Maybe there is more choice now due to the influx of developers from the iPhone craze but a few years ago there definitely wasn't. Toast is a commercial program so that is out, iTunes is not part of the OS either - you can just delete it when you're sick of it like I did.
I never found these all-in-one programs any good, perhaps because they are all modeled on iTunes. Quicktime is another piece of absolute rubbish that Apple continues to peddle to the masses for some unknown reason. Before my Mac died an untimely death I played *everything* in VLC, if that didn't work I used mplayer but it almost always did.
The thing about the cryptic filenames refers to the way it copies them onto iPods - who ever came up with this hair brained scheme and passed it off as being somehow superior to ordinary mass storage preserving the original filenames could do with a good hard kicking.
I remember when I had a Mac about 2 years ago it was very hard to find something that would burn CD's (yes I know VLC won't do this), play tunes and videos because the developers of all the alternative programs just gave up in the face of the mighty iTunes when that started to gain popularity.
And I hate, hate, hated iTunes, the interface, the then DRMified music store, the way it tried to force you to use a 'library' to store every single song that I only wanted to play once - it was and still is one of those programs like MPLAB [IDE for writing software for PIC] that just for some reason makes me want to dig my way to China with a teaspoon because that would be less stressful than using it.
Its like its authors decided the age-old concept of 'files' was not good enough anymore so their software (poorly) tries to portray the real-life concept of a dusty box filled with records while dumping every song into some random folder with a cryptic filename. But these wiseguys don't realise that I'd much rather deal with files that I can recognise by their filename, copy and move them with the well known 'cp' and 'mv' commands rather than having their craptastic software try to manage it all.
Having VLC go from the Mac would mean there is only one real alternative left - mplayer. Now mplayer is a fine piece of software but it's good to have VLC just in case, they both have their own distinct advantages.
I dunno about the rest of you, but I'd rather pay the full whack for an unlocked Maemo phone. I know we are in a recession and all, but an ad-supported phone seems going a bit far.
If after a year I want a new phone I will sell the unlocked phone for significantly more than an identical phone that is locked, but given that the 'average Joe' would rather pay 50 a month for 2 years than 500 upfront I will be one of the few, which is unfortunately making it harder for me to source my unlocked phones
The whole point of having a phone that runs Linux is the freedom of being able to customise and 'hack' it, not have it make sure I'm looking at the required number of ads. Far too often these days a Linux-based device only runs Linux because it saves the manufacturer the trouble of licensing a kernel or writing their own.
Contrary to popular belief, so called proprietary battery packs are actually filled with pretty standard lithium ion cells. These can be purchased on eBay and a variety of other outlets. Even if you can't find the correct size you will find a similar enough model that you can use instead - you might have to solder a few wires but nothing that requires mad skillz.
So next time you have an expensive proprietary battery pack go bad on you, bust it open yourself and put in a few new cells. This is also a service offered by some companies so you can get new batteries for discontinued equipment - much of this equipment is not worth paying someone to rebuild a battery for but for things like satellite phones (such as the Motorola 9500) it is well worth it.
Would it not be a good idea to fork MySQL at this point? rather than relying on Oracle who pledge (which is not legally binding) to continue supporting MySQL and giving it away for free. Even though there is no compelling reason for them to unless they plan to assimilate it into their outrageously priced commercial database packages
Big companies like Oracle are just not to be trusted, any embracing they do must be seen as simply the first step to extending and extinguishing. It would be completely naive to think otherwise
I'm not a google fanboi by any means but this is good news for the general American public who seem to think that the only way to get a phone is to buy a locked one through a network. I havn't bought a locked phone since '99 and the small subsidy they give in order to fob you off with a crippled device is never worth it.
Maybe if this is marketed well there will be more of a separation between device and network. You wouldn't buy a wifi PCI-E card that is only compatible with a certain brand of AP or 'hotspot' network, so why would a phone be any different?
Except at the start, they required a lot less of your privacy in order to do their business. now with the credit crunch and advertising revenue being harder to get they will have to resort to increasingly invasive profiling and targeting methods to make the same amount of money.
There is also no real alternative, there are no search engines that accept money rather than privacy. but as long as things like 'Scroogle' are allowed to continue existing there is no demand for such search engines either
or if you do use gmail, encrypt everything you send with an external app, have all your emails forwarded to another non-gmail account.
Running your own email server isn't exactly hard as long as your ISP is willing to change your PTR record and give you a static IP. Well worth it even just for the gains in privacy.
For google search i would use an anonimisng proxy, run a http proxy (bandwidth limited) to muddle your searches in between other people's but you will get the much hated 'sorry, your computer is generating automated queries screen' and will sometimes have to enter a capcha in order to use google search the odd time
Has anyone ever got into trouble for running a tor node? Also, not everyone lives in the US, with the level of 'freedom' over there it seems like you guys should be the ones using the tor nodes, not running them
As long as its your own dynamic IP I wouldn't be too worried about it. By running a tor node you are helping your own cause as well - the disassociation between user and IP. If anyone ever gives you any hassle just say "I'm running a tor node, the abuse has nothing to do with me, please fuck off". I believe the people behind tor have a selection sample letters of this sort on their site (but somewhat more polite)
If they were all using IRC/Jabber and regular POP3/SMTP email (with encryption/one-time pads) or something more decentralised and robust altogether the effects of 'slowing down the internet' would hardly be felt, since these protocols use so little bandwidth anyway. In this case anyway relying on 'De Cloud' ie. a couple of supermassive foreign social networking sites does not seem like the best course of action
This is why you don't use your real name on the internet. That includes facebook. If these guys all had weird names like IranDuDe401 like they would if they were using IRC and not some social networking site then the government would never be able to find their families in order to harass them.
I don't understand why everyone is rabbling on about 'carriers' like they have any actual say in the matter. sure a lot of people buy their phone that way but I'm going to assume that everyone in the target market for an open source phone knows that this is a rip-off.
I havn't bought a phone through a network since 2000. Since then all my phones have been unlocked, unbranded and uncrippled.
Whenever there is a child involved all notions of common sense and rational thinking go out the nearest window.
No law is too draconian, too invasive of one's privacy if there is even.1 of a % chance that it will ever prevent a child from having to experience the smallest noticeable amount of pain
I cant help but think that if Wikipedia don't comply and donate 100,000 GBP to some children's charity for their 'sin' in merely being involved in this whole thing they will be made out to be the bad ones and accused of sheltering paedophiles, rapists and other undesirables.
i wouldn't waste a whole machine on just a DNS server, less i was trying to heat the room and electricity was free. twould be easier to just block the redirects to the ads i suppose. if you already have a server of some sort or a half decent router that runs linux setting up a DNS server wouldn't take 2 hours
I hear this excuse about every type of service. "Look change to to our wonderful new cloud based data mining/advertising supported service and let us do all the work for you"
But really, I have been running servers of all sorts for years now and the only ones that require any significant amount of maintenance are the HTTP ones due to their content going stagnant (gopher does not count here as its OK to have stagnant content, makes it look more 'nostalgic' if it hasn't been updated in years I suppose)
A DNS server is pretty much set and forget, to the point where most consumer grade routers have one built in. Yeah sure its not the latest DNSSeC doohickey but i'm sure the next generation will have that
That's possible, but people will complain that it's spyware. You see, if you do all your spying server side and it isn't immediately obvious that everything you do with the software is being recorded then people won't mind it so much.
Offline == No ads, No statistics == No money for google
Also, protocols other than HTTP easily support the injection of ads, therefore google hate anything that isn't HTTP
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe there is more choice now due to the influx of developers from the iPhone craze but a few years ago there definitely wasn't. Toast is a commercial program so that is out, iTunes is not part of the OS either - you can just delete it when you're sick of it like I did.
I never found these all-in-one programs any good, perhaps because they are all modeled on iTunes. Quicktime is another piece of absolute rubbish that Apple continues to peddle to the masses for some unknown reason. Before my Mac died an untimely death I played *everything* in VLC, if that didn't work I used mplayer but it almost always did. The thing about the cryptic filenames refers to the way it copies them onto iPods - who ever came up with this hair brained scheme and passed it off as being somehow superior to ordinary mass storage preserving the original filenames could do with a good hard kicking.
I remember when I had a Mac about 2 years ago it was very hard to find something that would burn CD's (yes I know VLC won't do this), play tunes and videos because the developers of all the alternative programs just gave up in the face of the mighty iTunes when that started to gain popularity.
And I hate, hate, hated iTunes, the interface, the then DRMified music store, the way it tried to force you to use a 'library' to store every single song that I only wanted to play once - it was and still is one of those programs like MPLAB [IDE for writing software for PIC] that just for some reason makes me want to dig my way to China with a teaspoon because that would be less stressful than using it.
Its like its authors decided the age-old concept of 'files' was not good enough anymore so their software (poorly) tries to portray the real-life concept of a dusty box filled with records while dumping every song into some random folder with a cryptic filename. But these wiseguys don't realise that I'd much rather deal with files that I can recognise by their filename, copy and move them with the well known 'cp' and 'mv' commands rather than having their craptastic software try to manage it all.
Having VLC go from the Mac would mean there is only one real alternative left - mplayer. Now mplayer is a fine piece of software but it's good to have VLC just in case, they both have their own distinct advantages.
Facebook is to real life as a CAD drawing is to a real plane, with actual engines that emit CO2 and push the plane forward and all that jazz
This is not something slashdotters will ever have to worry about..
I dunno about the rest of you, but I'd rather pay the full whack for an unlocked Maemo phone. I know we are in a recession and all, but an ad-supported phone seems going a bit far.
If after a year I want a new phone I will sell the unlocked phone for significantly more than an identical phone that is locked, but given that the 'average Joe' would rather pay 50 a month for 2 years than 500 upfront I will be one of the few, which is unfortunately making it harder for me to source my unlocked phones
The whole point of having a phone that runs Linux is the freedom of being able to customise and 'hack' it, not have it make sure I'm looking at the required number of ads. Far too often these days a Linux-based device only runs Linux because it saves the manufacturer the trouble of licensing a kernel or writing their own.
Contrary to popular belief, so called proprietary battery packs are actually filled with pretty standard lithium ion cells. These can be purchased on eBay and a variety of other outlets. Even if you can't find the correct size you will find a similar enough model that you can use instead - you might have to solder a few wires but nothing that requires mad skillz.
So next time you have an expensive proprietary battery pack go bad on you, bust it open yourself and put in a few new cells. This is also a service offered by some companies so you can get new batteries for discontinued equipment - much of this equipment is not worth paying someone to rebuild a battery for but for things like satellite phones (such as the Motorola 9500) it is well worth it.
Would it not be a good idea to fork MySQL at this point? rather than relying on Oracle who pledge (which is not legally binding) to continue supporting MySQL and giving it away for free. Even though there is no compelling reason for them to unless they plan to assimilate it into their outrageously priced commercial database packages
Big companies like Oracle are just not to be trusted, any embracing they do must be seen as simply the first step to extending and extinguishing. It would be completely naive to think otherwise
I'm not a google fanboi by any means but this is good news for the general American public who seem to think that the only way to get a phone is to buy a locked one through a network. I havn't bought a locked phone since '99 and the small subsidy they give in order to fob you off with a crippled device is never worth it.
Maybe if this is marketed well there will be more of a separation between device and network. You wouldn't buy a wifi PCI-E card that is only compatible with a certain brand of AP or 'hotspot' network, so why would a phone be any different?
Except at the start, they required a lot less of your privacy in order to do their business. now with the credit crunch and advertising revenue being harder to get they will have to resort to increasingly invasive profiling and targeting methods to make the same amount of money.
There is also no real alternative, there are no search engines that accept money rather than privacy. but as long as things like 'Scroogle' are allowed to continue existing there is no demand for such search engines either
or if you do use gmail, encrypt everything you send with an external app, have all your emails forwarded to another non-gmail account.
Running your own email server isn't exactly hard as long as your ISP is willing to change your PTR record and give you a static IP. Well worth it even just for the gains in privacy.
For google search i would use an anonimisng proxy, run a http proxy (bandwidth limited) to muddle your searches in between other people's but you will get the much hated 'sorry, your computer is generating automated queries screen' and will sometimes have to enter a capcha in order to use google search the odd time
I'm sure there's an oul torrent out there that will let you have it for $0
... omg *ILLEGAL* use of our beloved Bittorrent protocol?? please excuse me while I fish my monocle out of my Brandy.
A fellow slashdotter suggesting a
Its about the same as lead-acid
It's good enough to power short-medium range electric cars without the short lifetime of lead acid batteries.
and it doesn't even come with support for a coin validator....
*shakes head in disappointment*
With the likes of Eric Schmidt saying "Privacy concerns are for wrongdoers" it is more relevant than ever.
and besides, I don't like web interfaces at all.
Has anyone ever got into trouble for running a tor node? Also, not everyone lives in the US, with the level of 'freedom' over there it seems like you guys should be the ones using the tor nodes, not running them
As long as its your own dynamic IP I wouldn't be too worried about it. By running a tor node you are helping your own cause as well - the disassociation between user and IP. If anyone ever gives you any hassle just say "I'm running a tor node, the abuse has nothing to do with me, please fuck off". I believe the people behind tor have a selection sample letters of this sort on their site (but somewhat more polite)
If they were all using IRC/Jabber and regular POP3/SMTP email (with encryption/one-time pads) or something more decentralised and robust altogether the effects of 'slowing down the internet' would hardly be felt, since these protocols use so little bandwidth anyway. In this case anyway relying on 'De Cloud' ie. a couple of supermassive foreign social networking sites does not seem like the best course of action
This is why you don't use your real name on the internet. That includes facebook. If these guys all had weird names like IranDuDe401 like they would if they were using IRC and not some social networking site then the government would never be able to find their families in order to harass them.
I don't understand why everyone is rabbling on about 'carriers' like they have any actual say in the matter. sure a lot of people buy their phone that way but I'm going to assume that everyone in the target market for an open source phone knows that this is a rip-off.
I havn't bought a phone through a network since 2000. Since then all my phones have been unlocked, unbranded and uncrippled.
Whenever there is a child involved all notions of common sense and rational thinking go out the nearest window.
.1 of a % chance that it will ever prevent a child from having to experience the smallest noticeable amount of pain
No law is too draconian, too invasive of one's privacy if there is even
I cant help but think that if Wikipedia don't comply and donate 100,000 GBP to some children's charity for their 'sin' in merely being involved in this whole thing they will be made out to be the bad ones and accused of sheltering paedophiles, rapists and other undesirables.
i wouldn't waste a whole machine on just a DNS server, less i was trying to heat the room and electricity was free. twould be easier to just block the redirects to the ads i suppose. if you already have a server of some sort or a half decent router that runs linux setting up a DNS server wouldn't take 2 hours
I hear this excuse about every type of service. "Look change to to our wonderful new cloud based data mining/advertising supported service and let us do all the work for you"
But really, I have been running servers of all sorts for years now and the only ones that require any significant amount of maintenance are the HTTP ones due to their content going stagnant (gopher does not count here as its OK to have stagnant content, makes it look more 'nostalgic' if it hasn't been updated in years I suppose)
A DNS server is pretty much set and forget, to the point where most consumer grade routers have one built in. Yeah sure its not the latest DNSSeC doohickey but i'm sure the next generation will have that
Does it work with Linux?
That's possible, but people will complain that it's spyware. You see, if you do all your spying server side and it isn't immediately obvious that everything you do with the software is being recorded then people won't mind it so much.
Offline == No ads, No statistics == No money for google Also, protocols other than HTTP easily support the injection of ads, therefore google hate anything that isn't HTTP