Also copyright law is only 50 years, so IMSLP has numerous scores that are only legally download-able in Canada.
The best thing RMS ever did (IMO) was help them not get shut down by big publishers of scores - in fact, rental prices are significantly down in the past few years, and I believe mostly because of them.
This is incredibly stupid - the iPad needs to be on the wi-fi network, so it HAS to be in close proximity, so it is ridiculous to assume it isn't being used by the content licensee.
A slingbox, on the other hand, is a proxy server (well, that and does content resizing if necessary) and makes it look like the content viewer is at some location when they could be anywhere (including off of the planet). Of course I could just record the content on my computer and set up a proxy server and do basically the same thing (would need to write an app to resize content as it is streamed).
The only way, and I repeat, the only way for the content owner to prevent it from being streamed anywhere on the planet is to control end-to-end communication of the content. Good luck there.
Forcing apps to be signed to run on the iPhone is dictatorial, but saying you can't have signed apps as per the GPLv3 is also dictatorial, so I personally find both Apple and FSF are dictatorships, with zealous charismatic leaders at the head. In fact, I'd argue that Apple and RMS's goals are actually more similar than dissimilar in some respects (on most Apple appliances the software is free, but source disclosure is the missing piece).
Personally, I don't think all software should be free because the hacker culture isn't compatible with generic hardware. Releasing code for a proprietary laser printer (RMS's main reason for starting the FSF movement) is much different than releasing code on a generic PC. If 5 hardware manufacturers pay for development of software on that generic PC and 6 companies use it, which do you think can undercut the competition on price? How about 150 people paying for development of a game that 12 million people play? It becomes unfair to the people that pay for the product unless there is some way to re-compensate them (e.g. advertising revenue, selling personal info of people that didn't pay for it, etc), and that direction scares me more.
China can't sell paid apps and Russia has restricted sales according to the site (they need to use ads, basically).
I would expect if a game was pirated Google would be able to freeze any payments and redirect them to the infringed on author, though I'm not sure of how often payments are made (if instantly, maybe google should reconsider and put a lag in them - maybe a week).
Yep, and that applies to the US, but IBM is a multinational company based in the US. Laws on bribery differ by country - for instance, in Germany until 1993 (I think) it was not only legal to bribe someone to get business, it was actually considered part of the business deal. It was so much a part of the culture that several companies continued the practice after it was banned causing major scandals. The European Union forbids bribery (and was the main reason for the change in Germany, as I recall), but in many Arabic and African countries it is still part of daily life.
I imagine it is very difficult to compete if the competition is allowed to give bribes but your business is not.
Even with cheap SSL certs, it still doesn't fix everything - I won't pay even $10 a year for one (the cheapest I've seen was around that - it was a single year only) unless I set up an e-commerce site again - it just doesn't matter for my small website. As for my job, where it should never be a problem to get a cert, I failed to get approval for one and had to set up my own CA to verify our SSL features worked (admittedly, the company that owned my division at the time was a bunch of notorious tightwads and we've since changed hands twice - this was ~6 years ago).
Because user tag-able metadata accomplishes the same thing and is supported by most file systems aside from NTFS, as I pointed out in a later post. WinFS was supposed to be designed around it on Windows platforms, but sadly it is no more. Most file system searches that support metadata tagging have searches that work similarly to relational databases (i.e. you can AND, OR, NOT, etc).
What you are referring to and what the author wants is metadata, and most OS's support such tagging... but the one in use by most people, NTFS, does not. WinFS was supposed to correct that, but MS shot that project in the head, then riddled its corpse with tank shell rounds. NTFS requires 3rd party products like tag2find. If you're on Linux or Mac, you're in luck because your file system most likely supports it.
As an example, on a mac, I could bring up the properties (I believe that is where it is now - back in my day on a mac tagging was a command line argument, but that was several versions back) and enter Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman as metadata for Good Omens. Now when I use Spotlight, a search for either will bring up Good Omens. The tags go with the data, so if the files are copied they retain the tags.
All of this is subjective - Microsoft is ethical in that they combat piracy in the workplace and promote ethical values (e.g. racial/sexual equality, anti-corruption training, etc) in the workplace, but their conduct as far as monopolistic behavior has been anything but ethical.
The number one in that category is Adobe, and they've had a similar history or relentlessly crushing the competition.
RMS hails from the days when software was free but tied to hardware, so even if the source was available, it only ran on VMS (for instance) and needed to be ported to other platforms, which was non-trivial. With the advent of 'C' and hardware independence, the hardware ties are removed.
So the question is who pays the software developers for their time (and I don't mean hobby time - I mean even a base survival income)?
From what I've read of RMS's view, that should be the hardware developers. That WILL NOT HAPPEN. The problem is you need ALL of the hardware vendors to agree to pay for it, and there is no penalty if one chooses not to pay for it. That company that skimped out can then undercut the competition on price and gain marketshare, so the competition will be forced stop paying for the software development. The alternative is proprietary hardware and probably proprietary compilers, and we're back to 1970.
Funny that RMS argues for free software, but he is essentially a communist dictator. Copyleft is communism - if you use it, you need to use it for everything and therefore must share everything with everyone for free (MS calls this cancer - I call it communism, and no, I don't mean that with the negative context that word has in the US). GPLv3, which he presides over is dictatorship - it allows for no deviancy from the communist path.
Communism is awesome if everyone buys in, but it doesn't work if someone doesn't (look at communal groups - Amish, Mennonites, etc - all are essentially ideal communists - if you need a barn built, your neighbors pitch in and when they need one built, they pitch in - that is idealistic communism). In the ideal world, all of the hardware manufacturers I mentioned above would pitch in because it is the right thing to do. In the real world, everyone doesn't share the same ideology, so it is doomed to failure without a dictator in charge.
I personally don't mind communism, but I don't like dictatorship. Yes, it is there to protect greedy capitalists from using your work and calling it their own (which is why my OSS project requires attribution but is otherwise BSD), but I actually don't mind someone value-adding to my hobby-time programming and sell it commercially - in fact, my OSS project has seen some trickle-back where two of our key developers are getting paid full time right now as long as they defer a feature 3 months (since both are professional contractors, that works well for them, and a 3 month head start time seems like a good deal to me - I've worked with apache project devs that do the same thing in the commercial software world).
actually, IE9 is reportedly slightly faster than Chrome in benchmarking, espeically sunspider benchmarks. That said...
Most sites I've read are reporting in real world testing, Chrome is still the browser to beat. Tech Radar says their page loaded nearly twice as fast in Chrome 10 as IE9. Chrome and Opera seem to be the fastest at handling CSS and page layout. WebKit based browsers (Opera and Safari) and Chrome score a perfect 100/100 on Acid 3, whereas Firefox 4 scores only 97/100 (albeit because Firefox wants the SVG fonts dropped for WOFF, and maybe MS does, too - they scored 95/100 and that was something like 37/100 with IE8).
Well if they try it in the US, I lynch someone at the post office.
Why? Because Verizon wants to leech $20/Month ($30 for family) for text messaging, and I choose to pay by the message ($1 each for sending OR receiving). I need to use text messaging about 3-5x a year at most (I have people send text messages to my email, and my phone bings when I get email, so having SMS/MMS is pointless - especially since most phone SMS/MMS can use an email addy instead of the phone #).
I would suddenly be paying $2.44 instead of $.44 per postage stamp ($1 to send a text, $1 to receive one), which is silly talk. The people that would lose the most from this? Charities. Why? Because I got my credit card number stolen not once, but twice by charitable donations and will only give them money by check now. I actually found this out myself from the credit card companies sending me proof-of-purchase and recognizing things that were amiss - for instance, one used a credit card I'd only used for that charity and nothing else (a rarely used card), and another used a credit card without the CCV and verification ID was email and phone, and they used my cell phone, and a fake gmail account... but only my university knows that combo, and I had recently donated.
Speaking of gmail, they now require an SMS/MMS message and won't do a phone call anymore for registration. Since they don't support SMS to an email address, it now costs me a buck if I want a new gmail address (I wanted to register one for sites I don't trust to not sell the address to spammers - $1 was too lame though, so I set up a private email server on my own site).
robot - I'm REALLY, really tragically sorry I need to do this to you *bzzt* > inserts anal probe with buzzsaw attachment human - screams robot - that really appears to hurt. I hope you don't mind me turning this on... *bzzt* human - screams some more robot - I'm tragically sorry your insides were turned to mush like that and you will die very soon. Do you want an aspirin? *bzzt* human is in shock already, so just stares blankly robot to robot overlord - patient seem to have taken that rather well. I do feel oh so tragically sorry. So on to the next? *bzzt*
Any extremist considers themselves morally superior, and left wing is no better than right (Al Franken is as full of himself as Rush Limbaugh).
Personally, I think the problem is the ESRB Sex (from ESRB in the late 1990s, but I doubt much has changed): 1) showing a female nipple is an automatic M 2) showing sexual parts is an automatic AO 3) sex is an automatic M (under the covers and infrequent or suggested)
Violence (from what I've observed - the commercial game I worked on didn't really have any violence per-se): 1) Violence without gore is a Teen (or less) 2) Violence with gore is an M 3) Violence with extreme gore and disturbing psychological behavior can get an AO
I've seen more nudity in a G rated movie than some M rated games.
So why do games reward you for sex? Because it is so taboo that it in itself has become a reward. Actually there are some exceptions - Fallout for instance, where it is part of the world. I missed the funny speech popups/conversations from 2 when 3 came out though (that was partially restored with New Vegas, but only as a female with Benny). Also Max Payne 2 (the cinematic part like the shower scene is part of the plot and not really a reward).
It isn't just a US problem, but the US seems to have to "clean it up" more, like Atari's cleaning of the Witcher (which was sex=reward since you collect cards and try to get them all...).
Yep, and incidentally, this is exactly what I envisioned 25ish years ago when running a Traveller game (RPG) - a molecular level 3D printer. Basically the replicator in Star Trek TNG only it didn't cook the food (actually, the ones in my game doubled as microwave ovens, but most food still needed to be prepared). The 3D printer I had read about took a day or more, but to be more realistic in sci-fi I decided it took "about 10 minutes," so Star Trek was a bit more progressive. The idea of molecular assemblers dates at least to 1987 (ST:TNG), but likely pre-dates that (as I said, I had the idea from reading about 3D printers, not Star Trek, and scripts for ST:TNG probably pre-date the show or about when I ran that game). 3D printers were first patented in the late 1970s and commercialized in the mid-1980s.
So? they have the best database software for enterprise users, and yes, I've tested different databases at the enterprise level extensively (but we currently only support the top 3). Really, you want Oracle to die, write database software that works better than theirs and prove it running enterprise level database applications (their core customer). We are entirely customer driven and nobody's requested postgres or MySQL yet, but Linux and Solr have made inroads, so an open source database may be in the future as well.
Also it's not like Apple is alone in bricking phones that are unlocked - Motorola includes eFuse in many of their phones which is designed to do exactly that, and far more proactively than Apple - if the behavior of the OS is suspect, it blows the eFuse and bricks the phone. Incidentally, eFuses were created not for protecting computers/phones, but rather for on-chip performance tuning. This is a completely evil use of eFuse, as it has no benefit to the consumer and is lock-in for the manufacturer/vendor.
I do agree with the point of the article's main point, though, which is Apple essentially controls the supply and magazine companies and such are essentially manufacturer, and Apple has been heavy handed about their cut. On the other hand Apple doesn't take that cut unless the subscriber finds the content on Apple's store, which was probably omitted in the article to incite, which is your point (the article looks at everything "with blinders on," which is flamebait - it's like the GOP on Global Warming or the Dems on Global Warming [both go way too far in one direction or the other]).
True - Highlander 2 made the first movie 10x better.
wow - I didn't typing something sarcastic like that could make me physically sick, but it did. Sadly that horrible piece of trash didn't end the series and they made something like 9 more movies, none of which I'll ever see unless they're being used as torture.
While I can't say it about most of these movies, I vastly prefer Blade Runner the movie to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the book. The mood organ was kinda silly, IMO (ooh, tune yourself to watch TV no matter what's on...um, yeah), though I know it was there to blur the lines between humans and replicants (or to show just how high Dick was at the time).
Well IMO the problem isn't really with Unity, which is meant to draw a younger audience, not codgers like me, it is the fact that Unity still doesn't make Linux play Windows games, so their attempt to draw in teens will probably backfire (and WINE is still far too difficult to use in many cases, even if it works).
I've been helping a Linux noob, and several suggestions: 1) avoid acronyms and abbreviations. Everyone is guilty of this, but Linux is worst - do you think/dev/sda means ANYTHING to a Linux noob? Well I can tell you for a fact that it doesn't, because I've been helping one. She didn't even know that was referring to her primary disk drive until I told her (and she's a tech geek in every way except Linux - and yes married [to my best friend, but he's less of a geek than she is]). 2) Program names need to tell the user what they do. Do you know what "Ruby" is? I'd guess a color or a gem, not a scripting language. Windows isn't very good at that, either (Microsoft Silverlight? wtf is that?!)- Apple is much better (for instance, iTunes makes a pretty nice mnemonic for what it does, but they've had their failures too - QuickTime?! The only time I want time to go quick is when I'm working and not under a tight deadline). 3) Shortcuts for multiple package select that can be dropped in. Why? Because installing them from package manager is too tedious, so people knowing how always go to terminal and do an apt-get. I want to copy the names of the packages I need from a URL and drop them on an installer and have them magically appear. 4) Icons should at least nearly always appear for new software, and if you need command line arguments there should be a way to add them and convenient help. I know that is a lot to ask, but for ease-of-use it is essential.
In many distributions there is also a program with an odd name that manages packages like Package Manager, and to a noob that means fedex packages, not software.
Tell that to Apple - every time I patch my (ancient - its OS is approaching end-of-life) mac, it tells me I have to reboot.
And though Linux is not UNIX, same thing with Ubuntu. The only reason I have it at all (in a VM, mind you, I prefer just about any other distribution because Ubuntu just seems to make developer work hell) is to support a friend because she is relatively clueless in any flavor of Linux, but I like to encourage the noobs to branch out from their Microsoft overlords.
My pure Linux box does get rebooted for more than just kernel patches, but usually because I use the patching mechanism and not manually patch like I did on my old gentoo box (and I could have a full time job patching that gentoo box, which is one reason I got rid of it).
Kind of wrong - BSD is not UNIX and not technically even UNIX-like because the Open Group defines UNIX as the trademark name that is UNIX, not the OS itself. It is kind of like calling every soda pop type beverage a Coke (and there are places that do!), even though they have nothing to do with Coke. BSD (and Linux) is technically an OS that operates similarly to OSes that carry the UNIX trademark (that's about the best I can do).
Slashdot Mirror
Also copyright law is only 50 years, so IMSLP has numerous scores that are only legally download-able in Canada.
The best thing RMS ever did (IMO) was help them not get shut down by big publishers of scores - in fact, rental prices are significantly down in the past few years, and I believe mostly because of them.
This is incredibly stupid - the iPad needs to be on the wi-fi network, so it HAS to be in close proximity, so it is ridiculous to assume it isn't being used by the content licensee.
A slingbox, on the other hand, is a proxy server (well, that and does content resizing if necessary) and makes it look like the content viewer is at some location when they could be anywhere (including off of the planet). Of course I could just record the content on my computer and set up a proxy server and do basically the same thing (would need to write an app to resize content as it is streamed).
The only way, and I repeat, the only way for the content owner to prevent it from being streamed anywhere on the planet is to control end-to-end communication of the content. Good luck there.
Forcing apps to be signed to run on the iPhone is dictatorial, but saying you can't have signed apps as per the GPLv3 is also dictatorial, so I personally find both Apple and FSF are dictatorships, with zealous charismatic leaders at the head. In fact, I'd argue that Apple and RMS's goals are actually more similar than dissimilar in some respects (on most Apple appliances the software is free, but source disclosure is the missing piece).
Personally, I don't think all software should be free because the hacker culture isn't compatible with generic hardware. Releasing code for a proprietary laser printer (RMS's main reason for starting the FSF movement) is much different than releasing code on a generic PC. If 5 hardware manufacturers pay for development of software on that generic PC and 6 companies use it, which do you think can undercut the competition on price? How about 150 people paying for development of a game that 12 million people play? It becomes unfair to the people that pay for the product unless there is some way to re-compensate them (e.g. advertising revenue, selling personal info of people that didn't pay for it, etc), and that direction scares me more.
China can't sell paid apps and Russia has restricted sales according to the site (they need to use ads, basically).
I would expect if a game was pirated Google would be able to freeze any payments and redirect them to the infringed on author, though I'm not sure of how often payments are made (if instantly, maybe google should reconsider and put a lag in them - maybe a week).
Yep, and that applies to the US, but IBM is a multinational company based in the US. Laws on bribery differ by country - for instance, in Germany until 1993 (I think) it was not only legal to bribe someone to get business, it was actually considered part of the business deal. It was so much a part of the culture that several companies continued the practice after it was banned causing major scandals. The European Union forbids bribery (and was the main reason for the change in Germany, as I recall), but in many Arabic and African countries it is still part of daily life.
I imagine it is very difficult to compete if the competition is allowed to give bribes but your business is not.
Even with cheap SSL certs, it still doesn't fix everything - I won't pay even $10 a year for one (the cheapest I've seen was around that - it was a single year only) unless I set up an e-commerce site again - it just doesn't matter for my small website. As for my job, where it should never be a problem to get a cert, I failed to get approval for one and had to set up my own CA to verify our SSL features worked (admittedly, the company that owned my division at the time was a bunch of notorious tightwads and we've since changed hands twice - this was ~6 years ago).
Because user tag-able metadata accomplishes the same thing and is supported by most file systems aside from NTFS, as I pointed out in a later post. WinFS was supposed to be designed around it on Windows platforms, but sadly it is no more. Most file system searches that support metadata tagging have searches that work similarly to relational databases (i.e. you can AND, OR, NOT, etc).
What you are referring to and what the author wants is metadata, and most OS's support such tagging... but the one in use by most people, NTFS, does not. WinFS was supposed to correct that, but MS shot that project in the head, then riddled its corpse with tank shell rounds. NTFS requires 3rd party products like tag2find. If you're on Linux or Mac, you're in luck because your file system most likely supports it.
As an example, on a mac, I could bring up the properties (I believe that is where it is now - back in my day on a mac tagging was a command line argument, but that was several versions back) and enter Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman as metadata for Good Omens. Now when I use Spotlight, a search for either will bring up Good Omens. The tags go with the data, so if the files are copied they retain the tags.
All of this is subjective - Microsoft is ethical in that they combat piracy in the workplace and promote ethical values (e.g. racial/sexual equality, anti-corruption training, etc) in the workplace, but their conduct as far as monopolistic behavior has been anything but ethical.
The number one in that category is Adobe, and they've had a similar history or relentlessly crushing the competition.
Speak for yourself - I went to every party I was invited to. Both of them.
RMS hails from the days when software was free but tied to hardware, so even if the source was available, it only ran on VMS (for instance) and needed to be ported to other platforms, which was non-trivial. With the advent of 'C' and hardware independence, the hardware ties are removed.
So the question is who pays the software developers for their time (and I don't mean hobby time - I mean even a base survival income)?
From what I've read of RMS's view, that should be the hardware developers. That WILL NOT HAPPEN. The problem is you need ALL of the hardware vendors to agree to pay for it, and there is no penalty if one chooses not to pay for it. That company that skimped out can then undercut the competition on price and gain marketshare, so the competition will be forced stop paying for the software development. The alternative is proprietary hardware and probably proprietary compilers, and we're back to 1970.
Funny that RMS argues for free software, but he is essentially a communist dictator. Copyleft is communism - if you use it, you need to use it for everything and therefore must share everything with everyone for free (MS calls this cancer - I call it communism, and no, I don't mean that with the negative context that word has in the US). GPLv3, which he presides over is dictatorship - it allows for no deviancy from the communist path.
Communism is awesome if everyone buys in, but it doesn't work if someone doesn't (look at communal groups - Amish, Mennonites, etc - all are essentially ideal communists - if you need a barn built, your neighbors pitch in and when they need one built, they pitch in - that is idealistic communism). In the ideal world, all of the hardware manufacturers I mentioned above would pitch in because it is the right thing to do. In the real world, everyone doesn't share the same ideology, so it is doomed to failure without a dictator in charge.
I personally don't mind communism, but I don't like dictatorship. Yes, it is there to protect greedy capitalists from using your work and calling it their own (which is why my OSS project requires attribution but is otherwise BSD), but I actually don't mind someone value-adding to my hobby-time programming and sell it commercially - in fact, my OSS project has seen some trickle-back where two of our key developers are getting paid full time right now as long as they defer a feature 3 months (since both are professional contractors, that works well for them, and a 3 month head start time seems like a good deal to me - I've worked with apache project devs that do the same thing in the commercial software world).
actually, IE9 is reportedly slightly faster than Chrome in benchmarking, espeically sunspider benchmarks. That said...
Most sites I've read are reporting in real world testing, Chrome is still the browser to beat. Tech Radar says their page loaded nearly twice as fast in Chrome 10 as IE9. Chrome and Opera seem to be the fastest at handling CSS and page layout. WebKit based browsers (Opera and Safari) and Chrome score a perfect 100/100 on Acid 3, whereas Firefox 4 scores only 97/100 (albeit because Firefox wants the SVG fonts dropped for WOFF, and maybe MS does, too - they scored 95/100 and that was something like 37/100 with IE8).
Well if they try it in the US, I lynch someone at the post office.
Why? Because Verizon wants to leech $20/Month ($30 for family) for text messaging, and I choose to pay by the message ($1 each for sending OR receiving). I need to use text messaging about 3-5x a year at most (I have people send text messages to my email, and my phone bings when I get email, so having SMS/MMS is pointless - especially since most phone SMS/MMS can use an email addy instead of the phone #).
I would suddenly be paying $2.44 instead of $.44 per postage stamp ($1 to send a text, $1 to receive one), which is silly talk. The people that would lose the most from this? Charities. Why? Because I got my credit card number stolen not once, but twice by charitable donations and will only give them money by check now. I actually found this out myself from the credit card companies sending me proof-of-purchase and recognizing things that were amiss - for instance, one used a credit card I'd only used for that charity and nothing else (a rarely used card), and another used a credit card without the CCV and verification ID was email and phone, and they used my cell phone, and a fake gmail account... but only my university knows that combo, and I had recently donated.
Speaking of gmail, they now require an SMS/MMS message and won't do a phone call anymore for registration. Since they don't support SMS to an email address, it now costs me a buck if I want a new gmail address (I wanted to register one for sites I don't trust to not sell the address to spammers - $1 was too lame though, so I set up a private email server on my own site).
heh - yeah
robot - I'm REALLY, really tragically sorry I need to do this to you *bzzt*
> inserts anal probe with buzzsaw attachment
human - screams
robot - that really appears to hurt. I hope you don't mind me turning this on... *bzzt*
human - screams some more
robot - I'm tragically sorry your insides were turned to mush like that and you will die very soon. Do you want an aspirin? *bzzt*
human is in shock already, so just stares blankly
robot to robot overlord - patient seem to have taken that rather well. I do feel oh so tragically sorry. So on to the next? *bzzt*
Any extremist considers themselves morally superior, and left wing is no better than right (Al Franken is as full of himself as Rush Limbaugh).
Personally, I think the problem is the ESRB
Sex (from ESRB in the late 1990s, but I doubt much has changed):
1) showing a female nipple is an automatic M
2) showing sexual parts is an automatic AO
3) sex is an automatic M (under the covers and infrequent or suggested)
Violence (from what I've observed - the commercial game I worked on didn't really have any violence per-se):
1) Violence without gore is a Teen (or less)
2) Violence with gore is an M
3) Violence with extreme gore and disturbing psychological behavior can get an AO
I've seen more nudity in a G rated movie than some M rated games.
So why do games reward you for sex? Because it is so taboo that it in itself has become a reward. Actually there are some exceptions - Fallout for instance, where it is part of the world. I missed the funny speech popups/conversations from 2 when 3 came out though (that was partially restored with New Vegas, but only as a female with Benny). Also Max Payne 2 (the cinematic part like the shower scene is part of the plot and not really a reward).
It isn't just a US problem, but the US seems to have to "clean it up" more, like Atari's cleaning of the Witcher (which was sex=reward since you collect cards and try to get them all...).
Yep, and incidentally, this is exactly what I envisioned 25ish years ago when running a Traveller game (RPG) - a molecular level 3D printer. Basically the replicator in Star Trek TNG only it didn't cook the food (actually, the ones in my game doubled as microwave ovens, but most food still needed to be prepared). The 3D printer I had read about took a day or more, but to be more realistic in sci-fi I decided it took "about 10 minutes," so Star Trek was a bit more progressive. The idea of molecular assemblers dates at least to 1987 (ST:TNG), but likely pre-dates that (as I said, I had the idea from reading about 3D printers, not Star Trek, and scripts for ST:TNG probably pre-date the show or about when I ran that game). 3D printers were first patented in the late 1970s and commercialized in the mid-1980s.
So? they have the best database software for enterprise users, and yes, I've tested different databases at the enterprise level extensively (but we currently only support the top 3). Really, you want Oracle to die, write database software that works better than theirs and prove it running enterprise level database applications (their core customer). We are entirely customer driven and nobody's requested postgres or MySQL yet, but Linux and Solr have made inroads, so an open source database may be in the future as well.
people still buy MP3 players? I've been using my phone for that for the past 10 years...
Also it's not like Apple is alone in bricking phones that are unlocked - Motorola includes eFuse in many of their phones which is designed to do exactly that, and far more proactively than Apple - if the behavior of the OS is suspect, it blows the eFuse and bricks the phone. Incidentally, eFuses were created not for protecting computers/phones, but rather for on-chip performance tuning. This is a completely evil use of eFuse, as it has no benefit to the consumer and is lock-in for the manufacturer/vendor. I do agree with the point of the article's main point, though, which is Apple essentially controls the supply and magazine companies and such are essentially manufacturer, and Apple has been heavy handed about their cut. On the other hand Apple doesn't take that cut unless the subscriber finds the content on Apple's store, which was probably omitted in the article to incite, which is your point (the article looks at everything "with blinders on," which is flamebait - it's like the GOP on Global Warming or the Dems on Global Warming [both go way too far in one direction or the other]).
True - Highlander 2 made the first movie 10x better. wow - I didn't typing something sarcastic like that could make me physically sick, but it did. Sadly that horrible piece of trash didn't end the series and they made something like 9 more movies, none of which I'll ever see unless they're being used as torture.
While I can't say it about most of these movies, I vastly prefer Blade Runner the movie to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the book. The mood organ was kinda silly, IMO (ooh, tune yourself to watch TV no matter what's on...um, yeah), though I know it was there to blur the lines between humans and replicants (or to show just how high Dick was at the time).
giant smurfs in a remake of the Ewok battle scene.
Well IMO the problem isn't really with Unity, which is meant to draw a younger audience, not codgers like me, it is the fact that Unity still doesn't make Linux play Windows games, so their attempt to draw in teens will probably backfire (and WINE is still far too difficult to use in many cases, even if it works).
/dev/sda means ANYTHING to a Linux noob? Well I can tell you for a fact that it doesn't, because I've been helping one. She didn't even know that was referring to her primary disk drive until I told her (and she's a tech geek in every way except Linux - and yes married [to my best friend, but he's less of a geek than she is]).
I've been helping a Linux noob, and several suggestions:
1) avoid acronyms and abbreviations. Everyone is guilty of this, but Linux is worst - do you think
2) Program names need to tell the user what they do. Do you know what "Ruby" is? I'd guess a color or a gem, not a scripting language. Windows isn't very good at that, either (Microsoft Silverlight? wtf is that?!)- Apple is much better (for instance, iTunes makes a pretty nice mnemonic for what it does, but they've had their failures too - QuickTime?! The only time I want time to go quick is when I'm working and not under a tight deadline).
3) Shortcuts for multiple package select that can be dropped in. Why? Because installing them from package manager is too tedious, so people knowing how always go to terminal and do an apt-get. I want to copy the names of the packages I need from a URL and drop them on an installer and have them magically appear.
4) Icons should at least nearly always appear for new software, and if you need command line arguments there should be a way to add them and convenient help. I know that is a lot to ask, but for ease-of-use it is essential.
In many distributions there is also a program with an odd name that manages packages like Package Manager, and to a noob that means fedex packages, not software.
Tell that to Apple - every time I patch my (ancient - its OS is approaching end-of-life) mac, it tells me I have to reboot.
And though Linux is not UNIX, same thing with Ubuntu. The only reason I have it at all (in a VM, mind you, I prefer just about any other distribution because Ubuntu just seems to make developer work hell) is to support a friend because she is relatively clueless in any flavor of Linux, but I like to encourage the noobs to branch out from their Microsoft overlords.
My pure Linux box does get rebooted for more than just kernel patches, but usually because I use the patching mechanism and not manually patch like I did on my old gentoo box (and I could have a full time job patching that gentoo box, which is one reason I got rid of it).
Kind of wrong - BSD is not UNIX and not technically even UNIX-like because the Open Group defines UNIX as the trademark name that is UNIX, not the OS itself. It is kind of like calling every soda pop type beverage a Coke (and there are places that do!), even though they have nothing to do with Coke. BSD (and Linux) is technically an OS that operates similarly to OSes that carry the UNIX trademark (that's about the best I can do).