...am I the only one reading the claims of apt-get being a good solution and thinking, "wtf?!"
...am I the only one realizing that as extremist zealot as most Linux geeks can be overall, the worst of the worst gravitate towards Debian or Gentoo?
...am I just imagining that Red Hat/Fedora Core support is something like five hundred times more widespread than Knoppix, Ubuntu, etc.?
Debian is its own worst enemy on two counts. First it has moved sloth-like using the wrong defense for the accusation. No one is seriously suggesting running it bleeding edge but that's what the adherents always scream is being claimed by detractors. The detractors are merely wanting it to be somewhat contemporary with the rest of the Linux world, which is isn't, and the amount of kludging over and around it that the distro builders do is testament to their intransigence.
Second is that they've if not actively encouraged, they've not actively discouraged the zealotry surrounding Debian and zealotry is a bad thing. It hasn't helped Microsoft to come clean about their idiotic practices that rub people the wrong way, it hasn't helped using it against Microsoft. It hasn't helped anywhere either for or against anything. So why keep on with it in Linux?
Some days, I wonder if the *nix world is still doomed by more of the same old same old and only Mac OSX, Red Hat, and Novel Suse reassure me in the slightest.
No, this we do not need. Remember "Something is Out There"? Today in light of current trends it would be "Something is Out of the Closet". "V" would be "G". Trek done over by NBC would be worse than anything Matt Groening could hypothesize as a joke for Futurama.
Battlestar Galactica? This would have every bad hackneyed new-age stereotype of the moment going like Queer Eye slammed upside CSI straight on into Trading Spaces meets a Democratic Party propaganda speaker crossbred with a social worker. The chances for monumental suckage are truly mind-boggling even for me and I can imagine a lot while sober and even more while drunk. I don't want to think more about this. It would give me nightmares. Think Adama being half-black, half-Chinese, a lesbian stuck in a man's body wishing for a sex change, a lawyer and a cop before the Cylons did their terrible yet totally understandable invasion where we'd never utter the word "genocidal" as they were in reality the victims and the humans getting their proper payback, who had a soft spot for interior decorating and a tendency for moralizing monologues that cover three commercial breaks and that is the least deviation from the original, getting worse from there. NBC could if they tried could quadruple the sci-fi fan suicide rate. "Dear World, Fresh Prince of Space sucked. I can't take anymore. I have not the stomach of Jay Sherman. Goodbye, cruel world."
If you want cheesy, go with UPN. If you want truly legendary bad television, go with the big three.
First we pioneered the good stuff and China churned the crap out. Now we pioneer the crap and China still churns it out. When do we reach the stage that we pioneer the crap and China churns out the good stuff?
Also, how do you say "Craptiva" and "Stinkpad" in Chinese?
Worst thing we've sold to China since selling them the idea that Michael Jackson is entertainment.
Like Knoppix, it sort of tried to work on boot. Installing it is another story. Once on a hard drive, I come at it from the position of a newbie from Windows land and judge them then once the "boot from a CD coolness" has gone away. Knoppix is like shaving with a dull Mach 3 razor and Ubuntu like shaving with a dull Mach 3 razor that is missing one blade. (Side observation: sounds unpleasantly like Ububu, and the implied haughtiness of using an African name is cheesy marketing at best. You could use any non-English name and I'd not buy into it based on the name any more than some tech-chem name like Optizoft or Citruvex.)
Fedora OTH, with everything installed and everything upgraded through YUM, works like a charm and does pretty much what I expect under Gnome or KDE and with great stability and no real contradictions or strange behavior.
Knoppix OTH changed from English to German all by itself one day and I could not find a way to switch it back. Ubuntu randomly decided not to play with my wireless mouse.
Fedora's quirks are at least consistent. Nothing random, pretty well behaved.
I think the attraction of these distros is the flash and bang they give simply by booting a CD. This is great for enticing those who are competent Windows users who can learn the technical ins and outs of Linux. They don't seem to be the thing for actually running Linux day in and day out.
Take a 640x480 space. One bit per space, 2^307,200 numbers, but they are from all zeros to all ones finite. Any image which could be digitized into this number space which could be reasonably recognized for what it was by a human, could be found either through brute force or random generation over time.
That includes images of people, places, and things, that never were.
Sooner or later, pictures of you doing stuff with farm animals, the guy on the grassy knoll, Duke Nukem's final release, etc., could all pop up within that number space. Nothing more than a number to the machine, but interpreted in that 640x480 matrice as something knowable by you.
This is just one of the interesting things about seemingly random large numbers and human perception.
"Man, like I had that baby just flyin' along doing all sorts of algorithms, and doing Quake, and man... You would not believe the kind of stuff you can do with a modded sheep."
"Yeah, I was like, takin' mine down Central Ave. and this cop, he just came outta nowhere, man. He could not even keep up, and its a real good thing I put the air dam on the rear end, cause the tail kept flyin' up and I hit the hill at Brisco, and nearly lost it totally."
"Modded" was a bad choice of words. Now I have images of blue neon trim and all sorts of flashy bling bling on the farm...
...we have yet another case of the first world looking at its needs and mistaking them for being identical to those of the third world. Now entering the beating-a-dead-horse-with-sarcasm-dept:
Yup, that kind of thinking sure helped the BIA do bang-up work on Indian reservations right here in the US. We'll just invent a concept and throw that at the problem. No need to actually investigate anything with respect to those you're foisting the (non)solution to the (non)problem.
Definitely kept the third world from being overrun by despots and tyrants, starvation and chaos, etc over the centuries. The third world is truly identical to the first thanks to this simple thinking. A few spiffy PCs and they'll be all set.
(I vaguelly recall this sentiment being used over the centuries in various forms... "if they drank tea like us, they'd be better off... if they dressed like us, they'd be better off... if they did X like us, they'd be better off...")
If my eyes roll up any more, they won't come back down out of my head.
Information access is not now nor has it ever been a problem solved by computers. We used to have a much more educated populace here in the first world before personal computers ever were a gleam in the eye of any but science fiction writers. We had books. And people took the time to learn to read them and then actually read.
We now have a society where all the information you could ever use and a million times the information you could never use is at their fingertips and the average chucklehead at McDonald's can't spell their own last name consistently.
The problem is attitude and priority, tyrants know this, and as long as the people are kept divided, kept occupied with basic survival, kept from information in whatever form, they will remain more malleable than otherwise which is what makes them easy prey for out-and-out dictators as well as subversive and subliminal schmucks who bring them to ruin just as surely all the while being lauded by that international brain trust called the United Nations.
Look at the US. Number one problem isn't information access, it's attitude towards that information and the priority of accessing it. If the people don't want to spend the time or can't spend the time to learn that the area of information exists in the first place, see any relevance to their lives in the second, and have the information spotty and hashed in the third, then they might as well not have it at all because as far as they are concerned, it doesn't exist.
What the third world needs is to have the time, interest, and desire to go after the information and absorb it whether online or through books/scrolls which have held us in good stead as a species for thousands of years.
I think showing them the glut of wonderful opportunties first worlders have yet are willfully squandered by them should be one visceral tool. I also think relentlessly pounding non-democratic-forces until they relent to the people is another, but no one can seem to agree on how to do it.
Thin clients with wireless Internet is the idea in the heads of yuppies with too much time on their hands over at the coffee area at Borders (which is itself a wonderful new expansion of the word "irony"). This is not the idea come up with by someone who is walking a half mile from their village and back several times a day to bring clean water back for the daily doings. This is not the idea in the minds of people who have to damn near rebuild the roof of their hut from scratch every other storm. This is not on the minds of people watching raw sewage in an eight inch deep trench running past their window. "Hmmm, if only we had an old Aptiva to boot a Kubuntu CD with so we could look at how well Sheffield Wednseday is doing... Oh well, better get back to town with my crops..."
If only its capabilities were as stable. No two files seem to get the same result with it on either my Windows or FC3 boxes, whether Quicktime, MPEG-2, or AVI. Sometimes it plays them, sometimes it doesn't.
I agree that something more friendly to the Linux community itself would have been better. I resist the urge to go tinfoil hat and say this was a telling tacit comment on the Linux community's friendliness towards the Mac in these days of the BSD-ish OSX, but will resist and not make that statement. You saw nothing, I said nothing. ; )
At least they didn't use Real Player as the required venue. That would have mightily sucked.
1. Would people have still bought the CDs in the same number they've downloaded individual MP3s had the CDs been unrippable? No. They foist on us a pre-packaged collection of tracks, only a couple of which are the popular most likely to be downloaded songs which they pushed relentlessly. Also, a couple of songs which might be liked but aren't being pushed for radio exposure.
We're about as likely to want to spend $20 on a CD to get just two songs as we would be to spend what we currently do on gas on the pumps and thanks to MP3s we have a choice.
I would say that they don't get it that we are willing to pay per song for only the songs we want and not for the bundle of two goods songs plus crap at an arbitrary rate, but they do get it. Thye just don't want to change because they are greedily addicted to their top-down command model of "you will pay for and get what we say".
2. Does anyone note that the artists are even more of a bunch of sheep than the listening public? These are the people who make almost no money off the CDs by comparison to the record companies. Whenever I think of Metallica's foray into becoming the butt boys for the RIAA, I harken back to a skit on The Ben Stiller Show and something about a drum stool.
Secure distributed file sharing is coming on fast and soon enough just about everything shared on the net will be spread across the network like a coherent concept across a neural net and their lawsuit onslaught will be stymied by inability to catch any one person with a complete incriminating file. We're progressing to the day when information in raw form will float across a network sea like Ghost in the Shell and if they don't get with it soon, we'll forget about ever paying for anything of theirs at all.
...welcome our new... no... who cares. Too bloody apathetic at this hour... No, can't even manage a Python reference either.
Still faster to listen to fellow techs from Britain online and a lot more colourful too. This can go in the "Yes, but can they make it into efficient text for my cell browser?" Department.
...the counter is dead blank under Firefox 1.0.3, FC3, latest stable kernel (I'm not trying to remember the digits at this late hour). Comes up on WinXP. Well, that's 1/2 point for the non-MS world.
I've often wondered why in-stock items at Tiger Direct take twelve days to find in their own warehouse and another four days to bother shipping and this only confirms my suspicion: they're smoking some incredible sh*t man.
I love how so many/.ers are all in favor of total intellectual property freedom and the ability to do whatever with whoever's IP whenever, but when the conservatives want to make it okay to skip past objectionable content on a DVD they bought, then everyone gets so pompous and self righteous over it. "How dare the Christian right be allowed to skip through scenes they don't want to see? Those were put in to piss them off in the first place! It's not fair!"
That right there sums it up. If it is okay to skip to the naughty bits for some, it should be okay to skip past the naughty bits for others. If DRM is bad then it is bad. Not okay to allow us to do what we want but not okay to allow others to do what they want. It's not censorship for people to have the ability to skip what they don't want to watch. If it is, then it's censoring you when I stick my fingers in my ears and close my eyes, right? And if I can't see you, then I'm invisible, right?
Can we try to drop the ultra-leftist claptrap for five seconds and see that the problem is that a bad law, punishing people with penalties out of all proportion to the offense, has been rammed down our throats at the behest of the MPAA which is slowly becoming alarmingly like an unofficial branch of Homeland Security?
1. DRM integration, bad idea. Guaranteed to drive people away in the long run. Only sort of crypto MS should be embracing is run-time on-the-fly of apps so they are effectively not pirate-able. I don't mind. I'm willing to pay for a copy if it works and doesn't crash every five seconds anymore. I think.
2. Encryption integration, we already have. Boards have been on the market for a while that will do all this locking down against theft, rendering drives useless without tke keys. Putting it in laptops is way overdue of course. Integrating it tightly with the OS? What if Windows' registry is corrupted and it suddenly thinks you're not an authorized paid user? Oops.
TCP/A, Palladium, crap, whatever you want to call it, not needed and not a good idea.
One warning: should Linux not get its sh*t together and fix the problems for the average innocent and naive users where administration and software installation and deinstallation is concerned, it will drop like a rock compared to a souped up and workably stable successor to Windows XP. Point, double click, answer questions, program installs itself properly for all or one user. No such animal in Linux.
Our nuclear weapons have had this feature for years. We've known for a long time how to use electric fields to create neutron emissions for a long time. It has applications in forcing rapid decay of isotopes which otherwise left to themselves would take forever. The kick-start from high energy neutrons is why they use it in nuclear weapons.
Read U.S. Nuclear Weapons by Chuck Hansen, which is out of print unfortunately. Good coverage of the massive amount of information declassified since the dawn of the atomic age, at least where weapons are concerned.
1. I can and do get HD locals already on my cable system in addition to a dozen other HD offerings.PROBLEM: Neither I nor over 75% of my neighnors can afford HD televisions currently and those who can are only getting the same content as the SD people just sharper picture. FURTHER PROBLEM: Lossy compression whether MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 especially when done repeatedly in line from content originator to my television means HD gives me excellent viewing of MPEG artifacting. EVEN FURTHER PROBLEM: This only plays into the retail equivalent of crack addiction in poorer areas: rent-to-own stores. In the name of getting what the Joneses have now we spend two to three times the retail cost in the long run and finish paying just in time for the thing to crap out at its normal end-of-life.
2. Satellite cannot give me high speed internet or phone service. In fact, I can get phone over cable or voice over IP or both simultaneously.
3. Satellite cannot give me interactive video-on-demand including gaming and information services such as those being rolled out now in various systems which will become the normal across the US in a few years.
Yeah, I really need Murdoch to give me DiVX-style video over satellite loaded ongoing with DRM and compatibility issues and on top of it I have to buy a box that I will need to replace at my cost when they change the technology; and that's going to make me just drop everything else that cable has to offer that DBS doesn't, right? I don't think so.
I'm a DBS and cable installer as well as support tech and after over a thousand installs, would never switch to DBS so it isn't as though I don't have direct exposure to the technology. It just doesn't appeal to me. I'll wait till we see the fabled LEO constellation of birds giving me high bandwidth and lower latency to portable devices wherever I go, but I won't hold my breath.
Thanks to OD (Object Disorientation) we can raise idiocy to a whole new level beyond mere C.
"Why did you write this with this library?" (taps screen)
"Because it works like before."
"And it also was broken before because that function," (tapping screen), "interacts with the first one you called and they create an overflow every time on five of the possible eight variables."
"No one ever selects those from the menu, just the other three."
"Security through statistical ignorance is not a solution!"
And so on... One of the things that has tripped up more C/C++ code than anything else is the unforseen interaction of what are otherwise on their own good code segments. Look at Windows. We have no idea what does what to what and we build whole development environments with what is already buggy code to begin with and then have the ballsy audacity to use that to build a whole other OS generation with it that we then... Oy. Does replication somehow magically eliminate the issues? Does ignoring it make it go away?
Of course not. But the way we act in IT, you'd think it did. We need to clean off the dreck and start over at some point from the bits up. But like 1984 the lie becomes truth, becomes a lie again, and after so long we can't remember what the truth actually was or even if the statement was ever made. We've already gone on to Longhorn by then. What's Windows 95?
Slashdot Mirror
Many are thinking it, I'm just saying it is all...
...am I the only one reading the claims of apt-get being a good solution and thinking, "wtf?!"
...am I the only one realizing that as extremist zealot as most Linux geeks can be overall, the worst of the worst gravitate towards Debian or Gentoo?
...am I just imagining that Red Hat/Fedora Core support is something like five hundred times more widespread than Knoppix, Ubuntu, etc.?
Debian is its own worst enemy on two counts. First it has moved sloth-like using the wrong defense for the accusation. No one is seriously suggesting running it bleeding edge but that's what the adherents always scream is being claimed by detractors. The detractors are merely wanting it to be somewhat contemporary with the rest of the Linux world, which is isn't, and the amount of kludging over and around it that the distro builders do is testament to their intransigence.
Second is that they've if not actively encouraged, they've not actively discouraged the zealotry surrounding Debian and zealotry is a bad thing. It hasn't helped Microsoft to come clean about their idiotic practices that rub people the wrong way, it hasn't helped using it against Microsoft. It hasn't helped anywhere either for or against anything. So why keep on with it in Linux?
Some days, I wonder if the *nix world is still doomed by more of the same old same old and only Mac OSX, Red Hat, and Novel Suse reassure me in the slightest.
Unless NBC starts carrying BattleStar Galactica(...)
No, this we do not need. Remember "Something is Out There"? Today in light of current trends it would be "Something is Out of the Closet". "V" would be "G". Trek done over by NBC would be worse than anything Matt Groening could hypothesize as a joke for Futurama.
Battlestar Galactica? This would have every bad hackneyed new-age stereotype of the moment going like Queer Eye slammed upside CSI straight on into Trading Spaces meets a Democratic Party propaganda speaker crossbred with a social worker. The chances for monumental suckage are truly mind-boggling even for me and I can imagine a lot while sober and even more while drunk. I don't want to think more about this. It would give me nightmares. Think Adama being half-black, half-Chinese, a lesbian stuck in a man's body wishing for a sex change, a lawyer and a cop before the Cylons did their terrible yet totally understandable invasion where we'd never utter the word "genocidal" as they were in reality the victims and the humans getting their proper payback, who had a soft spot for interior decorating and a tendency for moralizing monologues that cover three commercial breaks and that is the least deviation from the original, getting worse from there. NBC could if they tried could quadruple the sci-fi fan suicide rate. "Dear World, Fresh Prince of Space sucked. I can't take anymore. I have not the stomach of Jay Sherman. Goodbye, cruel world."
If you want cheesy, go with UPN. If you want truly legendary bad television, go with the big three.
First we pioneered the good stuff and China churned the crap out. Now we pioneer the crap and China still churns it out. When do we reach the stage that we pioneer the crap and China churns out the good stuff?
Also, how do you say "Craptiva" and "Stinkpad" in Chinese?
Worst thing we've sold to China since selling them the idea that Michael Jackson is entertainment.
or do I have possibly some old catalogs that show TigerDirect once calling itself Tiger Software?
O.o
TD is smoking crack on this one though. NO ONE thinks of TigerDirect when the word Tiger is mentioned among Mac afficianados.
Given OCR, a dot matrix printer dump of the hex code is machine readable and was once a customary medium in some circles.
"Here's the code, binary and source, and all revisions. 73,944 pages. What is your drop ship address?"
Hong Kong Cavaliers. Their scout-ish auxillary were Blue Blaze Irregulars.
Like Knoppix, it sort of tried to work on boot. Installing it is another story. Once on a hard drive, I come at it from the position of a newbie from Windows land and judge them then once the "boot from a CD coolness" has gone away. Knoppix is like shaving with a dull Mach 3 razor and Ubuntu like shaving with a dull Mach 3 razor that is missing one blade. (Side observation: sounds unpleasantly like Ububu, and the implied haughtiness of using an African name is cheesy marketing at best. You could use any non-English name and I'd not buy into it based on the name any more than some tech-chem name like Optizoft or Citruvex.)
Fedora OTH, with everything installed and everything upgraded through YUM, works like a charm and does pretty much what I expect under Gnome or KDE and with great stability and no real contradictions or strange behavior.
Knoppix OTH changed from English to German all by itself one day and I could not find a way to switch it back. Ubuntu randomly decided not to play with my wireless mouse.
Fedora's quirks are at least consistent. Nothing random, pretty well behaved.
I think the attraction of these distros is the flash and bang they give simply by booting a CD. This is great for enticing those who are competent Windows users who can learn the technical ins and outs of Linux. They don't seem to be the thing for actually running Linux day in and day out.
Take a 640x480 space. One bit per space, 2^307,200 numbers, but they are from all zeros to all ones finite. Any image which could be digitized into this number space which could be reasonably recognized for what it was by a human, could be found either through brute force or random generation over time.
That includes images of people, places, and things, that never were.
Sooner or later, pictures of you doing stuff with farm animals, the guy on the grassy knoll, Duke Nukem's final release, etc., could all pop up within that number space. Nothing more than a number to the machine, but interpreted in that 640x480 matrice as something knowable by you.
This is just one of the interesting things about seemingly random large numbers and human perception.
"Beatcron" was the rapping Autobot, right?
"Man, like I had that baby just flyin' along doing all sorts of algorithms, and doing Quake, and man... You would not believe the kind of stuff you can do with a modded sheep."
"Yeah, I was like, takin' mine down Central Ave. and this cop, he just came outta nowhere, man. He could not even keep up, and its a real good thing I put the air dam on the rear end, cause the tail kept flyin' up and I hit the hill at Brisco, and nearly lost it totally."
"Modded" was a bad choice of words. Now I have images of blue neon trim and all sorts of flashy bling bling on the farm...
1. This sounds like the w*t dr**ms of furry fans right off the bat. Nuff said.
2. Is it any more moral to experiment on the sheep than humans?
3. Will children be soon taught to recite other songs? "May was a little lamb, her fleece as white as snow..."
4. Will "Mint Jelly" be a new favorite scent in body washes now?
5. How will we tell the American public from the chimeras? Both have allegedly humans brains, both act like sheep...
6. Who will be the first to welcome our new Merino overlords?
7. Will Dan Merino be sued into forking over royalties regarding his name?
8. Will we reach a time when our livestock can rebuild our systems as fast as we can and we give new meaning to "server farm"?
9. Should I be against or for this, and exactly why?
In short, I came, I saw, I was no less confused than before, I shrugged. Category: Judgement Reserved Indefinitely.
...we have yet another case of the first world looking at its needs and mistaking them for being identical to those of the third world. Now entering the beating-a-dead-horse-with-sarcasm-dept:
Yup, that kind of thinking sure helped the BIA do bang-up work on Indian reservations right here in the US. We'll just invent a concept and throw that at the problem. No need to actually investigate anything with respect to those you're foisting the (non)solution to the (non)problem.
Definitely kept the third world from being overrun by despots and tyrants, starvation and chaos, etc over the centuries. The third world is truly identical to the first thanks to this simple thinking. A few spiffy PCs and they'll be all set.
(I vaguelly recall this sentiment being used over the centuries in various forms... "if they drank tea like us, they'd be better off... if they dressed like us, they'd be better off... if they did X like us, they'd be better off...")
If my eyes roll up any more, they won't come back down out of my head.
Information access is not now nor has it ever been a problem solved by computers. We used to have a much more educated populace here in the first world before personal computers ever were a gleam in the eye of any but science fiction writers. We had books. And people took the time to learn to read them and then actually read.
We now have a society where all the information you could ever use and a million times the information you could never use is at their fingertips and the average chucklehead at McDonald's can't spell their own last name consistently.
The problem is attitude and priority, tyrants know this, and as long as the people are kept divided, kept occupied with basic survival, kept from information in whatever form, they will remain more malleable than otherwise which is what makes them easy prey for out-and-out dictators as well as subversive and subliminal schmucks who bring them to ruin just as surely all the while being lauded by that international brain trust called the United Nations.
Look at the US. Number one problem isn't information access, it's attitude towards that information and the priority of accessing it. If the people don't want to spend the time or can't spend the time to learn that the area of information exists in the first place, see any relevance to their lives in the second, and have the information spotty and hashed in the third, then they might as well not have it at all because as far as they are concerned, it doesn't exist.
What the third world needs is to have the time, interest, and desire to go after the information and absorb it whether online or through books/scrolls which have held us in good stead as a species for thousands of years.
I think showing them the glut of wonderful opportunties first worlders have yet are willfully squandered by them should be one visceral tool. I also think relentlessly pounding non-democratic-forces until they relent to the people is another, but no one can seem to agree on how to do it.
Thin clients with wireless Internet is the idea in the heads of yuppies with too much time on their hands over at the coffee area at Borders (which is itself a wonderful new expansion of the word "irony"). This is not the idea come up with by someone who is walking a half mile from their village and back several times a day to bring clean water back for the daily doings. This is not the idea in the minds of people who have to damn near rebuild the roof of their hut from scratch every other storm. This is not on the minds of people watching raw sewage in an eight inch deep trench running past their window. "Hmmm, if only we had an old Aptiva to boot a Kubuntu CD with so we could look at how well Sheffield Wednseday is doing... Oh well, better get back to town with my crops..."
If only its capabilities were as stable. No two files seem to get the same result with it on either my Windows or FC3 boxes, whether Quicktime, MPEG-2, or AVI. Sometimes it plays them, sometimes it doesn't.
I agree that something more friendly to the Linux community itself would have been better. I resist the urge to go tinfoil hat and say this was a telling tacit comment on the Linux community's friendliness towards the Mac in these days of the BSD-ish OSX, but will resist and not make that statement. You saw nothing, I said nothing. ; )
At least they didn't use Real Player as the required venue. That would have mightily sucked.
I add to the cacophony of "they just don't get it" as well and add...
The time travel only exacerbated the inconsistancies in the Trek storyline since The Cage instead of fixed any of them.
The purposeful deviations were born of arrogance, ego, vanity, all the things that don't work well in Trek.
The fans were never listened to and they used blatant sex to sell it.
This was way beyond not getting it. This was homicidal cluelessness, killing what had been a useable franchise. RIP, Star Trek.
1. Would people have still bought the CDs in the same number they've downloaded individual MP3s had the CDs been unrippable? No. They foist on us a pre-packaged collection of tracks, only a couple of which are the popular most likely to be downloaded songs which they pushed relentlessly. Also, a couple of songs which might be liked but aren't being pushed for radio exposure.
We're about as likely to want to spend $20 on a CD to get just two songs as we would be to spend what we currently do on gas on the pumps and thanks to MP3s we have a choice.
I would say that they don't get it that we are willing to pay per song for only the songs we want and not for the bundle of two goods songs plus crap at an arbitrary rate, but they do get it. Thye just don't want to change because they are greedily addicted to their top-down command model of "you will pay for and get what we say".
2. Does anyone note that the artists are even more of a bunch of sheep than the listening public? These are the people who make almost no money off the CDs by comparison to the record companies. Whenever I think of Metallica's foray into becoming the butt boys for the RIAA, I harken back to a skit on The Ben Stiller Show and something about a drum stool.
Secure distributed file sharing is coming on fast and soon enough just about everything shared on the net will be spread across the network like a coherent concept across a neural net and their lawsuit onslaught will be stymied by inability to catch any one person with a complete incriminating file. We're progressing to the day when information in raw form will float across a network sea like Ghost in the Shell and if they don't get with it soon, we'll forget about ever paying for anything of theirs at all.
...welcome our new... no... who cares. Too bloody apathetic at this hour... No, can't even manage a Python reference either.
:q
Still faster to listen to fellow techs from Britain online and a lot more colourful too. This can go in the "Yes, but can they make it into efficient text for my cell browser?" Department.
...the counter is dead blank under Firefox 1.0.3, FC3, latest stable kernel (I'm not trying to remember the digits at this late hour). Comes up on WinXP. Well, that's 1/2 point for the non-MS world.
OSX Weasel? OS/XXX? Dingo?
I've often wondered why in-stock items at Tiger Direct take twelve days to find in their own warehouse and another four days to bother shipping and this only confirms my suspicion: they're smoking some incredible sh*t man.
Apple is going to slam dance with them in court.
I love how so many /.ers are all in favor of total intellectual property freedom and the ability to do whatever with whoever's IP whenever, but when the conservatives want to make it okay to skip past objectionable content on a DVD they bought, then everyone gets so pompous and self righteous over it. "How dare the Christian right be allowed to skip through scenes they don't want to see? Those were put in to piss them off in the first place! It's not fair!"
That right there sums it up. If it is okay to skip to the naughty bits for some, it should be okay to skip past the naughty bits for others. If DRM is bad then it is bad. Not okay to allow us to do what we want but not okay to allow others to do what they want. It's not censorship for people to have the ability to skip what they don't want to watch. If it is, then it's censoring you when I stick my fingers in my ears and close my eyes, right? And if I can't see you, then I'm invisible, right?
Can we try to drop the ultra-leftist claptrap for five seconds and see that the problem is that a bad law, punishing people with penalties out of all proportion to the offense, has been rammed down our throats at the behest of the MPAA which is slowly becoming alarmingly like an unofficial branch of Homeland Security?
1. DRM integration, bad idea. Guaranteed to drive people away in the long run. Only sort of crypto MS should be embracing is run-time on-the-fly of apps so they are effectively not pirate-able. I don't mind. I'm willing to pay for a copy if it works and doesn't crash every five seconds anymore. I think.
2. Encryption integration, we already have. Boards have been on the market for a while that will do all this locking down against theft, rendering drives useless without tke keys. Putting it in laptops is way overdue of course. Integrating it tightly with the OS? What if Windows' registry is corrupted and it suddenly thinks you're not an authorized paid user? Oops.
TCP/A, Palladium, crap, whatever you want to call it, not needed and not a good idea.
One warning: should Linux not get its sh*t together and fix the problems for the average innocent and naive users where administration and software installation and deinstallation is concerned, it will drop like a rock compared to a souped up and workably stable successor to Windows XP. Point, double click, answer questions, program installs itself properly for all or one user. No such animal in Linux.
Our nuclear weapons have had this feature for years. We've known for a long time how to use electric fields to create neutron emissions for a long time. It has applications in forcing rapid decay of isotopes which otherwise left to themselves would take forever. The kick-start from high energy neutrons is why they use it in nuclear weapons.
Read U.S. Nuclear Weapons by Chuck Hansen, which is out of print unfortunately. Good coverage of the massive amount of information declassified since the dawn of the atomic age, at least where weapons are concerned.
Rapid, *nix defintion: Any timeframe shorter than a Debian stable release.
1. I can and do get HD locals already on my cable system in addition to a dozen other HD offerings.PROBLEM: Neither I nor over 75% of my neighnors can afford HD televisions currently and those who can are only getting the same content as the SD people just sharper picture. FURTHER PROBLEM: Lossy compression whether MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 especially when done repeatedly in line from content originator to my television means HD gives me excellent viewing of MPEG artifacting. EVEN FURTHER PROBLEM: This only plays into the retail equivalent of crack addiction in poorer areas: rent-to-own stores. In the name of getting what the Joneses have now we spend two to three times the retail cost in the long run and finish paying just in time for the thing to crap out at its normal end-of-life.
2. Satellite cannot give me high speed internet or phone service. In fact, I can get phone over cable or voice over IP or both simultaneously.
3. Satellite cannot give me interactive video-on-demand including gaming and information services such as those being rolled out now in various systems which will become the normal across the US in a few years.
Yeah, I really need Murdoch to give me DiVX-style video over satellite loaded ongoing with DRM and compatibility issues and on top of it I have to buy a box that I will need to replace at my cost when they change the technology; and that's going to make me just drop everything else that cable has to offer that DBS doesn't, right? I don't think so.
I'm a DBS and cable installer as well as support tech and after over a thousand installs, would never switch to DBS so it isn't as though I don't have direct exposure to the technology. It just doesn't appeal to me. I'll wait till we see the fabled LEO constellation of birds giving me high bandwidth and lower latency to portable devices wherever I go, but I won't hold my breath.
Thanks to OD (Object Disorientation) we can raise idiocy to a whole new level beyond mere C.
"Why did you write this with this library?" (taps screen)
"Because it works like before."
"And it also was broken before because that function," (tapping screen), "interacts with the first one you called and they create an overflow every time on five of the possible eight variables."
"No one ever selects those from the menu, just the other three."
"Security through statistical ignorance is not a solution!"
And so on... One of the things that has tripped up more C/C++ code than anything else is the unforseen interaction of what are otherwise on their own good code segments. Look at Windows. We have no idea what does what to what and we build whole development environments with what is already buggy code to begin with and then have the ballsy audacity to use that to build a whole other OS generation with it that we then... Oy. Does replication somehow magically eliminate the issues? Does ignoring it make it go away?
Of course not. But the way we act in IT, you'd think it did. We need to clean off the dreck and start over at some point from the bits up. But like 1984 the lie becomes truth, becomes a lie again, and after so long we can't remember what the truth actually was or even if the statement was ever made. We've already gone on to Longhorn by then. What's Windows 95?