You don't think so? I have absolutely no problem imagining people putting up with anything with a pretty, helpful sounding name, even if it rapes their rights. Case in point: The Patriot Act. Sounds nice but is part of the rapid decline of personal freedoms. Jack shit has been really done about it, and the rights for it are simple and easy to grasp. It's even well-publicised by opponents. Now imagine digital rights (TC, secure paths (like trusted moniters), and so on). Add the complete phobia of scary words (read: slightly techinical terms) and if the PA didn't get shredded in a week, we don't have a snowball's chance in hell of breaking TC-related technology. People are too willing to pay tons of money to have confusing technology 'just work' even if it works lots less well than the old stuff. I'm scared shitless, and everyone on/. should be, too.
Sure ACPI is a hardware issue, but you know what? I have dealt with huge messes in terms of hardware, and it didn't work with windows. Sure manufactures building total shit ACPI that doesn't even resemble the standards can make free OSs that depend on them choke for a while, even require a little work or, heaven forbid, thought. On the other hand, I could never get a friend's computer to install windows, and upon a little inspection, discovered that his motherboard was assigning EVERY IRQ to the same two lines, plus a failed IDE controller, and froze the whole thing constantly, plus there was no IRQ control in the BIOS. Sure making the thing work took a hell of a lot of compiling and custom Linuxing(and a stern warning about data non-safety), but it did, and it worked without a hitch, and continues to do so to this day. The point here is that as long as the way things really work is hidden, the OS is shit. If anything goes wrong that the little dancing paperclip can't help you fix, you're generally screwed.
KDE was a little heavy for my 1/4GB laptop (not to mention that until the new plastik, I wanted to gouge my eyes out whenever I opened a Qt app)... I find that OpenBox3 will run inside ~5meg + X overhead. I usually have about half my RAM available when I have a shitload of xterms, audio player, firefox, Gaim, thunderbird, xchat, kile, and a handful of other apps open.
When will the labels figure this out?
"Dear God! Those heathens are stealing our music! They must just be a generation that is more evil than any before!" NO. They are a generation that is being lied to and exploited more than any before. CDs should not be $15 EVER, and especially not $23. When CDs were released, the RIAA insisted that the new format cost pennies to make, and that the inital higher costs of the format were just to overcome the expense of the switch, and that CDs would quickly drop in price. Years later, the median price is substantially higher than tapes EVER were. They are gouging customers for music that (as revealed in a Playboy interview about a year ago) is regarded even by the artists as low-quality shit that is only good for radio sound bytes. Most 'artists' don't care about the real quality of their music, they only care about making big money from radio-friendly CDs that can sell big for a few weeks. How many tracks do modern bands throw away because they weren't up to snuff? Not a whole damn lot. How many did Led Zeppelin throw away? I've heard that as many as two-thirds of the stuff they recorded for some albums was never released, because it's wasn't good enough.
People used to get together and talk about music.: really talk, not say they liked this or that song, but discuss album ordering and prduction techniques. How often does this happen any more? Damn near never, because music is pretty much all shit.
RIAA: Release music worth spending a little money on and charge us a less offensive price per album; for the next format you realease, don't destroy every possible use of the music by protecting the hell out of it like you did SACDs. I guarantee that you will have sales climb. You can't depend on the latest technology to save your ass, despite attacking it as unethical and evil like the last two did (tapes and radio, by the way).
I haven't needed signature-based AV for over a year, and I've never gotten a virus. What's my AV? POSIX. Look at the safety record of POSIX OSs. Only about 40 known viruses for Linux (yes, technically, it's not officially tested, but it does comply with the Single Unix Specification) or MacOS X (I know, it does not quite comply, and has also not been approved either), about 6 for commercial UNIXs. Almost all of these viruses were proof-of-concepts, and none have been seen in the wild (largely because the concept they proved was promptly secured).
Actually, according to a study a few years ago, "password" is by far the most common password in use today. Your observation is perfectly in line with that...
Highly NOT recommended. I sell retail in the summers, and we get nearly as many of these back as we sell. Perhaps a later rev. of the hardware will be more reliable, but between the low power signal and high failure rate we see, I say stay away for a bit...
I'm frankly excited about the suit. No sitting judge could possibly hope to rule in favor of Epicrealm (at least not without an embarassing overturning by another judge). Every loss by a software-patent holding party weakens the whole idea of software patents, and hopefully expedites the severe restriction/outright end thereof. Kudos to Epicrealm for fighting for the right side, even if it is only accidentally.
The FreeBSD people? Hell, they were nice to them compared to the Konquerer/KHTML devs... At least they bragged about the powers of the code they stole and gave passing mention of it (I noticed it in someone's install process "Installing BSD, but it sucked 'till we gave it magic pixie dust powers" or something like that).
*Shudders at the image of a catatonic AOL user who somehow wandered onto slashdot from the fluffy, nonthreatening kittycat pages...*
Not that I don't appreciate all those AOL users, I work in a tech shop and they are my bread and butter (virus cleanups for $70 a pop 'cause AOL antivirus sucks, and the NAV "Scan for viruses" button is too scary...) Seriously, I had a woman panicking on the phone about pushing a button (perhaps shut down?) for fear of losing all her data, despite all the reassurance I could muster).
Honestly, I really am.
I expected Apple to hold off on anything that looks like TC until Microsoft could release it first. They have spent so many years establishing a 'good guy'/counterculture/'free thinker' image that it seems foolish to rush in and be the first to build something so patiently corporate.
They definitely couldn't hold off on this 'technology' forever, since their business plan seems to revolve around becoming the world's premier digital content provider, but I just expected them to place cooperate image above preparation for that switch in the near future (with MS Vista coming out so 'soon,' just begging to take the flack for 'destroying any digital rights we have left').
Then again I'm not Jobs, and so far, he's done a damn good job with Apple's image, so I'm sure it's a calculated risk.
Umm... I like binocular vision. Sure your point about the reduced impact of ocular damage/degeneration is valid, but I think you're being a little too flip about consiquences of damage to one of the body's most sensitive organs...
During the war he had worked as a radar operator, so he was able to envision a display system built around cathode ray tubes where the user could build models of information graphically and jump around dynamically to whatever interested them.
Wikipedia anyone?
Re:Weee, another publicity-drenched waste of time
on
Hack IIS6 Contest
·
· Score: 1
So why do it? There are very few places on the Internet where hackers, good and bad, can hack legally.
Most people here seem to be overlooking one thing: Yes, the open-source office software users do not have enough clout to force a switch, but a large part of that problem is the fracturing of users among the many viable options. The Abiword, Koffice, OO.o, and gnome suite users all have their own 'primary' formats (the is, the default format, and the one which the program best loads/saves). With the adoption of a real standard which unifies (essentially) all alternative software users makes all these users into a much more important and formitable group. Now we have a solid 3% of the desktop market (Linux users) plus everyone who uses OO.o to avoid the cost of buying Office/trouble of pirating it (which is another several percent).
Yes, this is small, but how many archaic formats does Office support that don't have a tenth that user base? In a version or two Office will certainly have support for odt. When that version is common enough, one will actually have slightly better chances of opening files with this format than office *.doc.
No, passing this standard won't force Microsoft to ship a native.odt Word next quarter, but it very well may be the little push alternative/FOSS software needs to become mainstream supported.
Actually, Isaac Asamov addresses this problem (of location) in one of the short stories in "Robot Visions." It's actually considered primarily in the other direction: forward in time (presubably because all past states are easier to know than future). Regardless, it's treated as somewhat important problem in this piece, and the solution involves relativity as in to the other reply's point.
You have to remember Apple wants to charge the lowest possible price for music. They just use it as a way of selling ipods, and don't make any money off of it.
Actually, to make the same profit as with CDs, companies can charge little over $0.25 (based on essentially eliminated product creation and distribution costs). There is a very large profit margin on music sales online. One could actually argue that if sales keep growing as they are now, Apple could adopt the game console/printer model of making the big purchase (iPod) lucrative through profit-loss sales, and pulling in all the money from the replacement of the exaustable supplies--lets be honest... who wants to hear most modern music more than a couple times? I'd say it's disposable;-).
I found CUPS configuration (for an HP 920c) to be a breeze, far easier than under Windows. Unforunately, under Windows, the "make prints look like ass" is disabled, but under Linux it's set by default, and I can't find anywhere to turn it off.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft: You've got questions. We've got a dancing paperclip. (patiently stolen)
You don't think so? I have absolutely no problem imagining people putting up with anything with a pretty, helpful sounding name, even if it rapes their rights. Case in point: The Patriot Act. Sounds nice but is part of the rapid decline of personal freedoms. Jack shit has been really done about it, and the rights for it are simple and easy to grasp. It's even well-publicised by opponents. Now imagine digital rights (TC, secure paths (like trusted moniters), and so on). Add the complete phobia of scary words (read: slightly techinical terms) and if the PA didn't get shredded in a week, we don't have a snowball's chance in hell of breaking TC-related technology. People are too willing to pay tons of money to have confusing technology 'just work' even if it works lots less well than the old stuff. I'm scared shitless, and everyone on /. should be, too.
Sure ACPI is a hardware issue, but you know what? I have dealt with huge messes in terms of hardware, and it didn't work with windows. Sure manufactures building total shit ACPI that doesn't even resemble the standards can make free OSs that depend on them choke for a while, even require a little work or, heaven forbid, thought. On the other hand, I could never get a friend's computer to install windows, and upon a little inspection, discovered that his motherboard was assigning EVERY IRQ to the same two lines, plus a failed IDE controller, and froze the whole thing constantly, plus there was no IRQ control in the BIOS. Sure making the thing work took a hell of a lot of compiling and custom Linuxing(and a stern warning about data non-safety), but it did, and it worked without a hitch, and continues to do so to this day. The point here is that as long as the way things really work is hidden, the OS is shit. If anything goes wrong that the little dancing paperclip can't help you fix, you're generally screwed.
KDE was a little heavy for my 1/4GB laptop (not to mention that until the new plastik, I wanted to gouge my eyes out whenever I opened a Qt app)... I find that OpenBox3 will run inside ~5meg + X overhead. I usually have about half my RAM available when I have a shitload of xterms, audio player, firefox, Gaim, thunderbird, xchat, kile, and a handful of other apps open.
Bah to both of those! '..' for two chars, or .* for flexible length instead of any of those. Viva la RegEx!
When will the labels figure this out? "Dear God! Those heathens are stealing our music! They must just be a generation that is more evil than any before!" NO. They are a generation that is being lied to and exploited more than any before. CDs should not be $15 EVER, and especially not $23. When CDs were released, the RIAA insisted that the new format cost pennies to make, and that the inital higher costs of the format were just to overcome the expense of the switch, and that CDs would quickly drop in price. Years later, the median price is substantially higher than tapes EVER were. They are gouging customers for music that (as revealed in a Playboy interview about a year ago) is regarded even by the artists as low-quality shit that is only good for radio sound bytes. Most 'artists' don't care about the real quality of their music, they only care about making big money from radio-friendly CDs that can sell big for a few weeks. How many tracks do modern bands throw away because they weren't up to snuff? Not a whole damn lot. How many did Led Zeppelin throw away? I've heard that as many as two-thirds of the stuff they recorded for some albums was never released, because it's wasn't good enough. People used to get together and talk about music.: really talk, not say they liked this or that song, but discuss album ordering and prduction techniques. How often does this happen any more? Damn near never, because music is pretty much all shit. RIAA: Release music worth spending a little money on and charge us a less offensive price per album; for the next format you realease, don't destroy every possible use of the music by protecting the hell out of it like you did SACDs. I guarantee that you will have sales climb. You can't depend on the latest technology to save your ass, despite attacking it as unethical and evil like the last two did (tapes and radio, by the way).
Honestly...
I haven't needed signature-based AV for over a year, and I've never gotten a virus. What's my AV? POSIX. Look at the safety record of POSIX OSs. Only about 40 known viruses for Linux (yes, technically, it's not officially tested, but it does comply with the Single Unix Specification) or MacOS X (I know, it does not quite comply, and has also not been approved either), about 6 for commercial UNIXs. Almost all of these viruses were proof-of-concepts, and none have been seen in the wild (largely because the concept they proved was promptly secured).
Actually, according to a study a few years ago, "password" is by far the most common password in use today. Your observation is perfectly in line with that...
Sad, eh?
Highly NOT recommended. I sell retail in the summers, and we get nearly as many of these back as we sell. Perhaps a later rev. of the hardware will be more reliable, but between the low power signal and high failure rate we see, I say stay away for a bit...
Why stop there? Viva La XPDF!
I'm frankly excited about the suit. No sitting judge could possibly hope to rule in favor of Epicrealm (at least not without an embarassing overturning by another judge). Every loss by a software-patent holding party weakens the whole idea of software patents, and hopefully expedites the severe restriction/outright end thereof. Kudos to Epicrealm for fighting for the right side, even if it is only accidentally.
The FreeBSD people? Hell, they were nice to them compared to the Konquerer/KHTML devs... At least they bragged about the powers of the code they stole and gave passing mention of it (I noticed it in someone's install process "Installing BSD, but it sucked 'till we gave it magic pixie dust powers" or something like that).
*Shudders at the image of a catatonic AOL user who somehow wandered onto slashdot from the fluffy, nonthreatening kittycat pages...*
Not that I don't appreciate all those AOL users, I work in a tech shop and they are my bread and butter (virus cleanups for $70 a pop 'cause AOL antivirus sucks, and the NAV "Scan for viruses" button is too scary...) Seriously, I had a woman panicking on the phone about pushing a button (perhaps shut down?) for fear of losing all her data, despite all the reassurance I could muster).
Honestly, I really am. I expected Apple to hold off on anything that looks like TC until Microsoft could release it first. They have spent so many years establishing a 'good guy'/counterculture/'free thinker' image that it seems foolish to rush in and be the first to build something so patiently corporate. They definitely couldn't hold off on this 'technology' forever, since their business plan seems to revolve around becoming the world's premier digital content provider, but I just expected them to place cooperate image above preparation for that switch in the near future (with MS Vista coming out so 'soon,' just begging to take the flack for 'destroying any digital rights we have left'). Then again I'm not Jobs, and so far, he's done a damn good job with Apple's image, so I'm sure it's a calculated risk.
Umm... I like binocular vision. Sure your point about the reduced impact of ocular damage/degeneration is valid, but I think you're being a little too flip about consiquences of damage to one of the body's most sensitive organs...
Censorship via penicillin! "My dog ate my homework" replaced by "my mom's medicine ate my homework" would be good fun, too...
No, they're Dvorak, obviously!
During the war he had worked as a radar operator, so he was able to envision a display system built around cathode ray tubes where the user could build models of information graphically and jump around dynamically to whatever interested them.
Wikipedia anyone?
So why do it? There are very few places on the Internet where hackers, good and bad, can hack legally.
Two words: "From Russia."
Most people here seem to be overlooking one thing: Yes, the open-source office software users do not have enough clout to force a switch, but a large part of that problem is the fracturing of users among the many viable options. The Abiword, Koffice, OO.o, and gnome suite users all have their own 'primary' formats (the is, the default format, and the one which the program best loads/saves). With the adoption of a real standard which unifies (essentially) all alternative software users makes all these users into a much more important and formitable group. Now we have a solid 3% of the desktop market (Linux users) plus everyone who uses OO.o to avoid the cost of buying Office/trouble of pirating it (which is another several percent).
.odt Word next quarter, but it very well may be the little push alternative/FOSS software needs to become mainstream supported.
Yes, this is small, but how many archaic formats does Office support that don't have a tenth that user base? In a version or two Office will certainly have support for odt. When that version is common enough, one will actually have slightly better chances of opening files with this format than office *.doc.
No, passing this standard won't force Microsoft to ship a native
Actually, Isaac Asamov addresses this problem (of location) in one of the short stories in "Robot Visions." It's actually considered primarily in the other direction: forward in time (presubably because all past states are easier to know than future). Regardless, it's treated as somewhat important problem in this piece, and the solution involves relativity as in to the other reply's point.
You have to remember Apple wants to charge the lowest possible price for music. They just use it as a way of selling ipods, and don't make any money off of it.
;-).
Actually, to make the same profit as with CDs, companies can charge little over $0.25 (based on essentially eliminated product creation and distribution costs). There is a very large profit margin on music sales online. One could actually argue that if sales keep growing as they are now, Apple could adopt the game console/printer model of making the big purchase (iPod) lucrative through profit-loss sales, and pulling in all the money from the replacement of the exaustable supplies--lets be honest... who wants to hear most modern music more than a couple times? I'd say it's disposable
I found CUPS configuration (for an HP 920c) to be a breeze, far easier than under Windows. Unforunately, under Windows, the "make prints look like ass" is disabled, but under Linux it's set by default, and I can't find anywhere to turn it off.