I was thinking the exact same thing. However, I am sure that they would have people checking his computer every week or so to make sure he does not have Linux on it (of course he could run a live CD, maybe they will take those and bar him from burning CDs? He did, after all, run the 'illegal' torrent site).
Evading in my opinion by using Linux secretly can only make things worse in this case. The US government is awful at all times.
Yeah I agree with this post, although I wish I could get my Skype phone working now (I hope in the future). I use Gentoo and it is amazing (even though I broke it twice, now I am good). I am buying a new wireless card (MiniPCI and hacking my BIOS to make it work) and I am buying a new scanner, all for Linux compatibility. Non-interoperability from companies is absolutely ridiculous. And I know Mac users in general just buy new machines but I think hardware should be supported there too. Hopefully ASUS with open source drivers will influence the other companies to make open source drivers.
Getting my hands dirty at first made me only use Linux on and off the past 3 years, but this year I really got my hands dirty first with Kubuntu then Xubuntu then Ubuntu then back to Kubuntu and finally onto Gentoo. It is completely worth it to learn UNIX, and I almost always have Konsole open doing something. The only thing I cannot agree with you on is hating the command line (I absolutely love it, even on Windows it is great).
My advice also is to keep XP on a partition for things that just do not work in Linux or has no equivalent. Games especially, and some specialised software. I use Magic File Renamer (still have not found a good equivalent, KRename and others just do not do what this does) and foobar2000 in Windows to tag MP3s (sometimes with a virtual machine); just cannot find anything as easy to use in Linux (both sort of work on Wine, not 100%). I play RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 a lot on Windows, and a few other games. Project64 (a Nintendo 64 emulator) causes a black screen with Wine and thus does not work (Mupen64 is not as good and some of the plugins refuse to build for AMD64 at this time). Neither does VirtualDub also causing a black screen (and I still cannot find a Linux equivalent of this); GordianKnot works with Wine but it requires that VirtualDub and AviSynth are able to work. I use GordianKnot in Windows to rip DVDs to XviD still. I still have yet to try k9copy and some others like Thoggen but I am afraid the quality might not be as high. I also could not get Handbrake to build for AMD64 (Gentoo). I am also not sure dvd9to5 could match the quality of DVD Rebuilder with CCE.
I do not think it is really okay to pirate games but the fact is you cannot test out these games at the store to see if they are really worth the $50 and now $60 they are going to be. $50 is a lot of money in my opinion (even though software is often hundreds or thousands). I have purchased games when they are at a decent price even if it that means waiting till they are (often years from their release date).
Maybe what stores and online stores should do is give a demo. In the store, they should have every game's demo installed on a PC (this really would not be very hard, even a newbie at a PC could do this), and no company should not make a demo of their game in my opinion.
I know they are already doing this with Vista's game explorer but I hate Vista anyway. I know the game sites often have demos but these should be linked directly from online stores. And the downloadable demo should be playable without installing, it should be available as a zip (I absolutely hate installers, because you lose almost all control of what it will do).
The reason stores keep their kiosk mode browser on the laptops and PCs is because they do not want customers to find out how lousy Vista is. And same for the game stores, which have Vista's game explorer going all day. This is a kiosk app as well and they are not selling Vista but Microsoft could easily sue for misrepresentation.
Perhaps a free game demo (including free, and free and open source games) package manager would be a good idea? Hmm... *goes to make one*
If software companies (including game companies) are going to survive when open source is taking over, the only way to do it I would say is to provide store (including online store) demos. Then people can make an informed decision, whether it is to blow $50 on a game they might not like, or hundreds on software that is completely garbage (Windows Vista). When you get a car, you test drive it, don't you? Same should be for software.
I think I am going to demo (real demos, not downloading from "illegal" sources) new games from here on out and then decide if I am going to buy them, but maybe only when the price is under $30. $30 is a little bit unreasonable to me even, but it is much better than $60 or $50. It saves time and disk space and possibly DVDs/CDs.
Truthfully, I am addicted to Crack Attack, KPoker, Dopewars, and Same GNOME on Linux now. Great games.
They are afraid that once someone with a lot of time on their hands gets one of these cards they are going to hack it (to get all channels unrestricted, and maybe even surpass copy flags) and then release all details to the web. That is really all it is. I am sure the cable companies are urging all companies not to promote CableCard as they think it is not a very secure, and they have not so much prior experience with hacks regarding cards as companies like DirecTV and Dish Network do.
Once someone hacks this card, and everyone else does, the cable companies might have no choice but to kill that revision of the card remotely and have to send new cards to all customers, which would be "fixed," or reflash the cards remotely (which of course could mean downtime at the customers' ends, for those who watch late night, when they send updates to their boxes). The problem is then this cycle starts all over again. In other words, release card, someone hacks it, flash all cards, someone hacks it again, flash all cards again, someone hacks it yet again, and etc etc.
This is not much different than Sony releasing new firmware for the PSP, blocking homebrew, hacks and pirated games from playing, and then just waiting for someone to crack it before they release new firmware. Only one release of their new firmware really added new features thus far. The rest are all copy protection fixes. And sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes months before the new firmware is hacked in some way, but it seems crackers never sleep.
I understand their dilemma but perhaps they should stop trying to shove 50 channels of stuff we do not want to watch and start providing REAL customer service, like custom channels at a DECENT price. Comcast here is over ~$60/month just for "digital cable" (where 1-99 are analogue for compatibility reasons, because it is easier on their side, even though they could easily make the box get digital channels of those) with HBO. Add slow internet (supposedly 4Mbps but I never see it, and BitTorrent traffic shaping on their end) and decent phone service and that is (likely over) ~$150/month ($15 off the total price for having all 3 services).
It is absolutely unacceptable the only other option for TV service is satellite, and while good (ALL digital channels, and more HD than cable) it does not provide the compatibility with older sets without a box, and internet service on it is completely unacceptable. And also there is no satellite phone service to make a package any cheaper. I really cannot believe how communities can think having ONE company for cable service is a good idea somehow. I used to live in a different town and Charter was the provider there, and if I had to choose I would definitely choose theirs. The box you get with Comcast is incredibly slow with a crappy interface, just completely unacceptable for the price you pay. Charter's box was very fast, a nice simple interface, and their internet service was cheaper and far better than Comcast's will ever be. Add the fact that they are also doing fiber optics soon.
My opinion is Comcast should not be allowed to exist. And there is no doubt in my mind that they pay off town governments to own the areas they have now, and it is only a short amount of time before they own everywhere.
I do the exact same thing. I used to pirate like crazy and still have a lot of pirated things, and still pirate some things; it used to be like an addiction. Having the latest and greatest, cracked and working just felt good, especially for free. The problem is there is a risk of getting caught, even if you are not a cracker or "supplier", and I never planned on using Photoshop CS2 cracked for commercial purposes simply because I find that to be "wrong" in some way.
After some time of pirating, I began to find a lot of freeware (Windows has so much) and a lot of free and open source apps as well. I would say it probably started with Firefox years ago (although IE is free with Windows, which I always pirated). Then I looked into switching from Outlook Express to Thunderbird, did that successfully and I am still very happy with Thunderbird (hope the new team does not mess it up). I started using so much freeware and free software; most of my software on my Windows partition is freeware or free software, and I have replaced commercial programs with free ones; for example, I have removed MS Office and put OpenOffice and I have removed Photoshop CS2 in favour of GIMP (I really think anything that can be done in Photoshop can be done with GIMP). This year I have really started to use Linux a lot, starting with Kubuntu, now Gentoo AMD64. I am hardly ever on Windows and when I am it is to generate an nLite Windows XP for a friend or myself, to play games, or emulators that are not on Linux (Project64) or that do not work well on Linux yet. Also my Skype phone does not work in Linux at all, and my PS2 controller to USB adapter only sort of works. I learn a new thing in Linux just about every day, and I love it.
My friends constantly ask why I detest using commercial programs. They say things like "Well, I'm not a programmer so why do I need open source?" or things like "Why use X when you can just download Y?" For example, GIMP over Photoshop. A lot of them use Firefox but they almost never use freeware, and really like downloading software off torrents and using cracks and keygens, etc. I thought the idea of cracking software was really cool at one point, and it still does prove skill to me, but right now I see no point (other than games and software with dongles, because having to put in the CD or dongle JUST for the protection is absolutely ridiculous to me). What my friends and people who pirate do not realise is that they are only perpetuating the problem of companies using 'better' protections on their software and soon software may just take forever and crackers will just give up, because if I were a cracker, I would never spend more than 24 man hours on a crack. The companies will not stop using protections until piracy goes down, and hopefully when it does, everyone who pirated will be using free alternatives instead anyway.
Now if the software was sold at a decent price then of course people would perhaps not pirate, but I see almost NO reason to pirate software (excluding games) today when there is almost ALWAYS a viable free (or free and open source) alternative with no strings attached. Yet, there are so many people out there willing to use pirated software (even for commercial ends) just because market share to them represents quality. It is a really bad situation, and it affects the open source movement a lot in my opinion. How can open source prove itself to be better than pirating the so-called 'latest and greatest' from X company to the kid out there with no money?
That will not happen, because we have idiots in the government who truly believe big business (who always pays them off) can do all the work and are better than having government works do it. To support this, they say too much government will result in socialism/communism. I probably will leave this country because other countries WITH socialist parties and such seem to have a lot more emphasis on the people.
It's more like anything Anti-Anything-That-Is-Good-for-the-People. And it is too bad, it's not just so-called "repulicans"; both sides of government are pretty corrupt in this nation (USA), states included.
I do not know whether it is even worth to bother voting anymore. Both sides (the names we actually hear about) always get campaign money from big business and obviously will cater to those businesses when in office, so I do not see why a party makes a difference any more.
Until we have fair elections where everyone may participate, where everyone has a fair chance (perhaps the government should sponsor people? Yeah right, that would never happen), I cannot trust the government at all. The government right now is just a bunch of rich people (mostly lawyers) who know nothing about anything and only cater to big business. I know I do not have to pull out sources or examples to demonstrate this at all.
Uh, Adobe Reader 7 and 8 are both fast when you disable all the unnecessary programs. I've used a number of PDF viewers on Windows, and the best one as far as speed I've tried is SumatraPDF (a free GPL viewer). The problem is that not all the viewers, especially Foxit, view EVERYTHING correctly and I like to think you are guaranteed a correct viewing with Adobe's software since they own the specification. I much prefer to use Adobe Reader 8 with almost all plugins disabled, and I disable the Speed Launcher. It still loads very quickly and is much more reliable than using anything else. On Linux, my favourite viewer is KPDF, not Adobe's.
The problem is that doctors (and so many others) in America get paid too much. You think they want to get paid less all of a sudden with "lowered costs of healthcare"? I agree and want socialised healthcare and I am willing to pay the taxes but in America apparently no amount of money is good enough for anyone.
I completely agree. This web 2.0 nonsense is getting out of hand. Web has no version number. When was there web 1.0? Is it now? It's not an application last time I check.
What is the complete definition of web 2.0? Sounds to me like some people think it's flash which I totally disagree with. And others think it's conformance to W3C standards, completely separating content from formatting (HTML and CSS, and of course PHP) (which I would mostly agree with).
Then what are you complaining about? I think Adobe realises in the future that they might have to port x86-64 but for the time being x86-64 runs 32-bit apps perfectly even in 64-bit mode, and of course, most of the computers out there are running in x86 mode even if they support x86-64 (Plenty of AMD and Intel processors out there sold still running Windows (or Mac OS X) in 32-bit mode). There's 32-bit support in Windows x86-64 and in Linux x86-64 and Mac still has yet to make a 64-bit version. It's clear how Adobe would see no reason to port Flash to x86-64 yet (and as for PPC they already made that; it must be modular code by now).
What we need is Gnash to go forward in providing x86-64 (and other architectures) support for all versions of Flash.:) Hopefully with that will come free creation software too, even though I kind of do not like Flash because it requires a plugin to view, when I think the web should be accessible to all, and all Flash seems to do is make web designers work twice as hard trying to make a "flashy" (no pun intended) website and then later make a crummy non-Flash version (but at least that's compatible, hopefully conforms to W3C standards). I often view a non-Flash version of a site because there is something about the way Flash is, that I just do not like and never have liked.
on firefox, nspluginwrapper and regular flash x86 plugin are your friends. Or does Kubuntu not have its own build of that? That would be because Ubuntu sucks and is bloated to the highest degree possible.
Well, there is a release out there right now that is similar to a corporate release and does not require activation, but it cannot update. Regardless, people want Office for some reason. At my school, students can get it for around $20. People I know used to rely on me to get pirated stuff, but now I really really am against it because I think OpenOffice is for sure a viable alternative to Office (and AbiWord is definitely a viable alternative to Word).
Somehow a distro that's bloated as ever is for power users. (I'm referring to Ubuntu, which I used for a while). The real power user distro is Gentoo IMO.
Schools, discounts & piracy are the problem
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Does ODF Have a Future?
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As far as I know, every school (including mine) is using MS Office 2003 (for well cheap) or better and every student who cannot afford it is pirating it from other people or getting the student discounted version (for well cheap again).
It's weird to say that pirating is the problem, but I really think that every kid who knows something out there will just get a copy of Word from someone, somewhere, whether it be online or through a friend. Nobody out there is saying "Use AbiWord or Ooo to read it."
And it's very weird to say something like "MS might be gone someday and we may not be able to read the file format" to someone. How can any average person think MS would ever go out of business? You can certainly bring up big companies like Digital and all, but MS will probably not be making their mistakes.
Gentoo is 50x better than Ubuntu. They aren't in the same class of users I guess. I had been using Ubuntu for a few months and moved to Gentoo, and I never though KDE could be so fast on my hardware but now it is. It may have taken 12 hours to build, but it was all worth it.
Ubuntu's binaries are compiled with all features enabled and the dependencies through the roof. The hardware to run all the features at full speed without a glitch is really expensive (my dv5000 laptop certainly cannot do it). Meanwhile you can build KDE from scratch, removing things you don't need (I would never recommend building kdebase-meta). Linux is 50x faster for me now. I'm so glad I made the switch to Gentoo. Every system I have will have Gentoo on it from here on out, whether it be basic twm or icewm or even KDE on older hardware that takes days to build. It's all worth it in the end in my opinion.
Agreed. I have come across customer nudes in the past working at a repair shop. Customers should be afraid that techs are going to steal logins which could lead to banking information, credit card information, etc, and definitely NOT porn!
Just look up IE PassView on Google. Since IE stores this information by default, and the cookies as well, most customers do not change it. I've used it for getting customer login information back into place after a reinstall. I never take it for my own usage. I expect others do, unfortunately.
Secondly, if there's data that's been recently deleted, you can always get that back most of the time (I like Undelete best). I have not come across this yet, finding porn that was recently deleted. I will not be surprised the day I do.
Let's look at the bigger picture here though. The original poster put Porn in the title so we would all read it. But seriously, I work at a computer shop fixing PCs. I have all the software to get form fills in IE, passwords, and pretty much anything including tools to get back what was deleted. I have come across porn on customer's PCs before and customer nudes. But I don't copy these (unless I'm backing the data up for a reinstall). I would never store these for my own personal use. On a few occassions, I've copied media such as movies and TV shows that they downloaded off whatever shitty place.
Regardless, I strongly stick to my ethics when it comes to data retrieval. But I would highly doubt every tech out there does. This is why I'll never give my PC to anyone without first removing the HDD. Maybe Best Buy should train their techs in ETHICS and check their flash drives; just basically more monitoring. The small business I work for will not do this, and the customers trust us very much to backup and store their data and not use it for our own purposes. This includes business proposals, product images, etc. They trust us. I really doubt any big company would let their employees take their broken PCs to places like Best Buy EVER.
I now have a Mac Pro and wonder if this means Halo 2 will run on my Mac under Parallels running XP. (Yeah, I know Parallels can run Vista.)
Good luck with that. From what I remember, Parallels gives you only a very basic emulated 3D card (can't remember the name). So far no VMs give you good enough 3D emulation:(
Run XP from Boot Camp and run Halo 2 there. It should work great.
You'd be surprised then that a lot of the code uses their Mac-like UIs. There is hardly anything in the browser that looks like Windows. The idea here I guess is that the user (who to Apple will hopefully buy a Mac now), will forget they are on Windows. Maybe their Mac UIs ported to Windows in some fashion do not have so many holes? That is something to find out later.
iTunes and QuickTime both do dumb things on Windows, like run extra services (iPod service, iTunes service) and add Run entries (who the hell needs QuickTime in the tray??????!!!!!!!!!!).
When you install Safari, it asks if you want to install Apple Software Update and Bonjour extras. I deselected both. It seems Safari is extremely stand-alone in comparison to iTunes and QuickTime. At least it doesn't add a Run entry or services.
I ran it in XP in a virtual machine (VirtualBox) and it seemed pretty good. I'm glad Apple chose to keep the UI pretty much the same as OS X. And the interface in the options screens are the same as well. I would not be surprised if more people switched solely because Safari is very visually appealing. There are themes for Firefox to look similar to Safari, but nothing beats a true port.
I'll definitely be using this for development purposes.
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I was thinking the exact same thing. However, I am sure that they would have people checking his computer every week or so to make sure he does not have Linux on it (of course he could run a live CD, maybe they will take those and bar him from burning CDs? He did, after all, run the 'illegal' torrent site).
Evading in my opinion by using Linux secretly can only make things worse in this case. The US government is awful at all times.
Yeah I agree with this post, although I wish I could get my Skype phone working now (I hope in the future). I use Gentoo and it is amazing (even though I broke it twice, now I am good). I am buying a new wireless card (MiniPCI and hacking my BIOS to make it work) and I am buying a new scanner, all for Linux compatibility. Non-interoperability from companies is absolutely ridiculous. And I know Mac users in general just buy new machines but I think hardware should be supported there too. Hopefully ASUS with open source drivers will influence the other companies to make open source drivers.
Getting my hands dirty at first made me only use Linux on and off the past 3 years, but this year I really got my hands dirty first with Kubuntu then Xubuntu then Ubuntu then back to Kubuntu and finally onto Gentoo. It is completely worth it to learn UNIX, and I almost always have Konsole open doing something. The only thing I cannot agree with you on is hating the command line (I absolutely love it, even on Windows it is great).
My advice also is to keep XP on a partition for things that just do not work in Linux or has no equivalent. Games especially, and some specialised software. I use Magic File Renamer (still have not found a good equivalent, KRename and others just do not do what this does) and foobar2000 in Windows to tag MP3s (sometimes with a virtual machine); just cannot find anything as easy to use in Linux (both sort of work on Wine, not 100%). I play RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 a lot on Windows, and a few other games. Project64 (a Nintendo 64 emulator) causes a black screen with Wine and thus does not work (Mupen64 is not as good and some of the plugins refuse to build for AMD64 at this time). Neither does VirtualDub also causing a black screen (and I still cannot find a Linux equivalent of this); GordianKnot works with Wine but it requires that VirtualDub and AviSynth are able to work. I use GordianKnot in Windows to rip DVDs to XviD still. I still have yet to try k9copy and some others like Thoggen but I am afraid the quality might not be as high. I also could not get Handbrake to build for AMD64 (Gentoo). I am also not sure dvd9to5 could match the quality of DVD Rebuilder with CCE.
I do not think it is really okay to pirate games but the fact is you cannot test out these games at the store to see if they are really worth the $50 and now $60 they are going to be. $50 is a lot of money in my opinion (even though software is often hundreds or thousands). I have purchased games when they are at a decent price even if it that means waiting till they are (often years from their release date).
Maybe what stores and online stores should do is give a demo. In the store, they should have every game's demo installed on a PC (this really would not be very hard, even a newbie at a PC could do this), and no company should not make a demo of their game in my opinion.
I know they are already doing this with Vista's game explorer but I hate Vista anyway. I know the game sites often have demos but these should be linked directly from online stores. And the downloadable demo should be playable without installing, it should be available as a zip (I absolutely hate installers, because you lose almost all control of what it will do).
The reason stores keep their kiosk mode browser on the laptops and PCs is because they do not want customers to find out how lousy Vista is. And same for the game stores, which have Vista's game explorer going all day. This is a kiosk app as well and they are not selling Vista but Microsoft could easily sue for misrepresentation.
Perhaps a free game demo (including free, and free and open source games) package manager would be a good idea? Hmm... *goes to make one*
If software companies (including game companies) are going to survive when open source is taking over, the only way to do it I would say is to provide store (including online store) demos. Then people can make an informed decision, whether it is to blow $50 on a game they might not like, or hundreds on software that is completely garbage (Windows Vista). When you get a car, you test drive it, don't you? Same should be for software.
I think I am going to demo (real demos, not downloading from "illegal" sources) new games from here on out and then decide if I am going to buy them, but maybe only when the price is under $30. $30 is a little bit unreasonable to me even, but it is much better than $60 or $50. It saves time and disk space and possibly DVDs/CDs.
Truthfully, I am addicted to Crack Attack, KPoker, Dopewars, and Same GNOME on Linux now. Great games.
They are afraid that once someone with a lot of time on their hands gets one of these cards they are going to hack it (to get all channels unrestricted, and maybe even surpass copy flags) and then release all details to the web. That is really all it is. I am sure the cable companies are urging all companies not to promote CableCard as they think it is not a very secure, and they have not so much prior experience with hacks regarding cards as companies like DirecTV and Dish Network do.
Once someone hacks this card, and everyone else does, the cable companies might have no choice but to kill that revision of the card remotely and have to send new cards to all customers, which would be "fixed," or reflash the cards remotely (which of course could mean downtime at the customers' ends, for those who watch late night, when they send updates to their boxes). The problem is then this cycle starts all over again. In other words, release card, someone hacks it, flash all cards, someone hacks it again, flash all cards again, someone hacks it yet again, and etc etc.
This is not much different than Sony releasing new firmware for the PSP, blocking homebrew, hacks and pirated games from playing, and then just waiting for someone to crack it before they release new firmware. Only one release of their new firmware really added new features thus far. The rest are all copy protection fixes. And sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes months before the new firmware is hacked in some way, but it seems crackers never sleep.
I understand their dilemma but perhaps they should stop trying to shove 50 channels of stuff we do not want to watch and start providing REAL customer service, like custom channels at a DECENT price. Comcast here is over ~$60/month just for "digital cable" (where 1-99 are analogue for compatibility reasons, because it is easier on their side, even though they could easily make the box get digital channels of those) with HBO. Add slow internet (supposedly 4Mbps but I never see it, and BitTorrent traffic shaping on their end) and decent phone service and that is (likely over) ~$150/month ($15 off the total price for having all 3 services).
It is absolutely unacceptable the only other option for TV service is satellite, and while good (ALL digital channels, and more HD than cable) it does not provide the compatibility with older sets without a box, and internet service on it is completely unacceptable. And also there is no satellite phone service to make a package any cheaper. I really cannot believe how communities can think having ONE company for cable service is a good idea somehow. I used to live in a different town and Charter was the provider there, and if I had to choose I would definitely choose theirs. The box you get with Comcast is incredibly slow with a crappy interface, just completely unacceptable for the price you pay. Charter's box was very fast, a nice simple interface, and their internet service was cheaper and far better than Comcast's will ever be. Add the fact that they are also doing fiber optics soon.
My opinion is Comcast should not be allowed to exist. And there is no doubt in my mind that they pay off town governments to own the areas they have now, and it is only a short amount of time before they own everywhere.
I do the exact same thing. I used to pirate like crazy and still have a lot of pirated things, and still pirate some things; it used to be like an addiction. Having the latest and greatest, cracked and working just felt good, especially for free. The problem is there is a risk of getting caught, even if you are not a cracker or "supplier", and I never planned on using Photoshop CS2 cracked for commercial purposes simply because I find that to be "wrong" in some way.
After some time of pirating, I began to find a lot of freeware (Windows has so much) and a lot of free and open source apps as well. I would say it probably started with Firefox years ago (although IE is free with Windows, which I always pirated). Then I looked into switching from Outlook Express to Thunderbird, did that successfully and I am still very happy with Thunderbird (hope the new team does not mess it up). I started using so much freeware and free software; most of my software on my Windows partition is freeware or free software, and I have replaced commercial programs with free ones; for example, I have removed MS Office and put OpenOffice and I have removed Photoshop CS2 in favour of GIMP (I really think anything that can be done in Photoshop can be done with GIMP). This year I have really started to use Linux a lot, starting with Kubuntu, now Gentoo AMD64. I am hardly ever on Windows and when I am it is to generate an nLite Windows XP for a friend or myself, to play games, or emulators that are not on Linux (Project64) or that do not work well on Linux yet. Also my Skype phone does not work in Linux at all, and my PS2 controller to USB adapter only sort of works. I learn a new thing in Linux just about every day, and I love it.
My friends constantly ask why I detest using commercial programs. They say things like "Well, I'm not a programmer so why do I need open source?" or things like "Why use X when you can just download Y?" For example, GIMP over Photoshop. A lot of them use Firefox but they almost never use freeware, and really like downloading software off torrents and using cracks and keygens, etc. I thought the idea of cracking software was really cool at one point, and it still does prove skill to me, but right now I see no point (other than games and software with dongles, because having to put in the CD or dongle JUST for the protection is absolutely ridiculous to me). What my friends and people who pirate do not realise is that they are only perpetuating the problem of companies using 'better' protections on their software and soon software may just take forever and crackers will just give up, because if I were a cracker, I would never spend more than 24 man hours on a crack. The companies will not stop using protections until piracy goes down, and hopefully when it does, everyone who pirated will be using free alternatives instead anyway.
Now if the software was sold at a decent price then of course people would perhaps not pirate, but I see almost NO reason to pirate software (excluding games) today when there is almost ALWAYS a viable free (or free and open source) alternative with no strings attached. Yet, there are so many people out there willing to use pirated software (even for commercial ends) just because market share to them represents quality. It is a really bad situation, and it affects the open source movement a lot in my opinion. How can open source prove itself to be better than pirating the so-called 'latest and greatest' from X company to the kid out there with no money?
That will not happen, because we have idiots in the government who truly believe big business (who always pays them off) can do all the work and are better than having government works do it. To support this, they say too much government will result in socialism/communism. I probably will leave this country because other countries WITH socialist parties and such seem to have a lot more emphasis on the people.
It's more like anything Anti-Anything-That-Is-Good-for-the-People. And it is too bad, it's not just so-called "repulicans"; both sides of government are pretty corrupt in this nation (USA), states included.
I do not know whether it is even worth to bother voting anymore. Both sides (the names we actually hear about) always get campaign money from big business and obviously will cater to those businesses when in office, so I do not see why a party makes a difference any more.
Until we have fair elections where everyone may participate, where everyone has a fair chance (perhaps the government should sponsor people? Yeah right, that would never happen), I cannot trust the government at all. The government right now is just a bunch of rich people (mostly lawyers) who know nothing about anything and only cater to big business. I know I do not have to pull out sources or examples to demonstrate this at all.
Uh, Adobe Reader 7 and 8 are both fast when you disable all the unnecessary programs. I've used a number of PDF viewers on Windows, and the best one as far as speed I've tried is SumatraPDF (a free GPL viewer). The problem is that not all the viewers, especially Foxit, view EVERYTHING correctly and I like to think you are guaranteed a correct viewing with Adobe's software since they own the specification. I much prefer to use Adobe Reader 8 with almost all plugins disabled, and I disable the Speed Launcher. It still loads very quickly and is much more reliable than using anything else. On Linux, my favourite viewer is KPDF, not Adobe's.
The problem is that doctors (and so many others) in America get paid too much. You think they want to get paid less all of a sudden with "lowered costs of healthcare"? I agree and want socialised healthcare and I am willing to pay the taxes but in America apparently no amount of money is good enough for anyone.
I completely agree. This web 2.0 nonsense is getting out of hand. Web has no version number. When was there web 1.0? Is it now? It's not an application last time I check.
What is the complete definition of web 2.0? Sounds to me like some people think it's flash which I totally disagree with. And others think it's conformance to W3C standards, completely separating content from formatting (HTML and CSS, and of course PHP) (which I would mostly agree with).
Then what are you complaining about? I think Adobe realises in the future that they might have to port x86-64 but for the time being x86-64 runs 32-bit apps perfectly even in 64-bit mode, and of course, most of the computers out there are running in x86 mode even if they support x86-64 (Plenty of AMD and Intel processors out there sold still running Windows (or Mac OS X) in 32-bit mode). There's 32-bit support in Windows x86-64 and in Linux x86-64 and Mac still has yet to make a 64-bit version. It's clear how Adobe would see no reason to port Flash to x86-64 yet (and as for PPC they already made that; it must be modular code by now).
:) Hopefully with that will come free creation software too, even though I kind of do not like Flash because it requires a plugin to view, when I think the web should be accessible to all, and all Flash seems to do is make web designers work twice as hard trying to make a "flashy" (no pun intended) website and then later make a crummy non-Flash version (but at least that's compatible, hopefully conforms to W3C standards). I often view a non-Flash version of a site because there is something about the way Flash is, that I just do not like and never have liked.
What we need is Gnash to go forward in providing x86-64 (and other architectures) support for all versions of Flash.
on firefox, nspluginwrapper and regular flash x86 plugin are your friends. Or does Kubuntu not have its own build of that? That would be because Ubuntu sucks and is bloated to the highest degree possible.
Well, there is a release out there right now that is similar to a corporate release and does not require activation, but it cannot update. Regardless, people want Office for some reason. At my school, students can get it for around $20. People I know used to rely on me to get pirated stuff, but now I really really am against it because I think OpenOffice is for sure a viable alternative to Office (and AbiWord is definitely a viable alternative to Word).
Somehow a distro that's bloated as ever is for power users. (I'm referring to Ubuntu, which I used for a while). The real power user distro is Gentoo IMO.
As far as I know, every school (including mine) is using MS Office 2003 (for well cheap) or better and every student who cannot afford it is pirating it from other people or getting the student discounted version (for well cheap again).
It's weird to say that pirating is the problem, but I really think that every kid who knows something out there will just get a copy of Word from someone, somewhere, whether it be online or through a friend. Nobody out there is saying "Use AbiWord or Ooo to read it."
And it's very weird to say something like "MS might be gone someday and we may not be able to read the file format" to someone. How can any average person think MS would ever go out of business? You can certainly bring up big companies like Digital and all, but MS will probably not be making their mistakes.
Gentoo is 50x better than Ubuntu. They aren't in the same class of users I guess. I had been using Ubuntu for a few months and moved to Gentoo, and I never though KDE could be so fast on my hardware but now it is. It may have taken 12 hours to build, but it was all worth it.
Ubuntu's binaries are compiled with all features enabled and the dependencies through the roof. The hardware to run all the features at full speed without a glitch is really expensive (my dv5000 laptop certainly cannot do it). Meanwhile you can build KDE from scratch, removing things you don't need (I would never recommend building kdebase-meta). Linux is 50x faster for me now. I'm so glad I made the switch to Gentoo. Every system I have will have Gentoo on it from here on out, whether it be basic twm or icewm or even KDE on older hardware that takes days to build. It's all worth it in the end in my opinion.
Agreed. I have come across customer nudes in the past working at a repair shop. Customers should be afraid that techs are going to steal logins which could lead to banking information, credit card information, etc, and definitely NOT porn!
Just look up IE PassView on Google. Since IE stores this information by default, and the cookies as well, most customers do not change it. I've used it for getting customer login information back into place after a reinstall. I never take it for my own usage. I expect others do, unfortunately.
Secondly, if there's data that's been recently deleted, you can always get that back most of the time (I like Undelete best). I have not come across this yet, finding porn that was recently deleted. I will not be surprised the day I do.
Let's look at the bigger picture here though. The original poster put Porn in the title so we would all read it. But seriously, I work at a computer shop fixing PCs. I have all the software to get form fills in IE, passwords, and pretty much anything including tools to get back what was deleted. I have come across porn on customer's PCs before and customer nudes. But I don't copy these (unless I'm backing the data up for a reinstall). I would never store these for my own personal use. On a few occassions, I've copied media such as movies and TV shows that they downloaded off whatever shitty place.
Regardless, I strongly stick to my ethics when it comes to data retrieval. But I would highly doubt every tech out there does. This is why I'll never give my PC to anyone without first removing the HDD. Maybe Best Buy should train their techs in ETHICS and check their flash drives; just basically more monitoring. The small business I work for will not do this, and the customers trust us very much to backup and store their data and not use it for our own purposes. This includes business proposals, product images, etc. They trust us. I really doubt any big company would let their employees take their broken PCs to places like Best Buy EVER.
As strange as it is, I'm sure tested Halo 2 and other "Vista-only" games on XP to make sure they refused to install/run.
I now have a Mac Pro and wonder if this means Halo 2 will run on my Mac under Parallels running XP. (Yeah, I know Parallels can run Vista.)
:(
Good luck with that. From what I remember, Parallels gives you only a very basic emulated 3D card (can't remember the name). So far no VMs give you good enough 3D emulation
Run XP from Boot Camp and run Halo 2 there. It should work great.
Not sure what Slashdot's policy on linking to warez, especially torrents. :/
You'd be surprised then that a lot of the code uses their Mac-like UIs. There is hardly anything in the browser that looks like Windows. The idea here I guess is that the user (who to Apple will hopefully buy a Mac now), will forget they are on Windows. Maybe their Mac UIs ported to Windows in some fashion do not have so many holes? That is something to find out later.
iTunes and QuickTime both do dumb things on Windows, like run extra services (iPod service, iTunes service) and add Run entries (who the hell needs QuickTime in the tray??????!!!!!!!!!!).
When you install Safari, it asks if you want to install Apple Software Update and Bonjour extras. I deselected both. It seems Safari is extremely stand-alone in comparison to iTunes and QuickTime. At least it doesn't add a Run entry or services.
I ran it in XP in a virtual machine (VirtualBox) and it seemed pretty good. I'm glad Apple chose to keep the UI pretty much the same as OS X. And the interface in the options screens are the same as well. I would not be surprised if more people switched solely because Safari is very visually appealing. There are themes for Firefox to look similar to Safari, but nothing beats a true port.
I'll definitely be using this for development purposes.
Google? Or otherwise Wikipedia?