In the US, don't we have a 30 day cell phone contract escape clause? Where you can cancel cell contracts within 30 days of opening them - that way you're not screwed if they don't offer coverage in areas that are important to you.
When I first got a cell phone back in 2001, I had Cingular, and it had fantastic coverage everywhere I went - except home and work. But I was stuck in the contract. Fortunately for me, my purpose was as an emergency phone in case I broke down, etc; so actual home and work coverage was not that important.
Whatever this DNS thing is you're pointing out, it's not the first time it's happened, I am finding stuff from May 4, January, and even June 27 of last year with some of the same strings.
Except that we know many admins on Wikipedia have repeatedly abused their position to advance a point of view on a topic - sometimes even for a topic they have a vested personal interest in - and suppress an opposing view.
Who's to say that when an admin of Wikia Search also owns one or more sites in a given category, they won't use their power to repeatedly squash their competitor sites? And that when it comes up for review, their you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours admin friends won't be there to defend them?
Jimbo needs to do a lot of work in regard to increasing visibility of administrative process, and addressing administrative abuse (his typical response has been to blindly defend his admins).
If he doesn't, abuse will become a lot more rampant, a lot more widespread, and a lot more subtle since now we're talking about something which can directly affect profits of a company and those of its competitors.
No company has ever open sourced its goods without customers refusing to run non-open source software? Somebody should tell the many dozens of companies who have already done this.
You need an appropriate adoption level first if you want to force companies to open source. You won't get that adoption level unless users want to use the distribution, and users do not want to run a desktop without Youtube and software-rendered graphics.
Right, fast-tracking is for when you want to take the implementation of an existing established and widely used technology and turn it into a standard.
The reason it makes sense to fast track is because problems with it will already have been addressed by the creator of the technology, and spending a lot of time hypothesizing about potential problems within the ISO doesn't make much sense.
OOXML doesn't qualify, so they were already deviating from the intended purpose before they even began to debate the technology.
To determine the speed of law in a perfect vacuum, it seems like we have a common every day phenomenon that would answer this question accurately.
Just measure how fast statements from citizens about "constitutional rights" and "the good of the people" travel through one ear of an average politician and out the other.
W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium - they wouldn't work on a word processing (etc) standard document, though they might work on web-specific extensions to such a document.
I don't know if this is true with Phoenix or not, but it is true for Spirit & Opportunity and I have no reason to suspect it would be different for Phoenix.
The scientists are not really that interested in the visible light spectrum, the camera captures other wavelengths which are more telling of material composition and the like. They then use software to approximate that to colors the eyes would see, and which takes into account the likely appearance of objects (eg, Mars is likely to have a reddish tint on most things), but this is an approximation.
This is different from digital cameras which are also an approximation of sorts, but the wavelengths being captured by a standard digital camera is measuring the same wavelengths it's intending to output so the approximation is mostly a 3-channel color space approximation vs mapping non-visual spectrums to the visible spectrum.
That's why it's called false color - it's possible though unlikely that something is extremely reactive in a very narrow green band, but the camera completely missed it because it wasn't mapping that band.
RE #1: Says who? Every main stream DRM out there has been cracked. The very idea is flawed - you can't give a user everything he/she needs to play media while also preventing him/her from playing that media.
RE #2: This is what all DRM boils down to. Getting permission to use the media you already acquired the right to use.
It's an inherently customer-unfriendly practice. Look at users who bought music through the MSN music service. That service is going / has gone offline. Now those users can not upgrade their hardware without losing their music. They also had better hope they never need to reinstall Windows.
This past weekend I had a retro gaming set. I installed software that I used to play 10 years ago (some of it I had to run inside DOSBox). It was a blast. If the authentication servers are offline, I can't do this any longer even though it's my right.
I don't consider myself an abnormal user, but twice now I've had to call Audible (who sells DRM-wrapped audio books electronically) because I had run out of the number of activations of the dozens of books I had purchased. They warned me that I wouldn't be allowed to do this again - which is utter crap. The issue stemmed from my having had to reauthorize my media several times while attempting to repair my iPod (which never believed it was authorized to play the media).
Users hate DRM, and it's becoming increasingly something customers are aware of when making purchases.
3) Because of my long and very negative history with DRM, and because I'm increasingly allergic to the very idea of it, I will go without rather than purchase goods which are encumbered by it.
The only exception to that is the audiobooks I purchased through Audible - I consider them essential to the long commute I do, and there is neither a more convenient delivery mechanism for them, nor a system where I can acquire them as cheaply for as wide a selection as through Audible with an annual account.
I don't consider games as essential to me as audiobooks. I don't buy any encumbered music, though I buy several non-encumbered albums a month, mostly through Amazon MP3. I won't buy an encumbered game, because I'd rather do without entirely than have my rights crippled and experience the associated frustration.
RE: 4: If they could invent DRM which never once got in the way of my ability to legitimately use something I paid for, I wouldn't have a problem with it. No such thing exists though, because the very purpose is to be a tool that gets in the way of use.
The largest hubris is that he believes it's uncrackable. Modern game consoles have something similar, and they're defeated within a month or two of release, often with a mod chip soldered on the mainboard.
PC's would be easier because you could write a virtualization layer which the OS runs on top of; communications with the TPM chip could be intercepted, and specific valid game signatures could be captured from legitimate copies of the game, and used on illegitimate copies via the virtualization layer. Malware already exists at this level, it wouldn't be a long stretch to update it for gaming purposes.
Under such a scenario, when the majority of source files in a BSD project contain a snippet of GPL code, and that project can no longer build without those GPL snippets, then the project is effectively GPL since the GPL code has become inseparable from the BSD code.
Or else the exemption allows the code to become relicensed as BSD when included in a BSD project - then I can start a "GNU/Linux/BSD" project which is simply a repackaging of regular GNU/Linux under a BSD license.
It's not the place of the GPL to provide such an exception, it's the place of project owners to provide such an exception for their project if they desire it.
FWIW, there's some awesome stuff in BSD, but personally I feel like if I'm providing my code to you, and you find it useful the least you can do is provide your changes to my code back to me so the rest of the world can benefit.
It's true, you could be knocking off atoms but leaving behind their electrons.
But you'd be losing mass in the process unless you were also bombarding the object with neutron radiation, and the only if it were a material willing to take on the added neutrons. This would only work for so long before you possessed only low isotopes of your materials, eventually you'd run out of the ability to accept additional neutrons, doing so would be as likely to knock others off as to add new ones on.
In the process your molar count would be dropping, as you'd be knocking atoms off something, and that something would get brittle as you'd be tearing little holes in it. Neutron radiation also tends to make metals brittle, and cause the materials to emit gamma radiation as most high isotopes are radioactive (starting with hydrogen-2 deuterium to a small extent, hydrogen-3 tritium more so).
So you out-pedanted me =) But it's not very likely to be what's going on =)
I think since a positive charge is actually too few electrons, instead of solar wind carrying away the positive charge, it's depositing a negative charge (nothing is carried away).
It may be an issue that eventually enough charge is built up without any means of eliminating the excess that the voltage defeats conventional insulations.
Kinda feels more like iSheep to me. Two sheep do something. The other sheep don't really know why, but figure there's probably a good reason for it and start doing it too.
Instead of sheople, like Mac heads like to call PC users, it's sheepple.
The candidate base is much broader for voice talent than other types of acting.
High-paid movie actors need to be a good voice talent, plus they need to be attractive (not many unattractive actors bring in the big bucks), and they need to be good body actors (body language is significant).
The simple fact is that voice talent has fewer avenues to differentiate an individual from the pack. There are lots and lots of good voice actors, very few of them have name recognition allure, and the difference between good voice acting and great voice acting isn't discernable to most folks (so why pay the extra for a great voice actor when the difference lends no real value to your project?).
Frankly it's a lot like a professional cyclist being upset that he's not paid as much as a professional basketball player. There's so much less room for natural talent to make a differentiation, and in addition the demand, marketability, and name recognition is not nearly as high.
In my experience: Because the first time they try to do something new on it without you being around - but something they're comfortable doing under XP - they will revert back to what they know.
This is especially true if it gets in the way of them accomplishing what they're trying to do right now (that isn't exploring the OS).
Yeah. It makes you wonder why they bother with delivering TV shows or the OSes.
For the same reason manufacturing companies provide raw materials to their factories. These are the goods from which the final product (the money in your pocket) is produced.
The interesting thing about manufacturing is that there are many companies whose product is another company's raw material.
To media companies, your eyeballs are their product. They cultivate and fertilize it just like industrial farming. And just like industrial farming, they don't really care what's good for the product as long as it has sufficient yield.
To advertisers, your eyeballs are the raw material which they cook and add some yeast to, then let you ferment for a while, and in the end they hopefully produce a rich full-bodied pocketbook.
Don't mistake your place in the chain - if television was beer production, you'd be the malt or the hops growing in the field. Your only purpose is to be distilled and have all of your value drained away before being discarded as animal feed - after all, feces is an important fertilizer for growing malt and hops!
A lot of different distributions use the same sets of mirrors (eg, kernel.org, a lot of university sites, etc), so people downloading from single-stream sources like these would compete with each other much more than they do today.
You just end up 1 season behind the people who are willing to wade through the eternal bog that is broadcast and cable television. It's home-grown ala-carte TV.
I can't tell you the last time I found something interesting by flipping channels, I've reverted solely to pre-recorded shows, and even that is still a PITA compared to watching a DVD.
Not that I would of course, but if you were so inclined, you could use HandBrake + MetaX to record those DVD's to time-shift their viewing to a later date. Buy yourself a network SAN and a library front-end such as AppleTV, and never watch another commercial or worry about the broadcast flag again.
One is a user-friendly version, one is a developer-friendly version. Complaining about Synaptic Package Manager is like complaining about Registry Editor or Library entries on OSX.
A number of the developer packages (like Apache) aren't available in Add/Remove Applications because there's no way to provide a default install which would satisfy even most users, nor are normal users going to want a local web server. Putting them in here would needlessly clutter up this interface with packages only advanced users would be interested in - thus there's a clear need for separate package managers (though I'd buy the argument that it would be useful to put an "Advanced" button in the Add/Remove Applications which drops you into Synaptic, and vice-versa with a "Simple" button).
Even still, "apt-get install apache2" (or selecting apache2 from Synaptic) is still an order of magnitude easier than Windows or OSX.
I agree that collision between "Synaptic Package Manager" and "Synaptics Touchpad Driver" is unfortunate. At least they qualify the menu entry fully.
1) Click on Add/Remove Applications 2) Browse by category (Education, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Etc), search by keyword, search by description 3) Select the programs you want to install. 4) Unselect any programs you want to uninstall. 5) Click Apply
You don't have to Google to find the vendor website, you don't have to decide which of a dozen installers applies to you, you don't even have to know how to drag files to your Applications folder.
You also don't have to worry about software updates, you'll get a periodic notification with a digest of the available updates, unselect any you don't want to update if any, click update.
None of these programs leaves a little resident updater script eating 100mb of ram and 5% of your cpu. You don't have to worry about any of these programs being virus, spyware, or other malware. You don't have to worry about these programs requiring activation, collecting personal information, or costing any money.
This is better than anything Windows or OSX offers. It's easier, friendlier, and safer.
I tried noise canceling headphones to spare my hearing, but I did find this to be a bigger distraction than using an FM tuner for my ipod or playing CD's on my regular car stereo.
It's unfortunate, but part of being aware of the road requires hearing what's going on around you. This is especially true for horns or sirens, but also applies to having an additional sensory input of the position of cars around you such as a car in your blind spot.
In addition to losing a reasonably important sense, I also found that I paid more (too much) attention to the audiobook with headphones on.
Definitely more aware of it. If without an audiobook I am startled by a car in front of me braking, then listening to an audiobook my awareness reduces, I'm not just startled by the car in front of me braking, I'm also now a passenger in their car.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, don't we have a 30 day cell phone contract escape clause? Where you can cancel cell contracts within 30 days of opening them - that way you're not screwed if they don't offer coverage in areas that are important to you.
When I first got a cell phone back in 2001, I had Cingular, and it had fantastic coverage everywhere I went - except home and work. But I was stuck in the contract. Fortunately for me, my purpose was as an emergency phone in case I broke down, etc; so actual home and work coverage was not that important.
Whatever this DNS thing is you're pointing out, it's not the first time it's happened, I am finding stuff from May 4, January, and even June 27 of last year with some of the same strings.
Except that we know many admins on Wikipedia have repeatedly abused their position to advance a point of view on a topic - sometimes even for a topic they have a vested personal interest in - and suppress an opposing view.
Who's to say that when an admin of Wikia Search also owns one or more sites in a given category, they won't use their power to repeatedly squash their competitor sites? And that when it comes up for review, their you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours admin friends won't be there to defend them?
Jimbo needs to do a lot of work in regard to increasing visibility of administrative process, and addressing administrative abuse (his typical response has been to blindly defend his admins).
If he doesn't, abuse will become a lot more rampant, a lot more widespread, and a lot more subtle since now we're talking about something which can directly affect profits of a company and those of its competitors.
No company has ever open sourced its goods without customers refusing to run non-open source software? Somebody should tell the many dozens of companies who have already done this.
You need an appropriate adoption level first if you want to force companies to open source. You won't get that adoption level unless users want to use the distribution, and users do not want to run a desktop without Youtube and software-rendered graphics.
Right, fast-tracking is for when you want to take the implementation of an existing established and widely used technology and turn it into a standard.
The reason it makes sense to fast track is because problems with it will already have been addressed by the creator of the technology, and spending a lot of time hypothesizing about potential problems within the ISO doesn't make much sense.
OOXML doesn't qualify, so they were already deviating from the intended purpose before they even began to debate the technology.
To determine the speed of law in a perfect vacuum, it seems like we have a common every day phenomenon that would answer this question accurately.
Just measure how fast statements from citizens about "constitutional rights" and "the good of the people" travel through one ear of an average politician and out the other.
W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium - they wouldn't work on a word processing (etc) standard document, though they might work on web-specific extensions to such a document.
I don't know if this is true with Phoenix or not, but it is true for Spirit & Opportunity and I have no reason to suspect it would be different for Phoenix.
The scientists are not really that interested in the visible light spectrum, the camera captures other wavelengths which are more telling of material composition and the like. They then use software to approximate that to colors the eyes would see, and which takes into account the likely appearance of objects (eg, Mars is likely to have a reddish tint on most things), but this is an approximation.
This is different from digital cameras which are also an approximation of sorts, but the wavelengths being captured by a standard digital camera is measuring the same wavelengths it's intending to output so the approximation is mostly a 3-channel color space approximation vs mapping non-visual spectrums to the visible spectrum.
That's why it's called false color - it's possible though unlikely that something is extremely reactive in a very narrow green band, but the camera completely missed it because it wasn't mapping that band.
No they won't! Wikipedia disagrees with you!
RE #1: Says who? Every main stream DRM out there has been cracked. The very idea is flawed - you can't give a user everything he/she needs to play media while also preventing him/her from playing that media.
RE #2: This is what all DRM boils down to. Getting permission to use the media you already acquired the right to use.
It's an inherently customer-unfriendly practice. Look at users who bought music through the MSN music service. That service is going / has gone offline. Now those users can not upgrade their hardware without losing their music. They also had better hope they never need to reinstall Windows.
This past weekend I had a retro gaming set. I installed software that I used to play 10 years ago (some of it I had to run inside DOSBox). It was a blast. If the authentication servers are offline, I can't do this any longer even though it's my right.
I don't consider myself an abnormal user, but twice now I've had to call Audible (who sells DRM-wrapped audio books electronically) because I had run out of the number of activations of the dozens of books I had purchased. They warned me that I wouldn't be allowed to do this again - which is utter crap. The issue stemmed from my having had to reauthorize my media several times while attempting to repair my iPod (which never believed it was authorized to play the media).
Users hate DRM, and it's becoming increasingly something customers are aware of when making purchases.
3) Because of my long and very negative history with DRM, and because I'm increasingly allergic to the very idea of it, I will go without rather than purchase goods which are encumbered by it.
The only exception to that is the audiobooks I purchased through Audible - I consider them essential to the long commute I do, and there is neither a more convenient delivery mechanism for them, nor a system where I can acquire them as cheaply for as wide a selection as through Audible with an annual account.
I don't consider games as essential to me as audiobooks. I don't buy any encumbered music, though I buy several non-encumbered albums a month, mostly through Amazon MP3. I won't buy an encumbered game, because I'd rather do without entirely than have my rights crippled and experience the associated frustration.
RE: 4: If they could invent DRM which never once got in the way of my ability to legitimately use something I paid for, I wouldn't have a problem with it. No such thing exists though, because the very purpose is to be a tool that gets in the way of use.
The largest hubris is that he believes it's uncrackable. Modern game consoles have something similar, and they're defeated within a month or two of release, often with a mod chip soldered on the mainboard.
PC's would be easier because you could write a virtualization layer which the OS runs on top of; communications with the TPM chip could be intercepted, and specific valid game signatures could be captured from legitimate copies of the game, and used on illegitimate copies via the virtualization layer. Malware already exists at this level, it wouldn't be a long stretch to update it for gaming purposes.
Under such a scenario, when the majority of source files in a BSD project contain a snippet of GPL code, and that project can no longer build without those GPL snippets, then the project is effectively GPL since the GPL code has become inseparable from the BSD code.
Or else the exemption allows the code to become relicensed as BSD when included in a BSD project - then I can start a "GNU/Linux/BSD" project which is simply a repackaging of regular GNU/Linux under a BSD license.
It's not the place of the GPL to provide such an exception, it's the place of project owners to provide such an exception for their project if they desire it.
FWIW, there's some awesome stuff in BSD, but personally I feel like if I'm providing my code to you, and you find it useful the least you can do is provide your changes to my code back to me so the rest of the world can benefit.
It's true, you could be knocking off atoms but leaving behind their electrons.
But you'd be losing mass in the process unless you were also bombarding the object with neutron radiation, and the only if it were a material willing to take on the added neutrons. This would only work for so long before you possessed only low isotopes of your materials, eventually you'd run out of the ability to accept additional neutrons, doing so would be as likely to knock others off as to add new ones on.
In the process your molar count would be dropping, as you'd be knocking atoms off something, and that something would get brittle as you'd be tearing little holes in it. Neutron radiation also tends to make metals brittle, and cause the materials to emit gamma radiation as most high isotopes are radioactive (starting with hydrogen-2 deuterium to a small extent, hydrogen-3 tritium more so).
So you out-pedanted me =) But it's not very likely to be what's going on =)
I think since a positive charge is actually too few electrons, instead of solar wind carrying away the positive charge, it's depositing a negative charge (nothing is carried away).
It may be an issue that eventually enough charge is built up without any means of eliminating the excess that the voltage defeats conventional insulations.
Kinda feels more like iSheep to me. Two sheep do something. The other sheep don't really know why, but figure there's probably a good reason for it and start doing it too.
Instead of sheople, like Mac heads like to call PC users, it's sheepple.
The candidate base is much broader for voice talent than other types of acting.
High-paid movie actors need to be a good voice talent, plus they need to be attractive (not many unattractive actors bring in the big bucks), and they need to be good body actors (body language is significant).
The simple fact is that voice talent has fewer avenues to differentiate an individual from the pack. There are lots and lots of good voice actors, very few of them have name recognition allure, and the difference between good voice acting and great voice acting isn't discernable to most folks (so why pay the extra for a great voice actor when the difference lends no real value to your project?).
Frankly it's a lot like a professional cyclist being upset that he's not paid as much as a professional basketball player. There's so much less room for natural talent to make a differentiation, and in addition the demand, marketability, and name recognition is not nearly as high.
Nor is chroot intended as a security tool, even though it's widely used as such. It's quite possible to break out of chroot jail.
In my experience: Because the first time they try to do something new on it without you being around - but something they're comfortable doing under XP - they will revert back to what they know.
This is especially true if it gets in the way of them accomplishing what they're trying to do right now (that isn't exploring the OS).
The interesting thing about manufacturing is that there are many companies whose product is another company's raw material.
To media companies, your eyeballs are their product. They cultivate and fertilize it just like industrial farming. And just like industrial farming, they don't really care what's good for the product as long as it has sufficient yield.
To advertisers, your eyeballs are the raw material which they cook and add some yeast to, then let you ferment for a while, and in the end they hopefully produce a rich full-bodied pocketbook.
Don't mistake your place in the chain - if television was beer production, you'd be the malt or the hops growing in the field. Your only purpose is to be distilled and have all of your value drained away before being discarded as animal feed - after all, feces is an important fertilizer for growing malt and hops!
A lot of different distributions use the same sets of mirrors (eg, kernel.org, a lot of university sites, etc), so people downloading from single-stream sources like these would compete with each other much more than they do today.
On the other hand, BitTorrent.
Netflix + seasons of DVDs = cheaper, commercial free, restriction-free viewing.
You just end up 1 season behind the people who are willing to wade through the eternal bog that is broadcast and cable television. It's home-grown ala-carte TV.
I can't tell you the last time I found something interesting by flipping channels, I've reverted solely to pre-recorded shows, and even that is still a PITA compared to watching a DVD.
Not that I would of course, but if you were so inclined, you could use HandBrake + MetaX to record those DVD's to time-shift their viewing to a later date. Buy yourself a network SAN and a library front-end such as AppleTV, and never watch another commercial or worry about the broadcast flag again.
One is a user-friendly version, one is a developer-friendly version. Complaining about Synaptic Package Manager is like complaining about Registry Editor or Library entries on OSX.
A number of the developer packages (like Apache) aren't available in Add/Remove Applications because there's no way to provide a default install which would satisfy even most users, nor are normal users going to want a local web server. Putting them in here would needlessly clutter up this interface with packages only advanced users would be interested in - thus there's a clear need for separate package managers (though I'd buy the argument that it would be useful to put an "Advanced" button in the Add/Remove Applications which drops you into Synaptic, and vice-versa with a "Simple" button).
Even still, "apt-get install apache2" (or selecting apache2 from Synaptic) is still an order of magnitude easier than Windows or OSX.
I agree that collision between "Synaptic Package Manager" and "Synaptics Touchpad Driver" is unfortunate. At least they qualify the menu entry fully.
Allow me to userify it for you:
1) Click on Add/Remove Applications
2) Browse by category (Education, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Etc), search by keyword, search by description
3) Select the programs you want to install.
4) Unselect any programs you want to uninstall.
5) Click Apply
You don't have to Google to find the vendor website, you don't have to decide which of a dozen installers applies to you, you don't even have to know how to drag files to your Applications folder.
You also don't have to worry about software updates, you'll get a periodic notification with a digest of the available updates, unselect any you don't want to update if any, click update.
None of these programs leaves a little resident updater script eating 100mb of ram and 5% of your cpu. You don't have to worry about any of these programs being virus, spyware, or other malware. You don't have to worry about these programs requiring activation, collecting personal information, or costing any money.
This is better than anything Windows or OSX offers. It's easier, friendlier, and safer.
I tried noise canceling headphones to spare my hearing, but I did find this to be a bigger distraction than using an FM tuner for my ipod or playing CD's on my regular car stereo.
It's unfortunate, but part of being aware of the road requires hearing what's going on around you. This is especially true for horns or sirens, but also applies to having an additional sensory input of the position of cars around you such as a car in your blind spot.
In addition to losing a reasonably important sense, I also found that I paid more (too much) attention to the audiobook with headphones on.
Definitely more aware of it. If without an audiobook I am startled by a car in front of me braking, then listening to an audiobook my awareness reduces, I'm not just startled by the car in front of me braking, I'm also now a passenger in their car.