>grep 1G of source to understand all the API
>calls to create a graphical version of FTP that
>takes all of a day to write in VB or Borland
>Builder/Delphi for windows.
You're comparing developing with raw Xlib against high level Windows toolkits. It's pretty trivial to develop your hypothetical FTP app for Linux in hours, not days, using KDevelop, Glade.... or Borland Kylix, if you're the commercial kind. No grep required, though running through the beautiful tutorial complete with screen shots that comes with Qt might give you a leg up.
And don't talk to me about MSDN documentation until you've tried to write to any new, hot API of theirs, e.g. a custom Exchange app using their much-vaunted "Web Storage System". That experience really opened my eyes to just how good I have it when I develop for free platforms.
>Like it or not, Windows Update is much easier
>to use for the Unwashed Masses than is cvs
However, Mandrake's update tool is easier to use (and more current) than Windows Update. I'd even say it's slightly more accessible to the unclued due to its default presence on the desktop.
Number of times I've compiled my own kernel since installing Mandrake for the first time in 1999: zero.
Number of times I've EVER had to check code out of cvs for my home machine, even when I ran Slackware: zero.
The roll-your-own, alpha-software-on-a-production-server, Slack-or-nothing crowd will always be out there. I'm here to say it's now possible to run a stable production Linux box, desktop or server, without even installing gcc. Security announcements get mailed to you, you run the update tool, click "Install", and you're done. It's not only possible, it's *great*. Don't kid yourself, it's not 1994 any more.
Well, I call myself a "software developer", actually. I've got the beard and ponytail, I weigh about 300 pounds, I haven't worn a suit or tie to work in years, I'm not one to pretend I'm heterosexual, and oh, by the way, my last company credited me with saving their financial ass last year.
I provide expertise that no one else in my area seems to have and I stay very, very billable. I've pulled one all-nighter in the last decade but will do whatever is necessary to get a project done on time. I will work by myself or as part of a team, and I don't think anyone I've worked with would equate my "quirkiness" with an inability to help my team reach its goals.
While bad economic times can force people like me to at least pretend to conform a little bit, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of fixing systems created by guys from companies run as though they were temp agencies. I think the author needs to examine his company's interview style as others have suggested. But he should also take a look at his own motivations: people who make part of their living lecturing are effectively salespeople, and salespeople require an entirely different set of traits to be effective.
Appearance and political prowess aren't valid measures of engineering competence; productivity is.
How exactly is exploiting *this* Javascript behavior any more acceptable than NIMDA's web vector?
I think hydras are much more like a virus than they're like DeCSS. They deliberately produce undesirable behavior on the machine you own. In fact, I'd put many copy protection schemes into that category as well...
....since the concept of "banner ads" was still new, in fact: that the web is more analogous to a newspaper than a television program, and the best you can hope for is that people will respond to relevant ads as they do to newspaper ads. As a matter of fact, many people (including myself) pay for a newspaper subscription in part because we want the ads themselves!
Here's a clue stick for advertisers: "Punch the monkey and win $20" is not a "relevant ad" to most people, and never will be. Geography and affinity are not dead, and thus people will still pay more credence to an ad for a local restaurant than an offshore casino. They will honor relevant ads the same way they do newspaper ads: keep it in mind, maybe subconsciously, the next time they're in the market for the item being advertised.
Slashdot at least has it almost right: a Thinkgeek ad is at least marginally relevant to/. users, but this is almost a vertical market and one prone to buying things it doesn't need. (I have TWO photon lights on my keychain...)
What I feel when advertisers promote progressively more annoying schemes and then complain when people circumvent them (or merely decline to spend money at the advertised sites *cough* X10 *cough*) can only be described as cognitive dissonance. I can't decide whether it's the old school advertisers not getting the web, or the web people not hiring decent advertising people.
Good: Looked better than any other Trek, sometimes better than Farscape. The letterboxing was a nice touch. Probably the second best Trek pilot after DS9. The exposition didn't feel as awkward as I expected. The "unstuck in time" chamber is intriguing. The "nasty primitive aliens uplifted by their descendants" concept. The presence of a linguist, I don't know why but I like that.
Bad: The THEME SONG. EWWWWW. What is this, Pax? The run of the mill plot. The now-mandatory forced tension between crewmembers. The now-mandatory treknobabble (bad in this case for even treknobabble.) I liked the part about the hull going offline. Sounds like Braga and Berman did s/shields/hull/g on some rejected Voyager battle script. Also, oh no, we're fighting the Dominion again only this time they're kinda scaly.
Ugly: They need some new makeup artists to populate the "lots of different aliens" scenes, or maybe they should use Muppets;) The flashbacks were awkward and seemed like non-sequiturs most of the time. Also, while the Klingons were handled fairly well overall, "I HEAR DOOR!" Did you? Most of all, the glowing jello room, especially the camera work. I predict that despite the apparent 3M:1F ratio among the crew, no matter how many years the show runs, there will always be just enough female red shirts along on away missions that we'll never, ever, ever see two guys in there. Berman would feel too threatened. Oh yeah, and their genitalia are going to rot off now because they forgot to gently and sensuously rub jello into them under the backroomesque black lights.
Overall, not bad but I'm not sorry West Wing is coming back next Wednesday. Hope the new B5 pilot in January is a little more inspiring.
Most people at my company bring in things like Nerf guns and wiffle balls and play around the office at times. It can get really loud once in a while. Many of them even go so far as to participate in extracurricular sports together.
Of course, these are by and large the same people who are willing to work 26 hours straight if an emergency arises, and are very good at staying billable and making a crapload of money.
The problem with the dot bombs wasn't the Nerf guns. The problem with the dot bombs was VC's smoking way too much crack and management buying into their resulting high.
Well, it's plainly ineffective anyway. Four planes (so far) simultaneously hijacked by suicide crews, each of which hits its mark. Wouldn't want to work for any three-letter agency today.
What I'm worried about is what happens while everyone's watching CNN.
is that it doesn't go far enough. It's not close enough an analogy to the GPL because music is different than software, and merely keeping the finished product free is more like a free-beer "freeware" license than the GPL. It seems kinda weird in the differences in protection between a composition, an arrangement of that composition, a specific finished recording of that composition, and a live performance which between improv and everything else makes it a whole new ballgame.
It looks like it would make perfect sense to people who write folk songs (heh, including RMS), because those are sort of like free software - adding an extra verse is both common and analagous to adding a new function to some software. I don't do folk myself. I seem to remember there being a "Free Music License" around some time ago, but I think it had similar problems in that it focused on the idea of a finished studio track rather than its components.
But I also don't have a better alternative yet. I'm thinking about it in my copious free time;)
Way too late to be relevant, I know, but the Windows download tool Gozilla does this. And at least as of the beginning of this summer, it pays no attention to robots.txt. In fact, it doesn't spider your site at all, just quietly gathers data from individual users.
I threw a Mandrake 8 ISO out there for a friend (under/friendsname-mandrake-20010xxx) of mine and he downloaded it one night using Gozilla. I forgot to delete it, was looking through the logs a week later and found that about 20 people had downloaded the whole 500+ megs with an HTTP_REFERER of search.gozilla.com. After deleting it, I got hits from the same place for another few weeks (returning 404's) and then I assume I dropped out of their search engine.
If you go to that site, you'll see a minimal search engine whose CSS causes the text to be black on black in Konqueror. If you search for Mandrake now there are no hits (maybe mine was the only copy out there.) But since one of the search presets is for images, I'm sure Gozilla would piss off the gold rush guys as well if they knew how to read their logs. Search engines are the least of their worries once you get your entire user base unwittingly spidering for you.
...because even with the QT libraries and kdeinit having to load that first time it's still up faster than Mozilla. Then it runs using about half the RAM Mozilla does.
Add Nautilus to the mix and I start wishing KDE had better keyboard shortcuts so I could start using it fulltime.
"if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?"
Proponents of free software support the mere invalidation of proprietary software licenses, not their criminalization. Eric's argument is rather like an anti-drug pundit insisting that proponents of decriminalization are pushing for mandatory marijuana use.
In the imaginary universe where the FSF has achieved all its goals, you're welcome to put a shrinkwrap license on your software that says "don't copy this". No one will arrest you, but anyone would be free to laugh at you as they make a million copies. It's actually a far more libertine *and* libertarian place than ESR's dream world.
Rob
IE5 sucks too by the article's criteria.
on
Linux: Browser Wars
·
· Score: 1
Check it out.
1. Loading time. Sure, IE comes up in like 5 seconds but so does Konqueror if you're running KDE. In his test he was running Blackbox. Try running Win2K on a P166 with Litestep or something instead of Explorer and see how fast IE loads;)
2. Appearance. Using default settings, IE is gray. The author hates gray. He probably would have ranked IE right next to Konqueror if not Galeon in terms of appearance.
3. Ease of use. His only two criteria were "how do I turn off images" and "how do I turn off Javascript." IE has a far, far more byzantine approach to this than any of the browsers he reviewed. One is buried in the "custom security settings" dialog on the second tab of the Internet options dialog and is called "active scripting", not Javascript, and the other is buried 2/3 of the way down a scrolled list under the Advanced tab of Internet Options.
4. Page rendering. I'm typing this in Konqueror through a Java VNC client from IE, from a site where I'm doing some pretty intensive stuff targeted to IE, unfortunately, but which looks fine in normal browsers too. Anyway, the stuff I'm doing renders at about the same speed accessed remotely through Konqueror over VNC as it does accessed locally through IE. Konqueror, by the way, is running on a Celeron 400 with 256mb of RAM, IE is running on a dual P4-1GHz with 1.5GB of RAM.
It seems pretty clear that by the article author's criteria, IE would have ended up in the lower middle of the pack with Galeon still on top.
Oh no, not George Gilder!
on
Telecosm
·
· Score: 1
His appearance on the cover of Wired is the single event defining when Wired stopped being "Newsweek for nerds" and started being "Old Rich White Guys With Bad Investment Tips Digest."
Well, I go through a lot of CDR's now that I have a PC set up as a PVR in the living room. Even at really low (about VHS EP) quality, DivX;-) still only gets a little less than 3 hours on a disc. That's a lot of music videos though.
That, and when you start doing a lot of multitrack audio recording, 80 minutes turns into like 8 minutes. Plus if you're using cheap CD's to back up your audio projects, you really need a backup of the backup;)
I finally brought my Tivo killer online last week. It cost me about 800 bucks to build (based on an Athlon and ATI Radeon All In Wonder) but it does everything Tivo does. Plus, it plays DVD's, VCD's, DivX AVI's and every other computer video format I throw at it, MP3's, PC games, and most importantly, MAME;)
It has a 40 gig drive, meaning about 42 hours of video, and I can back up the shows I watch to CDR with little difficulty. Unlike Tivo, it can't tattle on me with no modem or network connection, though I'm sure digital cable takes care of that already. And any DVD issues I encounter with region codes and Macrovision are easily dealt with, not that it's been necessary so far.
I'd like to think a pre-built box like this could be sold for 500 bucks or so, but the entertainment cartels would never let it happen. So if you have Tivo privacy concerns, build your own, already.
Or an mp3 player? Would Debian include a media player in their distribution that disallowed decoding mp3's with the copyright bit set? Would anyone use cdparanoia if it refused to rip CD's not marked as "original"? Those access control bits are there in most audio formats, and as meaningless as the ones in PDF, yet no one cries foul when every MP3 and CD player in the world merrily ignores them. I think people would scream, holler and downgrade if the authors DID abide by those bits.
Debian (and every other distribution) has already dealt with this ethical dilemma whether consciously or not. Unilateral access controls in free software are in fact software bugs, especially when they're intentional. Packagers frequently fix glaring bugs when prepping a package for their distribution. So why not this one?
If they can't find it in themselves to patch xpdf, it seems to me that the pdf viewer should be GPL'ed ghostscript or something like it which is not intentionally buggy. If it doesn't render as well as xpdf, well... ghostscript source, meet xpdf. xpdf, ghostscript. The joy of GPL.
You could fit 34,800 hours (3.97 years) of DivX;-) video on such a device. Or 201,180 hours (22.97 years) of 128K MP3's, or 3,218,876 hours (367.45 years) of voice recorder quality audio.
If this is actually real, casual recording of
one's everyday life is about to get a whole lot cheaper. (Not to mention the art of bugging.)
Re:Be Aware of the powerdrain !!!
on
Cheap Linux PDAs
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· Score: 1
Or you can go with a vtech Helio. Same price as the Agenda, or cheaper if you're willing to dine at the amazon.com trough, but it has a faster processor, a built in voice recorder, and yeah, you can run a couple different strains of Linux on it. (I currently don't, because Linux on the Helio is only about as far along as Linux on the Agenda. You can also get the source for their "VTech OS", seemingly under the same kind of license as Java.)
It has much less RAM, true, but for me the voice recorder was the kicker. I use it all the time.
1. While just having internet access won't make poor people less poor, it will at least let them communicate with others in the same boat, and become aware of ways to get out of it. If their lot in life doesn't improve, it's also one avenue for political organization. While they could cut off free net access in the event that happened, it's many rungs up the ladder from the typical impoverished country which would take steps to keep its poor people isolated.
2. This is only part of the story. In a New York Times article I read earlier this week, there was a description of how Brazil is encouraging its researchers to violate American drug company patents and copy AIDS drugs for free treatment of the poor, the net effect being that they're controlling AIDS down there as well as we are here. Now they're distributing cheap computers with no Microsoft tax.
Why is this important? Because for apparently the first time, a less privileged country has realized that there's no need to pay rich countries for stuff that can be copied or has a freely available substitute. You can charge whatever you want for oil and take it away if a country won't pay up, but you can't take away their ability to copy your 'intellectual property'.
If they can do this and survive economically, it will change everything.
I had been meaning to join the EFF for a while, but having that link in front of me at a moment when I have a little extra money caused me to do it just now. Thanks.
While I'm sure this will change, hardware MP3 players like the Apex or mpTrip often have trouble playing VBR encoded MP3's. Those players stick with the bitrate they find at the beginning of the track, with sickening, often hilarious flanging and vocoder-like effects when they get to sections with changing bitrates.
As a consolation, now you can make any album you have sound just like "Kid A"...
I don't believe my tax dollars should go towards maintaining the world's biggest military, enforcing someone else's idea of morality, or bailing out big businesses whose management made poor decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
>grep 1G of source to understand all the API
>calls to create a graphical version of FTP that
>takes all of a day to write in VB or Borland
>Builder/Delphi for windows.
You're comparing developing with raw Xlib against high level Windows toolkits. It's pretty trivial to develop your hypothetical FTP app for Linux in hours, not days, using KDevelop, Glade.... or Borland Kylix, if you're the commercial kind. No grep required, though running through the beautiful tutorial complete with screen shots that comes with Qt might give you a leg up.
And don't talk to me about MSDN documentation until you've tried to write to any new, hot API of theirs, e.g. a custom Exchange app using their much-vaunted "Web Storage System". That experience really opened my eyes to just how good I have it when I develop for free platforms.
>Like it or not, Windows Update is much easier
>to use for the Unwashed Masses than is cvs
However, Mandrake's update tool is easier to use (and more current) than Windows Update. I'd even say it's slightly more accessible to the unclued due to its default presence on the desktop.
Number of times I've compiled my own kernel since installing Mandrake for the first time in 1999: zero.
Number of times I've EVER had to check code out of cvs for my home machine, even when I ran Slackware: zero.
The roll-your-own, alpha-software-on-a-production-server, Slack-or-nothing crowd will always be out there. I'm here to say it's now possible to run a stable production Linux box, desktop or server, without even installing gcc. Security announcements get mailed to you, you run the update tool, click "Install", and you're done. It's not only possible, it's *great*. Don't kid yourself, it's not 1994 any more.
Well, I call myself a "software developer", actually. I've got the beard and ponytail, I weigh about 300 pounds, I haven't worn a suit or tie to work in years, I'm not one to pretend I'm heterosexual, and oh, by the way, my last company credited me with saving their financial ass last year.
I provide expertise that no one else in my area seems to have and I stay very, very billable. I've pulled one all-nighter in the last decade but will do whatever is necessary to get a project done on time. I will work by myself or as part of a team, and I don't think anyone I've worked with would equate my "quirkiness" with an inability to help my team reach its goals.
While bad economic times can force people like me to at least pretend to conform a little bit, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of fixing systems created by guys from companies run as though they were temp agencies. I think the author needs to examine his company's interview style as others have suggested. But he should also take a look at his own motivations: people who make part of their living lecturing are effectively salespeople, and salespeople require an entirely different set of traits to be effective.
Appearance and political prowess aren't valid measures of engineering competence; productivity is.
>the polaroid took 405 pics before we
>ran out of film.
Cool, so all Polaroid has to do is focus on the "partygoer with $400 film budget" demographic and they'll be on top again in no time!
How exactly is exploiting *this* Javascript behavior any more acceptable than NIMDA's web vector?
I think hydras are much more like a virus than they're like DeCSS. They deliberately produce undesirable behavior on the machine you own. In fact, I'd put many copy protection schemes into that category as well...
....since the concept of "banner ads" was still new, in fact: that the web is more analogous to a newspaper than a television program, and the best you can hope for is that people will respond to relevant ads as they do to newspaper ads. As a matter of fact, many people (including myself) pay for a newspaper subscription in part because we want the ads themselves!
/. users, but this is almost a vertical market and one prone to buying things it doesn't need. (I have TWO photon lights on my keychain...)
Here's a clue stick for advertisers: "Punch the monkey and win $20" is not a "relevant ad" to most people, and never will be. Geography and affinity are not dead, and thus people will still pay more credence to an ad for a local restaurant than an offshore casino. They will honor relevant ads the same way they do newspaper ads: keep it in mind, maybe subconsciously, the next time they're in the market for the item being advertised.
Slashdot at least has it almost right: a Thinkgeek ad is at least marginally relevant to
What I feel when advertisers promote progressively more annoying schemes and then complain when people circumvent them (or merely decline to spend money at the advertised sites *cough* X10 *cough*) can only be described as cognitive dissonance. I can't decide whether it's the old school advertisers not getting the web, or the web people not hiring decent advertising people.
Good: Looked better than any other Trek, sometimes better than Farscape. The letterboxing was a nice touch. Probably the second best Trek pilot after DS9. The exposition didn't feel as awkward as I expected. The "unstuck in time" chamber is intriguing. The "nasty primitive aliens uplifted by their descendants" concept. The presence of a linguist, I don't know why but I like that.
;) The flashbacks were awkward and seemed like non-sequiturs most of the time. Also, while the Klingons were handled fairly well overall, "I HEAR DOOR!" Did you? Most of all, the glowing jello room, especially the camera work. I predict that despite the apparent 3M:1F ratio among the crew, no matter how many years the show runs, there will always be just enough female red shirts along on away missions that we'll never, ever, ever see two guys in there. Berman would feel too threatened. Oh yeah, and their genitalia are going to rot off now because they forgot to gently and sensuously rub jello into them under the backroomesque black lights.
Bad: The THEME SONG. EWWWWW. What is this, Pax? The run of the mill plot. The now-mandatory forced tension between crewmembers. The now-mandatory treknobabble (bad in this case for even treknobabble.) I liked the part about the hull going offline. Sounds like Braga and Berman did s/shields/hull/g on some rejected Voyager battle script. Also, oh no, we're fighting the Dominion again only this time they're kinda scaly.
Ugly: They need some new makeup artists to populate the "lots of different aliens" scenes, or maybe they should use Muppets
Overall, not bad but I'm not sorry West Wing is coming back next Wednesday. Hope the new B5 pilot in January is a little more inspiring.
Most people at my company bring in things like Nerf guns and wiffle balls and play around the office at times. It can get really loud once in a while. Many of them even go so far as to participate in extracurricular sports together.
Of course, these are by and large the same people who are willing to work 26 hours straight if an emergency arises, and are very good at staying billable and making a crapload of money.
The problem with the dot bombs wasn't the Nerf guns. The problem with the dot bombs was VC's smoking way too much crack and management buying into their resulting high.
Well, it's plainly ineffective anyway. Four planes (so far) simultaneously hijacked by suicide crews, each of which hits its mark. Wouldn't want to work for any three-letter agency today.
What I'm worried about is what happens while everyone's watching CNN.
is that it doesn't go far enough. It's not close enough an analogy to the GPL because music is different than software, and merely keeping the finished product free is more like a free-beer "freeware" license than the GPL. It seems kinda weird in the differences in protection between a composition, an arrangement of that composition, a specific finished recording of that composition, and a live performance which between improv and everything else makes it a whole new ballgame.
;)
It looks like it would make perfect sense to people who write folk songs (heh, including RMS), because those are sort of like free software - adding an extra verse is both common and analagous to adding a new function to some software. I don't do folk myself. I seem to remember there being a "Free Music License" around some time ago, but I think it had similar problems in that it focused on the idea of a finished studio track rather than its components.
But I also don't have a better alternative yet. I'm thinking about it in my copious free time
Way too late to be relevant, I know, but the Windows download tool Gozilla does this. And at least as of the beginning of this summer, it pays no attention to robots.txt. In fact, it doesn't spider your site at all, just quietly gathers data from individual users.
/friendsname-mandrake-20010xxx) of mine and he downloaded it one night using Gozilla. I forgot to delete it, was looking through the logs a week later and found that about 20 people had downloaded the whole 500+ megs with an HTTP_REFERER of search.gozilla.com. After deleting it, I got hits from the same place for another few weeks (returning 404's) and then I assume I dropped out of their search engine.
I threw a Mandrake 8 ISO out there for a friend (under
If you go to that site, you'll see a minimal search engine whose CSS causes the text to be black on black in Konqueror. If you search for Mandrake now there are no hits (maybe mine was the only copy out there.) But since one of the search presets is for images, I'm sure Gozilla would piss off the gold rush guys as well if they knew how to read their logs. Search engines are the least of their worries once you get your entire user base unwittingly spidering for you.
...because even with the QT libraries and kdeinit having to load that first time it's still up faster than Mozilla. Then it runs using about half the RAM Mozilla does.
Add Nautilus to the mix and I start wishing KDE had better keyboard shortcuts so I could start using it fulltime.
"if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?"
Proponents of free software support the mere invalidation of proprietary software licenses, not their criminalization. Eric's argument is rather like an anti-drug pundit insisting that proponents of decriminalization are pushing for mandatory marijuana use.
In the imaginary universe where the FSF has achieved all its goals, you're welcome to put a shrinkwrap license on your software that says "don't copy this". No one will arrest you, but anyone would be free to laugh at you as they make a million copies. It's actually a far more libertine *and* libertarian place than ESR's dream world.
Rob
Check it out.
;)
1. Loading time. Sure, IE comes up in like 5 seconds but so does Konqueror if you're running KDE. In his test he was running Blackbox. Try running Win2K on a P166 with Litestep or something instead of Explorer and see how fast IE loads
2. Appearance. Using default settings, IE is gray. The author hates gray. He probably would have ranked IE right next to Konqueror if not Galeon in terms of appearance.
3. Ease of use. His only two criteria were "how do I turn off images" and "how do I turn off Javascript." IE has a far, far more byzantine approach to this than any of the browsers he reviewed. One is buried in the "custom security settings" dialog on the second tab of the Internet options dialog and is called "active scripting", not Javascript, and the other is buried 2/3 of the way down a scrolled list under the Advanced tab of Internet Options.
4. Page rendering. I'm typing this in Konqueror through a Java VNC client from IE, from a site where I'm doing some pretty intensive stuff targeted to IE, unfortunately, but which looks fine in normal browsers too. Anyway, the stuff I'm doing renders at about the same speed accessed remotely through Konqueror over VNC as it does accessed locally through IE. Konqueror, by the way, is running on a Celeron 400 with 256mb of RAM, IE is running on a dual P4-1GHz with 1.5GB of RAM.
It seems pretty clear that by the article author's criteria, IE would have ended up in the lower middle of the pack with Galeon still on top.
Shouldn't that be "Quake on me?"
His appearance on the cover of Wired is the single event defining when Wired stopped being "Newsweek for nerds" and started being "Old Rich White Guys With Bad Investment Tips Digest."
Et tu, Slashdot?
Well, I go through a lot of CDR's now that I have a PC set up as a PVR in the living room. Even at really low (about VHS EP) quality, DivX;-) still only gets a little less than 3 hours on a disc. That's a lot of music videos though.
;)
That, and when you start doing a lot of multitrack audio recording, 80 minutes turns into like 8 minutes. Plus if you're using cheap CD's to back up your audio projects, you really need a backup of the backup
It has a 40 gig drive, meaning about 42 hours of video, and I can back up the shows I watch to CDR with little difficulty. Unlike Tivo, it can't tattle on me with no modem or network connection, though I'm sure digital cable takes care of that already. And any DVD issues I encounter with region codes and Macrovision are easily dealt with, not that it's been necessary so far.
I'd like to think a pre-built box like this could be sold for 500 bucks or so, but the entertainment cartels would never let it happen. So if you have Tivo privacy concerns, build your own, already.
Or an mp3 player? Would Debian include a media player in their distribution that disallowed decoding mp3's with the copyright bit set? Would anyone use cdparanoia if it refused to rip CD's not marked as "original"? Those access control bits are there in most audio formats, and as meaningless as the ones in PDF, yet no one cries foul when every MP3 and CD player in the world merrily ignores them. I think people would scream, holler and downgrade if the authors DID abide by those bits.
Debian (and every other distribution) has already dealt with this ethical dilemma whether consciously or not. Unilateral access controls in free software are in fact software bugs, especially when they're intentional. Packagers frequently fix glaring bugs when prepping a package for their distribution. So why not this one?
If they can't find it in themselves to patch xpdf, it seems to me that the pdf viewer should be GPL'ed ghostscript or something like it which is not intentionally buggy. If it doesn't render as well as xpdf, well... ghostscript source, meet xpdf. xpdf, ghostscript. The joy of GPL.
If this is actually real, casual recording of one's everyday life is about to get a whole lot cheaper. (Not to mention the art of bugging.)
It has much less RAM, true, but for me the voice recorder was the kicker. I use it all the time.
1. While just having internet access won't make poor people less poor, it will at least let them communicate with others in the same boat, and become aware of ways to get out of it. If their lot in life doesn't improve, it's also one avenue for political organization. While they could cut off free net access in the event that happened, it's many rungs up the ladder from the typical impoverished country which would take steps to keep its poor people isolated.
2. This is only part of the story. In a New York Times article I read earlier this week, there was a description of how Brazil is encouraging its researchers to violate American drug company patents and copy AIDS drugs for free treatment of the poor, the net effect being that they're controlling AIDS down there as well as we are here. Now they're distributing cheap computers with no Microsoft tax.
Why is this important? Because for apparently the first time, a less privileged country has realized that there's no need to pay rich countries for stuff that can be copied or has a freely available substitute. You can charge whatever you want for oil and take it away if a country won't pay up, but you can't take away their ability to copy your 'intellectual property'.
If they can do this and survive economically, it will change everything.
I had been meaning to join the EFF for a while, but having that link in front of me at a moment when I have a little extra money caused me to do it just now. Thanks.
As a consolation, now you can make any album you have sound just like "Kid A"...
But they do anyway. Welcome to Civics 101.