Getting really tired of hearing this. Nothing is finely tuned for life. As far as we know, it takes certain conditions for very complex life to form, but that simply means that complex life will only form in those conditions, and here we are. If there were no regions in this universe with the right conditions for complex life we would not be here.
I used Ubuntu for about a year and a half. When unity came out, I gave it a try, quit using Ubuntu entirely because of it. Now I use windows and kind of dislike it but whatever. At least everything worked for me without having to tweak anything. I do miss several really nice features, though. But not enough to want to return.
Ubuntu had a decent mix of ease-of-maintenance and ease-of-use, and then they ditched the ease of use and added an app store.
Your rights are only worth anything if you have the means to actually defend them. In legal theory this is not the case, your rights are supposed to be intrinsic. But in actual reality, this is exactly the case, since money and power can exert pressure and pressure can remove your ability to fight back or (more likely) make the expenditure involved more than you are willing to expend.
So yes, the right to fair use no longer exists practically. Your rights can be overridden by funding. You can be shut up by enough money.
They're not challenging consoles. They're becoming consoles. Locked-down hardware, closed internals, gatekeeper needing to sign software, set-top equipment... that's a console. Its not LIKE a console, it IS one.
So now that they've finally bloated it to the point that it looks like and slugs like one of the apps I'll never ever allow on my computer and absolutely hate the look and feel of (itunes), what good alternatives are there for someone who just wants to auto-download RSS-feed-driven podcast type videos automatically?
Bonus points for not having a web browser or video player inside it. I have a web browser. I have a video player. Both are better than any embedded one could ever be.
Except that in the USA that kind of limitation has a very specific life-and-limb type of specification. "Harming the public order" etc is VERY nebulous and can be interpreted by those in power as anything which harms THEIR order.
To me, some of the design choices seem to be pretty poor - most specifically with the "Unified menu" thing. Now, I do like the idea of using the extra space along the top for the menu - that makes sense. Just look at firefox 4 with the menu collapsed into a button and the tabs along the top, for example.
What doesn't make sense is that the close buttons and menus there appear even from non-maximized apps. This is copying apple without actual Human Interface Design justification. Its copying a bad decision for a bad reason. There's nothing wrong with folding the menus and close buttons into the top bar when the window is maximised, but when its floating those menus and close buttons need to follow the window around, like a mini top bar of its own. Otherwise it gets really confusing fast.
He didn't have them over a barrel. They had bottomless pockets and could keep him coming back to court every day for the rest of his life, and it wouldn't even make them flinch.
This is how big money uses the legal system.
He was backed into a corner by sheer weight of cash, and got a terrible one sided deal out of it.
But... but... but I just switched to ubuntu like, 8 months ago and its been the best desktop OS I ever used! But then again, I do have this habit of climbing onto sinking ships...
To be fair, I'd love to advocate linux to everyone I know, but e.g. the #1 reason they can't is that they use Photoshop, or Netflix, or Zune Marketplace, or whatever other flavor of application, so game over. The 'use gimp' argument is not even worth laughing at anymore. And the "use vmware" argument completely misses the point. And WINE just isn't good enough. And its not WINEs fault, really.
So yeah. Its not about the OS. Its about the applications. The number one barrier is not that the OS doesn't boot in 10 seconds. It's not the wallpaper. Its not the desktop usability. Its not the price. Its not driver compatibility (anymore). Its not network setup. Its not web browser. Its not the window style. Its not where the indicators are. Its not what edge of the screen the menus are on. Its not the presence or absence of a dock. Its applications (or lack thereof).
Until that changes, we'll get nowhere. Nobody mainstream cares about software freedom. Nobody mainstream cares about security. They only care that Netflix doesn't work and they can't sync their Zune, and Team Fortress 2 runs at 30 fps (or not at all) instead of 200fps.
The browser vendors' fetishistic obsession with Javascript speed is most irritating.
I'd love to see them concentrate on startup speed and memory usage and rendering speed instead. On the windows machine I use at work, I have to run a third party service which runs in the background and keeps most of it resident, just so that it takes a couple seconds to start up instead of half a minute.
I like how folks are going on about how being able to rent / resell their games make it worth having it in disk form.
Meanwhile, the big names in the industry are starting to do everything they can to prevent resale, or even rental. Its only a matter of time before they finally just go for it and make it so that they all ship with the one-time-use "premium content unlock code" and become demos without it. Ubisoft has already begun down this path - and so has EA. Soon your 60 buck game will have 0 resell value.
I prefer the simpler "For every new law you make two must be removed."
It will be easy at first.
And I'm talking law, the constitution is of course off limits:)
You're missing the fact that the chip itself gets an encrypted HDCP stream (that's the whole point of end-to-end encryption) and thus needs to be blu-ray (HDCP) compliant and needs to do decryption and thus have decryption keys from sony. To get those keys you (as a chip manufacturer) need to sign a ginormous 'you're screwed if these ever leak' document that is very scary.
Besides the obvious (binaries), its still the only 'universal' discussion group format. If you're looking for a discussion of a tech bit, (some code) for example, especially, you can search google groups and get EVERY newsgroup.
But its been on the decline. More and more online forums have been replacing it for discussion, tips, help. Unfortunately, there are no standards for those, each one seems to operate differntly, so they get searched and catalogued just like the rest of the web.
It makes it harder to seperate discussion-like content from page content, and on top of it, a lot of them now require logins and stuff, or turn off spidering completely to the threads inside their forum, meaning a lot of the information is pretty much lost forever.
Actually reading the page comparison, it seems like its not as bad as this article suggests.
It still says he supports network neutrality, it just no longer goes onto a rambling long paragraph explaining it. It still says he wants to protect the first ammendment, it no longer goes into a tirade about porn.
Basically, its been optimized to not put someone asleep.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing most of it is astroturfing. They are up against folks with a lot of money who find their image to be important, after all.
Getting really tired of hearing this. Nothing is finely tuned for life. As far as we know, it takes certain conditions for very complex life to form, but that simply means that complex life will only form in those conditions, and here we are. If there were no regions in this universe with the right conditions for complex life we would not be here.
Its okay. If that happens I'll switch away from them too. It hasn't happened yet, so I'll stick where I am.
I used Ubuntu for about a year and a half. When unity came out, I gave it a try, quit using Ubuntu entirely because of it. Now I use windows and kind of dislike it but whatever. At least everything worked for me without having to tweak anything. I do miss several really nice features, though. But not enough to want to return. Ubuntu had a decent mix of ease-of-maintenance and ease-of-use, and then they ditched the ease of use and added an app store.
Your rights are only worth anything if you have the means to actually defend them. In legal theory this is not the case, your rights are supposed to be intrinsic. But in actual reality, this is exactly the case, since money and power can exert pressure and pressure can remove your ability to fight back or (more likely) make the expenditure involved more than you are willing to expend. So yes, the right to fair use no longer exists practically. Your rights can be overridden by funding. You can be shut up by enough money.
They're not challenging consoles. They're becoming consoles. Locked-down hardware, closed internals, gatekeeper needing to sign software, set-top equipment... that's a console. Its not LIKE a console, it IS one.
me
So now that they've finally bloated it to the point that it looks like and slugs like one of the apps I'll never ever allow on my computer and absolutely hate the look and feel of (itunes), what good alternatives are there for someone who just wants to auto-download RSS-feed-driven podcast type videos automatically? Bonus points for not having a web browser or video player inside it. I have a web browser. I have a video player. Both are better than any embedded one could ever be.
Except that in the USA that kind of limitation has a very specific life-and-limb type of specification. "Harming the public order" etc is VERY nebulous and can be interpreted by those in power as anything which harms THEIR order.
To me, some of the design choices seem to be pretty poor - most specifically with the "Unified menu" thing. Now, I do like the idea of using the extra space along the top for the menu - that makes sense. Just look at firefox 4 with the menu collapsed into a button and the tabs along the top, for example. What doesn't make sense is that the close buttons and menus there appear even from non-maximized apps. This is copying apple without actual Human Interface Design justification. Its copying a bad decision for a bad reason. There's nothing wrong with folding the menus and close buttons into the top bar when the window is maximised, but when its floating those menus and close buttons need to follow the window around, like a mini top bar of its own. Otherwise it gets really confusing fast.
He didn't have them over a barrel. They had bottomless pockets and could keep him coming back to court every day for the rest of his life, and it wouldn't even make them flinch. This is how big money uses the legal system. He was backed into a corner by sheer weight of cash, and got a terrible one sided deal out of it.
But... but... but I just switched to ubuntu like, 8 months ago and its been the best desktop OS I ever used! But then again, I do have this habit of climbing onto sinking ships...
To be fair, I'd love to advocate linux to everyone I know, but e.g. the #1 reason they can't is that they use Photoshop, or Netflix, or Zune Marketplace, or whatever other flavor of application, so game over. The 'use gimp' argument is not even worth laughing at anymore. And the "use vmware" argument completely misses the point. And WINE just isn't good enough. And its not WINEs fault, really.
So yeah. Its not about the OS. Its about the applications. The number one barrier is not that the OS doesn't boot in 10 seconds. It's not the wallpaper. Its not the desktop usability. Its not the price. Its not driver compatibility (anymore). Its not network setup. Its not web browser. Its not the window style. Its not where the indicators are. Its not what edge of the screen the menus are on. Its not the presence or absence of a dock. Its applications (or lack thereof).
Until that changes, we'll get nowhere. Nobody mainstream cares about software freedom. Nobody mainstream cares about security. They only care that Netflix doesn't work and they can't sync their Zune, and Team Fortress 2 runs at 30 fps (or not at all) instead of 200fps.
Don't they know that in south africa its 50% off if you pay the police in cash when they stop you?
Its a good thing that all evil robots are required to have glowing red eyes or we'd be in serious trouble
The browser vendors' fetishistic obsession with Javascript speed is most irritating.
I'd love to see them concentrate on startup speed and memory usage and rendering speed instead. On the windows machine I use at work, I have to run a third party service which runs in the background and keeps most of it resident, just so that it takes a couple seconds to start up instead of half a minute.
I'd be one of those subversives sitting on the ad-free internet, and enjoying every minute. Just like it was back before corporations took it over.
I like how folks are going on about how being able to rent / resell their games make it worth having it in disk form. Meanwhile, the big names in the industry are starting to do everything they can to prevent resale, or even rental. Its only a matter of time before they finally just go for it and make it so that they all ship with the one-time-use "premium content unlock code" and become demos without it. Ubisoft has already begun down this path - and so has EA. Soon your 60 buck game will have 0 resell value.
They'll just garnish your wages for the rest of your life. Welcome to slave labor for the RIAA, folks. And yes, it happens.
I prefer the simpler "For every new law you make two must be removed." It will be easy at first. And I'm talking law, the constitution is of course off limits :)
You're missing the fact that the chip itself gets an encrypted HDCP stream (that's the whole point of end-to-end encryption) and thus needs to be blu-ray (HDCP) compliant and needs to do decryption and thus have decryption keys from sony. To get those keys you (as a chip manufacturer) need to sign a ginormous 'you're screwed if these ever leak' document that is very scary.
You can't cut back on funding! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!
Trade secrets are actually another area of law, and are already covered by various laws and penalties.
Sounds like the website needs to do the same thing the torrent websites do and host over in another country, ignoring the law entirely.
But its been on the decline. More and more online forums have been replacing it for discussion, tips, help. Unfortunately, there are no standards for those, each one seems to operate differntly, so they get searched and catalogued just like the rest of the web.
It makes it harder to seperate discussion-like content from page content, and on top of it, a lot of them now require logins and stuff, or turn off spidering completely to the threads inside their forum, meaning a lot of the information is pretty much lost forever.
Actually reading the page comparison, it seems like its not as bad as this article suggests. It still says he supports network neutrality, it just no longer goes onto a rambling long paragraph explaining it. It still says he wants to protect the first ammendment, it no longer goes into a tirade about porn. Basically, its been optimized to not put someone asleep.