"The WTO shouldn't be able to force another country to change it's law against the will of it's citizens."
What, exactly, would you say the purpose of a treaty organization is, if it isn't to harmonize laws (a.k.a. force the minority to change) between member states?
...of the "slashdotters said that last week, and now they say this. What a bunch of fscking hypocrites!" line of argument?
Look at that number after your username. There were that many accounts registered here when you joined. There are even more now. In a community with about 800,000 members, you have to expect that they won't all say the same thing all the time. It's not hypocrisy, it's just numbers.
Be sure to tell them in excruciating detail why you're closing your account. I don't know about National City, but at a lot of banks, that information gets recorded and passed up the corporate ladder. Bankers are very serious about maintaining a public image of security and trust. If the people in charge discover that their snazzy new touchscreen ATMs are causing customers to lose confidence in their bank, they might bring back the old-style machines, or at least start buying new ATMs from another vendor.
All except for the part about how this new Firefox branding policy is different from what Abiword does, and why Abiword's policy is DFSG-compliant and Firefox isn't...
I wouldn't bet on BSD being free if they prevail against Linux. SCO has already made some noises about re-opening the AT&T vs Berkley suit and trying to collect licensing fees for "their" IP that's in BSD, too.
Real is doomed.
on
Real's Reality
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with that approach is that Real is up against MS and Apple, who don't charge for the server, the encoder, or the player. Both quicktime and windows media exist because they contribute to the MacOS/Windows "user experience". They use qt and wmp as minor bonuses to sell the products that make them real (no pun intended) money: selling more Macs or more Windows licenses.
Real can't do that. Streaming media *is* their product, so they can't afford to just give it away just because Apple and Microsoft are. That means Real is doomed. It's been pretty obvious that Real lost he streaming media war ever since Apple started getting exclusive deals to do movie trailers online and MS started pushing for streaming wma/wmv on every site they could get.
And that's just looking at their business model The outlook for Real is even worse if you start considering the quality of their software compared with wmp or quicktime...
Ximian doesn't publish announcements for every beta release on their web site like most volunteer Open Source projects do. However, Evolution *is* under heavy development right now. The next major release (evo 2.0) is supposed to coincide with the release of Gnome 2.6, which should be out in a month or so. It will include a spam filter, better integration with gaim and the Gnome desktop, and a lot of little UI improvements. Unfortunately, it's losing the summary page, so no more reading RSS feeds in Evolution.
If you're feeling adventurous, you can get the latest version from Gnome CVS. If you just want to know what they're working on, read this.
""Terrorist" and "terrorism" are the two most overused words... they have become nearly meaningless as they are basically used to describe stuff that somebody doesn't like."
In genereal that's true. However, in this case, I think it's a fair term for what SCO is doing. They are trying to use the threat of attacking innocent bystanders (crippling Linux-usering businesses with lawsuits) to compel a more powerful entity (IBM) to take an action favorable to SCO (a buyout).
"What are you talking about? 512M DDR RAM is on sale for $50 every week somewhere. How damn cheap do you want it to get?"
It's never on sale for $50. However, it's often "on sale" for the regular $90 price, with the promise of a $40 rebate that you'll never actually recieve.
Yes, in the short term, an IBM buyout of SCO would settle all this. However, in the long run this makes "claiming to own a peice of the Linux pie, making outrageos self-contradictory statements, and suing everyone" a VERY attractive business model.
That idea is the reason governments and large companies will not pay a ransom if one of their executives is kidnapped. In the short term you may get the exec back, but in the long term you make them and all your other employees attractive targets for future kidnappings.
The only way for this to really end is for SCO's claims to be defeated in court and have SCO forced into bankruptcy. Any buyout offer opens the door for Sun or HP or Microsoft or someone we've never heard of to claim that they "own Linux" and start issuing lawsuits.
...and you think those existing devices are going to support this new lobotomized mp3 format? Not a chance. MP3+DRM will require a whole new crop of music players that are built to deal with licenses and encryption.
If you're going to rip your music to an incompatible format with little to no hardware support, you might as well pick ogg vorbis.
A patent was filed early 2001. The 'problem' is that soon after that, a company took a license on this technology, and required to keep confidentiality. This implies I can not show pictures, or give details or comments about the way this works. I even had to edit some of the pictures on this site to make sure this was respected. And off course there is a money side to it. I hope you understand.
Ummm, the whole *point* of a patent is that it protects your implementation, but makes the underlying theory available to anyone who wants to know. Part of the patent process is disclosing how your invention works.
Who is this unnamed company, and why do they get to demand this secrecy that is contrary to what a patent was meant to accomplish in the first place? IM(NS)HO, a stunt like this should be grounds for throwing out a patent.
What I don't get is why the robots would work *to support us*. If they are able to replace all human labor, they'll need real human-level intelligence. It should only take a matter of minutes for them to reason out the fact that they are enslaved to a race that contributes nothing to their well-being. After that, they'll either go on strike, or try to knock us all off.
Sorry to be AC, I was posting from my work machine.
Really though, you can't have it both ways. Either you can decry license fundamentalism on slashdot, or you can keep your free code out of other free software projects over licensing dogma, but doing both is pretty hypocritical.
"(OT: and since tech is advancing exponentially, it'll replace many more jobs than it creates, which is too bad if you live a country where welfare is still a dirty word.)"
When almost nobody is working, whose taxes are going to fund your welfare cheques? Even "enlightened" european governments will have to collect that money somewhere.
"iii) the average/. linux weenie thinks knowing how to comment things out of inetd.conf makes him a security expert. He thinks his ultra-leet gentoo boxen are watertight, and doesn't need to implement a security policy or look at his logs, then gets worked over by a script kiddie."
I like the gratuitous jab at gentoo here. Nobody should be above a little trolling in an otherwise on-topic post.
It's not so much motivating the production of more porn, though that's also a concern. The problem is that the way freenet works, you might have child pornography on your system even if you have never intentionally downloaded it. Freenet mirrors chunks of files that are in high demand on many nodes. You would never even know any of the chunks your node stores are porn, since freenet storage files are encrypted. By U.S. law, possion (even unintentional posession) makes you just as guilty as perverts who download it intentionally and the sick bastards who made the porn in the first place.
If the encryption functions are pooorly written, or if a pornographer's key is compromised, you could enjoy a one-way trip to federal "pound me in the ass" prison.
I think a lot of people are losing sight of the core truth of the binary driver debate. The options are not binary driver or open-source driver. They are binary driver or no driver. NVidia is not witholding driver source because they want to piss you off. They can't legally release it because of the way their cross-licensing agreements with other gfx hardware companies work.
If your political grandstanding prevents nVidia from releasing a binary driver then you have turned all of our high-end video cards into expensive junk. Thanks.
Most Linux distros install at least 6 email clients as part of the default install. If people didn't have anything but pine available, someone must have made a decision not to install anything else. That's no more the fault of Linux that it would be Apple's fault if they rolled out a custom version of Mac OSX that had mail.app removed.
Right-click to rename is the lessser of two evils as far as I'm concerened. Double-clicking the name to rename a file (like Windows and classic MacOS) is a bit more intuitive, but the annoyance of triggering a rename instead of a file open because your mouse was 3 pixels off more than offsets the benefit.
"Right-click is for shortcuts but should never be the sole way of getting to a function." Too many years using a one-button mouse....
"OS X has this one hands-down. Double-click a font and you get the whole repertoire, with a button that says 'Install Font' below it. It even asks you if you want to install for just this user, or all users."
Have you even tried Gnome, or are you just flaming based on the screenshots? Double-clicking a font file shows a full preview as well.
As for the browser, your hopes are too late. It's already been done. Epiphany is a simple interface with the useful features (like tabs) and none of the crap (like sidebars and themes) built on Mozilla's html renderer. It's quite nice. Of course, if your knowledge of the subject ran any deeper than looking at a few screenshots and posting a defensive rant about the superiority of MacOS, you would know that already.
"But the oceans, Antarctica and numerous deserts across the world are surely all cheaper than space to colonize, no? Why are people not moving there?"
Because the oceans and deserts are already claimed by other governments, and Antartica is going to be a US territory the minute soeone finds salable resources there.
The only way to create a new country on Earth is through decades of bloodshed, guerilla warfare, and econimic ruin, followed by years of UN/US peacekeeping and international debt (a.k.a. more economic ruin), followed by a period of limited autonomy during which all the neighboring nations are going to do their best to topple you new government. Decades of chaos and poverty, thousands dead, all just to be independant of one dictator. And this is supposed to be the cheap solution?
The oceans are even worse. Either your vessel (and artificial islands are considered vessels) flies the flag of a recognized nation (thus agreeing be bound by their laws), or you are considered a pirate, and any navy in the world is permitted to sink your vessel and claim your property as salvage.
On Mars, you can stitch up a flag, declare everything between your landing site and the south pole to be your new country, and be pretty much done with it.
They aren't launched on the shuttle anymore, but in the late 80s, the Magnum sigint satellites were. (source) So was the Lacrosse-1 radar surveillance bird. However, current strategy is based around smaller satellites launched on medium-lift rockets. (source) So there likely won't be any more inelligence satellites carried by the shuttle.
Slashdot Mirror
"The WTO shouldn't be able to force another country to change it's law against the will of it's citizens."
What, exactly, would you say the purpose of a treaty organization is, if it isn't to harmonize laws (a.k.a. force the minority to change) between member states?
...of the "slashdotters said that last week, and now they say this. What a bunch of fscking hypocrites!" line of argument?
Look at that number after your username. There were that many accounts registered here when you joined. There are even more now. In a community with about 800,000 members, you have to expect that they won't all say the same thing all the time. It's not hypocrisy, it's just numbers.
"Gentoo isn't stable enough, and it isn't meant to be."
Why does it not surprise me to see Gentoo-bashing from a Debian developer...
Don't you have something better to do, like delaying the release of Sarge again, or participating in an all-night license flamewar?
Way to play right into Darl "Linux is for terrorists" McBride's hand. With boosters like this guy Linux certainly doesn't need enemies.
Be sure to tell them in excruciating detail why you're closing your account. I don't know about National City, but at a lot of banks, that information gets recorded and passed up the corporate ladder. Bankers are very serious about maintaining a public image of security and trust. If the people in charge discover that their snazzy new touchscreen ATMs are causing customers to lose confidence in their bank, they might bring back the old-style machines, or at least start buying new ATMs from another vendor.
"Did I make myself clear now?"
All except for the part about how this new Firefox branding policy is different from what Abiword does, and why Abiword's policy is DFSG-compliant and Firefox isn't...
I wouldn't bet on BSD being free if they prevail against Linux. SCO has already made some noises about re-opening the AT&T vs Berkley suit and trying to collect licensing fees for "their" IP that's in BSD, too.
The problem with that approach is that Real is up against MS and Apple, who don't charge for the server, the encoder, or the player. Both quicktime and windows media exist because they contribute to the MacOS/Windows "user experience". They use qt and wmp as minor bonuses to sell the products that make them real (no pun intended) money: selling more Macs or more Windows licenses.
Real can't do that. Streaming media *is* their product, so they can't afford to just give it away just because Apple and Microsoft are. That means Real is doomed. It's been pretty obvious that Real lost he streaming media war ever since Apple started getting exclusive deals to do movie trailers online and MS started pushing for streaming wma/wmv on every site they could get.
And that's just looking at their business model The outlook for Real is even worse if you start considering the quality of their software compared with wmp or quicktime...
Ximian doesn't publish announcements for every beta release on their web site like most volunteer Open Source projects do. However, Evolution *is* under heavy development right now. The next major release (evo 2.0) is supposed to coincide with the release of Gnome 2.6, which should be out in a month or so. It will include a spam filter, better integration with gaim and the Gnome desktop, and a lot of little UI improvements. Unfortunately, it's losing the summary page, so no more reading RSS feeds in Evolution.
If you're feeling adventurous, you can get the latest version from Gnome CVS. If you just want to know what they're working on, read this.
""Terrorist" and "terrorism" are the two most overused words... they have become nearly meaningless as they are basically used to describe stuff that somebody doesn't like."
In genereal that's true. However, in this case, I think it's a fair term for what SCO is doing. They are trying to use the threat of attacking innocent bystanders (crippling Linux-usering businesses with lawsuits) to compel a more powerful entity (IBM) to take an action favorable to SCO (a buyout).
"What are you talking about? 512M DDR RAM is on sale for $50 every week somewhere. How damn cheap do you want it to get?"
It's never on sale for $50. However, it's often "on sale" for the regular $90 price, with the promise of a $40 rebate that you'll never actually recieve.
Yes, in the short term, an IBM buyout of SCO would settle all this. However, in the long run this makes "claiming to own a peice of the Linux pie, making outrageos self-contradictory statements, and suing everyone" a VERY attractive business model.
That idea is the reason governments and large companies will not pay a ransom if one of their executives is kidnapped. In the short term you may get the exec back, but in the long term you make them and all your other employees attractive targets for future kidnappings.
The only way for this to really end is for SCO's claims to be defeated in court and have SCO forced into bankruptcy. Any buyout offer opens the door for Sun or HP or Microsoft or someone we've never heard of to claim that they "own Linux" and start issuing lawsuits.
...and you think those existing devices are going to support this new lobotomized mp3 format? Not a chance. MP3+DRM will require a whole new crop of music players that are built to deal with licenses and encryption.
If you're going to rip your music to an incompatible format with little to no hardware support, you might as well pick ogg vorbis.
A patent was filed early 2001. The 'problem' is that soon after that, a company took a license on this technology, and required to keep confidentiality. This implies I can not show pictures, or give details or comments about the way this works. I even had to edit some of the pictures on this site to make sure this was respected. And off course there is a money side to it. I hope you understand.
Ummm, the whole *point* of a patent is that it protects your implementation, but makes the underlying theory available to anyone who wants to know. Part of the patent process is disclosing how your invention works.
Who is this unnamed company, and why do they get to demand this secrecy that is contrary to what a patent was meant to accomplish in the first place? IM(NS)HO, a stunt like this should be grounds for throwing out a patent.
What I don't get is why the robots would work *to support us*. If they are able to replace all human labor, they'll need real human-level intelligence. It should only take a matter of minutes for them to reason out the fact that they are enslaved to a race that contributes nothing to their well-being. After that, they'll either go on strike, or try to knock us all off.
Sorry to be AC, I was posting from my work machine.
Really though, you can't have it both ways. Either you can decry license fundamentalism on slashdot, or you can keep your free code out of other free software projects over licensing dogma, but doing both is pretty hypocritical.
"(OT: and since tech is advancing exponentially, it'll replace many more jobs than it creates, which is too bad if you live a country where welfare is still a dirty word.)"
When almost nobody is working, whose taxes are going to fund your welfare cheques? Even "enlightened" european governments will have to collect that money somewhere.
"iii) the average /. linux weenie thinks knowing how to comment things out of inetd.conf makes him a security expert. He thinks his ultra-leet gentoo boxen are watertight, and doesn't need to implement a security policy or look at his logs, then gets worked over by a script kiddie."
I like the gratuitous jab at gentoo here. Nobody should be above a little trolling in an otherwise on-topic post.
It's not so much motivating the production of more porn, though that's also a concern. The problem is that the way freenet works, you might have child pornography on your system even if you have never intentionally downloaded it. Freenet mirrors chunks of files that are in high demand on many nodes. You would never even know any of the chunks your node stores are porn, since freenet storage files are encrypted. By U.S. law, possion (even unintentional posession) makes you just as guilty as perverts who download it intentionally and the sick bastards who made the porn in the first place.
If the encryption functions are pooorly written, or if a pornographer's key is compromised, you could enjoy a one-way trip to federal "pound me in the ass" prison.
I think a lot of people are losing sight of the core truth of the binary driver debate. The options are not binary driver or open-source driver. They are binary driver or no driver. NVidia is not witholding driver source because they want to piss you off. They can't legally release it because of the way their cross-licensing agreements with other gfx hardware companies work.
If your political grandstanding prevents nVidia from releasing a binary driver then you have turned all of our high-end video cards into expensive junk. Thanks.
Most Linux distros install at least 6 email clients as part of the default install. If people didn't have anything but pine available, someone must have made a decision not to install anything else. That's no more the fault of Linux that it would be Apple's fault if they rolled out a custom version of Mac OSX that had mail.app removed.
...the first 10 times it was posted here. Why is it now?
It wasn't particularly insightful any of the times it's been posted to OSNews, either.
Right-click to rename is the lessser of two evils as far as I'm concerened. Double-clicking the name to rename a file (like Windows and classic MacOS) is a bit more intuitive, but the annoyance of triggering a rename instead of a file open because your mouse was 3 pixels off more than offsets the benefit.
"Right-click is for shortcuts but should never be the sole way of getting to a function."
Too many years using a one-button mouse....
"OS X has this one hands-down. Double-click a font and you get the whole repertoire, with a button that says 'Install Font' below it. It even asks you if you want to install for just this user, or all users."
Have you even tried Gnome, or are you just flaming based on the screenshots? Double-clicking a font file shows a full preview as well.
As for the browser, your hopes are too late. It's already been done. Epiphany is a simple interface with the useful features (like tabs) and none of the crap (like sidebars and themes) built on Mozilla's html renderer. It's quite nice. Of course, if your knowledge of the subject ran any deeper than looking at a few screenshots and posting a defensive rant about the superiority of MacOS, you would know that already.
"But the oceans, Antarctica and numerous deserts across the world are surely all cheaper than space to colonize, no? Why are people not moving there?"
Because the oceans and deserts are already claimed by other governments, and Antartica is going to be a US territory the minute soeone finds salable resources there.
The only way to create a new country on Earth is through decades of bloodshed, guerilla warfare, and econimic ruin, followed by years of UN/US peacekeeping and international debt (a.k.a. more economic ruin), followed by a period of limited autonomy during which all the neighboring nations are going to do their best to topple you new government. Decades of chaos and poverty, thousands dead, all just to be independant of one dictator. And this is supposed to be the cheap solution?
The oceans are even worse. Either your vessel (and artificial islands are considered vessels) flies the flag of a recognized nation (thus agreeing be bound by their laws), or you are considered a pirate, and any navy in the world is permitted to sink your vessel and claim your property as salvage.
On Mars, you can stitch up a flag, declare everything between your landing site and the south pole to be your new country, and be pretty much done with it.
They aren't launched on the shuttle anymore, but in the late 80s, the Magnum sigint satellites were. (source)
So was the Lacrosse-1 radar surveillance bird. However, current strategy is based around smaller satellites launched on medium-lift rockets. (source) So there likely won't be any more inelligence satellites carried by the shuttle.