It's amazing, we have so much technology here in the US, but it's all tied up in the hands of the most shortsighted, stupid, and greedy SOBs that ever walked the earth.
Read the article for a little insight into their minds. It's unthinkable that they could simply provide a service and take a steady profit. Their revenues HAVE to climb every quarter, and they're in a tizzy because the customers aren't cooperating by happily coughing up more money every month for more crap that no one wants.
But, I just bought a new simm for each country. So, get off the airport in Italy, for instance, pop in the Italian simm, and good to go with a local number. A bit of a pain, but still cheaper and much more reliable than trying to use a cell in the US.
It is a rip off here in the US, yes. Unbelievable.
In Europe, you can get decent deals, however. Your prepaid service has a good shelf life, unlike here where you simply MUST buy more minutes every month or they cut you off. You don't get charged for receiving calls (caller pays) and in fact with the service I had you actually got a (very) small kickback when someone called you. The prices were reasonable, and I would prepay roughly $60 and not need to worry about it again for 6 months.
When I came back to the US, I went to try and get service and it was an absolute nightmare. They don't want to just sell you bloody phone service, they want to give you a 'free' (read paid for by you, in the fine print, of course) phone that was loaded with all this crap I don't care about, making it far more complex than it needs to be, they want you to pay at least $60-75 every month, and they're very pushy about it. Even after politing refusing this over and over again and finally getting the simple phone service that I wanted, it's $20 a pop, there are connection fees and charges for receiving calls and every sneaky hidden gotcha in the book. That $20 lasts me barely a week, so when all the crap is added up it turns out to be TWELVE times as expensive as the service I was used to. And on top of that, of course, coverage SUCKS. And when I'm in an area with no coverage at all for a few weeks, I come back, and find that my prepaid phone, with a positive balance, has been turned off - apparently because one is required to add money every month whether you're using it or not, or else you lose it.
This was with T-Mobile, who were reputed to have by far the best coverage in the area I was in, by the way. If the others are worse, I don't understand how they stay in business at all.
So I've just packed my phone away. The cellular companies in this company, apparently, aren't interested in offering simple telephone service at a reasonable price. Until they are, I am not interested in them.
It's utterly nonsensical to say that they can't release specs because of patents, unless you mean because they're violating someone elses and afraid to get caught. Patents are, by definition and law, public disclosures. The entire point to getting a patent is so that you don't *need* to keep it a secret anymore.
Nvidia doesn't claim this, by the way. They claim that writing drivers is simply 'too complex' for the free software community to help with it. Which not only misses the point entirely, but is just ludicrously wrong in every respect. The free software community has produced more and better drivers than any company on earth, and will continue to do so for companies that are smart enough to simply open up the interface specs.
So you can see that imprisonment and torture is evil, but not that enslavement when done with soft gloves and a gilded cage is? Perhaps you should think about what the essence of evil is a bit...
I reckon it was a little passive-aggressive outburst that caused them to give the answer in a.doc file instead of a standard format of some kind. Not happy campers about having to give up the power and prestige that would have accrued them if their desired interpretation had been accepted.
Fortunately a readable copy is to be found a click or two from the page you linked, here so now us long-haired smellies can read it too.
Yeah, the integrated graphics really isn't that bad a deal. Unless you really MUST play the latest FPS at the highest graphic levels with perfect action, in which case why the heck are you buying an entry-level laptop?
Particularly since it's a well supported chipset for X11 if you ever change operating systems (Apple will discontinue OS support for the model long before it ceases functioning if my experience is any guide,) the choice of graphics looks real good to me.
Nonsense. There are plenty of tasks involved in making quality software that don't require programming skill. Anyone that's motivated to help should be able to find a way to do so, whether improving documentation, testing and reporting bugs or usability issues, etc.
And if you're a businessman and you need something just like this only with some feature added, or some bug fixed, etc. for your business, you can pay someone to do what you need with the existing code a lot cheaper than having something written from scratch in many cases too.
It could be an extensions issue, as others have suggested. It could just be his browsing habits.
As long as I stay on a few sites I frequent it never crashes. But every so often I go off searching for something, hitting lots of odd pages, and whenever I do that, sooner or later firefox goes boom.
Firefox is quite stable as long as you feed it nothing too wierd, but it will crash and burn on garbage input, and if you hit enough webpages from different sites these days you'll eventually find some real trash.
I used to be a huge fan of Opera, but it's as bloated as everything else in recent versions.
Plus the best feature, full on MDI instead of retarded tabs, doesn't work on the Mac.
And, of course, it's not free, so you can't fork it anyhow. Now, if it were, and I could, and I had the time and/or money... a fork from Opera 3.62 might be very nice.
It's not unstable as in crashes for no reason - it once was, but it's pretty stable now, in general. You can make it go boom pretty easy feeding it garbage data though, and if you're out bouncing around on the wild wild web instead of just working on a fairly small set of more or less well-coded pages, you'll see it go boom now and then.
IE, on the other hand, is really very well coded. You can feed it random garbage almost indefinitely and it stands up fine - really an acid test for good coding. Unfortunately, no matter how well coded it is, the design specs ensure it will never be worth using. A very well written trojan delivery system/virus buiders toolkit/web perversion utility. Such a waste.
Yes, the basic gist of what he said is enough to send coffee and coke up millions of readers noses worldwide... but look carefully at that statement. There's some more subtle twisting there, that might just slip by under your radar, especially if you're busy trying to breathe or looking for something to clean up the keyboard.
He contrasts free software, not with *proprietary* software, but with *commercial* software. This is also completely off the mark - most free software *is* commercial after all. What Microsoft is desperately trying to cling to against the march of progress here is not *commerce* - which is not in any danger - but against *proprietarism* - a very different beast.
Another difference is that you can, if you wish, actually help make it stable!
Well, in firefox's case that would probably mean forking it since the development team has a chronic case of featuritis, but again, you can do that if it's important enough to you.
There are some definite advantages in terms of reliability and security to the free software model, but that doesn't mean all free software is going to be more reliable or more secure than all proprietary software - far from it. Free software, however, does allow users to become involved and part of the process, rather than condemning them to exist only as passive 'consumers.' And it does respond to their needs, rather than to the desires of the marketing department.
IE is much better coded than firefox - and firefox therefore crashes more often. Yet, despite that advantage, IE is much less *secure.* And that's what you get when marketing determines the program specifications...
You have every right to your beliefs, however misguided they may be, I'll defend your right to hold them, and to propound them. But please, try to at least be honest here.
If you think capitalism is the answer, it is you who needs to stop smoking whatever anaesthetic you're on and wake up. People are no happier than they were 50 years ago, just richer and poorer. Those in power tell us it's so superior, but the only real difference is that they are clever enough to distract us with shiny baubles instead of beating us with a stick.
Speaking of things told us by 'those in power' that are fairy tales with no basis in reality - this hasn't been anything even vaguely resembling a capitalist system for many, many years. So, you see, you're flailing around blindly here. You can criticise the current economic system all you want, and I'll probably agree with you more often than not. But it's not capitalism. It hardly resembles capitalism. It's much closer to communism, in fact, and it's getting even closer every day, thanks to the work of folks like the RIAA. That was my original point, which sailed right over your head apparently.
Still, no doubt you're happy with that, being one of the rich.
Totally off the mark. I guarantee you, of the two of us, you're the rich and pampered one.
You see, the root value of communism, which you can see clearly all the way from Marx and Engles to Stalin and Mao, is the rejection of individual rights, individual values, individuality itself. And that's exactly what the RIAA is doing as well, in their overwhelming craving to have income without any of that messy stuff like actually providing something of value to individual customers, in accordance with their individual values, to justify taking the product of their labour away from them. To the RIAA, individual rights are clearly just an annoying obstacle to their idea of utopia - they use the word 'pirate' much the way communists use 'bourgois.' And just as the communists rationalise their desire to disregard individual rights and values by simply removing individuality from their consciousness - I'm serious here, how often does Marx mention any person as an individual? Marx teaches you that people don't exist as individuals, only as members of a 'class.' Just like Marx, the RIAA attempts to remove the infividual from the picture and never refers to them, they refer to groups only... 'pirates' and 'consumers' mostly.
I'm not a pirate. I'm damn sure not a 'consumer.' And no, I'm not a 'prole' either, thank you very much.
Kind of tangential, but haven't you noticed that the communists are always the poor little rich kids, trying to salve their guilty consciences, while the real 'proles' usually shun them? Think about it.
Communism the ideology, if taken seriously, leads to communism the implementation. Quite simple.
McCarthy was right about a lot of things. There WERE communist spies everywhere at the time. Of course he was a demogogue and a moron, and never actually caught them, spending his time terrorising *sympathisers* like you instead of the actual spies, and in the process probably doing more damage to the US than the actual spies were doing.
And 'unfettered capitalism?' Huh? What the heck have you been smoking?
Communism, in a nutshell, is about the abolition of private property and individual rights. And that's exactly what the RIAA is clearly about too, as they make even clearer with every action.
Have you ever really thought about what the difference is between a good counterfeit and a 'real' bill, btw? Fascinating, if you follow it through.
You're conflating several quite different things into one lump-all: stealing. But they're very different things, and they deserve to be addressed on their own merits. Counterfeiting != copyright infringement != stealing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing, we have so much technology here in the US, but it's all tied up in the hands of the most shortsighted, stupid, and greedy SOBs that ever walked the earth.
Read the article for a little insight into their minds. It's unthinkable that they could simply provide a service and take a steady profit. Their revenues HAVE to climb every quarter, and they're in a tizzy because the customers aren't cooperating by happily coughing up more money every month for more crap that no one wants.
Yes, the roaming charges are a rip off for sure.
But, I just bought a new simm for each country. So, get off the airport in Italy, for instance, pop in the Italian simm, and good to go with a local number. A bit of a pain, but still cheaper and much more reliable than trying to use a cell in the US.
It is a rip off here in the US, yes. Unbelievable.
In Europe, you can get decent deals, however. Your prepaid service has a good shelf life, unlike here where you simply MUST buy more minutes every month or they cut you off. You don't get charged for receiving calls (caller pays) and in fact with the service I had you actually got a (very) small kickback when someone called you. The prices were reasonable, and I would prepay roughly $60 and not need to worry about it again for 6 months.
When I came back to the US, I went to try and get service and it was an absolute nightmare. They don't want to just sell you bloody phone service, they want to give you a 'free' (read paid for by you, in the fine print, of course) phone that was loaded with all this crap I don't care about, making it far more complex than it needs to be, they want you to pay at least $60-75 every month, and they're very pushy about it. Even after politing refusing this over and over again and finally getting the simple phone service that I wanted, it's $20 a pop, there are connection fees and charges for receiving calls and every sneaky hidden gotcha in the book. That $20 lasts me barely a week, so when all the crap is added up it turns out to be TWELVE times as expensive as the service I was used to. And on top of that, of course, coverage SUCKS. And when I'm in an area with no coverage at all for a few weeks, I come back, and find that my prepaid phone, with a positive balance, has been turned off - apparently because one is required to add money every month whether you're using it or not, or else you lose it.
This was with T-Mobile, who were reputed to have by far the best coverage in the area I was in, by the way. If the others are worse, I don't understand how they stay in business at all.
So I've just packed my phone away. The cellular companies in this company, apparently, aren't interested in offering simple telephone service at a reasonable price. Until they are, I am not interested in them.
It's utterly nonsensical to say that they can't release specs because of patents, unless you mean because they're violating someone elses and afraid to get caught. Patents are, by definition and law, public disclosures. The entire point to getting a patent is so that you don't *need* to keep it a secret anymore.
Nvidia doesn't claim this, by the way. They claim that writing drivers is simply 'too complex' for the free software community to help with it. Which not only misses the point entirely, but is just ludicrously wrong in every respect. The free software community has produced more and better drivers than any company on earth, and will continue to do so for companies that are smart enough to simply open up the interface specs.
So you can see that imprisonment and torture is evil, but not that enslavement when done with soft gloves and a gilded cage is? Perhaps you should think about what the essence of evil is a bit...
You can add a number of Matrox cards to that list too. Up to the 550, which is a pretty capable card, and still available at a reasonable price.
XGL definitely does NOT require blobware to work. It does, sadly, require blobware to work on Nvidia hardware. But that's not the same thing.
They can, but they'll run into problems if they try to sell any such products over here, which will neuter the effect somewhat.
Thanks.
I reckon it was a little passive-aggressive outburst that caused them to give the answer in a .doc file instead of a standard format of some kind. Not happy campers about having to give up the power and prestige that would have accrued them if their desired interpretation had been accepted.
Fortunately a readable copy is to be found a click or two from the page you linked, here so now us long-haired smellies can read it too.
Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design.
People have murdered and raped each other since the dawn of time too.
Doesn't make it right. Doesn't make it lawful.
Yeah, the integrated graphics really isn't that bad a deal. Unless you really MUST play the latest FPS at the highest graphic levels with perfect action, in which case why the heck are you buying an entry-level laptop?
Particularly since it's a well supported chipset for X11 if you ever change operating systems (Apple will discontinue OS support for the model long before it ceases functioning if my experience is any guide,) the choice of graphics looks real good to me.
Nonsense. There are plenty of tasks involved in making quality software that don't require programming skill. Anyone that's motivated to help should be able to find a way to do so, whether improving documentation, testing and reporting bugs or usability issues, etc.
And if you're a businessman and you need something just like this only with some feature added, or some bug fixed, etc. for your business, you can pay someone to do what you need with the existing code a lot cheaper than having something written from scratch in many cases too.
It all adds up.
It's gratis. It's not free. If it were free I could fork it...
It could be an extensions issue, as others have suggested. It could just be his browsing habits.
As long as I stay on a few sites I frequent it never crashes. But every so often I go off searching for something, hitting lots of odd pages, and whenever I do that, sooner or later firefox goes boom.
Pretty sure it has to do with this.
Firefox is quite stable as long as you feed it nothing too wierd, but it will crash and burn on garbage input, and if you hit enough webpages from different sites these days you'll eventually find some real trash.
I used to be a huge fan of Opera, but it's as bloated as everything else in recent versions. Plus the best feature, full on MDI instead of retarded tabs, doesn't work on the Mac. And, of course, it's not free, so you can't fork it anyhow. Now, if it were, and I could, and I had the time and/or money... a fork from Opera 3.62 might be very nice.
It's not unstable as in crashes for no reason - it once was, but it's pretty stable now, in general. You can make it go boom pretty easy feeding it garbage data though, and if you're out bouncing around on the wild wild web instead of just working on a fairly small set of more or less well-coded pages, you'll see it go boom now and then.
IE, on the other hand, is really very well coded. You can feed it random garbage almost indefinitely and it stands up fine - really an acid test for good coding. Unfortunately, no matter how well coded it is, the design specs ensure it will never be worth using. A very well written trojan delivery system/virus buiders toolkit/web perversion utility. Such a waste.
Yes, the basic gist of what he said is enough to send coffee and coke up millions of readers noses worldwide... but look carefully at that statement. There's some more subtle twisting there, that might just slip by under your radar, especially if you're busy trying to breathe or looking for something to clean up the keyboard.
He contrasts free software, not with *proprietary* software, but with *commercial* software. This is also completely off the mark - most free software *is* commercial after all. What Microsoft is desperately trying to cling to against the march of progress here is not *commerce* - which is not in any danger - but against *proprietarism* - a very different beast.
Another difference is that you can, if you wish, actually help make it stable!
Well, in firefox's case that would probably mean forking it since the development team has a chronic case of featuritis, but again, you can do that if it's important enough to you.
There are some definite advantages in terms of reliability and security to the free software model, but that doesn't mean all free software is going to be more reliable or more secure than all proprietary software - far from it. Free software, however, does allow users to become involved and part of the process, rather than condemning them to exist only as passive 'consumers.' And it does respond to their needs, rather than to the desires of the marketing department.
IE is much better coded than firefox - and firefox therefore crashes more often. Yet, despite that advantage, IE is much less *secure.* And that's what you get when marketing determines the program specifications...
Fortunately they still have PPC based laptops in stock. At reduced prices, no less.
Who said anything about OSX?
Buy a freaking apple laptop and put linux on it. Works great. Intel or PPC, doesn't matter, that's the beauty of free software.
Advancing apologetics doesn't indicate sympathy?
Please.
You have every right to your beliefs, however misguided they may be, I'll defend your right to hold them, and to propound them. But please, try to at least be honest here.
Speaking of things told us by 'those in power' that are fairy tales with no basis in reality - this hasn't been anything even vaguely resembling a capitalist system for many, many years. So, you see, you're flailing around blindly here. You can criticise the current economic system all you want, and I'll probably agree with you more often than not. But it's not capitalism. It hardly resembles capitalism. It's much closer to communism, in fact, and it's getting even closer every day, thanks to the work of folks like the RIAA. That was my original point, which sailed right over your head apparently.
Totally off the mark. I guarantee you, of the two of us, you're the rich and pampered one.
You see, the root value of communism, which you can see clearly all the way from Marx and Engles to Stalin and Mao, is the rejection of individual rights, individual values, individuality itself. And that's exactly what the RIAA is doing as well, in their overwhelming craving to have income without any of that messy stuff like actually providing something of value to individual customers, in accordance with their individual values, to justify taking the product of their labour away from them. To the RIAA, individual rights are clearly just an annoying obstacle to their idea of utopia - they use the word 'pirate' much the way communists use 'bourgois.' And just as the communists rationalise their desire to disregard individual rights and values by simply removing individuality from their consciousness - I'm serious here, how often does Marx mention any person as an individual? Marx teaches you that people don't exist as individuals, only as members of a 'class.' Just like Marx, the RIAA attempts to remove the infividual from the picture and never refers to them, they refer to groups only... 'pirates' and 'consumers' mostly.
I'm not a pirate. I'm damn sure not a 'consumer.' And no, I'm not a 'prole' either, thank you very much.
Kind of tangential, but haven't you noticed that the communists are always the poor little rich kids, trying to salve their guilty consciences, while the real 'proles' usually shun them? Think about it.
Typical apologism. And really quite senseless.
Communism the ideology, if taken seriously, leads to communism the implementation. Quite simple.
McCarthy was right about a lot of things. There WERE communist spies everywhere at the time. Of course he was a demogogue and a moron, and never actually caught them, spending his time terrorising *sympathisers* like you instead of the actual spies, and in the process probably doing more damage to the US than the actual spies were doing.
And 'unfettered capitalism?' Huh? What the heck have you been smoking?
Don't you dare tell me what to install on my computer!
What incredible arrogance!
There it is again.
Guess what, you're wrong. You have horrible taste, and you always will, because you're too self-absorbed to even notice there's a problem.
Nope. See, that's what they want you to think.
Communism, in a nutshell, is about the abolition of private property and individual rights. And that's exactly what the RIAA is clearly about too, as they make even clearer with every action.
Think about it.
Counterfeiting isn't stealing either.
Have you ever really thought about what the difference is between a good counterfeit and a 'real' bill, btw? Fascinating, if you follow it through.
You're conflating several quite different things into one lump-all: stealing. But they're very different things, and they deserve to be addressed on their own merits. Counterfeiting != copyright infringement != stealing.