How many times do you have to be lied to and/or fucked over by Microsoft before you too will develop this completely healthy and rational hatred of their bullshit antics and tactics?
There are plenty of rational detractors of Microsoft. However, they're virtually extinct on Groklaw. You could power a city with the power of the knee-jerk responses there.
> True competition drives profit margins down to subsistence levels.
Nonsense. The market price tends to settle at a price point, where the demand is not affected sufficiently by further price moves to result in an increase in profit. This is greater than the marginal cost -- otherwise there wasn't a point in being in the business in the first place. There's a disincentive to lower prices beyond that except as a zero-sum game with the competition, and there are a lot more incentives than just price that motivate customers. No one would be buying $600 phones if that wasn't the case.
Even a competitive market kept competitive by antitrust regulation is going to boil down to a few major players though. I don't think that can necessarily be called an oligopoly or a cartel though.
> Having a rng online is kind of defeating the purpose.
Tell that to online RPG dice rollers. A true and trustworthy online RNG service can also be non-repudiable, instead of having everyone needing to trust that you didn't rig the RNG algorithm on your side. An online Nomic I play uses the cents digit of the opening price of publicly traded stocks as a random digit (the sample is typically once a month, so it's chaotic enough). Random.org has a daily log of its numbers. I'd really love an online RNG that logged in realtime so that I could pick them more-or-less on demand.
> Imagine if your DVD players said 'this movie is too adult for you, you cannot play it' if you tried to play a John Waters film or a porno.
Most DVD players do have such lockout features. My player occasionally gets corrupted and locks EVERYTHING out -- have to reset the firmware to fix it.
I'm all for controls in the console, but unfortunately the morality police won't be satisfied unless they personally control the distribution of everything.
For what it can do, the PS3 is not at all too expensive for me -- I'll qualify that I'm an American, I know that Europeans are getting a raw deal -- but there's a simple reason I still don't have one: no games. Seriously, take a look at ebGames, and virtually every title is scheduled for the end of the year or next year. And the titles that are out frankly don't do much for me.
Perhaps I'll get one in 2008, but by then I bet I can pick up newer-generation XBox360 and a ton of used games for it. Viva Pinata for the GF, Overlord for myself... Both exclusives, too. Well, if I'm in the mood for a Blu-Ray player perhaps, but I bet there will be much cheaper ones out by then.
Well, since no one in the small market for clusters was willing to throw significant cash at the problem, what other driver is there but developer interest?
Keep in mind that clustering in general isn't dead, just that much of it has moved to the language level. Parallelizing individual loops isn't something openMosix or anything else like it can do out of the box.
WinCE has a lot to recommend it technically (though I thought the CE name was dead now?) but the Windows mentality still pervades some of the devices, representing a serious Inability To Get It. I found myself helping my gf's stepfather with his Axim, where he found he couldn't move a map file to the CF card. It turned out that the map file was opened by a running application that was backgrounded and hung. I ended up rebooting the device to make it work. Unbelievable. Same damn annoying filesystem and process semantics on a device that doesn't need it. You never have this kind of problem on a Palm.
XNU is probably closer to the design of Dragonfly BSD than Mach/BSD. And thank god for that -- Mach is otherwise just glacial performance-wise. It was a fine piece of research work, sure, but when DEC decided to actually base a production OS on it, it gave microkernels a bad name that persists to this day. Which is too bad really... microkernels have come a long way since, but now the situation is opposite: they're stuck in research when they need to break out into production.
NT is still technically a microkernel, and it does all right when embedded, but the godawful Win32 API is now the OS for all intents and purposes.
In the end though, even though I know all these theoretical details about how my OS is built and functions, I still just want to Make It Go.
The DMCA is in some sense, multiple laws. The part that I'm arguing is a good law is the "takedown" provision that many people seem to think is one of its worst parts. There's room for disagreement, but as some responses go, I guess snarky nitpicking about wholes and parts is more important than the facts of the matter. Doubly ironic on Slashdot I think, for reasons that need no explanation. Not accusing your reply so much, but the other ones I got are eye-rolling.
Hell, even the PATRIOT act probably has one or two good provisions. I'm sure if I tried to research them in depth though, I'd find myself disappeared to Gitmo (yeah yeah, I know, not part of the act)
> If I scan and post a picture of the Mona Lisa out of an art history book, am I making an illegal reproduction of part of that book?
Yep, though there's definitely a fair use argument there. The law is actually pretty clear about performance and display rights. Try selling your own prints of images copied from the Getty digital archives and see how far you get. It's a twisty, ambiguous, and nuanced area of law, but the law is anything but silent about it.
Fine then, it has good parts. In fact, the overall gist of the bill is good, because it's a uniform law with safe harbor provisions, and it keeps lawyers from going jurisdiction-shopping for maximum damage whenever they see something on the internet they don't like. If the law were fully enforced, it wouldn't in fact be abused so widely.
Making a false claim under the DMCA is PERJURY. It's a criminal offense.
The DMCA is a good law with poisonous rider provisions (stuff about circumvention devices for example), and of course like any law with good intentions, is being gamed and rigged by those who are less than honorable. The situation under the DMCA is better than the previous regime, where an ISP could find itself liable for someone simply having uploaded something that's a blatant violation. Unfortunately, the "easy out" that it gives ISPs is responsible for the number and scale of the bogus takedowns too.
I want to see, in the words of FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle (great name!), "a few public hangings" for bogus DMCA takedowns. I'm not deluded enough to believe it will happen. Why we don't see any perjury prosecutions is simply representative of endemic corruption that implicitly favors the monied interests (because they're "good for the economy"). But blaming it on the DMCA itself is just naive.
So screw the copyright regimes. I don't do much copying, but I don't shed a single solitary tear for the labels and studios. Cynicism sure does breed contempt for the law.
This hole might have been a bit easier for Sun to patch if they hadn't made the automatic updater, jusched.exe such an unstable and annoying piece of junk. Or if they made updates work at all. My JRE is still beta 2 and has never seen an update since.
Screw it. I run Windows anyway, it's not like my system isn't already full of holes. What's one more?
> We've been on a heating trend for longer than we've been pumping out poisons into our atmosphere.
Al Gore addresses that one pretty nicely in his movie when he shows the graphs correlating. And while some argue how ice core samples might not be perfectly accurate, it's worth noting that the ice managed to exist for long enough to actually provide us with core samples -- i.e. at no point over the last couple million years did it actually all melt away. At the current rate, all that ice could in fact be gone in 50 years, and whether we caused it or not, we're damn sure going to have to deal with it.
Heck, Gore didn't even get into the scariest part -- if the hydromethane in the permafrost and in the oceans starts to release in large quantities, that will make the greenhouse effect from CO2 look like kids stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
> The OLPC is kinda like that.
Fiction?
> Yeah right. Where'd you learn that claptrap? In Economics 101?
Clearly Slashdot and the interwebs have a superior curriculum. At least Bombula used fancy school-learning type of words to respond to me.
This place is more like Digg every day.
How many times do you have to be lied to and/or fucked over by Microsoft before you too will develop this completely healthy and rational hatred of their bullshit antics and tactics?
There are plenty of rational detractors of Microsoft. However, they're virtually extinct on Groklaw. You could power a city with the power of the knee-jerk responses there.
> Can you prove that you weren't switched at birth?
Yunno, I've heard there are tests for that.
Damn, I just found out I was switched with my identical twin brother!
> In the USA for example, elections are on a Tuesday (!), and there is no incentive to change that
Friday - Muslim holy day
Saturday - Shabbat
Sunday - Some other religion's holy day
Employers have to give you the time off, but for some it's still a big commute. It's a travesty that the whole day isn't a mandatory holiday.
> True competition drives profit margins down to subsistence levels.
Nonsense. The market price tends to settle at a price point, where the demand is not affected sufficiently by further price moves to result in an increase in profit. This is greater than the marginal cost -- otherwise there wasn't a point in being in the business in the first place. There's a disincentive to lower prices beyond that except as a zero-sum game with the competition, and there are a lot more incentives than just price that motivate customers. No one would be buying $600 phones if that wasn't the case.
Even a competitive market kept competitive by antitrust regulation is going to boil down to a few major players though. I don't think that can necessarily be called an oligopoly or a cartel though.
> Having a rng online is kind of defeating the purpose.
Tell that to online RPG dice rollers. A true and trustworthy online RNG service can also be non-repudiable, instead of having everyone needing to trust that you didn't rig the RNG algorithm on your side. An online Nomic I play uses the cents digit of the opening price of publicly traded stocks as a random digit (the sample is typically once a month, so it's chaotic enough). Random.org has a daily log of its numbers. I'd really love an online RNG that logged in realtime so that I could pick them more-or-less on demand.
They knew all about that, so they did the last 10% first, which will make the rest a breeze.
I prefer "Sanctimonious Repressive Bureaucrats" myself.
> Imagine if your DVD players said 'this movie is too adult for you, you cannot play it' if you tried to play a John Waters film or a porno.
Most DVD players do have such lockout features. My player occasionally gets corrupted and locks EVERYTHING out -- have to reset the firmware to fix it.
I'm all for controls in the console, but unfortunately the morality police won't be satisfied unless they personally control the distribution of everything.
For what it can do, the PS3 is not at all too expensive for me -- I'll qualify that I'm an American, I know that Europeans are getting a raw deal -- but there's a simple reason I still don't have one: no games. Seriously, take a look at ebGames, and virtually every title is scheduled for the end of the year or next year. And the titles that are out frankly don't do much for me.
Perhaps I'll get one in 2008, but by then I bet I can pick up newer-generation XBox360 and a ton of used games for it. Viva Pinata for the GF, Overlord for myself... Both exclusives, too. Well, if I'm in the mood for a Blu-Ray player perhaps, but I bet there will be much cheaper ones out by then.
Talk about going out with a shrug.
Well, since no one in the small market for clusters was willing to throw significant cash at the problem, what other driver is there but developer interest?
Keep in mind that clustering in general isn't dead, just that much of it has moved to the language level. Parallelizing individual loops isn't something openMosix or anything else like it can do out of the box.
Look, when you're talking about a particular model at a particular price for a particular sales period, using "SKU" is actually appropriate.
But yeah, most people use it wrong. "Price point" also irks me the same way.
WinCE has a lot to recommend it technically (though I thought the CE name was dead now?) but the Windows mentality still pervades some of the devices, representing a serious Inability To Get It. I found myself helping my gf's stepfather with his Axim, where he found he couldn't move a map file to the CF card. It turned out that the map file was opened by a running application that was backgrounded and hung. I ended up rebooting the device to make it work. Unbelievable. Same damn annoying filesystem and process semantics on a device that doesn't need it. You never have this kind of problem on a Palm.
XNU is probably closer to the design of Dragonfly BSD than Mach/BSD. And thank god for that -- Mach is otherwise just glacial performance-wise. It was a fine piece of research work, sure, but when DEC decided to actually base a production OS on it, it gave microkernels a bad name that persists to this day. Which is too bad really ... microkernels have come a long way since, but now the situation is opposite: they're stuck in research when they need to break out into production.
NT is still technically a microkernel, and it does all right when embedded, but the godawful Win32 API is now the OS for all intents and purposes.
In the end though, even though I know all these theoretical details about how my OS is built and functions, I still just want to Make It Go.
... much more than 10 years old.
The DMCA is in some sense, multiple laws. The part that I'm arguing is a good law is the "takedown" provision that many people seem to think is one of its worst parts. There's room for disagreement, but as some responses go, I guess snarky nitpicking about wholes and parts is more important than the facts of the matter. Doubly ironic on Slashdot I think, for reasons that need no explanation. Not accusing your reply so much, but the other ones I got are eye-rolling.
Hell, even the PATRIOT act probably has one or two good provisions. I'm sure if I tried to research them in depth though, I'd find myself disappeared to Gitmo (yeah yeah, I know, not part of the act)
As long as we're counting ... s/purjury/perjury/
But really, I've long since given up. I did like the "sediment" malapropism tho, it's kind of apropos.
> If I scan and post a picture of the Mona Lisa out of an art history book, am I making an illegal reproduction of part of that book?
Yep, though there's definitely a fair use argument there. The law is actually pretty clear about performance and display rights. Try selling your own prints of images copied from the Getty digital archives and see how far you get. It's a twisty, ambiguous, and nuanced area of law, but the law is anything but silent about it.
"Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
Fine then, it has good parts. In fact, the overall gist of the bill is good, because it's a uniform law with safe harbor provisions, and it keeps lawyers from going jurisdiction-shopping for maximum damage whenever they see something on the internet they don't like. If the law were fully enforced, it wouldn't in fact be abused so widely.
Making a false claim under the DMCA is PERJURY. It's a criminal offense.
The DMCA is a good law with poisonous rider provisions (stuff about circumvention devices for example), and of course like any law with good intentions, is being gamed and rigged by those who are less than honorable. The situation under the DMCA is better than the previous regime, where an ISP could find itself liable for someone simply having uploaded something that's a blatant violation. Unfortunately, the "easy out" that it gives ISPs is responsible for the number and scale of the bogus takedowns too.
I want to see, in the words of FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle (great name!), "a few public hangings" for bogus DMCA takedowns. I'm not deluded enough to believe it will happen. Why we don't see any perjury prosecutions is simply representative of endemic corruption that implicitly favors the monied interests (because they're "good for the economy"). But blaming it on the DMCA itself is just naive.
So screw the copyright regimes. I don't do much copying, but I don't shed a single solitary tear for the labels and studios. Cynicism sure does breed contempt for the law.
This hole might have been a bit easier for Sun to patch if they hadn't made the automatic updater, jusched.exe such an unstable and annoying piece of junk. Or if they made updates work at all. My JRE is still beta 2 and has never seen an update since.
Screw it. I run Windows anyway, it's not like my system isn't already full of holes. What's one more?
> Is there an editor in the house?
No. HTH.
> It comes down to dynamism vs. one-size-fits-all stasism . I prefer the former.
You mean one-size-fits-all corporatism? You really think you're still the one in charge when the government steps back?
> We've been on a heating trend for longer than we've been pumping out poisons into our atmosphere.
Al Gore addresses that one pretty nicely in his movie when he shows the graphs correlating. And while some argue how ice core samples might not be perfectly accurate, it's worth noting that the ice managed to exist for long enough to actually provide us with core samples -- i.e. at no point over the last couple million years did it actually all melt away. At the current rate, all that ice could in fact be gone in 50 years, and whether we caused it or not, we're damn sure going to have to deal with it.
Heck, Gore didn't even get into the scariest part -- if the hydromethane in the permafrost and in the oceans starts to release in large quantities, that will make the greenhouse effect from CO2 look like kids stuff.