Lets face it there is a REASON why OEMs ain't been using Linux, and it ain't because writing all them checks for OEM copies of Windows gives them a big happy, its because the Linux driver model sucks when it comes to updates.
Well, I guess I've been lucky then, since I've never had an update break a driver in Linux, and I've been using it for ten years. OTOH, A Windows XP update replaced a perfectly good network driver with one that was completely nonfunctional. Of course, I've been using MS OSes for three times as long as Linux, so in another twenty years I might see a Linux update trash a driver -- but I'll believe it when I see it.
A PC manufacturer isn't going to ship a box using an OS that won't work on that box. If you buy a PC with Ubuntu preinstalled, you're not going to have driver issues. Period.
And there is a good reason OEMs aren't using Linux -- with Windows they can make money from all the crapware they're paid to include with the computer.
Very, very few people would consider holding back on a cure for money; not many of those psychopaths have the personal skills to end up at the top of a big corporation
Hmm, what's Wikipedia say about sociopathy (Antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy are both sociopathies)
It is characterized by at least 3 of the following: Callous unconcern for the feelings of others. Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, though having no difficulty in establishing them. Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence. Incapacity to experience guilt or to profit from experience, particularly punishment. Markedly prone to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior that has brought the person into conflict with society.
Sounds like Newt Gingrich to me. He rose pretty high in society. I'd say a CEO would be hindered in doing his job with a lack of sociopathy.
I was in a car wreck about fifteen years ago, and the radiologist looking at the X-Rays of my back said "well, nothing's broken, everything looks ok except you have arthritis."
I said "I know, when are you guys going to come up with a cure for that?" He replied "there's no money in cures, the money's in treatments." I'd be surprised that a "naive, junior-high, my-parents-don't-get-it thinking" person could make it through medical school and an internship.
I'm on Boost Mobile. How is unlimited talk, text, long distance, 411, roaming, internet, and email for $45 overpriced? Back in the landline days twenty years ago when long distance calls were expensive most of my pohone bills were higher than my cell bill is now (and I no longer have a landline).
the first CD standards actually had dead space on the disc, becuase they didn't need it all for the target recording length
The drawback wasn't the length allowable on the disk, it was the speed of computers' CPUs.
The point of a higher sample rate is the fact that the closer you get to the Nyquist limit, the more aliasing you have. A 15kHz tone only has three samples, far too few to be able to discern a sine wave from a sawtooth wave.
One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science.
Well, that's pretty simple, actually. If you're not in the 1% and you're conservative (in the modern sense, today's "conservatives" would call Eisenhower and Reagan liberals) you're fighting against your own interests. Notice that the conservatives were all for continuing the tax breaks for the rich that Bush pushed through, but against tax breaks for the middle class and fought those breaks tooth and nail? They're for flat taxes, which would only benefit the rich? They claim to be against deficits but are for war, the most expensive of government programs? They're against medicare, social security, spending on public education, and everything else that only benefits the poor and middle class?
Anyone earning less than a quarter million per year who votes Republican is voting against his own interests.
We've seen this on AGW, on tobacco's links to cancer, on asbestos,
Again, conservatives are for big business and only big business. They're funded by oil companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc. and they have lots of money to dupe foolish middle class people.
to a certain extent on evolution (though that's explainable from the conservative church groups)
What I don't understand is conservative church groups. Conservatives are for everything Jesus taught against. Taxes? Christ said "render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's and to God that which is God's". He taught against arrogance (the meek shall inherit the earth), pride, greed, the death penalty, etc. Conservatives want everyone to have a job, Christ preached about the lillies of the field. Conservatives are against the homeless, Jesus WAS homeless (remember that next time you curse a bum).
Jesus was a liberal. So why are there conservative churches?
Why is there no backlash from conservatives themselves?
Because if they're middle class they've already been duped, and if they're rich they're the ones doing the duping.
If you are going to call someone a "shill" for the people paying the bills, then you have to be fair and apply the same standard for both side.
Yes, if both sides are shilling. A shill pretends to be an outside observer when he's actually being paid by the side he's representing. It's a traditional carnival/magic show trick where the magician reads the mind of a "stranger" from the audience.
If Bill Gates signs on to/. as an AC and says Windows is the best OS on earth, he's shilling. If he signs in as himself and says the same thing, he's not.
The oil companies have an agenda, and they pretend to not be behind the deniers. That makes them shills. If someone from the solar industry put up billboards warning about global warming without a "paid for by Solar Inc" they would also be shilling.
The climatologists who are warning about GW aren't shills. They're scientists.
Do you really believe that Climate Change is a hoax perpetrated by government to raise your taxes or something? You do realize that the AGW folks (Big Oil) benefit from big government, right?
That's a stretch. Ask any fifty year old black person what they think of hip hop and the ghetto culture and you'll find that they agree with me, and will phrase it more strongly than I did.
You know that the hip-hop was mainstreamed by rich white businessmen, right? They did the black community a grave disservice when they introduced "gangsta rap."
The math doesn't add up, so I suspect that their tests were faulty in some way. At 15kHz, a tone I can even hear and I'm 60, there are only three samples per wavecrest. With only three samples there's no possible way to diffrentiate a square wave from a sawtooth wave from a sine wave.
The link you provided mentioned noise levels, this puzzles me. Digital sound should have no noise at all. Perhaps the above mentioned aliasing distortion could be percieved as noise?
I think counterfeit should be illegal digital or not
If you're talking about commercial piracy, I agree.
If we truly value creativity we must drive down cost of entry, make it less of a risk (by making the cost low) create a truly initiative work, so almost anyone can produce it.
And it's happening, thanks to tech! Already musicians are telling RIAA labels to fuck off (I know two of them personally) and are producing their own recordings. They shot Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning for a couple thousand dollars, and it's far better than much of what comes out of Hollywood (if you haven't seen it, DL it from the BT stub on their web site, it's hilarious).
Buy reducing the copyright to a couple of years, haven't made a profit after 2 years tough.
Well, two years is way too short IMO. Asimov didn't make a dime from the Foundation trilogy until Doubleday bought the rights from Gnome Press ten years after it was initially published. But the current length is just insane. There is absolutely no reason whatever why the LOTR books or Foundation or a Jimi Hendrix album should still be under copyright, let alone Steamboat Willy.
Of course there are. Electric lights? Automobiles? Telephones? Computers? The Fucking Internet??? Nobody thought of the internet until 1946 (Full text at the link).
That said, though, you're right, DropBox didn't invent "cloud" computing (I hate that damned "cloud" ignorance the tech-illiterate marketers came up with).
In the US it used to be that non-commercial use was non-infringing; taping your records was legal, loaning them was legal. Copyright couuld only be gotten by giving two copies in tangible form to the copyright office. I don't see how ones and zeros are in any way tangible. How can you grant copyright on a number?
I don't think 20 years would be excessive, but the present life+95 is incredibly bad. We've allowed the media companies to steal our heritage, and now wer'e allowing them to steal our privacy and freedoms.
Anecdotally, I have more complaints with my electric company than the city water bureau.
Of course. If your water rates skyrocket or it starts tasting bad or the pressure is too low, you're going to vote the Mayor out of office. YOU are the water company's shareholder.
I'm pretty sure Jesse White got re-elected as Illinois Secretary of State because the lines at the licence bureau are short, the people are friendly, and the process takes little time (as opposed to the convicted felon who held the job before him and who is now in Federal prison).
If your electricity is out often and your rates are sky high, you have no recourse whatever. You just have to put up with it. It isn't like you can vote the CEO out or switch to another provider.
For example, companies like Ubisoft are on my permanent ban list, because of their idiotic DRM.
It's ronic that the studio's attempt to stop piracy costs them sales when piracy itself has never been shown to cost sales, and may even increase them.
If person, like the GP, has the ability to pay and still chooses not to, then that's their choice. But don't paint everyone else with the same dishonest brush.
Well, see, that's what's wrong with the conversation. People think everyone else is like them. Thieves think stealing is normal (real theives, not copyright infringers) and the only people who don't steal are those too afraid to. Pirates who would buy if they coudn't pirate think everyone else is, too. But considering the data and studies that have been done, it's reasonable to figure that most people are like you and me. Some studies have shown that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates.
An interesting study a couple of years ago (sorry, I can no longer find a link) was commissioned by a book publisher who wanted to know how much piracy was costing him. Pirate books take a few weeks to hit the internet, so the researchers looked at sales data to see how much of a drop in sales there was. They were astounded when rather than a drop, there was a spike in sales!
If "nobody would pay to read a book they can read for free" then public libraries would have killed books.
As Doctorow notes, nobody ever went broke from piracy but many artists have starved from obscurity.
Plus we'd still have a half-century of recorded music to enjoy
More than twice that. One of the bad things about current copyright law is that it lasts so long that you have people calling for copyright's outright abolition. IMO only commercial infringement should be illegal (like it used to be) and the life+90 years should be shortened to twenty. Twenty years is long enough for patents, why isn't it long enough for copyrights?
these aren't Linux users you're talking about. Apple'a upgrade is easy.
If you think upgrading a modern Linux distro is hard, you're in the wrong place. One click, one password, done.
These aren't Windows users you're talking about here, chief. I always dreaded Windows upgrades, how many times should I have to boot a fucking computer to upgrade a program? Linux upgrades are also fast, I have Win 7 on a notebook (better than previous versions) but I still dread Patch Tuesday. The damned computer's completely useless for ten minutes when it reboots.
I have no clue how easy or hard upgrading a Mac would be, but I'd be willing to bet it's less of a pain in the ass than upgrading Windows.
Not necessarily. Is a counterfeit Rolex as high quality as a real one? I think digital data should be free, but counterfeit physical goods should be illegal. Nobody has lost anything if you download my book, and you may like it and buy a physical copy. But if you're buying that counterfeit, then I have indeed lost a sale.
I'd suggest that the law be changed to make copying digital data legal, and make the entertainment industries live within this paradigm, using free downloads to sell physical items. It would have been a lot easier before they convinced everyone that nobody wants albums and everybody wants singles, and that an MP3 is the same as a CD track.
They could also raise the sampling rates 10x and quadruple the bitrate, it would mean huge files that would blow every analog recording away. The present 16 bit 44k samples are "good enough", better than cassette, having no noise (unlike vinyl)and was the best they could do back when CDs were developed. They should take it to the next level.
Actually, "nigger" is a mispronounciation of "negro," which is Spanish for "balck". It's not a slur because it means "black," it's a slur because like "hacker" has changed from meaning a hardware tinkerer or someone who writes quick and dirty single use code to a cyber burglar. During slavery the word "nigger" changed from its original term for the pigmentation to "farm animals that look almost human."
I'm saying that words only mean what the speaker intends them to mean.
What is conveyed is what the listener hears. Misunderstanding isn't hard to do, and being clear is. Does that jingle from a sex toy commercial say "where fun and fantasy meet" or is it "we're fun and fantasy meat?"
Words are not letters or sounds, they are ideas and they only have meaning to how we use and interpret them.
Very true. I doubt American blacks will ever get over slavery, the Jews didn't and theirs was thousands of years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets face it there is a REASON why OEMs ain't been using Linux, and it ain't because writing all them checks for OEM copies of Windows gives them a big happy, its because the Linux driver model sucks when it comes to updates.
Well, I guess I've been lucky then, since I've never had an update break a driver in Linux, and I've been using it for ten years. OTOH, A Windows XP update replaced a perfectly good network driver with one that was completely nonfunctional. Of course, I've been using MS OSes for three times as long as Linux, so in another twenty years I might see a Linux update trash a driver -- but I'll believe it when I see it.
A PC manufacturer isn't going to ship a box using an OS that won't work on that box. If you buy a PC with Ubuntu preinstalled, you're not going to have driver issues. Period.
And there is a good reason OEMs aren't using Linux -- with Windows they can make money from all the crapware they're paid to include with the computer.
Very, very few people would consider holding back on a cure for money; not many of those psychopaths have the personal skills to end up at the top of a big corporation
Hmm, what's Wikipedia say about sociopathy (Antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy are both sociopathies)
Sounds like Newt Gingrich to me. He rose pretty high in society. I'd say a CEO would be hindered in doing his job with a lack of sociopathy.
I was in a car wreck about fifteen years ago, and the radiologist looking at the X-Rays of my back said "well, nothing's broken, everything looks ok except you have arthritis."
I said "I know, when are you guys going to come up with a cure for that?" He replied "there's no money in cures, the money's in treatments." I'd be surprised that a "naive, junior-high, my-parents-don't-get-it thinking" person could make it through medical school and an internship.
I'm on Boost Mobile. How is unlimited talk, text, long distance, 411, roaming, internet, and email for $45 overpriced? Back in the landline days twenty years ago when long distance calls were expensive most of my pohone bills were higher than my cell bill is now (and I no longer have a landline).
To hold the driver's beer. It's Nevada, common now...
Having a second person to hold the driver's beer is common in Nevada? They outlawed cupholders there?
the first CD standards actually had dead space on the disc, becuase they didn't need it all for the target recording length
The drawback wasn't the length allowable on the disk, it was the speed of computers' CPUs.
The point of a higher sample rate is the fact that the closer you get to the Nyquist limit, the more aliasing you have. A 15kHz tone only has three samples, far too few to be able to discern a sine wave from a sawtooth wave.
One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science.
Well, that's pretty simple, actually. If you're not in the 1% and you're conservative (in the modern sense, today's "conservatives" would call Eisenhower and Reagan liberals) you're fighting against your own interests. Notice that the conservatives were all for continuing the tax breaks for the rich that Bush pushed through, but against tax breaks for the middle class and fought those breaks tooth and nail? They're for flat taxes, which would only benefit the rich? They claim to be against deficits but are for war, the most expensive of government programs? They're against medicare, social security, spending on public education, and everything else that only benefits the poor and middle class?
Anyone earning less than a quarter million per year who votes Republican is voting against his own interests.
We've seen this on AGW, on tobacco's links to cancer, on asbestos,
Again, conservatives are for big business and only big business. They're funded by oil companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc. and they have lots of money to dupe foolish middle class people.
to a certain extent on evolution (though that's explainable from the conservative church groups)
What I don't understand is conservative church groups. Conservatives are for everything Jesus taught against. Taxes? Christ said "render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's and to God that which is God's". He taught against arrogance (the meek shall inherit the earth), pride, greed, the death penalty, etc. Conservatives want everyone to have a job, Christ preached about the lillies of the field. Conservatives are against the homeless, Jesus WAS homeless (remember that next time you curse a bum).
Jesus was a liberal. So why are there conservative churches?
Why is there no backlash from conservatives themselves?
Because if they're middle class they've already been duped, and if they're rich they're the ones doing the duping.
If you store your photo's on facebook and don't have backups if it elsewhere, then you deserve what you get
You left out a word. If you don't store your photo's what?
If you are going to call someone a "shill" for the people paying the bills, then you have to be fair and apply the same standard for both side.
Yes, if both sides are shilling. A shill pretends to be an outside observer when he's actually being paid by the side he's representing. It's a traditional carnival/magic show trick where the magician reads the mind of a "stranger" from the audience.
If Bill Gates signs on to /. as an AC and says Windows is the best OS on earth, he's shilling. If he signs in as himself and says the same thing, he's not.
The oil companies have an agenda, and they pretend to not be behind the deniers. That makes them shills. If someone from the solar industry put up billboards warning about global warming without a "paid for by Solar Inc" they would also be shilling.
The climatologists who are warning about GW aren't shills. They're scientists.
Do you really believe that Climate Change is a hoax perpetrated by government to raise your taxes or something? You do realize that the AGW folks (Big Oil) benefit from big government, right?
That's a stretch. Ask any fifty year old black person what they think of hip hop and the ghetto culture and you'll find that they agree with me, and will phrase it more strongly than I did.
You know that the hip-hop was mainstreamed by rich white businessmen, right? They did the black community a grave disservice when they introduced "gangsta rap."
The math doesn't add up, so I suspect that their tests were faulty in some way. At 15kHz, a tone I can even hear and I'm 60, there are only three samples per wavecrest. With only three samples there's no possible way to diffrentiate a square wave from a sawtooth wave from a sine wave.
The link you provided mentioned noise levels, this puzzles me. Digital sound should have no noise at all. Perhaps the above mentioned aliasing distortion could be percieved as noise?
I think counterfeit should be illegal digital or not
If you're talking about commercial piracy, I agree.
If we truly value creativity we must drive down cost of entry, make it less of a risk (by making the cost low) create a truly initiative work, so almost anyone can produce it.
And it's happening, thanks to tech! Already musicians are telling RIAA labels to fuck off (I know two of them personally) and are producing their own recordings. They shot Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning for a couple thousand dollars, and it's far better than much of what comes out of Hollywood (if you haven't seen it, DL it from the BT stub on their web site, it's hilarious).
Buy reducing the copyright to a couple of years, haven't made a profit after 2 years tough.
Well, two years is way too short IMO. Asimov didn't make a dime from the Foundation trilogy until Doubleday bought the rights from Gnome Press ten years after it was initially published. But the current length is just insane. There is absolutely no reason whatever why the LOTR books or Foundation or a Jimi Hendrix album should still be under copyright, let alone Steamboat Willy.
With an "I'll accept a cookie from this site" button on your browser, just like with pop-up blockers.
there are no completely new ideas.
Of course there are. Electric lights? Automobiles? Telephones? Computers? The Fucking Internet??? Nobody thought of the internet until 1946 (Full text at the link).
That said, though, you're right, DropBox didn't invent "cloud" computing (I hate that damned "cloud" ignorance the tech-illiterate marketers came up with).
That, and who doesn't use a spellchecker in their browser?
Those who are at work and forced to use IE7 or earlier.
In the US it used to be that non-commercial use was non-infringing; taping your records was legal, loaning them was legal. Copyright couuld only be gotten by giving two copies in tangible form to the copyright office. I don't see how ones and zeros are in any way tangible. How can you grant copyright on a number?
I don't think 20 years would be excessive, but the present life+95 is incredibly bad. We've allowed the media companies to steal our heritage, and now wer'e allowing them to steal our privacy and freedoms.
It's insane.
Anecdotally, I have more complaints with my electric company than the city water bureau.
Of course. If your water rates skyrocket or it starts tasting bad or the pressure is too low, you're going to vote the Mayor out of office. YOU are the water company's shareholder.
I'm pretty sure Jesse White got re-elected as Illinois Secretary of State because the lines at the licence bureau are short, the people are friendly, and the process takes little time (as opposed to the convicted felon who held the job before him and who is now in Federal prison).
If your electricity is out often and your rates are sky high, you have no recourse whatever. You just have to put up with it. It isn't like you can vote the CEO out or switch to another provider.
For example, companies like Ubisoft are on my permanent ban list, because of their idiotic DRM.
It's ronic that the studio's attempt to stop piracy costs them sales when piracy itself has never been shown to cost sales, and may even increase them.
If person, like the GP, has the ability to pay and still chooses not to, then that's their choice. But don't paint everyone else with the same dishonest brush.
Well, see, that's what's wrong with the conversation. People think everyone else is like them. Thieves think stealing is normal (real theives, not copyright infringers) and the only people who don't steal are those too afraid to. Pirates who would buy if they coudn't pirate think everyone else is, too. But considering the data and studies that have been done, it's reasonable to figure that most people are like you and me. Some studies have shown that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates.
An interesting study a couple of years ago (sorry, I can no longer find a link) was commissioned by a book publisher who wanted to know how much piracy was costing him. Pirate books take a few weeks to hit the internet, so the researchers looked at sales data to see how much of a drop in sales there was. They were astounded when rather than a drop, there was a spike in sales!
If "nobody would pay to read a book they can read for free" then public libraries would have killed books.
As Doctorow notes, nobody ever went broke from piracy but many artists have starved from obscurity.
You don't matter, meatbag.
You have a Surrogate? Cool! Where can I get one?
They have pirate parties in Pittsburg. Happens whenever their baseball team wins a game.
Plus we'd still have a half-century of recorded music to enjoy
More than twice that. One of the bad things about current copyright law is that it lasts so long that you have people calling for copyright's outright abolition. IMO only commercial infringement should be illegal (like it used to be) and the life+90 years should be shortened to twenty. Twenty years is long enough for patents, why isn't it long enough for copyrights?
these aren't Linux users you're talking about. Apple'a upgrade is easy.
If you think upgrading a modern Linux distro is hard, you're in the wrong place. One click, one password, done.
These aren't Windows users you're talking about here, chief. I always dreaded Windows upgrades, how many times should I have to boot a fucking computer to upgrade a program? Linux upgrades are also fast, I have Win 7 on a notebook (better than previous versions) but I still dread Patch Tuesday. The damned computer's completely useless for ten minutes when it reboots.
I have no clue how easy or hard upgrading a Mac would be, but I'd be willing to bet it's less of a pain in the ass than upgrading Windows.
I don't see anything in the bible that supports that POV.
Not necessarily. Is a counterfeit Rolex as high quality as a real one? I think digital data should be free, but counterfeit physical goods should be illegal. Nobody has lost anything if you download my book, and you may like it and buy a physical copy. But if you're buying that counterfeit, then I have indeed lost a sale.
I'd suggest that the law be changed to make copying digital data legal, and make the entertainment industries live within this paradigm, using free downloads to sell physical items. It would have been a lot easier before they convinced everyone that nobody wants albums and everybody wants singles, and that an MP3 is the same as a CD track.
They could also raise the sampling rates 10x and quadruple the bitrate, it would mean huge files that would blow every analog recording away. The present 16 bit 44k samples are "good enough", better than cassette, having no noise (unlike vinyl)and was the best they could do back when CDs were developed. They should take it to the next level.
Don't expect that to hapopen, though.
Actually, "nigger" is a mispronounciation of "negro," which is Spanish for "balck". It's not a slur because it means "black," it's a slur because like "hacker" has changed from meaning a hardware tinkerer or someone who writes quick and dirty single use code to a cyber burglar. During slavery the word "nigger" changed from its original term for the pigmentation to "farm animals that look almost human."
I'm saying that words only mean what the speaker intends them to mean.
What is conveyed is what the listener hears. Misunderstanding isn't hard to do, and being clear is. Does that jingle from a sex toy commercial say "where fun and fantasy meet" or is it "we're fun and fantasy meat?"
Words are not letters or sounds, they are ideas and they only have meaning to how we use and interpret them.
Very true. I doubt American blacks will ever get over slavery, the Jews didn't and theirs was thousands of years ago.