"your own machine" here does NOT mean your TiVo; the poster used a different term to make that distinction. You can, if you want to, hook up the necessary ports to your desktop PC (for example) and run your modified TiVo software on it (in fact, since you'd probably need to modify the software just to make it compatible, this is perfectly reasonable). As for the inability to run your modified software on your TiVo, the GPL is a software license; you are claiming that the GPL should not only regulate modification and redistribution of source code, but that it should regulate the behavior of hardware with regard to the software it runs. TiVo is not "free hardware" in the sense that its operating system is "free software" and if you don't like that, don't buy a TiVo! They chose not to openly license their hardware, and that is their decision to make. If (GNU/)Linux was under the current GPLv3 draft, TiVo would simply have based their operating system off one under a more permissive license, such as BSD. If they wanted to, they could then refuse to provide the source at all. Sorry if that bugs you, but there is no law requiring TiVo to let you do whatever you want with their hardware.
For one thing, there are far more than 3 iPods; you've got different sizes (and thus costs, playlist capacities, etc.) and different colors (don't even pretend Apple doesn't make a big deal out of coloring their hardware). Then you have the stores with live demo units, complete with headphones, where only having three iPods would really limit how many people could listen. You have iPods playing music videos on continuous loops, iPods in docks, iPods with transmitters... Also, don't forget the posters, the accessories sold separately, and the ideal arrangement whereby they are spread out just enough to catch the eye of anybody who walks past, reather than being packed for space efficiency. Any store that wants to sell iPods could EASILY fill up their entire display case, and I've never seen a US store that wasn't in a specific partnership with an alternate manufacturer that didn't devote at least half their display space to iPods. For Apple, 10% is a TINY portion, which suggests iPods aren't nearly as prevalent everywhere as they are here.
They have de-integrated IE and Explorer, so compromising one won't directly affect the other. You can no longer navigate from local filesystem to web page without switching applications. Theoretically, that should mean that iexplore.exe is no longer required, but I'm not sure how uninstallable it is. Like OSX I suspect the core rendering system is required and is used by quite a few components of the OS. I believe Sidebar gadgets, for example, use HTML/JavaScript.
Using the Gecko engine probably would have broken every single plugin for IE, required some interesting workarounds for ActiveX, and caused licencing issues. IE testers and patch developers would have to learn to work with the new code, and would go from one set of issues to another. Furthermore, which version should they go with? The Firefox 3.0 branch of the engine is the most standards-compliant, according to the Acid2 test... but is also the least well tested in actual use. Furthermore, it could COMPLETELY break legacy site support. Hopefully MS will be smart enough to try and recognize IE6 code and adapt for it, but the Gecko engine wouldn't have a chance.
All those hotkeys do, and have as long as I have used them (Win 3.11), work on MS software. If some 3rd-party Windows developer decides to move the Redo combo Ctrl-Shift-Z instead of Ctrl-Y, that's not MS's fault. I hate stuff like that, because I use hotkeys so much that I end up triggering erroneous commands. In that area, Macs have it pretty good. They have another advantage: keyboard layout control. Not every PC has the ` key right above the Tab key, so using that for reverse-navigating Alt-Tab would be a bad idea. You can pretty much count on the Shift key being there, in almost perfect position for left ring or pinky finger.
Windows has a good middle ground between the wildly different hotkeys of the *nix world (I think a lot of people stand by emacs simply because they can't get their fingers to do anythng else anymore... same for vi. GUI programs are slightly more consistent.) and the limited software selection of the Mac world. I realize this isn't Apple's fault, and they would love more people to develop for their platform... but some of those people would not (do not?) respect Apple's preferred UI tricks.
Bringing up the PC users who use right-click to cut and paste is silly, since plenty of Mac users go all the way to the screentop menu bar for that. Using context menu for bold or italic I have never seen; Win and Mac alike use toolbars if they don't use hotkeys. Where the Windows contet enus REALLY shine is in things like SendTo (right-click a file, click once, it's and attachment. Right-click another file - say an HTML page - and open it for editing rather than viewing.) and Properties (yes, there are hotkeys for Properties. Almost nobody knosw them, but even the naivest Windows user learns how to open them from context menus really quickly). On XP, Runas... was the saving grace that made it halfway possible to use a LUA for everything, even if it was dumb you had to do it that way. OTOH, Linux isn't that far yet, generally; you need to use a terminal. Linux does have Move To and Copy To context menus on files, though. At any rate, these are things almost nobody would use the keyboard for (it's doable, but you need to be desperate or crazy).
finally, remember that although Apple has had graphical, mouse-driven desktops for far longer than MS, I had 3-button mouse back in DOS days, and while XTree Gold didn't use the other buttons for much, the desktop environment we used at the time (looked a lot like Windows 3x, but not a MS product) and some games actually could and would use every singles button. For the last 5 years, I have felt feel utterly crippled if I must use a 2-button mouse, and always have uses for at least 5 buttons in virtually any program. That alone made using Macs a nuisance for me.
It is very close to how Ubuntu runs. There *is* an Administrator account, with full superuser permissions, but it is disabled. If you try to do something via Runas: Administrator, it will not work - no matter what password you use - because that account isn't active (similar to the way that trying to use the su command in Ubuntu is a good way to confuse and annoy yourself). However, if you are running a program and it needs administrative permissions for something, a dialog will ask you for administrative permissions. You can set this up to require a password above and beynd the one you use to log in, as well. In this it is more like OSX than any Linux I've tried. Most progams, such as Windows Defender, can be opened for interaction without superuser priveleges, then will demand them when and only when necessary. As of my current build, installers tend to demand first even if they might theoretically not need superuser, but this capability (called User Account Control or UAC) has improved with every beta release.
You can also run a program (including Explorer, cmd, or even Unix shell in the most complete editions) with superuser priveleges to begin with. I consider this unneccessary, usually, but it's a context menu option on any executable. Although each control panel portion runs with separate permissions, Computer Management, for example, displays a UAC prompt when started, and everything done within it has superuser priveleges.
Actually, the sad thing is that although there are many great turn-based strategy games, most of them just don't get much respect. The shining counterexample I can think of right now is Civ 4, but there are plenty of others. There are some great open-source TBS games, such as Battle for Wesnoth, most of wich focus largely on great AI (a few Civilization clones fall into this category). There are also plenty of low-cost commercial ones that on't get widely advertised (a personal favorite is the Space Empires series, which has acceptable AI and is highly moddable).
I still play Alpha Centauri (Civilization on an alien planet, for those wo don't know) and Heros of Might and Magic III (haven't tried IV yet). Both AC and HoMaM3 are well over 5 years old, but both have: decent AI, great map generators, ability to play anything from a 30-min to a 6-hour game (not counting campaigns), tons of replayability, and enough strategic aspects to work on that there's always more thinking to do. Neither has fantastic graphics or a sophisticated game engine by today's standards; they win on good design. There's litte aside from cutscene movies that cannot easily be written, even improved on by OSS developers (Wesnoth, it's hats off to you). While I agree that RTS games get far more attention than most TBS, don't discount the greatness of TBS; they're not only still there, most of them are far easier on the pocketbook.
One very practical day-to-day use of such a device would be at sea, both for larger yachts and possibly smaller military vessels (especially on detached duty). Having lived on a private boat for several years (too small for this, but I know a few that weren't) I can tell you that the very things listed here - power, refridgeration, and water - are exactly what boats need. The kind of engineering they did with the airflow could also be used to improve efficiency using seawater, and refridgeration is a huge requirement. The energy to cool our tiny, well-insulated fridge is a huge portion of our energy budget, and our desalinator is another. Water production would go up very dramatically if it wasn't forced to collect it out of the air (even this would be more effective in hot, humid areas, such as tropical oceans).
Doesn't have to be Outlook, Outlook Express/Windows Mail, or any other particular e-mail client. You could get this from Pine (or Thunderbird). It's just a Windows executable that messes with your Firefox profile folder. I'm half-tempted to see if I can find it and run it in Wine, just to see if it can even figure out how to effect a Linux Firefox profile. Note that Linux permissions won't help; by default the Firefox profile folder is (must be) writable.
There's an add-on to IE6 called the MSN (or Live) Toolbar that gives tabbed browsing capabilities. It's inferior to IE7, or even Firefox out-of-the-box (which is also inferior to IE7), but it sure beats stardard IE6. Of course, 6 is still less secure, far less standards compliant, and has an inferior UI, but for those of us who must use it at work, it is acceptable.
This may be the case. Vista however, does use 3D accel - a lot of it - if you run the Aero interface. Aero is unnecessary, but considering how many people actually care about OSX's eye-candy, I don't forsee many Vista boxes running sans-Aero. It does improve the UI a bit, too.
There has already been curiosity as to whether GPU utilization will reduce laptop battery life for Vista; although Vista has better power management than XP (not sure how OSX's compares, but OSX is probably pretty good) I turn off Aero for extra battery life when mobile.
If you're talking about the NTFS Encrypting File System, the encryption is tied to the account in several ways:
Changing your password shouldn't block access to the encrypted files
An admin resetting your password makes the encrypted files unrecoverable, however
Copying the bits of the EFS encrypted file to another computer with the same user name and password will NOT allow you to decrypt them
This tool allowed you to choose a different password for a file, and to export it to another computer (with the tool) which could then decipher the file if you provide the correct password (regardless of the account on the other machine). It also did not transparently decipher files for you the way EFS does; EFS is great against somebody stealing your laptop and trying to read sensitive data off it, but does nothing against somebody sitting down at your machine if you forgot to lock your account or log off.
Vista uses a new, backward-compatible version of NTFS. While it isn't the WinFS we've been hoping for, it does do some nice things like monitor changes to files and directories, and allow you to roll back these changes (literally, the most important parts of a versioning system. Not quite sure where it stores the rollback data, but my guess is in ostentatiously free space that is flagged in a special way). XP and even older Linux NTFS drivers are compatible with Vista's FS, but they are moving ahead... and I can't fault them for it. I would remind you also that Windows drivers for Linux filesystems are also playing catchup... here we have EXT4 coming out and the best Windows driver available is EXT2 (no journaling AT ALL).
Even the newest editions of Vista are still months away from release, and driver support is one of the things that tend to come all in a rush at the end. Windows has far better driver support, both for cutting-edge (where Linux utterly lacks, usually) and legacy (which Macs lack) devices than either major competing OS. It's not Linux's fault if hardware vendors don't bother to release a version of their driver for a market share like Linux's (even if it makes me want to kick the folks at Broadcom where it hurts) but even including the various proprietary drivers for Linux won't bring it up to the level of an RTM Windows OS. Even when the driver is included (touchpad, for example) the configuration options are limited and often involve manually editing config files (even in SUSE, with its excellent YaST config tool).
Also, does SUSE Watcher (auto-update tool) scan for new hardware downloads? Microsoft Update can do this, and indeed with current CTP's of Vista that's what you do; install it (those drivers which have been ported to Vista are installed now) and then it asks you to run Update and grab the latest beta drivers, or legacy ones for those companies that haven't ported theirs yet. Takes a few minutes, might require rebooting once (although even video drivers can now be installed without rebooting) but is mostly quick and painless. I'm not knocking Linux, certainly not SUSE, but you don't give Vista nearly the credit it deserves.
Totally untrue, for anybody who uses Vista much... even the Feb CTP was good enough that it pained me to go back to XP, and every CTP since then has improved a lot. Besides, new computers WILL ship with Vista, so even if it doesn't gain MS any market share, it won't lose it either. XP acceptance took quite a while, but nobody can deny it was a profitable product. When you have a market share like MS, you don't need everybody to switch to the latest-generation iWhatever to turn a profit, you just need to be seen as having a new product to replace the old one. I tri-boot SUSE (older version than this), XP, and Vista, and while Wine isn't good enough that I don't need Windows anymore, I never use XP if I can help it.
SUSE uses the 2.6.15 kernel, so no native Bcm driver yet (possibly not even the native wifi stack to support it, which is in.16 I think....17 has the driver). Short of building your own kernel, you have two options: ndiswrapper, or LinuxantDriverloader. ndiswrapper is an OSS kernel module and CLI configuration tool that allows the use of a Windows driver in Linux. Personally, I have not once gotten it to work completely, on any distro, but I have seen it done on other peoples' computers. SUSE ships with a (usually somewhat outdated) version of ndiswrapper. Driverloader, on the other hand, is proprietary software. The licencing cost isn't bad, and there's a trial period to make sure it works, but it's not free. As best I can tell, it does the same thing as ndiswrapper, but it seems to do it better (I once got it to work in FC4, though it would cause a kernel panic in seconds... apparently this is/was a known problem. During those seconds I had connectivity, though.) It uses a web-based GUI on loopback address for configuration. The newer versions of either should, hopefully, support WPA (Driverloader says it does), maybe WPA2.
Given the amount of Mono (opne source.NET framework) SLED apparently uses, it actually might be usable for C#/VB.NET development as well as traditional OSS languages like C, C++, Python, Java, and etc. I haven't looked at the Mono project in a couple of months, but I love C# (and have to use VB.NET at work) so I'm interested in seeing how thwy fare on Linux.
Of course, there's the question of development environment. Eclipse is good and Vim works well for little stuff, but I have yet to see a real replacement for Visual Studio on Linux (say, does anybody know if it runs in Wine? I've never tried, actually...)
Good point. Russian credit cards might get billed, but ours shouldn't. Russian law is just strict enough that AllOfMP3 needs SOME cash flow to be successful. At the very least they would probably either take down their English language and western currency sales pages, or block customers from purchasing using western credit cards.
Actually, if they marketed it to Islamics of that particular belief (and not all believe women must go covered) it probably WOULD be illegal, most likely under some form of hate speach or religious intolerance law. "Marketed" meaning, of course,
Providing it in the target's language, even though it is not that of the provider and country it is ostensibly for. (Heck, do you think 'All of MP3' has any meaning in Russian?)
Charging for it, especially in the target's currency, instead of simply providing a free service.
I'm not going to bother debating this further, your analogy is too weak. Russia HAS copyright laws; AllOfMP3 is simply taking advantage of a hole in them to make a killing in countries where their service is completely illegal. You buying is as illegal as them selling, and if they were truly trying to limit it Russia, they would probably block sales to foreign credit cards or something similar, rather than posting a notice (in English, on and English page) suggesting clients confirm the legality (in the client's country, which is where it matters) of their purchases (in US dollars or British pounds) themselves.
Oh, and are you suggesting that it should be legal for you to buy fully automatic weapons in countries where that is legal, and have them shipped to the US or UK for use here? If nothing else, AllOfMP3 is exporting - and it's western customers are importing - products that are not legal here.
None of that $200 would have gone to the artists anyways, it all goes to the RIAA mafia. Why are you happy with that?
Bullshit. Ever heard of royalties? It's how people who produce intellectual property - be it authors, artists, or some actors - get paid. Whatever you think about the RIAA, they are under contract obligation to pay the artists for every title sold, and they do. Sure, a lot goes to the industry as well... who pay the costs for recording studios (professional studios and sound engineers are NOT cheap), the advertising and promotions, and the up-front costs on all production and distribution of the albums.
That's a big risk, and if you don't like it, buy from indie artits instead. What, you've never heard of The Divorce? Too bad... they're better than many, perhaps most industry-supported bands, and they do well enough locally (after all, their albums cost less than the big labels) but they don't make much money, not compared to far worse artists that everybody knows or knew (Backstreet Boys anybody?) and The Divorce were one of the lucky bands that found somebody to help them produce professional-quality albums. They've toured accross the country, been well-received 3000 miles from their standard distribution range, yet they get little reward for it. Indie bands that do well are the exception, not the rule, and while the RIAA are probably almost as much of greedy bastards as you think, the big names in music got their money from somewhere.
Great iea, except for one little thing... AllOfMP3 pays effectively nothing to the artists. The RIAA/BPI might make bushels of money doing this... except, of course, they're under contract to provide a certain royalty to the artist for every title sold. You CAN NOT do that at AllOfMP3's prices and remain profitable.
The way I've often explained why P2P and 'sharing' music is wrong is thus: you walk into a store, grab 50 CDs (maybe all copies of one disc) and on your way out pay for one of them and smuggle the others under your coat. You then hand out the stolen albums to anybody who asks. Under the reasonable assumption that the store hadn't bought more copies of the disc than it could sell, you have just stolen 49 albums in profit from the store... and handed them out to all your pals. Hopefully you see where this is wrong; shoplifting forces the store to raise prices or go out of business. Raising prices reduces sales. Since the store pays the same amount, in royalties to the artist and purchase price to the industry, the artists and industries lose income. Thus they must raise costs. It all goes downhill.
AllOfMP3 is doing exactly the same thing... except instead of giving away $18 worth of album to everybody - $18 that rightfully belong to the store, or other legal music distributor - they are giving away $16 worth of album and pocketing $2 on every one. The artists and industries are no better off, but the piracy has moved from level of kids whining that they deserve to get it for free (or that it "wants to be free" *rolls eyes*) to black-market criminals. They are making their living by being both thief and fence in one.
It could be argued that a site like AllOfMP3 is actually LESS legal than peer-to-peer, etc.
The site asks for very little money, compared to other music stores. But it pays even less. What you are doing is paying to suport a service that, by American laws, is illegal. Not only are they providing copyrighted materials, they are lining their own pockets in the deal. Paying for a licence to broadcast non-recordable and non-redistributable music, but providing permanently downloadable files, is the same as recording sports on HDTV, editing out the commercials, and selling the complete season, digital format, for $5 a piece. (That's maybe $4 for startup costs, DVDs, and packaging, plus a buck profit on the side.)
One can almost argue that *sharing* music is legal under fair use (the distinction being that when you share your CD with one other person, you no longer have the CD... but that's not the point here). Taking money in exchange for copyrighted materials is wrong under pretty much any interpretation of US law that I've ever heard (though IANAL).
So what if I hurt them, they'll die eventually, and then it's gone, so who cares. I might as well make myself happy.
Plenty of reasons: They might hurt you back being one of the top ones. Another being that the happiness you got would probably be short-term compared to the misery of years in prison. The vast majority of people know why anarchy is a bad idea; if you don't I'm not sure how you managed to figure out the operation of a computer.
But, then there's my religion which says that people have souls, they are real, and eternal. And their soul is no different from mine.
So, because somebody tells you that A) you have a soul B) other people also have souls C) both your soul and the souls of others are eternal, and presumably D) after death, you will be judged based on your actions in life, you have refused to live the life that you apparently want to? You are one scary piece of work! What else will you believe if the people in the big building with stained glass windows and a cross on top (minor assumption there, sorry if I guessed wrong) tell you? How about if they say it actually IS okay to do what you want to, but only with little boys? Some of them did, most likely there are some who still do.
I'm usually pretty impressed with athiests who control themself, but at the same time I think thier stupid. Why would they do that? It gains them nothing at all, so they lived a miserable life, and died, seems like dumb thing to do to me.
I'm an agnostic, not an athiest (I'm not SURE I'm right; I don't subscribe to any dogma. I do believe in evolution over intelligent design, and a few similar things, however... and I don't believe in souls.) I don't think my life is miserable because I control myself. I have no desire to find myself on the business end of the justice system, or to live my life on the run. While desire to have sex is natural (regardless of whether the other person wants it or not) you'll get a lot more long-term benefit from finding a loving life partner then you will from forcing yourself on somebody and going through the consequences.
Basically, what this post boils down to is that you have no personal ethics, but don't hurt people because your religious leaders/texts tell you not to. The thought of causing people (or "just a bunch of meat, with no real existance - they sure think that they are real, but what do I care? They are just a bunch of nerves blinking, no different then a computer") pain and suffering doesn't bother you at all. But, because they supposedly have a soul your fun is suddenly off-limits? You also show a nearly complete inability to see the big picture, or have no regard for law and society in general (which brings up the question of why you would have any for religious law...) Oh, and you can't spell.
No surprise this is posted AC, but whever modded this up should be ashamed.
I apologise to anybody offended by my irreverence with regard to churches, Christianity, etc. I was trying to make a point, and deliberately wrote more roughly than I would to anybody I had any reason to respect. And no, I don't disrespect people based on religion.
For the love of...
Somebody is offering you something that is no cost to you, might be a real advantage, and will probably cost them... and your response is "hehehe, lets go hurt them for it!" WTF is wrong with you?!? Did a PlaysForSure player fall out of the sky and kill your grandmother or something? The only thing worse than the post itself (this is/. after all, there will be fanboys and haters) is the +5 mod...
Maybe I'm just disappointed; I had actually thought the old concept of getting +5 by blindly bashing the $hit out of MS was finally going away.
Actually, thats more likely to be unexpected *bonus offer* in addition to a different sort of purchase...;-)
All jokes aside, there's actually a hole of sorts in your argument; if college student's don't like viruses, why do so many use Kazaa, etc? At least the open-source P2P's don't usually have that particular problem.
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"your own machine" here does NOT mean your TiVo; the poster used a different term to make that distinction. You can, if you want to, hook up the necessary ports to your desktop PC (for example) and run your modified TiVo software on it (in fact, since you'd probably need to modify the software just to make it compatible, this is perfectly reasonable). As for the inability to run your modified software on your TiVo, the GPL is a software license; you are claiming that the GPL should not only regulate modification and redistribution of source code, but that it should regulate the behavior of hardware with regard to the software it runs. TiVo is not "free hardware" in the sense that its operating system is "free software" and if you don't like that, don't buy a TiVo! They chose not to openly license their hardware, and that is their decision to make. If (GNU/)Linux was under the current GPLv3 draft, TiVo would simply have based their operating system off one under a more permissive license, such as BSD. If they wanted to, they could then refuse to provide the source at all. Sorry if that bugs you, but there is no law requiring TiVo to let you do whatever you want with their hardware.
Not true
For one thing, there are far more than 3 iPods; you've got different sizes (and thus costs, playlist capacities, etc.) and different colors (don't even pretend Apple doesn't make a big deal out of coloring their hardware). Then you have the stores with live demo units, complete with headphones, where only having three iPods would really limit how many people could listen. You have iPods playing music videos on continuous loops, iPods in docks, iPods with transmitters... Also, don't forget the posters, the accessories sold separately, and the ideal arrangement whereby they are spread out just enough to catch the eye of anybody who walks past, reather than being packed for space efficiency. Any store that wants to sell iPods could EASILY fill up their entire display case, and I've never seen a US store that wasn't in a specific partnership with an alternate manufacturer that didn't devote at least half their display space to iPods. For Apple, 10% is a TINY portion, which suggests iPods aren't nearly as prevalent everywhere as they are here.
They have de-integrated IE and Explorer, so compromising one won't directly affect the other. You can no longer navigate from local filesystem to web page without switching applications. Theoretically, that should mean that iexplore.exe is no longer required, but I'm not sure how uninstallable it is. Like OSX I suspect the core rendering system is required and is used by quite a few components of the OS. I believe Sidebar gadgets, for example, use HTML/JavaScript.
Using the Gecko engine probably would have broken every single plugin for IE, required some interesting workarounds for ActiveX, and caused licencing issues. IE testers and patch developers would have to learn to work with the new code, and would go from one set of issues to another. Furthermore, which version should they go with? The Firefox 3.0 branch of the engine is the most standards-compliant, according to the Acid2 test... but is also the least well tested in actual use. Furthermore, it could COMPLETELY break legacy site support. Hopefully MS will be smart enough to try and recognize IE6 code and adapt for it, but the Gecko engine wouldn't have a chance.
All those hotkeys do, and have as long as I have used them (Win 3.11), work on MS software. If some 3rd-party Windows developer decides to move the Redo combo Ctrl-Shift-Z instead of Ctrl-Y, that's not MS's fault. I hate stuff like that, because I use hotkeys so much that I end up triggering erroneous commands. In that area, Macs have it pretty good. They have another advantage: keyboard layout control. Not every PC has the ` key right above the Tab key, so using that for reverse-navigating Alt-Tab would be a bad idea. You can pretty much count on the Shift key being there, in almost perfect position for left ring or pinky finger. Windows has a good middle ground between the wildly different hotkeys of the *nix world (I think a lot of people stand by emacs simply because they can't get their fingers to do anythng else anymore... same for vi. GUI programs are slightly more consistent.) and the limited software selection of the Mac world. I realize this isn't Apple's fault, and they would love more people to develop for their platform... but some of those people would not (do not?) respect Apple's preferred UI tricks. Bringing up the PC users who use right-click to cut and paste is silly, since plenty of Mac users go all the way to the screentop menu bar for that. Using context menu for bold or italic I have never seen; Win and Mac alike use toolbars if they don't use hotkeys. Where the Windows contet enus REALLY shine is in things like SendTo (right-click a file, click once, it's and attachment. Right-click another file - say an HTML page - and open it for editing rather than viewing.) and Properties (yes, there are hotkeys for Properties. Almost nobody knosw them, but even the naivest Windows user learns how to open them from context menus really quickly). On XP, Runas... was the saving grace that made it halfway possible to use a LUA for everything, even if it was dumb you had to do it that way. OTOH, Linux isn't that far yet, generally; you need to use a terminal. Linux does have Move To and Copy To context menus on files, though. At any rate, these are things almost nobody would use the keyboard for (it's doable, but you need to be desperate or crazy). finally, remember that although Apple has had graphical, mouse-driven desktops for far longer than MS, I had 3-button mouse back in DOS days, and while XTree Gold didn't use the other buttons for much, the desktop environment we used at the time (looked a lot like Windows 3x, but not a MS product) and some games actually could and would use every singles button. For the last 5 years, I have felt feel utterly crippled if I must use a 2-button mouse, and always have uses for at least 5 buttons in virtually any program. That alone made using Macs a nuisance for me.
It is very close to how Ubuntu runs. There *is* an Administrator account, with full superuser permissions, but it is disabled. If you try to do something via Runas: Administrator, it will not work - no matter what password you use - because that account isn't active (similar to the way that trying to use the su command in Ubuntu is a good way to confuse and annoy yourself). However, if you are running a program and it needs administrative permissions for something, a dialog will ask you for administrative permissions. You can set this up to require a password above and beynd the one you use to log in, as well. In this it is more like OSX than any Linux I've tried. Most progams, such as Windows Defender, can be opened for interaction without superuser priveleges, then will demand them when and only when necessary. As of my current build, installers tend to demand first even if they might theoretically not need superuser, but this capability (called User Account Control or UAC) has improved with every beta release.
You can also run a program (including Explorer, cmd, or even Unix shell in the most complete editions) with superuser priveleges to begin with. I consider this unneccessary, usually, but it's a context menu option on any executable. Although each control panel portion runs with separate permissions, Computer Management, for example, displays a UAC prompt when started, and everything done within it has superuser priveleges.
Actually, the sad thing is that although there are many great turn-based strategy games, most of them just don't get much respect. The shining counterexample I can think of right now is Civ 4, but there are plenty of others. There are some great open-source TBS games, such as Battle for Wesnoth, most of wich focus largely on great AI (a few Civilization clones fall into this category). There are also plenty of low-cost commercial ones that on't get widely advertised (a personal favorite is the Space Empires series, which has acceptable AI and is highly moddable).
I still play Alpha Centauri (Civilization on an alien planet, for those wo don't know) and Heros of Might and Magic III (haven't tried IV yet). Both AC and HoMaM3 are well over 5 years old, but both have: decent AI, great map generators, ability to play anything from a 30-min to a 6-hour game (not counting campaigns), tons of replayability, and enough strategic aspects to work on that there's always more thinking to do. Neither has fantastic graphics or a sophisticated game engine by today's standards; they win on good design. There's litte aside from cutscene movies that cannot easily be written, even improved on by OSS developers (Wesnoth, it's hats off to you). While I agree that RTS games get far more attention than most TBS, don't discount the greatness of TBS; they're not only still there, most of them are far easier on the pocketbook.
One very practical day-to-day use of such a device would be at sea, both for larger yachts and possibly smaller military vessels (especially on detached duty). Having lived on a private boat for several years (too small for this, but I know a few that weren't) I can tell you that the very things listed here - power, refridgeration, and water - are exactly what boats need. The kind of engineering they did with the airflow could also be used to improve efficiency using seawater, and refridgeration is a huge requirement. The energy to cool our tiny, well-insulated fridge is a huge portion of our energy budget, and our desalinator is another. Water production would go up very dramatically if it wasn't forced to collect it out of the air (even this would be more effective in hot, humid areas, such as tropical oceans).
Doesn't have to be Outlook, Outlook Express/Windows Mail, or any other particular e-mail client. You could get this from Pine (or Thunderbird). It's just a Windows executable that messes with your Firefox profile folder. I'm half-tempted to see if I can find it and run it in Wine, just to see if it can even figure out how to effect a Linux Firefox profile. Note that Linux permissions won't help; by default the Firefox profile folder is (must be) writable.
There's an add-on to IE6 called the MSN (or Live) Toolbar that gives tabbed browsing capabilities. It's inferior to IE7, or even Firefox out-of-the-box (which is also inferior to IE7), but it sure beats stardard IE6. Of course, 6 is still less secure, far less standards compliant, and has an inferior UI, but for those of us who must use it at work, it is acceptable.
This may be the case. Vista however, does use 3D accel - a lot of it - if you run the Aero interface. Aero is unnecessary, but considering how many people actually care about OSX's eye-candy, I don't forsee many Vista boxes running sans-Aero. It does improve the UI a bit, too.
There has already been curiosity as to whether GPU utilization will reduce laptop battery life for Vista; although Vista has better power management than XP (not sure how OSX's compares, but OSX is probably pretty good) I turn off Aero for extra battery life when mobile.
- Changing your password shouldn't block access to the encrypted files
- An admin resetting your password makes the encrypted files unrecoverable, however
- Copying the bits of the EFS encrypted file to another computer with the same user name and password will NOT allow you to decrypt them
This tool allowed you to choose a different password for a file, and to export it to another computer (with the tool) which could then decipher the file if you provide the correct password (regardless of the account on the other machine). It also did not transparently decipher files for you the way EFS does; EFS is great against somebody stealing your laptop and trying to read sensitive data off it, but does nothing against somebody sitting down at your machine if you forgot to lock your account or log off.Vista uses a new, backward-compatible version of NTFS. While it isn't the WinFS we've been hoping for, it does do some nice things like monitor changes to files and directories, and allow you to roll back these changes (literally, the most important parts of a versioning system. Not quite sure where it stores the rollback data, but my guess is in ostentatiously free space that is flagged in a special way). XP and even older Linux NTFS drivers are compatible with Vista's FS, but they are moving ahead... and I can't fault them for it. I would remind you also that Windows drivers for Linux filesystems are also playing catchup... here we have EXT4 coming out and the best Windows driver available is EXT2 (no journaling AT ALL).
Oh, please
Even the newest editions of Vista are still months away from release, and driver support is one of the things that tend to come all in a rush at the end. Windows has far better driver support, both for cutting-edge (where Linux utterly lacks, usually) and legacy (which Macs lack) devices than either major competing OS. It's not Linux's fault if hardware vendors don't bother to release a version of their driver for a market share like Linux's (even if it makes me want to kick the folks at Broadcom where it hurts) but even including the various proprietary drivers for Linux won't bring it up to the level of an RTM Windows OS. Even when the driver is included (touchpad, for example) the configuration options are limited and often involve manually editing config files (even in SUSE, with its excellent YaST config tool).
Also, does SUSE Watcher (auto-update tool) scan for new hardware downloads? Microsoft Update can do this, and indeed with current CTP's of Vista that's what you do; install it (those drivers which have been ported to Vista are installed now) and then it asks you to run Update and grab the latest beta drivers, or legacy ones for those companies that haven't ported theirs yet. Takes a few minutes, might require rebooting once (although even video drivers can now be installed without rebooting) but is mostly quick and painless. I'm not knocking Linux, certainly not SUSE, but you don't give Vista nearly the credit it deserves.
Totally untrue, for anybody who uses Vista much... even the Feb CTP was good enough that it pained me to go back to XP, and every CTP since then has improved a lot. Besides, new computers WILL ship with Vista, so even if it doesn't gain MS any market share, it won't lose it either. XP acceptance took quite a while, but nobody can deny it was a profitable product. When you have a market share like MS, you don't need everybody to switch to the latest-generation iWhatever to turn a profit, you just need to be seen as having a new product to replace the old one. I tri-boot SUSE (older version than this), XP, and Vista, and while Wine isn't good enough that I don't need Windows anymore, I never use XP if I can help it.
SUSE uses the 2.6.15 kernel, so no native Bcm driver yet (possibly not even the native wifi stack to support it, which is in .16 I think... .17 has the driver). Short of building your own kernel, you have two options: ndiswrapper, or Linuxant Driverloader. ndiswrapper is an OSS kernel module and CLI configuration tool that allows the use of a Windows driver in Linux. Personally, I have not once gotten it to work completely, on any distro, but I have seen it done on other peoples' computers. SUSE ships with a (usually somewhat outdated) version of ndiswrapper. Driverloader, on the other hand, is proprietary software. The licencing cost isn't bad, and there's a trial period to make sure it works, but it's not free. As best I can tell, it does the same thing as ndiswrapper, but it seems to do it better (I once got it to work in FC4, though it would cause a kernel panic in seconds... apparently this is/was a known problem. During those seconds I had connectivity, though.) It uses a web-based GUI on loopback address for configuration. The newer versions of either should, hopefully, support WPA (Driverloader says it does), maybe WPA2.
Given the amount of Mono (opne source .NET framework) SLED apparently uses, it actually might be usable for C#/VB.NET development as well as traditional OSS languages like C, C++, Python, Java, and etc. I haven't looked at the Mono project in a couple of months, but I love C# (and have to use VB.NET at work) so I'm interested in seeing how thwy fare on Linux.
Of course, there's the question of development environment. Eclipse is good and Vim works well for little stuff, but I have yet to see a real replacement for Visual Studio on Linux (say, does anybody know if it runs in Wine? I've never tried, actually...)
Interesting that they use so much Mono. It almost sounds like they might be using more .NET than MS is!
Good point. Russian credit cards might get billed, but ours shouldn't. Russian law is just strict enough that AllOfMP3 needs SOME cash flow to be successful. At the very least they would probably either take down their English language and western currency sales pages, or block customers from purchasing using western credit cards.
- Providing it in the target's language, even though it is not that of the provider and country it is ostensibly for. (Heck, do you think 'All of MP3' has any meaning in Russian?)
- Charging for it, especially in the target's currency, instead of simply providing a free service.
I'm not going to bother debating this further, your analogy is too weak. Russia HAS copyright laws; AllOfMP3 is simply taking advantage of a hole in them to make a killing in countries where their service is completely illegal. You buying is as illegal as them selling, and if they were truly trying to limit it Russia, they would probably block sales to foreign credit cards or something similar, rather than posting a notice (in English, on and English page) suggesting clients confirm the legality (in the client's country, which is where it matters) of their purchases (in US dollars or British pounds) themselves.Oh, and are you suggesting that it should be legal for you to buy fully automatic weapons in countries where that is legal, and have them shipped to the US or UK for use here? If nothing else, AllOfMP3 is exporting - and it's western customers are importing - products that are not legal here.
That's a big risk, and if you don't like it, buy from indie artits instead. What, you've never heard of The Divorce? Too bad... they're better than many, perhaps most industry-supported bands, and they do well enough locally (after all, their albums cost less than the big labels) but they don't make much money, not compared to far worse artists that everybody knows or knew (Backstreet Boys anybody?) and The Divorce were one of the lucky bands that found somebody to help them produce professional-quality albums. They've toured accross the country, been well-received 3000 miles from their standard distribution range, yet they get little reward for it. Indie bands that do well are the exception, not the rule, and while the RIAA are probably almost as much of greedy bastards as you think, the big names in music got their money from somewhere.
Great iea, except for one little thing... AllOfMP3 pays effectively nothing to the artists. The RIAA/BPI might make bushels of money doing this... except, of course, they're under contract to provide a certain royalty to the artist for every title sold. You CAN NOT do that at AllOfMP3's prices and remain profitable.
The way I've often explained why P2P and 'sharing' music is wrong is thus: you walk into a store, grab 50 CDs (maybe all copies of one disc) and on your way out pay for one of them and smuggle the others under your coat. You then hand out the stolen albums to anybody who asks. Under the reasonable assumption that the store hadn't bought more copies of the disc than it could sell, you have just stolen 49 albums in profit from the store... and handed them out to all your pals. Hopefully you see where this is wrong; shoplifting forces the store to raise prices or go out of business. Raising prices reduces sales. Since the store pays the same amount, in royalties to the artist and purchase price to the industry, the artists and industries lose income. Thus they must raise costs. It all goes downhill.
AllOfMP3 is doing exactly the same thing... except instead of giving away $18 worth of album to everybody - $18 that rightfully belong to the store, or other legal music distributor - they are giving away $16 worth of album and pocketing $2 on every one. The artists and industries are no better off, but the piracy has moved from level of kids whining that they deserve to get it for free (or that it "wants to be free" *rolls eyes*) to black-market criminals. They are making their living by being both thief and fence in one.
It could be argued that a site like AllOfMP3 is actually LESS legal than peer-to-peer, etc.
The site asks for very little money, compared to other music stores. But it pays even less. What you are doing is paying to suport a service that, by American laws, is illegal. Not only are they providing copyrighted materials, they are lining their own pockets in the deal. Paying for a licence to broadcast non-recordable and non-redistributable music, but providing permanently downloadable files, is the same as recording sports on HDTV, editing out the commercials, and selling the complete season, digital format, for $5 a piece. (That's maybe $4 for startup costs, DVDs, and packaging, plus a buck profit on the side.)
One can almost argue that *sharing* music is legal under fair use (the distinction being that when you share your CD with one other person, you no longer have the CD... but that's not the point here). Taking money in exchange for copyrighted materials is wrong under pretty much any interpretation of US law that I've ever heard (though IANAL).
Plenty of reasons: They might hurt you back being one of the top ones. Another being that the happiness you got would probably be short-term compared to the misery of years in prison. The vast majority of people know why anarchy is a bad idea; if you don't I'm not sure how you managed to figure out the operation of a computer.
So, because somebody tells you that A) you have a soul B) other people also have souls C) both your soul and the souls of others are eternal, and presumably D) after death, you will be judged based on your actions in life, you have refused to live the life that you apparently want to? You are one scary piece of work! What else will you believe if the people in the big building with stained glass windows and a cross on top (minor assumption there, sorry if I guessed wrong) tell you? How about if they say it actually IS okay to do what you want to, but only with little boys? Some of them did, most likely there are some who still do.
I'm an agnostic, not an athiest (I'm not SURE I'm right; I don't subscribe to any dogma. I do believe in evolution over intelligent design, and a few similar things, however... and I don't believe in souls.) I don't think my life is miserable because I control myself. I have no desire to find myself on the business end of the justice system, or to live my life on the run. While desire to have sex is natural (regardless of whether the other person wants it or not) you'll get a lot more long-term benefit from finding a loving life partner then you will from forcing yourself on somebody and going through the consequences.
Basically, what this post boils down to is that you have no personal ethics, but don't hurt people because your religious leaders/texts tell you not to. The thought of causing people (or "just a bunch of meat, with no real existance - they sure think that they are real, but what do I care? They are just a bunch of nerves blinking, no different then a computer") pain and suffering doesn't bother you at all. But, because they supposedly have a soul your fun is suddenly off-limits? You also show a nearly complete inability to see the big picture, or have no regard for law and society in general (which brings up the question of why you would have any for religious law...) Oh, and you can't spell.
No surprise this is posted AC, but whever modded this up should be ashamed.
I apologise to anybody offended by my irreverence with regard to churches, Christianity, etc. I was trying to make a point, and deliberately wrote more roughly than I would to anybody I had any reason to respect. And no, I don't disrespect people based on religion.
For the love of... /. after all, there will be fanboys and haters) is the +5 mod...
Somebody is offering you something that is no cost to you, might be a real advantage, and will probably cost them... and your response is "hehehe, lets go hurt them for it!" WTF is wrong with you?!? Did a PlaysForSure player fall out of the sky and kill your grandmother or something? The only thing worse than the post itself (this is
Maybe I'm just disappointed; I had actually thought the old concept of getting +5 by blindly bashing the $hit out of MS was finally going away.
Actually, thats more likely to be unexpected *bonus offer* in addition to a different sort of purchase... ;-)
All jokes aside, there's actually a hole of sorts in your argument; if college student's don't like viruses, why do so many use Kazaa, etc? At least the open-source P2P's don't usually have that particular problem.