Canada is actually a misspelling of Kanata, the Huron-Iroquois word for "village". Idoit european settlers cam eover here, and asked the natives where they were, and when they said "Kanata", they thought it mean the name of the country.
I don't think you understand what a "dead-end" product is. Sony is so big that even if no other manufacturer supports their formats, they will continue to exist, and be popular, as long as Sony wants.
Mini-disc is example 1. Been around 15+ years. You cans till buy them, and are still popular among certain crowds. I don't see that as a 'dead-end product'.
Memory stick is an even better example. Guess who the #1 maker and seller of digital cameras in the world is? Sony. Guess what format all those cameras use? Memory stick.
When it comes to the phone system, regulation is important for one reason only - 911.
Vonage doesn't ever support 911 in all areas right now. Even if they did, the calls are packets routed over the internet - what if the connection quality drops while you are speaking to emergency personnel? What about the 911 caller locator service? They'll have to make that work over VOIP too if it is going to gain this much popularity. This will likely require national standards and regulation.
Just wait until the first person who uses VOIP (or even a visitor to their house) dies because they couldn't reach a 911 operator, and the victim's parents start screaming hellfire to their congressman.
Bundling did play a factor yes. And bundling is what has kept them in the lead for so long.
But the parent is totally right in saying that Netscape 4 - 4.5 sucked donkey balls. It was slow, bloated, and incredibly hard to develop HTML for because of its goofy layers system. Even if MS had never bundled anything, I am quite convinced that Internet Explorer 4 (and later 5) would have gotten the majority market.
After that it becomes more grey. If IE had never been bundled, IE6 vs. Netscape 6-7-Mozilla is much more difficult to call.
If MS decided to send me, or anyone of millions of small companies, a letter saying "pay us 10,000 in royalties or we will sue you for 10 million in damages", guess what? I can't afford the patent attorney for the 8+ months of litigation, and I sure as hell can't afford the 10 million.
The sad thing is that I should even need a patent attorney in this case - it should be so cut and deied that you could represent yourself! But alas, that is rarely so.
The DMCA applies only to cases whereby an encryption / obfuscation method was broken in order to facilitate copyright infringement. If there is no encryption involved, there is no need for the DMCA as standard copyright law applies.
Regardless of the merits of the case or not, it is a cut and dried copyright case. It has nothing to do with the DMCA whatsoever, since the page is not encrypted. Seems like whoever filed the complaint has no clue what they are doing.
While I cannot possibly comprehend why you would need to run such a machine for a few hours a month (if I needed an extra machine for testing or something running a local UML kernel on my desktop would be both simpler and *faster* than running an old, old 486), if that is the case, then I guess you are right.
In business, if a virus sweeps your network and deletes 10-15 peoples home directories, no sweat. You tell them to keep working, and one at a time restore their files from the backup you did of those directories yesterday. (Any non-braindead company I would hope would be doing daily backups of user data).
But if the virus takes out the *OS*, thats a whole other ball of wax. The sysadmin, who is a limited resource, has ot go around to N machines and re-install/re-image them. And for the hours this takes him, all the people involved cannot do any work. So you're basically throwing thousands of dollars of salary per hour down the toilet.
The four ISA 10Mbps ethernet cards I have in an old 486DX66, manufactured in 1991/92, aren't "worthless junk", and are currently supported in the latest 2.6.8.1 kernel, which this machine is capable of running (actually, it is running 2.6.7, I haven't got around to upgrading it).
Actually, considering I could buy a PII or newer with two PCI nics, with full system specs that would thrash that sustem, for under 50 bucks, yes I would call that whole system "worthless junk".
The savings on your power bill alone yb upgrading to a modern mor epower efficient system/PSU would probably pay for the price of the upgrade in a few months.
Anyway, the results are not SiteFinder, just "buy this domain or e-mail the registrant". Besides,.cc isn't an autoresolution or even a relatively common domain, which was the problem with SiteFinder.
No, the problem with sitefinder is that it returns bogus, corrupted DNS information, which breaks a hell of a lot of 3rd party software that follows the RFCs.
NVidia provides binary drivers precompiled for the most common distors - RedHat, Fedora, Suse, Mandrake. They can't possibly provide binaries for all of them.
Compiling your own is the price you pay for using a less popular distro. I have to compile my own in Gentoo as well. Not that I mind, it takes all of 10 seconds.
Oh, little things, like the reassurance of being able to continue to use the hardware I've paid for even if nVidia don't feel like continuing to develop the drivers if-and-when the kernel API changes
Yeah. You mean like my Zoran TV tuner card that hasnt worked since the 2.2 series, despite their being public specs and sources for it? Drivers are only maintained as long as the developer is around. And unless you have the skills to write your own drivers (and most of us, including large numbers of application developers, *don't*), the having specs/source or not is irrelevant.
...like with the recent 4k stacks issue...
You mean the "issue" that nvidia had *working drivers* for within weeks after it was *even an option* in the kernel? You mean the "issue" that "open" drivers like *ahem* ATI have and NVidia does not?
That, and Free drivers are more stable that proprietary drivers in my experience, and when they aren't, you can look at the code to try to figure out why
Again. you are in the vast minority in being able to do this. So don't bash NVidia for catering to the rest of us.
Apples DRM isn't as tough as the WMA one... It's been thouroghly cracked, and apple isn't making attempts to put out stronger encryption because they dont seem to care that much
WMA's encryption has also been cracked. IIRC it was crached within 48 hours of it's release, and Microsoft hasn't come out with a new scheme either.WTF does that have to do with anything?
Answer: Nothing, It costs money to make these formats, and publish millions of files with them, money the companies can't afford to spend over and over again every time a format is cracked. Give it a year.
What is less evil about Apple's DRM. Is that there is a little room for fair play. You can copy the music to multiple computers, and unlimited iPods.
And you can do the exact same thing with Microsoft's DRM. There are basically checkboxes the publisher can choose what they want to allow and how many times.
If the files *you* happen to be getting are overly restricted, complain to the publisher. They are the ones who set the values, not Microsoft.
It's the exact same thing with AAC DRM. It just happens that the publichser (Apple) chose some values you like.
Conclusion: you could say Apple is "less eveil" than publichser X, but saying AAC's DRM is "less evil"than WMA's is pure nonsense.
The networks are out to make money, not be your friend. They wouldn't be airing reality TV if they didnt make money at it.
However, the profit margins on a reality TV show are MUCH higher. They don't have to pay expensive actors, they don't have to build or maintain sets, they don't need to hire extras from the screen actors guild, etc. They can even usually do product placements *on* the shows to make more money.
Then you have shows like American Idol - not only is the show cheap, but afterwards, they have an artist that is guaranteed to sell at least a few records - and they don't have to spend any money promoting them!
The marketers that convinced the masses to watch these shows are pure genius. And the networks are laughing all the way to the bank.
How is looking at a 5 year stock chart proof of anything, other than your own complete lack of knowledge of the markets?
Firstly, if you look at the longer term history of Kodak (here, you will see that where they are now is not that far off from where they were in 1965 and 1985. You will also see that from 65 to 85 they went up and down much like they did from 85 to now. They didn't "die" in 1985, why would now be different? Remember a stock's value is the "perceived" value of the copany as set by the market. People like you who *think* Kodak is on the way out influence it just as much as actual revenue and profit figures.
Aside from that, Kodak is certainly *not* the way out. They are one of the leaders in the emerging OLED market. Think laptop screens, PDAs, cell phones, you name it, soon they will have a stake in it.
Google's policy has been "you'll neve rhave to delete any email". I thought id' give it a go. I am on 5 high traffic MLs and a few others. Until now I had filters that only kept the messages that interested me. I thought "great, with GMail I can keep them all and use the search to find what I need if I need to later."
After only 2 weeks of forwarding all the email to my gmail account, I was over 30 MB. If I was to continue that trend, GMails "never delete" policy would have my account overflowing in under 16 months. I have had my current account much longer than that.
If I had a 100GB account, it would last me forever essentially ( 150 years or more ).
Some people get more email than you. deal with it.
This is totally stupid. OO.org formats already support embedded images. The OO.org format is actually a tar.gz that can contain many files, including XML documents and PNG images.
If it is a vector image they can just use SVG, which is XML.
If it is a raster image they just use PNG and embed the dile
Do you really know that little about OO formats or is this a joke?
Also there there tend to be volcanoes associated with subduction zones
This bring sup an interesting idea.
Why can't they use some of their fancy GPS-guided ICBMs to deliver the nuclear waste into the heart of volcanos in remote sites for disposal?
A few million metric tons of lava will disperse the waste readily, intermixing it with the earth's magma. and like the parent poster said, the stuff is already radioactive.
Why would you be doing usability testing using Slackware? If they were using the default Mandrake KDE 3.3 many of these settings are changed out of the box, including the menus, to make it much more user-friendly.
If you are doing a review aimed at transitioning users, why would you be using a KDE compiled from source, then whining about the defaults? New users don't compile stuff from source, they use whatever the distro comes with, which means they *never* see the defaults in KDE source. Really, the source defaults should be more geared toward power users, since they're the only ones compiling it anyways.
Most all the problems noted are minor "annoyance" settings IMO. Eg, if more uses of a distro want to see stars when they type, because it is a distro aimed at Windows migration, then they can turn it on. If more users of that distro are *not* coming from windows and would rather have the option that makes more sense from a security standpoint, then they can leave it off. It is that simple.
KDE is not "KDE, the one for all". The whole point of having these things configurable is so that distribution makers can tailor the settings for their audience. Why should the default KDE settings be more "Windows-like"? Why not more "Amiga-like"? If you are going to be doing a review on KDE where you are testing it with Windows users who have never used Linux before, it makes *no sense* to leave the settings at the defaults, you should tweak them to look like Windows.Just like if you were going to do a review where most people were coming from Macs, it would make sense to turn on the MacOS style menuing system where the application bar is permanatly attached to the top of the screen and follows every app (yes, KDE can do this, its a simple click away).
Linux is not Windows. There is never going to be "The Linux" that you go and use because different distros are aimed at different markets. If Gentoo was ever as f*cked up as RedHat after an install I would probably puke. But to users migrating from Windows, RedHat is fine because all they want is a familiar UI. This is all fine. It is what makes Linux great, and it is why KDE is configurable.
While I somewhat agree, there is good reason the media doesn't use the term "cracker" to describe someone who writes viruses / trojans / defaces sites / etc.
"Cracker" is already a derogatory term that has been used far longer than computers have been around. If someone on the 6 o'clock news said " A cracker defaced Microsoft.com today", 95% of the American population would immediately assume they meant that "A homophobic, racist southerner defaced Microsoft.com today."
Cracker was already taken long before computers were even invented. We should have come up with a better word. It's our own fault.
This is a global option in KDE. It's up to the distro how they want their defaults. Personally I like the stars *off* so a casual passer by can't see how long or short my password is.
anti-aliased fonts off by default
Again, a distribution thing. If you compile KDE from source yourself you'll find them (surprise!) on by default.
Kopete send messages by pressing enter
Again, default config thing a packager could easily change. And in current KDE CVS it is already changed.
far too many options shown by default, etc.
A distro could easily change the default KControl link to point to settings:// instead, which is far less confusing.
Mostly an uninformed article IMO. If the reviwers want to test the newbie usability of *KDE* itself, not of whatever distro they happen to be on, they should at least spend some time learning how to do things in KDE so that they can set up the system to be newbie-friendly *before* the newbies test it.
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I don't think you understand what a "dead-end" product is. Sony is so big that even if no other manufacturer supports their formats, they will continue to exist, and be popular, as long as Sony wants.
Mini-disc is example 1. Been around 15+ years. You cans till buy them, and are still popular among certain crowds. I don't see that as a 'dead-end product'.
Memory stick is an even better example. Guess who the #1 maker and seller of digital cameras in the world is? Sony. Guess what format all those cameras use? Memory stick.
I would hardly call that a 'dead-end'.
When it comes to the phone system, regulation is important for one reason only - 911.
Vonage doesn't ever support 911 in all areas right now. Even if they did, the calls are packets routed over the internet - what if the connection quality drops while you are speaking to emergency personnel? What about the 911 caller locator service? They'll have to make that work over VOIP too if it is going to gain this much popularity. This will likely require national standards and regulation.
Just wait until the first person who uses VOIP (or even a visitor to their house) dies because they couldn't reach a 911 operator, and the victim's parents start screaming hellfire to their congressman.
Bundling did play a factor yes. And bundling is what has kept them in the lead for so long.
But the parent is totally right in saying that Netscape 4 - 4.5 sucked donkey balls. It was slow, bloated, and incredibly hard to develop HTML for because of its goofy layers system. Even if MS had never bundled anything, I am quite convinced that Internet Explorer 4 (and later 5) would have gotten the majority market.
After that it becomes more grey. If IE had never been bundled, IE6 vs. Netscape 6-7-Mozilla is much more difficult to call.
If MS decided to send me, or anyone of millions of small companies, a letter saying "pay us 10,000 in royalties or we will sue you for 10 million in damages", guess what? I can't afford the patent attorney for the 8+ months of litigation, and I sure as hell can't afford the 10 million.
The sad thing is that I should even need a patent attorney in this case - it should be so cut and deied that you could represent yourself! But alas, that is rarely so.
The DMCA applies only to cases whereby an encryption / obfuscation method was broken in order to facilitate copyright infringement. If there is no encryption involved, there is no need for the DMCA as standard copyright law applies.
Regardless of the merits of the case or not, it is a cut and dried copyright case. It has nothing to do with the DMCA whatsoever, since the page is not encrypted. Seems like whoever filed the complaint has no clue what they are doing.
While I cannot possibly comprehend why you would need to run such a machine for a few hours a month (if I needed an extra machine for testing or something running a local UML kernel on my desktop would be both simpler and *faster* than running an old, old 486), if that is the case, then I guess you are right.
In business, if a virus sweeps your network and deletes 10-15 peoples home directories, no sweat. You tell them to keep working, and one at a time restore their files from the backup you did of those directories yesterday. (Any non-braindead company I would hope would be doing daily backups of user data). But if the virus takes out the *OS*, thats a whole other ball of wax. The sysadmin, who is a limited resource, has ot go around to N machines and re-install/re-image them. And for the hours this takes him, all the people involved cannot do any work. So you're basically throwing thousands of dollars of salary per hour down the toilet.
The four ISA 10Mbps ethernet cards I have in an old 486DX66, manufactured in 1991/92, aren't "worthless junk", and are currently supported in the latest 2.6.8.1 kernel, which this machine is capable of running (actually, it is running 2.6.7, I haven't got around to upgrading it).
Actually, considering I could buy a PII or newer with two PCI nics, with full system specs that would thrash that sustem, for under 50 bucks, yes I would call that whole system "worthless junk".
The savings on your power bill alone yb upgrading to a modern mor epower efficient system/PSU would probably pay for the price of the upgrade in a few months.
Anyway, the results are not SiteFinder, just "buy this domain or e-mail the registrant". Besides, .cc isn't an autoresolution or even a relatively common domain, which was the problem with SiteFinder.
No, the problem with sitefinder is that it returns bogus, corrupted DNS information, which breaks a hell of a lot of 3rd party software that follows the RFCs.
NVidia provides binary drivers precompiled for the most common distors - RedHat, Fedora, Suse, Mandrake. They can't possibly provide binaries for all of them.
Compiling your own is the price you pay for using a less popular distro. I have to compile my own in Gentoo as well. Not that I mind, it takes all of 10 seconds.
Oh, little things, like the reassurance of being able to continue to use the hardware I've paid for even if nVidia don't feel like continuing to develop the drivers if-and-when the kernel API changes
Yeah. You mean like my Zoran TV tuner card that hasnt worked since the 2.2 series, despite their being public specs and sources for it? Drivers are only maintained as long as the developer is around. And unless you have the skills to write your own drivers (and most of us, including large numbers of application developers, *don't*), the having specs/source or not is irrelevant.
...like with the recent 4k stacks issue...
You mean the "issue" that nvidia had *working drivers* for within weeks after it was *even an option* in the kernel? You mean the "issue" that "open" drivers like *ahem* ATI have and NVidia does not?
That, and Free drivers are more stable that proprietary drivers in my experience, and when they aren't, you can look at the code to try to figure out why
Again. you are in the vast minority in being able to do this. So don't bash NVidia for catering to the rest of us.
Apples DRM isn't as tough as the WMA one... It's been thouroghly cracked, and apple isn't making attempts to put out stronger encryption because they dont seem to care that much
WMA's encryption has also been cracked. IIRC it was crached within 48 hours of it's release, and Microsoft hasn't come out with a new scheme either.WTF does that have to do with anything?
Answer: Nothing, It costs money to make these formats, and publish millions of files with them, money the companies can't afford to spend over and over again every time a format is cracked. Give it a year.
What is less evil about Apple's DRM. Is that there is a little room for fair play. You can copy the music to multiple computers, and unlimited iPods.
And you can do the exact same thing with Microsoft's DRM. There are basically checkboxes the publisher can choose what they want to allow and how many times.
If the files *you* happen to be getting are overly restricted, complain to the publisher. They are the ones who set the values, not Microsoft.
It's the exact same thing with AAC DRM. It just happens that the publichser (Apple) chose some values you like.
Conclusion: you could say Apple is "less eveil" than publichser X, but saying AAC's DRM is "less evil"than WMA's is pure nonsense.
And exactly why is AAC's DRM "less evil" than WMA's DRM? Because it is made by Apple and not MS??!?!
Anyone else like a big slice of bias with that? Anyone?
Last I checked AMD was shipping Opterons over a year ago.
And I know several people who have Athlon 64's at home.
The networks are out to make money, not be your friend. They wouldn't be airing reality TV if they didnt make money at it.
However, the profit margins on a reality TV show are MUCH higher. They don't have to pay expensive actors, they don't have to build or maintain sets, they don't need to hire extras from the screen actors guild, etc. They can even usually do product placements *on* the shows to make more money.
Then you have shows like American Idol - not only is the show cheap, but afterwards, they have an artist that is guaranteed to sell at least a few records - and they don't have to spend any money promoting them!
The marketers that convinced the masses to watch these shows are pure genius. And the networks are laughing all the way to the bank.
Block outgoing connections to ports 6667-7000. This will stop all but the most net-savvy IRC'ers who have BNCs or something.
Google's policy has been "you'll neve rhave to delete any email". I thought id' give it a go. I am on 5 high traffic MLs and a few others. Until now I had filters that only kept the messages that interested me. I thought "great, with GMail I can keep them all and use the search to find what I need if I need to later."
After only 2 weeks of forwarding all the email to my gmail account, I was over 30 MB. If I was to continue that trend, GMails "never delete" policy would have my account overflowing in under 16 months. I have had my current account much longer than that.
If I had a 100GB account, it would last me forever essentially ( 150 years or more ).
Some people get more email than you. deal with it.
This is totally stupid. OO.org formats already support embedded images. The OO.org format is actually a tar.gz that can contain many files, including XML documents and PNG images.
If it is a vector image they can just use SVG, which is XML.
If it is a raster image they just use PNG and embed the dile
Do you really know that little about OO formats or is this a joke?
Also there there tend to be volcanoes associated with subduction zones
This bring sup an interesting idea.
Why can't they use some of their fancy GPS-guided ICBMs to deliver the nuclear waste into the heart of volcanos in remote sites for disposal?
A few million metric tons of lava will disperse the waste readily, intermixing it with the earth's magma. and like the parent poster said, the stuff is already radioactive.
Why would this not work?
The review is bogus.
Most all the problems noted are minor "annoyance" settings IMO. Eg, if more uses of a distro want to see stars when they type, because it is a distro aimed at Windows migration, then they can turn it on. If more users of that distro are *not* coming from windows and would rather have the option that makes more sense from a security standpoint, then they can leave it off. It is that simple.
KDE is not "KDE, the one for all". The whole point of having these things configurable is so that distribution makers can tailor the settings for their audience. Why should the default KDE settings be more "Windows-like"? Why not more "Amiga-like"? If you are going to be doing a review on KDE where you are testing it with Windows users who have never used Linux before, it makes *no sense* to leave the settings at the defaults, you should tweak them to look like Windows.Just like if you were going to do a review where most people were coming from Macs, it would make sense to turn on the MacOS style menuing system where the application bar is permanatly attached to the top of the screen and follows every app (yes, KDE can do this, its a simple click away).
Linux is not Windows. There is never going to be "The Linux" that you go and use because different distros are aimed at different markets. If Gentoo was ever as f*cked up as RedHat after an install I would probably puke. But to users migrating from Windows, RedHat is fine because all they want is a familiar UI. This is all fine. It is what makes Linux great, and it is why KDE is configurable.
While I somewhat agree, there is good reason the media doesn't use the term "cracker" to describe someone who writes viruses / trojans / defaces sites / etc.
"Cracker" is already a derogatory term that has been used far longer than computers have been around. If someone on the 6 o'clock news said " A cracker defaced Microsoft.com today", 95% of the American population would immediately assume they meant that "A homophobic, racist southerner defaced Microsoft.com today."
Cracker was already taken long before computers were even invented. We should have come up with a better word. It's our own fault.
no stars echoed while the password was typed,
This is a global option in KDE. It's up to the distro how they want their defaults. Personally I like the stars *off* so a casual passer by can't see how long or short my password is.
anti-aliased fonts off by default
Again, a distribution thing. If you compile KDE from source yourself you'll find them (surprise!) on by default.
Kopete send messages by pressing enter
Again, default config thing a packager could easily change. And in current KDE CVS it is already changed.
far too many options shown by default, etc.
A distro could easily change the default KControl link to point to settings:// instead, which is far less confusing.
Mostly an uninformed article IMO. If the reviwers want to test the newbie usability of *KDE* itself, not of whatever distro they happen to be on, they should at least spend some time learning how to do things in KDE so that they can set up the system to be newbie-friendly *before* the newbies test it.