It shouldn't really be surprising that a legislative solution isn't going to do much to solve a social problem. There was an idea going on around in the beginning of the last century that banning alcoholic beverages would magically erase all their harmful effects from society. As it happened, such laws only served to create a huge market for smugglers and organised criminals, putting things further out of reach for regulation.
I would imagine that sweeping the concept of violence under the carpet, in a society in which it's quite firmly rooted, would fare no better. Germany, of all nations, should know this better than most.
Actually Internet conventional wisdom is fairly unpredictable when it comes to copyright.
That may be because you're trying to fit hundreds of thousands of people under a single stereotype.
Here's a different view:
Case 1: Metallica vs the Internet
W4reZ kid: LOL, retards. Information wants to be free. Musicians should make money from live gigs + paying for stuff is just lame anyway.
Consumer rights activist: It's copyright infringement, not stealing. Stealing is when you take something away from someone. Like when a mugger took my iRiver full of Metallica songs I'd ripped from CDs I already own. Anyway, here's a chart displaying how record sales have in fact been on a steady rise since Napster, perhaps the music industry could learn something here?
Case 2: Someone uses GPL code in a non GPL product
FOSS advocate: It's still copyright infringement, by the way, as well as a license breach. These people don't have the right to use the code that way, and they should be made aware of that if they aren't already.
Random fanatic: Burn the infidels!
Case 3: Pasty white Mac fans remix music, get sued
Original artist: Stealing! Plagiarism! Fortunately I have significantly more legal resources at hand than these guys so the copyright law applies also in practice.
W4reZ kid: Information wants to be free! Down with the big corporate money!
Case 4: A rich black man uses 4 chords from nerdy white guys
Original artist: Stealing! Plagiarism! Fortun-- oh, drat!
Please listen to what's behind the links before posting the first thing that comes to mind. It's not just a similarity - much less simple influence. It's an exact match all the way from the melody down to the bass and drum lines and the synth samples.
Actually, I love the fact that the Cylons are getting more human. It's so great because as the series evolve you realise that the humans are being colder and colder and acting more like.... machines.
I'm sort of expecting this to lead to the Cylons' own "fall from paradise" - after all, at some point it was mentioned that they hate humans partly for being undeveloped enough that they still kill each other over petty matters. With Baltar playing the part of the snake, it's not far from where the Cylons would wake up to realise that they need to face their human characteristics and come to terms with them, rather than actively try to deny them. Either way, they're pretty much acting like confused teenagers at the moment, which is sort of amusing in its own right.
Then again, the series also seems bent on surprising me, so who knows.
That moderation certainly didn't come unexpected, what with the general bias around here. So here's my little disclaimer: I've been around Macs for over a decade and I even own one. Despite that, I'm quite certain my personal hell will be having to troubleshoot Macs for an eternity.
Apple's products, at least current ones, are nice for first impressions and as long as nothing too out of the ordinary happens, but the messiahs of computing or pinnacles of human technological advancement they're not.
Is there a cell phone on the market today that even approaches the power, design and ease of use of a Mac or an iPod? Obviously, no.
The current line of phones are already crashing and locking up on occasion - all we need now is less colour and one or two gimmick features and we're pretty much there.
Even the NES demo units had a similar feature - you could press a button to select a cart from the ones in the unit. After some time the console would reset and display a Nintendo title screen again and start to rotate through the titles.
"Intentional freezing" sounds more like a bad cover-up to me, though.
Yeah, configuring X is still one of the weakest links. I think I've heard about the X.org folks working on creating a better framework for configuration for a few years now, but I don't have a clue as to how they're progressing on it, or if it's already present. In the end it should make it easier to do changes on the fly.
Games are a bit of a tough one - I think the people switching to Linux now generally aren't the sort that consume a lot of games, because there aren't many. On the other hand there's not a huge incentive to port games because there isn't a big market. In technical terms porting should be easier now than it was a few years ago, but for current development teams it would probably mean relearning a lot of things to make good use of portable APIs. The fact that OpenGL is effectively being crippled in Vista doesn't help at all either.
A lot of problems will probably just gradually solve themselves as (or if) desktop Linux gains enough momentum. It would've been quite unheard of ten years ago for Linux to have received support from big commercial vendors such as Adobe or Nvidia, and it's a small miracle that free operating systems have gotten even as far as they currently have. We'll just have to wait and see.
Perhaps you should come out of the cave again - a lot has happened during the past five years or so. The first distribution I tried was Red Hat 5.2, and to tell the truth you couldn't really do a whole lot with the graphical interface (which was either FVWM2 or Gnome 1.2 by default, I think). Learning the shell was pretty much mandatory.
The current desktop distributions are a completely different game. A lot of what used to be hand-tweaking on the administration side is automated and there's a good collection of graphical tools for configuring things that aren't. The software collections in general are a lot bigger and of higher quality. The desktop environments themselves have come leaps and bounds in terms of usability. I can do most of the stuff I do with Ubuntu, and I do.
That said, I still have to go back to Windows for games and home studio work. I still haven't really looked into the current situation on the latter, so if someone can recommend a nice package to replace the likes of Jeskola Buzz or FL Studio, I'm open to suggestions.
I think the US is the only country in the world with such a strict view on drinking, and it does not help.
Coming from Finland, I can assure you that it's not the case.
The legal drinking age here is 18 years (20 years for strong liquor). Taxing is heavy and the regulations for selling alcoholic beverages in bars and restaurants are strict to the point of being ridiculous. For instance, they're technically not allowed to sell more than one standard drink at a time, so you can't - say - get yourself a double gin tonic, but the bartender will happily first make you a regular one and then let you buy a shot of gin.
Oh, and the only place to get beverages stronger than regular beer is a state-owned monopoly. Not so long ago it would've been unheard of that you could even get beer at your local grocery store, but that was changed through extensive protesting and campaigning. Attempts have also been made to get the same treatment for wines, without success.
So what about the effects of all this? We're constantly being displayed near the top of the list of heaviest-drinking countries. Several people travel over the gulf to Estonia to buy their booze because the price level is more sensible - and you can find our domestic products there for almost half the local price. All the while teenagers keep on biting the forbidden fruit, and sadly it's not such an uncommon sight to see kids the age of 14 or even less getting piss drunk outside on the streets. There's some education about the risks of alcohol use, but less so about good drinking habits.
The punchline: what do the regulatory bodies think would be an effective means to solve all these problems? Stricter regulations!
I'm sure you can run Commander Keen perfectly well, after all the work that MS poured into making sure those legacy 16-bit applications.
I'm sure you must've heard that 16-bit support has been dropped from the AMD64-- whoops, I mean "x64" builds of Windows. Oh well, at least we still have DOSBox.
Seriously speaking though, big businesses also still run a whole bunch of what you wouldn't hesitate to call legacy software. Legacy also means it's tried and tested, so they'll much rather sit around and keep on using it than reimplementing. On the other hand, growing requirements and maintenance costs can drive them to upgrade their hardware from time to time - so a backwards-compatible operating system can be a good bait.
Of course, the sensibility of making yourself dependent on such things is a whole different matter.
If you make sure that those with money don't influence the market so they make more money than Pareto law is actually good for the economy in my opinion
So the world would be a better place if everyone would just be nice and play by the rules? Why hasn't anyone thought of that before!
I live in Finland, and had to google to find out what you're talking about. I guess the claims about Hydrocell's products come pretty close, but fuel cell technology is not really in that wide use here.
Electric and (more so, I'd presume) hybrid cars do have some penetration, but then again there's less obstacles to adopting them.
While we're at it, why constrain this only to public places - where's my constitutional right to apply a pair of pliers to the power line of the neighbour with the loud stereo set?
I say, there's nothing like a nice technical solution to a social issue.
Patents are published - that's the whole point of them. They aren't secret.
Software patents are often also convoluted beyond comprehension to even experts of the field. As far as I know, mathematical algorithms still can't be patented even in the US, so a straightforward piece with supplementary pseudo-code isn't even possible. The facts have to be disguised in order to pass. This makes it a real joyride to actually find out what it is you should be aware of.
At the very least they seem to have a reputation for standing up very well to all sorts of rugged conditions - bar perhaps the floppy drives. I don't have much user experience myself, besides playing some games on my grandfather's Kaypro when I was a kid (Hunt the Wumpus and a Space Invaders clone at least - I think it had Adventure as well).
You must be very good - I certainly couldn't make a judgement on die size or complexity by looking at pictures of the outer packages.
Sarcasm aside, AMD seems to have a knack for integrating things, so I wouldn't put it past them to think of a way to strip some needless bus logic off of the GPU, marry it with a memory controller and put it inside one package ready to be stuck into a socket. The rest of the electronics pretty much involve getting data in and out of the frame buffer and to a format more suitable for display hardware, and that part could be integrated to the motherboard.
Sharing the memory bus with the CPU still doesn't sound like paving the way for extremely high-end graphics, though.
Lord of the Rings was great. But Return of the King was a little too long. If they'd cut out some of the ending, they could have put more content in elsewhere [Tom Bomadil at the start, Sacking of Hobbiton by Saruman at end].
I'm not sure either of those elements would fit in very well. The sacking of Hobbiton kind of works as a smaller "unwinding story" at the end of the book, but it would probably feel even more like dragging on the ending if they put it in the movie. It's also too much of a cliché already for heroes to return from a successful quest to a wrecked home village (though perhaps that could have left room for a sequel).
As for Bombadil, the first book makes it quite clear that Tolkien really liked Hobbiton and its surroundings. If the movie dragged the beginning as far as the book does, some of the audience might've fallen asleep by the time the hobbits finally reached Rivendell. Bombadil is a part of the background lore, but essentially just a distraction concerning the main storyline.
The Hobbit ought to be a much more straightforward adaptation - the story flows on quite nicely without too many sidetracks and there's less facets to cover. It's the other prequel that worries me more, although Silmarillion does have some very nice material.
You probably had to use the same network provider for a year or more, at inflated prices.
Or he simply got himself a model which doesn't run Linux, play videos, do his laundry and make him coffee while organising his socks and rearranging Beethoven's 5th for the kazoo.
I don't know much about the situation in the U.S.A., but around here basic models can easily go for under 50 EUR retail.
Re:Moving on to the games consoles ?
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
Aren't the games consoles actually better for playing games ?
Depends. Possibly not if you're into strategy, role-playing, graphical adventure (a rarity these days, granted) or FPS games, for instance. The gamepad just doesn't quite cut the cheese with them.
Desktop computers used to have more involving titles in general when compared to consoles, but easily portable console titles have since guaranteed a steady flow of games that appear for the PC with little or no adaptation.
I couldn't switch completely to Linux since I have about 50 gig of data on HDb that Mandrake 10.1 can't access (thinks subdirectories are files, thanks to Microsoft who automatically converted FAT32 to some other file system), so I'm dual boot; Windows for audio (50 gb of MP3s) and Linux for the internet.
Either your Mandrake installation has an extremely old NTFS driver, is misconfigured in some way, or the subdirectories are encrypted or compressed. NTFS read support for Linux has been around for quite some time - even full read-write support exists now and seems to work fine, although it's slow.
Only if the porting quality is far better than it was with FF7 and FF8, thank you very much.
Both were big enough pains even back then, with a computer and OS of the same era - trying to get them to run now on a modern box with 3D-acceleration is... well, hardly worth the trouble, since Playstation emulators do quite nicely for both and actual PSones are quite cheap on the second-hand market.
The bundled Yamaha software synths were a nice touch, though.
Slashdot Mirror
It shouldn't really be surprising that a legislative solution isn't going to do much to solve a social problem. There was an idea going on around in the beginning of the last century that banning alcoholic beverages would magically erase all their harmful effects from society. As it happened, such laws only served to create a huge market for smugglers and organised criminals, putting things further out of reach for regulation.
I would imagine that sweeping the concept of violence under the carpet, in a society in which it's quite firmly rooted, would fare no better. Germany, of all nations, should know this better than most.
That may be because you're trying to fit hundreds of thousands of people under a single stereotype.
Here's a different view:
W4reZ kid: LOL, retards. Information wants to be free. Musicians should make money from live gigs + paying for stuff is just lame anyway.
Consumer rights activist: It's copyright infringement, not stealing. Stealing is when you take something away from someone. Like when a mugger took my iRiver full of Metallica songs I'd ripped from CDs I already own. Anyway, here's a chart displaying how record sales have in fact been on a steady rise since Napster, perhaps the music industry could learn something here?
FOSS advocate: It's still copyright infringement, by the way, as well as a license breach. These people don't have the right to use the code that way, and they should be made aware of that if they aren't already.
Random fanatic: Burn the infidels!
Original artist: Stealing! Plagiarism! Fortunately I have significantly more legal resources at hand than these guys so the copyright law applies also in practice.
W4reZ kid: Information wants to be free! Down with the big corporate money!
Original artist: Stealing! Plagiarism! Fortun-- oh, drat!
W4reZ kid: Damn, I don't know what to say now.
Please listen to what's behind the links before posting the first thing that comes to mind. It's not just a similarity - much less simple influence. It's an exact match all the way from the melody down to the bass and drum lines and the synth samples.
One hell of a coincidence if you ask me.
It is a smart move, but I can't help thinking that it's rather like they're attempting to be more like Ubuntu in wake of its popularity.
Of course, being more like Ubuntu is only half a step away from being more like Debian, so I'd better start dodging too.
I'm sort of expecting this to lead to the Cylons' own "fall from paradise" - after all, at some point it was mentioned that they hate humans partly for being undeveloped enough that they still kill each other over petty matters. With Baltar playing the part of the snake, it's not far from where the Cylons would wake up to realise that they need to face their human characteristics and come to terms with them, rather than actively try to deny them. Either way, they're pretty much acting like confused teenagers at the moment, which is sort of amusing in its own right.
Then again, the series also seems bent on surprising me, so who knows.
That moderation certainly didn't come unexpected, what with the general bias around here. So here's my little disclaimer: I've been around Macs for over a decade and I even own one. Despite that, I'm quite certain my personal hell will be having to troubleshoot Macs for an eternity.
Apple's products, at least current ones, are nice for first impressions and as long as nothing too out of the ordinary happens, but the messiahs of computing or pinnacles of human technological advancement they're not.
The current line of phones are already crashing and locking up on occasion - all we need now is less colour and one or two gimmick features and we're pretty much there.
Even the NES demo units had a similar feature - you could press a button to select a cart from the ones in the unit. After some time the console would reset and display a Nintendo title screen again and start to rotate through the titles.
"Intentional freezing" sounds more like a bad cover-up to me, though.
Does it r-- oh, nevermind!
Yeah, configuring X is still one of the weakest links. I think I've heard about the X.org folks working on creating a better framework for configuration for a few years now, but I don't have a clue as to how they're progressing on it, or if it's already present. In the end it should make it easier to do changes on the fly.
Games are a bit of a tough one - I think the people switching to Linux now generally aren't the sort that consume a lot of games, because there aren't many. On the other hand there's not a huge incentive to port games because there isn't a big market. In technical terms porting should be easier now than it was a few years ago, but for current development teams it would probably mean relearning a lot of things to make good use of portable APIs. The fact that OpenGL is effectively being crippled in Vista doesn't help at all either.
A lot of problems will probably just gradually solve themselves as (or if) desktop Linux gains enough momentum. It would've been quite unheard of ten years ago for Linux to have received support from big commercial vendors such as Adobe or Nvidia, and it's a small miracle that free operating systems have gotten even as far as they currently have. We'll just have to wait and see.
Perhaps you should come out of the cave again - a lot has happened during the past five years or so. The first distribution I tried was Red Hat 5.2, and to tell the truth you couldn't really do a whole lot with the graphical interface (which was either FVWM2 or Gnome 1.2 by default, I think). Learning the shell was pretty much mandatory.
The current desktop distributions are a completely different game. A lot of what used to be hand-tweaking on the administration side is automated and there's a good collection of graphical tools for configuring things that aren't. The software collections in general are a lot bigger and of higher quality. The desktop environments themselves have come leaps and bounds in terms of usability. I can do most of the stuff I do with Ubuntu, and I do.
That said, I still have to go back to Windows for games and home studio work. I still haven't really looked into the current situation on the latter, so if someone can recommend a nice package to replace the likes of Jeskola Buzz or FL Studio, I'm open to suggestions.
Coming from Finland, I can assure you that it's not the case.
The legal drinking age here is 18 years (20 years for strong liquor). Taxing is heavy and the regulations for selling alcoholic beverages in bars and restaurants are strict to the point of being ridiculous. For instance, they're technically not allowed to sell more than one standard drink at a time, so you can't - say - get yourself a double gin tonic, but the bartender will happily first make you a regular one and then let you buy a shot of gin.
Oh, and the only place to get beverages stronger than regular beer is a state-owned monopoly. Not so long ago it would've been unheard of that you could even get beer at your local grocery store, but that was changed through extensive protesting and campaigning. Attempts have also been made to get the same treatment for wines, without success.
So what about the effects of all this? We're constantly being displayed near the top of the list of heaviest-drinking countries. Several people travel over the gulf to Estonia to buy their booze because the price level is more sensible - and you can find our domestic products there for almost half the local price. All the while teenagers keep on biting the forbidden fruit, and sadly it's not such an uncommon sight to see kids the age of 14 or even less getting piss drunk outside on the streets. There's some education about the risks of alcohol use, but less so about good drinking habits.
The punchline: what do the regulatory bodies think would be an effective means to solve all these problems? Stricter regulations!
I'm sure you must've heard that 16-bit support has been dropped from the AMD64-- whoops, I mean "x64" builds of Windows. Oh well, at least we still have DOSBox.
Seriously speaking though, big businesses also still run a whole bunch of what you wouldn't hesitate to call legacy software. Legacy also means it's tried and tested, so they'll much rather sit around and keep on using it than reimplementing. On the other hand, growing requirements and maintenance costs can drive them to upgrade their hardware from time to time - so a backwards-compatible operating system can be a good bait.
Of course, the sensibility of making yourself dependent on such things is a whole different matter.
So the world would be a better place if everyone would just be nice and play by the rules? Why hasn't anyone thought of that before!
I live in Finland, and had to google to find out what you're talking about. I guess the claims about Hydrocell's products come pretty close, but fuel cell technology is not really in that wide use here.
Electric and (more so, I'd presume) hybrid cars do have some penetration, but then again there's less obstacles to adopting them.
While we're at it, why constrain this only to public places - where's my constitutional right to apply a pair of pliers to the power line of the neighbour with the loud stereo set?
I say, there's nothing like a nice technical solution to a social issue.
Yeah, as if any users could ever be foolish enough to deliberately download and install malware.
Oh look, this nice-looking program seems to be free...
Software patents are often also convoluted beyond comprehension to even experts of the field. As far as I know, mathematical algorithms still can't be patented even in the US, so a straightforward piece with supplementary pseudo-code isn't even possible. The facts have to be disguised in order to pass. This makes it a real joyride to actually find out what it is you should be aware of.
At the very least they seem to have a reputation for standing up very well to all sorts of rugged conditions - bar perhaps the floppy drives. I don't have much user experience myself, besides playing some games on my grandfather's Kaypro when I was a kid (Hunt the Wumpus and a Space Invaders clone at least - I think it had Adventure as well).
You must be very good - I certainly couldn't make a judgement on die size or complexity by looking at pictures of the outer packages.
Sarcasm aside, AMD seems to have a knack for integrating things, so I wouldn't put it past them to think of a way to strip some needless bus logic off of the GPU, marry it with a memory controller and put it inside one package ready to be stuck into a socket. The rest of the electronics pretty much involve getting data in and out of the frame buffer and to a format more suitable for display hardware, and that part could be integrated to the motherboard.
Sharing the memory bus with the CPU still doesn't sound like paving the way for extremely high-end graphics, though.
I'm not sure either of those elements would fit in very well. The sacking of Hobbiton kind of works as a smaller "unwinding story" at the end of the book, but it would probably feel even more like dragging on the ending if they put it in the movie. It's also too much of a cliché already for heroes to return from a successful quest to a wrecked home village (though perhaps that could have left room for a sequel).
As for Bombadil, the first book makes it quite clear that Tolkien really liked Hobbiton and its surroundings. If the movie dragged the beginning as far as the book does, some of the audience might've fallen asleep by the time the hobbits finally reached Rivendell. Bombadil is a part of the background lore, but essentially just a distraction concerning the main storyline.
The Hobbit ought to be a much more straightforward adaptation - the story flows on quite nicely without too many sidetracks and there's less facets to cover. It's the other prequel that worries me more, although Silmarillion does have some very nice material.
Or he simply got himself a model which doesn't run Linux, play videos, do his laundry and make him coffee while organising his socks and rearranging Beethoven's 5th for the kazoo.
I don't know much about the situation in the U.S.A., but around here basic models can easily go for under 50 EUR retail.
Depends. Possibly not if you're into strategy, role-playing, graphical adventure (a rarity these days, granted) or FPS games, for instance. The gamepad just doesn't quite cut the cheese with them.
Desktop computers used to have more involving titles in general when compared to consoles, but easily portable console titles have since guaranteed a steady flow of games that appear for the PC with little or no adaptation.
Either your Mandrake installation has an extremely old NTFS driver, is misconfigured in some way, or the subdirectories are encrypted or compressed. NTFS read support for Linux has been around for quite some time - even full read-write support exists now and seems to work fine, although it's slow.
Only if the porting quality is far better than it was with FF7 and FF8, thank you very much.
Both were big enough pains even back then, with a computer and OS of the same era - trying to get them to run now on a modern box with 3D-acceleration is... well, hardly worth the trouble, since Playstation emulators do quite nicely for both and actual PSones are quite cheap on the second-hand market.
The bundled Yamaha software synths were a nice touch, though.