In which case I apologise. I was responding to postings on the thread, not TFA. When "Vista" was released I upgraded to OpenSUSE 10.2 so I have no direct experience of current copies or trials of MS Office.
Oh give me a break! how can you add new features to a product without changing the format, and rending it unreadable by OLD software?
Just because the new software supports extra features does not compel it to "upgrade" the format of all your existing documents. It can still read them in their existing format (obviously, else it wouldn't be able to "upgrade" them) and should only change the formatting if you save the document after actually using a new feature. Even then, it should only ever "update" it to the oldest format that supports all the features currently in use in that document. Any other scheme is either incompetent or evil.
Not true. The UK TV license says that if your TV is "capable" of receiving a service, i.e. has a tuner attached, then you are liable to pay a license fee even if that tuner isn't plugged into an aerial ("antenna" for US readers) and/or the service isn't broadcast where you are.
I'm not "saying" that - I'm saying that an unscrupulous lawyer could make that argument, and at the very least it would tie the company up in court time.
Most anti-virus software isn't storing the checksums of your commercial packages, just of the viruses. You'll find that any EULA that prevents you "distributing derivatives of the software" could be interpreted strictly to mean that you couldn't generate and publish checksums.
And the other point that you glossed over is the prohibitive cost of buying a legitimate copy of every version of every commercial package in order to install them to create these checksums.
My point is that it's much cheaper and less of a legal liability to write something like this to search for OSS than the alternative.
I didn't say they were equivalent; what I said was that the legalspeak used in many proprietary licenses doesn't differentiate between them. Many companies selling proprietary code would love the opportunity to sue a third party for publishing any of their code's "secrets", even if it's just a checksum.
I suspect that the problem is in creating the checksums required to recognise the installed applications.
A database of free/OSS programs can be generated and given away for free because they can get the apps for free and they know that if one app can be legally scanned for then they all can. A database of commercial apps, on the other hand, requires the compiler to purchase at least one license for each app they install to checksum, some of which will be obscenely expensive yet extremely unlikely to be on an end-user's machine.
An added complication is that many of the non-OSS apps will have a license that explicitly forbids any form of reverse engineering including the publishing of any form of checksumming of the package. At the very least you can say that they all will have different licenses that will need to be read in minute detail by expensive lawyers before they can be added to the database.
I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that 50% of the Americans believe that there are aliens on the earth
Yet there's so much resistance to the idea that George W Bush and his father before him are really shape-shifting lizard creatures with a hidden agenda. Go figure.
Baird first transmitted colour television on July 3rd 1928, and in the same year he demonstrated stereoscopic ("3D") television. On August 15 1944 he demonstrated a fully electronic colour display with 600 lines - a higher resolution than that eventually adopted by RCA in the US.
Most American websites tend to "gloss over" his work with a line like "John Logie Baird also worked on television in the UK" if they mention him at all, with flat-out lies about all of RCA's "firsts". During WW2, Baird would have beaten RCA to the production of commercial fully-electronic TV sets, but his factory was taken over by the Government for the production of tubes for RADAR displays, a fact that was kept a state secret until sometime in the late 1970s.
The technology predates television, for crying out loud.
Only if by "predates" you mean "came along 19 years later"...
John Logie Baird demonstrated Television in January of 1926, and it was commercially available by 1928. The atomic bomb was developed, tested and deployed in 1945.
Windows XP was a major improvement over Windows 95/98 (which is what most people were using when XP was first released)
I notice you gloss over Windows 2000 users there, many of whom, like myself, had the sense not to upgrade to XP. XP had no compelling advantage over 2000, and Vista is a huge backward step in terms of compatibility, resource usage and forced DRM. I upgraded directly from 2000 to Linux, and I'm very happy with it. The only Windows-only program that is essential to me runs perfectly under WINE. [Insert smug grin smiley HERE]
What PC game is going to make me want to upgrade to DX-10?... If there's some game that absolutely will not run on DX-9, then I'll just go without and stick to console games, as I am doing now.
That's a bit weird. I didn't buy my wall adapter until after I'd installed Rockbox, and it works fine. There is a small quirk, though; it takes between three and five minutes for the iPod to realise it's there and put up the "Battery Charging" screen. Have you just been too impatient?
If I was teaching new users, I'd rater they learned early on that software has bugs, how to recover from them and steps to take to ensure that problems with the software didn't impact on their productivity. The alternative is a school with a strict IT policy that runs perfectly installed software and doesn't allow you to install anything that might conflict - you learn to use it, then the first time it crashes in the "real world" you are lost.
I didn't say that it did. I said that it made copying files back off onto an arbitary computer awkward, so the DRM'd stuff looks less bad in comparison. As has been mentioned elsewhere, if you want to copy a particular track onto a friend's machine you have a choice of the "official" way, which means "authorising" your iPod for their copy of iTunes (or is it the other way round; I always get confused by that...) or the unofficial way, which means being able to navigate to a hidden folder and then identify the file you're looking for from its deliberately munged filename. Oh, and you'll need third-party software to restore the filename to something human-readable.
Compare and contrast to an iPod running Rockbox, or any other "proper" MP3 player, where you plug it in under pretty much any OS, it shows up as a drive and you just copy the files you want on and off of it. Apple may say they maintain this system as a "legacy", but they are quick enough to drop all "legacy" support in, say, Quicktime, if they think it'll force users to upgrade and thus invalidate their "Pro" licences so they have to pay again.
You can't put an MP3 onto an (unmodified) iPod in a manner that it will both play, and be capable of being copied back off onto a computer that isn't "authorised" for that iPod. If you copy it with iTunes you can play it, but you can't freely copy it off again. If you copy it in "data mode" you can freely copy it off again, but you can't play it. This is not a bug; this is a design "feature" to make the sharing of free music awkward at best thus making the iTMS seem less cumbersome.
Bullshit. They failed for technical reasons or for DRM reasons or for a combination of technical and DRM reasons and may get an assist from bad or no design. You are defending the 8-track tape. It is pitiful from a technical perspective.
I think Betamax might be a better example - technically superior to VHS, but killed off by a combination of hype and under-the-table dealings with the movie studios.
I don't have a land line. Why? The cell phone is _cheaper_. If you're going to be pragmatic, ditch the land line.
I only have a landline to get the bundled "free" ADSL. If I could get 8Mb/s through a cell 'phone for less then I would just have a cell 'phone. I rarely make actual 'phone calls.
The problem with this approach is that the things the iPod does that are "better" have been copyrighted by Apple, so a competitor has to come up with a different way of achieving the same result without infringing Apple's copyrights and thus risking a legal suit. If a third party startup does come up with a better way of doing something, Apple just buys them up and absorbs their copyrights into their own canon. Resistance is futile.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't even listen to music on my genuine IPod
I know how you feel. I discovered the audio archives over at http://www.archive.org/ - there you can download old radio shows ("The Shadow", "The Stan Freeburg Show" etc.) along with a good selection of podcasts from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/waystolisten/podcasts/g uide/ (I recommend the "Documentary Archive) and now most of my iPod is filled with speech radio.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I can't wait for the dream sequence where Mulder and Scully explore an old haunted house with Scooby-Doo.
In which case I apologise. I was responding to postings on the thread, not TFA. When "Vista" was released I upgraded to OpenSUSE 10.2 so I have no direct experience of current copies or trials of MS Office.
Just because the new software supports extra features does not compel it to "upgrade" the format of all your existing documents. It can still read them in their existing format (obviously, else it wouldn't be able to "upgrade" them) and should only change the formatting if you save the document after actually using a new feature. Even then, it should only ever "update" it to the oldest format that supports all the features currently in use in that document. Any other scheme is either incompetent or evil.
Not true. The UK TV license says that if your TV is "capable" of receiving a service, i.e. has a tuner attached, then you are liable to pay a license fee even if that tuner isn't plugged into an aerial ("antenna" for US readers) and/or the service isn't broadcast where you are.
I'm not "saying" that - I'm saying that an unscrupulous lawyer could make that argument, and at the very least it would tie the company up in court time.
Most anti-virus software isn't storing the checksums of your commercial packages, just of the viruses. You'll find that any EULA that prevents you "distributing derivatives of the software" could be interpreted strictly to mean that you couldn't generate and publish checksums.
And the other point that you glossed over is the prohibitive cost of buying a legitimate copy of every version of every commercial package in order to install them to create these checksums.
My point is that it's much cheaper and less of a legal liability to write something like this to search for OSS than the alternative.
I didn't say they were equivalent; what I said was that the legalspeak used in many proprietary licenses doesn't differentiate between them. Many companies selling proprietary code would love the opportunity to sue a third party for publishing any of their code's "secrets", even if it's just a checksum.
I suspect that the problem is in creating the checksums required to recognise the installed applications.
A database of free/OSS programs can be generated and given away for free because they can get the apps for free and they know that if one app can be legally scanned for then they all can. A database of commercial apps, on the other hand, requires the compiler to purchase at least one license for each app they install to checksum, some of which will be obscenely expensive yet extremely unlikely to be on an end-user's machine.
An added complication is that many of the non-OSS apps will have a license that explicitly forbids any form of reverse engineering including the publishing of any form of checksumming of the package. At the very least you can say that they all will have different licenses that will need to be read in minute detail by expensive lawyers before they can be added to the database.
Yet there's so much resistance to the idea that George W Bush and his father before him are really shape-shifting lizard creatures with a hidden agenda. Go figure.
Baird first transmitted colour television on July 3rd 1928, and in the same year he demonstrated stereoscopic ("3D") television. On August 15 1944 he demonstrated a fully electronic colour display with 600 lines - a higher resolution than that eventually adopted by RCA in the US.
Most American websites tend to "gloss over" his work with a line like "John Logie Baird also worked on television in the UK" if they mention him at all, with flat-out lies about all of RCA's "firsts". During WW2, Baird would have beaten RCA to the production of commercial fully-electronic TV sets, but his factory was taken over by the Government for the production of tubes for RADAR displays, a fact that was kept a state secret until sometime in the late 1970s.
Only if by "predates" you mean "came along 19 years later"...
John Logie Baird demonstrated Television in January of 1926, and it was commercially available by 1928. The atomic bomb was developed, tested and deployed in 1945.
In which case, I apologise for my gullibility.
I notice you gloss over Windows 2000 users there, many of whom, like myself, had the sense not to upgrade to XP. XP had no compelling advantage over 2000, and Vista is a huge backward step in terms of compatibility, resource usage and forced DRM. I upgraded directly from 2000 to Linux, and I'm very happy with it. The only Windows-only program that is essential to me runs perfectly under WINE. [Insert smug grin smiley HERE]
Freudian typo, anyone...?
Alternately, http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/
Ditto. :-)
That's a bit weird. I didn't buy my wall adapter until after I'd installed Rockbox, and it works fine. There is a small quirk, though; it takes between three and five minutes for the iPod to realise it's there and put up the "Battery Charging" screen. Have you just been too impatient?
If I was teaching new users, I'd rater they learned early on that software has bugs, how to recover from them and steps to take to ensure that problems with the software didn't impact on their productivity. The alternative is a school with a strict IT policy that runs perfectly installed software and doesn't allow you to install anything that might conflict - you learn to use it, then the first time it crashes in the "real world" you are lost.
I didn't say that it did. I said that it made copying files back off onto an arbitary computer awkward, so the DRM'd stuff looks less bad in comparison. As has been mentioned elsewhere, if you want to copy a particular track onto a friend's machine you have a choice of the "official" way, which means "authorising" your iPod for their copy of iTunes (or is it the other way round; I always get confused by that...) or the unofficial way, which means being able to navigate to a hidden folder and then identify the file you're looking for from its deliberately munged filename. Oh, and you'll need third-party software to restore the filename to something human-readable.
Compare and contrast to an iPod running Rockbox, or any other "proper" MP3 player, where you plug it in under pretty much any OS, it shows up as a drive and you just copy the files you want on and off of it. Apple may say they maintain this system as a "legacy", but they are quick enough to drop all "legacy" support in, say, Quicktime, if they think it'll force users to upgrade and thus invalidate their "Pro" licences so they have to pay again.
I'm a Linux user, and I own an iPod. I wiped its firmware and installed "Rockbox". Now it's a *proper* MP3 player. :-P
You can't put an MP3 onto an (unmodified) iPod in a manner that it will both play, and be capable of being copied back off onto a computer that isn't "authorised" for that iPod. If you copy it with iTunes you can play it, but you can't freely copy it off again. If you copy it in "data mode" you can freely copy it off again, but you can't play it. This is not a bug; this is a design "feature" to make the sharing of free music awkward at best thus making the iTMS seem less cumbersome.
I think Betamax might be a better example - technically superior to VHS, but killed off by a combination of hype and under-the-table dealings with the movie studios.
I only have a landline to get the bundled "free" ADSL. If I could get 8Mb/s through a cell 'phone for less then I would just have a cell 'phone. I rarely make actual 'phone calls.
The problem with this approach is that the things the iPod does that are "better" have been copyrighted by Apple, so a competitor has to come up with a different way of achieving the same result without infringing Apple's copyrights and thus risking a legal suit. If a third party startup does come up with a better way of doing something, Apple just buys them up and absorbs their copyrights into their own canon. Resistance is futile.
I know how you feel. I discovered the audio archives over at http://www.archive.org/ - there you can download old radio shows ("The Shadow", "The Stan Freeburg Show" etc.) along with a good selection of podcasts from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/waystolisten/podcasts/