the general deficiencies of services using DRM.
No, you didn't. You spoke specifically about iTunes. Would you like to retract your statements about iTunes? Would you like to retract what you said about iTunes and re-frame your accusations in general terms so that they might or might not be applicable to iTunes?
neither you nor other respondants really took issue with my characterization of the facts of the matter
I think maybe you need to read my comment again. I told you specifically that you were mistaken. You said that it's difficult to copy music from one computer to another; I corrected you, then you backtracked and claimed you were basically just repeating a rumor you'd picked up somewhere. You said that FairPlay "prevents you from exercising some of your legally protected rights." I corrected you. You said that the process of burning to a CD would be a violation of the law. Again, I corrected you. Please read more closely next time.
I find this to be a fundemental violation of the idea of personal privacy
Seems pretty clear that you have no understand of what "privacy" means. You're just stringing words together. There are no privacy implications here. You might as well claim that there's a sixth-amendment issue, or that FairPlay infringes on your right to keep and bear arms. It's just nonsense, just utter nonsense. I think you'd do well to back off the "privacy" jibber jabber and get back on firmer rhetorical ground.
Give them an inch and they'll take a mile, so to speak.
Yes, we've all heard the "slippery slope" argument before, and we all know that it's a logical fallacy. Step back.
I'll refer you to what the lawyers at the EFF said about it
Please don't. Partisan lobbying groups are not a good source of information on questions like these. They're more interested in pushing an agenda than they are in dealing with what's written in the law.
One need only look at the Sklyarov, DeCSS, or similar cases
Elcomsoft was acquitted specifically on 1201(c)(1). Want to try again?
not to mention the situation between Apple and Real I linked to before
I don't know if you've noticed or anything, but we've been using keys to unlock the doors to our buildings and to limit access to our cars for a long time now. It seems to work okay.
USB is ubiquitous now, and the technology to build USB keys has reached the commodity point. USB flash drives of a gigabyte or more are less than $200, and a security key wouldn't need to be anywhere near that big. One with just a few kilobytes of memory could contain an encrypted private key that's unlocked with a password.
This idea strikes me as being so obvious that I can't imagine I'm the only one to think of it. Where's the fatal flaw that I'm not seeing?
I guess you haven't been watching "Battlestar Galactica." I find it hard to imagine anybody who's seen that show saying, "I can't possibly see what would be a better use of a timeslot."
Given that conservatives were able to get to the bottom of stories inside CBS News, the University of Colorado and CNN without going dumpster-diving and smearing a man's name with allegations of gay prostitution, I'd say it's not even remotely arguable. Wouldn't you?
If you trace the history of this investigation (especially the diaries of SusanG, who originated the project), you'll see that those who were involved in the actual research work were motivated because they saw what appeared to be a link between Gannon/Guckert and the 'outing' of Valerie Plame.
That's simply untrue. They were motivated by politics and nothing else. This is obvious to anybody who isn't blinded by partisanship.
Blowing a CIA agent's cover is a felony offense, and bears investigating.
Then where's the Robert Novak witch-hunt? It was Novak who blew her cover. His column ran two days before Gannon published his first article.
They were, in effect, trying to rise above the partisan brawl with something incontrovertible.
I don't know which is more troubling. The idea that you would say such an obviously untrue thing, or the idea that you might believe it.
Kos himself seems to think that it's fair game questioning the guy's sexual preference, something which the research team (and I) reject out of hand.
Then why did they go dumpster-diving? You're just not speaking the truth here.
But what I find truly fascinating about all this is that everybody on the left is eager to humiliate Gannon out of his job, but that nobody on the left is interested in investigating Joe Wilson's perfidy. You know, the real story here? You may have heard of it? The one where a special envoy lied about his findings in Niger?
This is just a partisan conspiracy theory designed to undermine the administration's second term legislative agenda, a la Whitewater. It's bullshit. It's nonsense. And by continuing to defend it in the strongest terms, you're just making an ass of yourself.
Your comment is filled with misinformation. I'm happy to give you the benefit of the doubt and conclude that you're just parroting what you've heard from others. Let me take this opportunity to correct you on some pretty important matters of fact.
A non-journalist was paid, yes, paid, to stand bald-face in the press room
That allegation is not supported by the facts. Accusations that Gannon was, in the parlance of the day, "a plant" are complete speculation at this point, unsupported by any evidence at all.
And calling him a "non-journalist" is disingenuous. He was employed by a news service. That makes him a journalist. You can argue that he wasn't a trained journalist or that he wasn't a good journalist, but you can't dispute that he was, in fact, a journalist.
once again, the administation was lying to us
Complete fantasy.
He was running gay domains
Three filthy domain names were registered in the name of Talon's parent company. These names were never actually associated with any Web content. They were just registered names. Which doesn't excuse the fact that they were filthy, but it means that you're not telling the truth when you say that he was running them. It wasn't him, and they weren't being run at all.
he releases reworded GOP press releases
If that were a crime, half of the journalists in this country would have to plead guilty. The issue here isn't that he wrote stories based on press releases. The issue is that he wrote stories based on press releases from people you don't like.
and has indulged in gay baiting
That's a false accusation.
He himself appears shirtless on some of these domains.
There is a picture of him that was associated with an AOL profile. It shows a bald guy with his shirt off. The picture certainly isn't flattering, but it's not sexual either. And it was never associated with any of the domain names his parent company's parent company owned, because none of those names were ever associated with any content at all.
This, by itself, would be enough to make the rounds on the blogs, as yet another example of right-wing hypocritisy
The fact that a reporter used an unflattering picture of himself in his AOL profile is "hypocritisy?" Have you seen Molly Ivins?
Anyone trying to pretend the important story is the gay story is almost certainly a) a 12 year old, or b) someone trying to divert attention
I'm confused. Why did you dedicate over 100 words to what you call "the gay story," saying yourself, "This, by itself, would be enough to make the rounds," if it's not important to you? I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I think you're sending a mixed message here.
the administation, yet again, is lying to people
The fact that you have twice accused the administration of lying reveals your partisanship. The only people who use that kind of language are the blind Bush haters. Why won't you at least be honest and admit that you're interested in this story because you hope it will make the White House look bad? Jeff Gannon was honest enough to openly admit that he was supportive of the administration. Why can't you be honest enough to admit that you're an opponent of the administration?
by representing a paid shill as an actual journalist
Again: Accusations of his being "a paid shill" are just plain false. If you want to make accusations like that, you're going to have to do more than some sleazy dumpster diving. You're going to have to do some actual investigative reporting to uncover some kind of connection. At this time, no such connection exists, so you're just blowing hot air.
The only reason the gay story is important because it shows this guy wasn't just a shill, he was a shill who probably didn't believe in the thing he was shilling.
Actually not quite, because of course you're buying digital music that has been encoded in a lossy format
Blah blah blah. CDs are "lossy" too. But they're good enough. If you don't consider [music storage format X] to be good enough, don't buy it.
I haven't tried iTMS
Strangely, this seems not to have stopped you from running off at the mouth about something you don't actually have any knowledge of. Maybe you should spend a minute thinking about that.
it is in that sense that I see it as an invasion of privacy
I'm going to ask you again: How do you figure privacy has anything to do with it?
You mean H.R.2281 -- Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the one that's referred to as the DMCA on copyright.gov?
That piece of legislation ceased to exist on 10/28/98 when it was signed into law. Remember "how a bill becomes a law?" When a bill is signed by the President, new provisions are created in the United States Code, or existing provisions are changed. The bill itself ceases to exist. So please stop talking about the DMCA, a legal document that hasn't existed for more than six years.
You cited 1201(a)(1)(A). You should have kept reading. Because 1201(c)(1) says, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title." In other words, the fair-use defense still stands.
For God's sake, educate yourself before it's too late. This is the second time in just a few hours that you've spewed misinformation on subjects which you freely admit you know nothing about. Please stop doing that.
...And a person with a 2GHz processor will get better performance than a 1GHz processor (with the the same processor core, of course), so why not charge based on clock rate?
I thought they did. Isn't one of the options to buy a license based on how many units of computing power you have in your server, where "how many" is defined as CPUs times speed times an architecture-dependent fudge-factor?
It may be quite permissive, but it still prevents you from exercising some of your legally protected rights.
No, it does not, because as soon as you press the "burn CD" button, you've got the exact same thing you would have had if you'd bought the CD in the store.
I have known people who had difficulty moving music they bought on their work computer to a their home computer where they wanted to listen to it
That's vague, and sounds bogus to me. All you have to do is copy the files. When you play a protected song the first time, you're asked for your password. Once you enter that password, all your protected music will pay on that computer. You can do that on (I think it is) up to five computers at once. If you authorize five computers and then want to authorize a sixth, all you have to do is select the "de-authorize" menu item on one of the five authorized computers. Easy as pie.
And there are also obsticales if you want to switch to a FOSS OS and still use the music you payed for legally.
I don't know what "FOSS OS" is, but I'm assuming you mean some operating system other than Windows or Mac OS X. Two words: "burn CD."
you're saying that I can get proper use out of the product I payed for if I'm willing to illegally break into it, because I believe this would violate the DMCA.
Well, no, it wouldn't violate the law (there is no DMCA; it's Title 17), but don't sweat that. It seems like nobody's actually read the law they're so afraid of. But more importantly, you don't need to "break into" anything. All you need to do is hit "burn CD."
Look, from what I've heard, iTMS has one of the best DRM systems, but I still find the whole thing to be an unethical invasion of privacy.
I suspect that you might just be throwing words out there now. What does iTunes have to do with privacy?
His legal name is Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Zuniga is his last name. He writes under the pen name of Markos Moulitsas. Oh, but writing under a pen name is okay as long as it's somebody you agree with, right?
he had a disclaimer on his website that he was on Dean's payroll
Not until long after the convention, which he covered as a journalist.
Kos was supposedly something of an outsider in the Dean camp.
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Howard Dean's presidential candidacy has been irrelevant for a long time. Why do you even feel the need to mention this?
Why do I... what? You can't be serious. I feel the need to mention it because this is precisely what lefty bloggers have accused Jeff Gannon of: paid advocacy journalism. Markos Zuniga took checks from the Dean campaign at the same time as he was covering the Democratic National Convention. This isn't even in dispute. It's a plain, simple fact. And yet when Markos Zuniga levels unfounded, false accusations at Jeff Gannon for doing the same thing, nobody even stops to notice the irony.
Yes, just like other reporters do, only bloggers aren't limited to publishing one edition per day or one column per week or whatever.
blur the lines between drafts and releases for early access
Um, no. Bloggers do not actually do that. Bloggers don't publish drafts. Drafts, by definition, are not visible to readers.
share across competing organizations
I don't think that's really true, because bloggers don't really compete with anybody. There's no profit motive attached to blogging --unless you're Andrew Sullivan --so there's no competition involved. It works more like a rumor mill or office grapevine than it does like a marketplace.
That's a lot like open source, where the source is the text of the stories, and the repository is the blogs themselves.
No, it's not like that at all. In particular, bloggers are aggressively protective of their property rights. A key element of the "open source" model is the abolition or abdication of property rights. Bloggers jealously guard their property rights, responding immediately and unpleasantly if somebody steals their content.
Also absent from the blogosphere is the "open source" movement's actively hostile attitude toward commercialization. The vast majority of bloggers are also professional writers. They use their blogs to hone their skills and to generate buzz about themselves in order to drum up business. This is the exact opposite of "open source's" anti-capitalist ethic.
The "open source" metaphor just doesn't work here, I'm afraid.
I guess it's impressive... if you discount the fact that that kind of collaboration goes on among bloggers every day. It happened on Eason Jordan, it happened on Ward Churchill, it happened on Rathergate, and it's happened before that. And it will go on happening, because it's a natural process.
Calling it "open source" anything is just stupid though. That's just co-opting a buzz word that some people believe carries some degree of cache. It doesn't really mean anything, it doesn't really describe anything.
Do you think Slashdotters should not be allowed to criticize the government or Gannon?
I believe that the solution to bad speech is more speech, not less. If liberal bloggers didn't like what Gannon was saying, why didn't they fight it with speech of their own? Why did they find it necessary to dig up personally humiliating connections between Gannon's parent company's parent company and some filthy Internet domain names? The answer, of course, as made crystal clear by Markos Zuniga to Howard Kurtz, is that that's what it took to drum up the public's interest in the story. They used the sex angle deliberately to make it impossible for Gannon to continue to do his job.
I believe that the way to deal with somebody you disagree with is to share your own opinion and let the public decide, not to silence the other guy.
But hey, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the "freedom of speech for me, but not for thee" attitude. Lord knows it's prevalent enough.
So the fact that they're delibrately loading in people who ask questions they want, instead of giving that space to people who actually ask important issues, is completely meaningless to you?
If you really think the communications office was stacking the deck, ask yourself why Helen Thomas wasn't given the boot years ago.
It's bad enough journalists feel they can't ask probing questions of they won't be allowed back in.
Sigh. Have you ever even seen a White House press briefing? They're brutal. It's like feeding time at the shark tank. This "they're scared to ask tough questions" thing is just complete crap.
Now they're delibrately keeping journalists out
Who was excluded? Where's your evidence that anybody was excluded? See Thomas-comma-Helen.
The point is they've made a mockery of the entire press briefing by their apparent belief they can do any damn thing they want.
Um. They can do any damn thing they want. It's their room. If they wanted to shut down the press office entirely, they could do that. If they wanted to throw it open to any blogger with a laptop, they could do that. It's their room.
None of the other members of the White House press corp attempts to conceal their identity as he did.
Mike Allen and Jim Engel both use pen names. There's another one, a female reporter whose pseudonym I can't remember unfortunately. And those are just the ones I can think off of the top of my head.
Gannon/Guckert is not a journalist.
So? I don't recall the clause in the first amendment limiting the freedom of the press to people with j-school degrees.
he doesn't work for a legimimate news outlet.
How do you define "legitimate?" More importantly, why do you define "legitimate," if it's not to exclude people you don't like?
His function at press conferences appears to have been to save the ass of Scott McLellan or the President by asking softball questions.
His "function," if you want to call it that, was to ask whatever questions he wanted to ask, just like every other reporter in the press room. The fact that he asked questions that you don't like doesn't mean he doesn't belong there. Hell, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who doesn't think Helen Thomas spent her last few years in the briefing room as an openly partisan hack, but nobody called for her removal. Because we have a free press, you see.
Markos Moulitsas, a San Francisco liberal who writes the popular Kos site, said of Gannon: "He has been extremely anti-gay in his writings. He's been a shill for the Christian right. So there's a certain level of hypocrisy there that I thought was fair game and needed to be called out."
Asked if digging into someone's personal and business activities was proper retaliation, Moulitsas said: "If that's what it took to really bring attention to him, it's one of those unfortunate facts of reality in the way we operate today. It's sex that really draws attention to these things."
Tell me again how it's not about the sex angle. Tell me again how it's only "cranks" and "small-minded people" who are pushing the gay sex aspect of the story.
You're absolutely right. I should have been more clear about that in my comment. Everybody's got an agenda. The problem arises when people try to hide their agenda, or to pretend that they don't have one.
That's why I don't have any problem with Jeff Gannon. He was quite open about his support for the administration. The bloggers who attacked him, on the other hand, adopted high-minded language about bias and the free press when what they really meant was, "This guy supports stuff that we dislike, so we're looking for a reason to get him ejected from the game."
Slashdot Mirror
In the end I find myself more impressed with GNU/Linux.
... which are all incredibly hard to look at. So ... you know. To each his own, I guess, but ... wow. Horrible.
This baffles me. Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about Linux. I don't know what "GNU/Linux" is. Is it something different?
a good example of the GNOME desktop integration
But the pieces only work with each other, not with other applications. There's no interoperability between, say, the piece of Evolution that stores your address book and your chat program.
I like Psi which is a great Jabber client
That's fine and all, but it's kind of like being the only person in town with a Home telephone when everybody else has switched to Bell. There's nobody to talk to.
AmaroK kicks iTunes' ass in my not so humble opinion
Okay, well, you've obviously got some criteria which would seem strange and silly to me. Because the Web site is so incredibly disorganized I can't find the list of features; the only thing I can find quickly is a set of screen shots
I don't think so much of the OS X desktop and feel your 1979 comment is a flamebait.
What does "flamebait" mean? Let me clarify so you don't misunderstand me: Looking at Linux, you'd think that it was created in 1979. It's based on very, VERY old ideas. Programs have bad user interfaces and don't work together. Major pieces of the puzzle are simply missing: There's no way to assemble movies into a DVD for example. It's like Linux was created back before we had DVDs, and never caught up. For that matter, it's like it was created back before we had human user interfaces, and never caught up.
That's what I meant: It looks like 1979. It's bad. Like, bad all by itself. It can still be less bad than other things, and I'm sure there are computer operating systems out there that are worse. But when you put it side-by-side with a Mac, well, it's just kind of embarrassing, isn't it? It's just kinda sad, I think. It wouldn't be as disappointing if Linux were some dusty relic that nobody's touched for twenty years, but it looks an awful lot like it's still in active development. Which means there are people out there who are working hard, every day, to make Linux bad. And that makes me depressed, to see all that labor just wasted on trash.
I'm having a very hard time taking your list seriously. It starts with this:
... hell, the fonts are even optically kerned in real time! You're just out of your mind.
No SSH server.
Dude, what the hell do you think that "remote login" checkbox is in the Sharing preferences pane? That turns on ssh.
But really, the bottom line here is this one:
Image and font rendering isn't as good as pango/xorg.
That's just a big old heaping pile of crap. There is no better on-screen graphics system than Quartz 2D. There just isn't. Everything is antialiased, everything is color-calibrated
I don't know where you got "proprietary wireless driver." The AirPort Extreme card is a commercial-off-the-shelf miniPCI 802.11g card with an Apple logo on it.
Is it such an absurd concept for you that some people might actually prefer GNU/Linux to OS X for whatever reason?
Yes.
What's so special about OS X?
Um, slux? Have you ever used it? You can take a Mac out of the box, plug it in, and be on the Internet doing whatever you want to do in about five minutes. You don't have to dick around with settings, or fiddle with security stuff. It comes with great personal productivity software: Mail, Address Book, iCal, Keychain Access (for storing passwords and sensitive information), TextEdit (for word processing), Preview (for reading electronic documents), iChat (for audio, video and text chat). Some applications that are kinda sorta similar to those are available for Linux, but they've got three huge problems: First, they're laughably primitive by comparison. Second, they don't work together at all. Third, if they're bundled with the OS, they're bundled with a gazillion other programs of dubious value, making them nearly impossible to find.
Want examples of how these programs work together? The most obvious one is Address Book and Mail. They're two separate programs, as they should be. But all your contacts in Address Book show up in mail through address auto-completion. And you can add people to Address Book right from Mail. How about Mail and iChat? If you receive an e-mail from somebody on your iChat list, and that person is available to chat, a little light appears by the mail message. You can click the message, and up pops a video chat window with that person. Those are just two examples of how these programs all work together. It feels like you're using one big program with a lot of windows, even though you're not tied into using all of the pieces together.
And that's just the stuff that's included with the base OS. Every new Mac (as far as I know) comes with iLife, which gives you iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD, three programs that don't have even vague approximations on Linux.
Then, of course, there's iTunes. I can't imagine living without iTunes, frankly.
Given that Mac OS X does so much, it is, yes, a pretty absurd concept for me that people might want to throw all that functionality away and use an operating system that makes you feel like it's 1979 all over again.
64 bit support on the application level(photoshop, etc.) for Panther has no performance benefit because the operating system really just breaks the instructions in half.
Um. You really don't understand how 64-bit computing works, do you? When a program is compiled to a 64-bit ABI, the instructions are not, themselves, 64-bit words. Rather, the program just uses 64-bit pointers, allowing it to address more than 2 GB of virtual memory.
Besides, you can't even run Photoshop on Linux, so I don't understand how putting Linux on your 64-bit Mac could possibly improve your life.
I think everyone obsessing over that is being a bit silly, but the left rather enjoys the right being hypocrits.
Confused again. It was leftists who dug up and promoted the links to smut. How is it that the right is guilty of "hypocritisy?" Especially considering this story has not made the rounds on right-wing blogs, except in the form of commentary observing that while right-wingers take down Eason Jordan purely by reporting his story and doing top-shelf journalism (see Malkin, Michelle), left-wingers felt it necessary to go dumpster-diving to find trash to throw at Jeff Gannon. Is that the "hypocritisy" you were referring to?
the business, Bedrock Corp of Wilmington, that owns the domains was located at his home address.
You've been the victim of some misinformation, no doubt spread by a leftist who thought the smut angle was a big deal. And here you are spreading that misinformation, demonstrating that you think the smut angle is a big deal. And yet you claim that you think it isn't. Which is it?
through the shell domain of TalonNews, which is merely a place for the GOPUSA to get stories
Talon News is obviously a news service. The fact that you don't like it doesn't mean you get to declare that it's not a news service. If it were up to me, al-Jazeera would be regarded as the propaganda arm of global Islamofascism and disbanded. But I don't get to make that call. Because we live in a plural society, and even those with whom we disagree get to speak.
Gannon is not a journalist
Reports the news = journalist. Employed by a news service + reports the news = professional journalist.
Gannon is working for a PR firm employed by Republicans.
So only Democrats get to report the news? Do I have that right? Only vocal opponents of the administration in power get to write the news of the day?
I'm pretty sure if you just take a minute you'll realize how insane you're being.
As for 'gay baiting' and whatnot, I really don't have time to look up and read all his gibberish.
Then howzabout you quit slandering the man, huh? If you don't know what you're talking about, please stop talking about it.
But he did defend Santorum's rather offensive comment that you copied.
There was nothing even remotely offensive about Santorum's comment. Hell, I'll defend Santorum's comment. Do you think that that disqualifies me from reporting the news?
You'd have to exclude some American societies for that to work. (e.g, Boston marriage)
Um, no. The acts of judges who legislate from the bench are the problem. See why it's so important for people like Santorum to give voice to the conservative point of view? Because people like yourself don't even understand it. How can you disagree with something when you don't even understand it?
He's defining marriage as a (presumably sexual) 'relationship not between homosexuals'
No, he's not defining marriage at all. He's merely saying that for thousands of years, marriage has had a definition, and that definition has been between a man and a woman. See what I mean? How can you disagree when you don't even understand?
quite a few societies have never distinguished between a relationship with a man and a woman and two women
That's a false statement. There are many cultures in which polygamy (or even polyamory) is accepted, but in those cultures the marriage is between one man and one woman. The fact that the man in question gets to marry another woman at the same time doesn't mean the union is among three people. The union is between two people, and two of those unions exist and overlap at the same time.
See why Gannon's work was important, even if you don't agree with him? Because there are people like you out there who are so confused about the subject that they don't
Siber Systems' Pass2Go is a USB key with integrated RoboForm form-filler software.
No. Bullshit third-party hacks are not the answer. The solution needs to be integrated at the OS level, into the Mac OS X keychain for example.
In order to bring Windows into the conversation, of course, we first have to drag it into the 21st century by equipping it with something comparable to the keychain.
I'm a bit puzzled by your increasingly combative tone.
Then let me explain: You're talking out your ass. By your own admission, you've never used iTunes. By your own admission, you have neither read nor understood the law you're trying to invoke. You don't know what you're talking about. I have very little patience for people who spout nonsense because they are incapable of recognizing the limits of their own knowledge.
I'm not complaining about the fact that AAC is a lossy format
I really don't care what your specific gripe is; it boils down to, "The quality isn't high enough for me." That's entirely your personal decision, but it's not unique to iTunes. You can say the same thing about any other form of recorded music, because they're all "lossy" to one extent or another. You're trying to say "this is a problem with iTunes" when the truth is that it's just a simple matter of personal preference.
my point is that you have to damage the product in order make full use of it
Sigh. That's just silly. Because you've never bought a song from iTunes, you've never burned one to CD. You don't know that when you do so, you end up with an uncompressed, unencrypted CD. You also don't know that re-encoding that CD in MP3 format produces no audible differences, as long as you use enough bits to hold all the details that the more efficient AAC format was able to record. Say, 256 kilobits per second to encode what started out as a 128-kilobit-per-second AAC file. That's because the MP3 format is demonstrably inferior to the AAC format; it's got nothing to do with iTunes, and it completely fallacious to refer to the process as "damaging the product." That's just crap, and I think you know it.
I spoke about the general deficiencies of services using DRM.
No, you didn't. You spoke specifically about iTunes. Would you like to retract your statements about iTunes? Would you like to retract what you said about iTunes and re-frame your accusations in general terms so that they might or might not be applicable to iTunes?
neither you nor other respondants really took issue with my characterization of the facts of the matter
I think maybe you need to read my comment again. I told you specifically that you were mistaken. You said that it's difficult to copy music from one computer to another; I corrected you, then you backtracked and claimed you were basically just repeating a rumor you'd picked up somewhere. You said that FairPlay "prevents you from exercising some of your legally protected rights." I corrected you. You said that the process of burning to a CD would be a violation of the law. Again, I corrected you. Please read more closely next time.
I find this to be a fundemental violation of the idea of personal privacy
Seems pretty clear that you have no understand of what "privacy" means. You're just stringing words together. There are no privacy implications here. You might as well claim that there's a sixth-amendment issue, or that FairPlay infringes on your right to keep and bear arms. It's just nonsense, just utter nonsense. I think you'd do well to back off the "privacy" jibber jabber and get back on firmer rhetorical ground.
Give them an inch and they'll take a mile, so to speak.
Yes, we've all heard the "slippery slope" argument before, and we all know that it's a logical fallacy. Step back.
I'll refer you to what the lawyers at the EFF said about it
Please don't. Partisan lobbying groups are not a good source of information on questions like these. They're more interested in pushing an agenda than they are in dealing with what's written in the law.
One need only look at the Sklyarov, DeCSS, or similar cases
Elcomsoft was acquitted specifically on 1201(c)(1). Want to try again?
not to mention the situation between Apple and Real I linked to before
Real had no fair-use defense to fal
I don't know if you've noticed or anything, but we've been using keys to unlock the doors to our buildings and to limit access to our cars for a long time now. It seems to work okay.
USB is ubiquitous now, and the technology to build USB keys has reached the commodity point. USB flash drives of a gigabyte or more are less than $200, and a security key wouldn't need to be anywhere near that big. One with just a few kilobytes of memory could contain an encrypted private key that's unlocked with a password.
This idea strikes me as being so obvious that I can't imagine I'm the only one to think of it. Where's the fatal flaw that I'm not seeing?
I guess you haven't been watching "Battlestar Galactica." I find it hard to imagine anybody who's seen that show saying, "I can't possibly see what would be a better use of a timeslot."
Arguably, it's been more effective than the left.
Given that conservatives were able to get to the bottom of stories inside CBS News, the University of Colorado and CNN without going dumpster-diving and smearing a man's name with allegations of gay prostitution, I'd say it's not even remotely arguable. Wouldn't you?
If you trace the history of this investigation (especially the diaries of SusanG, who originated the project), you'll see that those who were involved in the actual research work were motivated because they saw what appeared to be a link between Gannon/Guckert and the 'outing' of Valerie Plame.
That's simply untrue. They were motivated by politics and nothing else. This is obvious to anybody who isn't blinded by partisanship.
Blowing a CIA agent's cover is a felony offense, and bears investigating.
Then where's the Robert Novak witch-hunt? It was Novak who blew her cover. His column ran two days before Gannon published his first article.
They were, in effect, trying to rise above the partisan brawl with something incontrovertible.
I don't know which is more troubling. The idea that you would say such an obviously untrue thing, or the idea that you might believe it.
Kos himself seems to think that it's fair game questioning the guy's sexual preference, something which the research team (and I) reject out of hand.
Then why did they go dumpster-diving? You're just not speaking the truth here.
But what I find truly fascinating about all this is that everybody on the left is eager to humiliate Gannon out of his job, but that nobody on the left is interested in investigating Joe Wilson's perfidy. You know, the real story here? You may have heard of it? The one where a special envoy lied about his findings in Niger?
This is just a partisan conspiracy theory designed to undermine the administration's second term legislative agenda, a la Whitewater. It's bullshit. It's nonsense. And by continuing to defend it in the strongest terms, you're just making an ass of yourself.
Your comment is filled with misinformation. I'm happy to give you the benefit of the doubt and conclude that you're just parroting what you've heard from others. Let me take this opportunity to correct you on some pretty important matters of fact.
A non-journalist was paid, yes, paid, to stand bald-face in the press room
That allegation is not supported by the facts. Accusations that Gannon was, in the parlance of the day, "a plant" are complete speculation at this point, unsupported by any evidence at all.
And calling him a "non-journalist" is disingenuous. He was employed by a news service. That makes him a journalist. You can argue that he wasn't a trained journalist or that he wasn't a good journalist, but you can't dispute that he was, in fact, a journalist.
once again, the administation was lying to us
Complete fantasy.
He was running gay domains
Three filthy domain names were registered in the name of Talon's parent company. These names were never actually associated with any Web content. They were just registered names. Which doesn't excuse the fact that they were filthy, but it means that you're not telling the truth when you say that he was running them. It wasn't him, and they weren't being run at all.
he releases reworded GOP press releases
If that were a crime, half of the journalists in this country would have to plead guilty. The issue here isn't that he wrote stories based on press releases. The issue is that he wrote stories based on press releases from people you don't like.
and has indulged in gay baiting
That's a false accusation.
He himself appears shirtless on some of these domains.
There is a picture of him that was associated with an AOL profile. It shows a bald guy with his shirt off. The picture certainly isn't flattering, but it's not sexual either. And it was never associated with any of the domain names his parent company's parent company owned, because none of those names were ever associated with any content at all.
This, by itself, would be enough to make the rounds on the blogs, as yet another example of right-wing hypocritisy
The fact that a reporter used an unflattering picture of himself in his AOL profile is "hypocritisy?" Have you seen Molly Ivins?
Anyone trying to pretend the important story is the gay story is almost certainly a) a 12 year old, or b) someone trying to divert attention
I'm confused. Why did you dedicate over 100 words to what you call "the gay story," saying yourself, "This, by itself, would be enough to make the rounds," if it's not important to you? I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I think you're sending a mixed message here.
the administation, yet again, is lying to people
The fact that you have twice accused the administration of lying reveals your partisanship. The only people who use that kind of language are the blind Bush haters. Why won't you at least be honest and admit that you're interested in this story because you hope it will make the White House look bad? Jeff Gannon was honest enough to openly admit that he was supportive of the administration. Why can't you be honest enough to admit that you're an opponent of the administration?
by representing a paid shill as an actual journalist
Again: Accusations of his being "a paid shill" are just plain false. If you want to make accusations like that, you're going to have to do more than some sleazy dumpster diving. You're going to have to do some actual investigative reporting to uncover some kind of connection. At this time, no such connection exists, so you're just blowing hot air.
The only reason the gay story is important because it shows this guy wasn't just a shill, he was a shill who probably didn't believe in the thing he was shilling.
Do a LexisNexis search. He never actuall
Actually not quite, because of course you're buying digital music that has been encoded in a lossy format
Blah blah blah. CDs are "lossy" too. But they're good enough. If you don't consider [music storage format X] to be good enough, don't buy it.
I haven't tried iTMS
Strangely, this seems not to have stopped you from running off at the mouth about something you don't actually have any knowledge of. Maybe you should spend a minute thinking about that.
it is in that sense that I see it as an invasion of privacy
I'm going to ask you again: How do you figure privacy has anything to do with it?
You mean H.R.2281 -- Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the one that's referred to as the DMCA on copyright.gov?
That piece of legislation ceased to exist on 10/28/98 when it was signed into law. Remember "how a bill becomes a law?" When a bill is signed by the President, new provisions are created in the United States Code, or existing provisions are changed. The bill itself ceases to exist. So please stop talking about the DMCA, a legal document that hasn't existed for more than six years.
You cited 1201(a)(1)(A). You should have kept reading. Because 1201(c)(1) says, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title." In other words, the fair-use defense still stands.
For God's sake, educate yourself before it's too late. This is the second time in just a few hours that you've spewed misinformation on subjects which you freely admit you know nothing about. Please stop doing that.
...And a person with a 2GHz processor will get better performance than a 1GHz processor (with the the same processor core, of course), so why not charge based on clock rate?
I thought they did. Isn't one of the options to buy a license based on how many units of computing power you have in your server, where "how many" is defined as CPUs times speed times an architecture-dependent fudge-factor?
As much as I despise hate speech, I'm also not a fan of thought crime.
There's no easy answer.
It may be quite permissive, but it still prevents you from exercising some of your legally protected rights.
No, it does not, because as soon as you press the "burn CD" button, you've got the exact same thing you would have had if you'd bought the CD in the store.
I have known people who had difficulty moving music they bought on their work computer to a their home computer where they wanted to listen to it
That's vague, and sounds bogus to me. All you have to do is copy the files. When you play a protected song the first time, you're asked for your password. Once you enter that password, all your protected music will pay on that computer. You can do that on (I think it is) up to five computers at once. If you authorize five computers and then want to authorize a sixth, all you have to do is select the "de-authorize" menu item on one of the five authorized computers. Easy as pie.
And there are also obsticales if you want to switch to a FOSS OS and still use the music you payed for legally.
I don't know what "FOSS OS" is, but I'm assuming you mean some operating system other than Windows or Mac OS X. Two words: "burn CD."
you're saying that I can get proper use out of the product I payed for if I'm willing to illegally break into it, because I believe this would violate the DMCA.
Well, no, it wouldn't violate the law (there is no DMCA; it's Title 17), but don't sweat that. It seems like nobody's actually read the law they're so afraid of. But more importantly, you don't need to "break into" anything. All you need to do is hit "burn CD."
Look, from what I've heard, iTMS has one of the best DRM systems, but I still find the whole thing to be an unethical invasion of privacy.
I suspect that you might just be throwing words out there now. What does iTunes have to do with privacy?
The man's name is Markos Moulitsas, not Zuniga.
... what? You can't be serious. I feel the need to mention it because this is precisely what lefty bloggers have accused Jeff Gannon of: paid advocacy journalism. Markos Zuniga took checks from the Dean campaign at the same time as he was covering the Democratic National Convention. This isn't even in dispute. It's a plain, simple fact. And yet when Markos Zuniga levels unfounded, false accusations at Jeff Gannon for doing the same thing, nobody even stops to notice the irony.
His legal name is Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Zuniga is his last name. He writes under the pen name of Markos Moulitsas. Oh, but writing under a pen name is okay as long as it's somebody you agree with, right?
he had a disclaimer on his website that he was on Dean's payroll
Not until long after the convention, which he covered as a journalist.
Kos was supposedly something of an outsider in the Dean camp.
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Howard Dean's presidential candidacy has been irrelevant for a long time. Why do you even feel the need to mention this?
Why do I
Bloggers share developing info
Yes, just like other reporters do, only bloggers aren't limited to publishing one edition per day or one column per week or whatever.
blur the lines between drafts and releases for early access
Um, no. Bloggers do not actually do that. Bloggers don't publish drafts. Drafts, by definition, are not visible to readers.
share across competing organizations
I don't think that's really true, because bloggers don't really compete with anybody. There's no profit motive attached to blogging --unless you're Andrew Sullivan --so there's no competition involved. It works more like a rumor mill or office grapevine than it does like a marketplace.
That's a lot like open source, where the source is the text of the stories, and the repository is the blogs themselves.
No, it's not like that at all. In particular, bloggers are aggressively protective of their property rights. A key element of the "open source" model is the abolition or abdication of property rights. Bloggers jealously guard their property rights, responding immediately and unpleasantly if somebody steals their content.
Also absent from the blogosphere is the "open source" movement's actively hostile attitude toward commercialization. The vast majority of bloggers are also professional writers. They use their blogs to hone their skills and to generate buzz about themselves in order to drum up business. This is the exact opposite of "open source's" anti-capitalist ethic.
The "open source" metaphor just doesn't work here, I'm afraid.
I guess it's impressive ... if you discount the fact that that kind of collaboration goes on among bloggers every day. It happened on Eason Jordan, it happened on Ward Churchill, it happened on Rathergate, and it's happened before that. And it will go on happening, because it's a natural process.
Calling it "open source" anything is just stupid though. That's just co-opting a buzz word that some people believe carries some degree of cache. It doesn't really mean anything, it doesn't really describe anything.
Do you think Slashdotters should not be allowed to criticize the government or Gannon?
I believe that the solution to bad speech is more speech, not less. If liberal bloggers didn't like what Gannon was saying, why didn't they fight it with speech of their own? Why did they find it necessary to dig up personally humiliating connections between Gannon's parent company's parent company and some filthy Internet domain names? The answer, of course, as made crystal clear by Markos Zuniga to Howard Kurtz, is that that's what it took to drum up the public's interest in the story. They used the sex angle deliberately to make it impossible for Gannon to continue to do his job.
I believe that the way to deal with somebody you disagree with is to share your own opinion and let the public decide, not to silence the other guy.
But hey, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the "freedom of speech for me, but not for thee" attitude. Lord knows it's prevalent enough.
So the fact that they're delibrately loading in people who ask questions they want, instead of giving that space to people who actually ask important issues, is completely meaningless to you?
If you really think the communications office was stacking the deck, ask yourself why Helen Thomas wasn't given the boot years ago.
It's bad enough journalists feel they can't ask probing questions of they won't be allowed back in.
Sigh. Have you ever even seen a White House press briefing? They're brutal. It's like feeding time at the shark tank. This "they're scared to ask tough questions" thing is just complete crap.
Now they're delibrately keeping journalists out
Who was excluded? Where's your evidence that anybody was excluded? See Thomas-comma-Helen.
The point is they've made a mockery of the entire press briefing by their apparent belief they can do any damn thing they want.
Um. They can do any damn thing they want. It's their room. If they wanted to shut down the press office entirely, they could do that. If they wanted to throw it open to any blogger with a laptop, they could do that. It's their room.
Freedom sucks, huh?
None of the other members of the White House press corp attempts to conceal their identity as he did.
Mike Allen and Jim Engel both use pen names. There's another one, a female reporter whose pseudonym I can't remember unfortunately. And those are just the ones I can think off of the top of my head.
Gannon/Guckert is not a journalist.
So? I don't recall the clause in the first amendment limiting the freedom of the press to people with j-school degrees.
he doesn't work for a legimimate news outlet.
How do you define "legitimate?" More importantly, why do you define "legitimate," if it's not to exclude people you don't like?
His function at press conferences appears to have been to save the ass of Scott McLellan or the President by asking softball questions.
His "function," if you want to call it that, was to ask whatever questions he wanted to ask, just like every other reporter in the press room. The fact that he asked questions that you don't like doesn't mean he doesn't belong there. Hell, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who doesn't think Helen Thomas spent her last few years in the briefing room as an openly partisan hack, but nobody called for her removal. Because we have a free press, you see.
Heh. I just got around to reading Howard Kurtz' story on the subject.Tell me again how it's not about the sex angle. Tell me again how it's only "cranks" and "small-minded people" who are pushing the gay sex aspect of the story.
You're absolutely right. I should have been more clear about that in my comment. Everybody's got an agenda. The problem arises when people try to hide their agenda, or to pretend that they don't have one.
That's why I don't have any problem with Jeff Gannon. He was quite open about his support for the administration. The bloggers who attacked him, on the other hand, adopted high-minded language about bias and the free press when what they really meant was, "This guy supports stuff that we dislike, so we're looking for a reason to get him ejected from the game."
That's a great point. Thank you.