...like our global friends, we don't acknowledge the DMCA. It's just an American thing is it not?
One would think so. But we probably should ask Dmitry Sklyarov for his opinion first.
I'm guessing this dude didn't have US customers so that's why the DMCA doesn't apply? I don't know if Canadian law has something similar... Either way, I don't believe the mod chips, or even installing them for a fee should be (or is?) illegal. There are laws in existance already that protect copyright and IP. Laws like the DMCA are unneccessary and interfere with our (constitutional - for Americans, God given for everyone else) rights.
What about strapping the thing you your belt and harness the kinetic energy from your movements. There are some things like watches that do this. Of course cell phones use more power than that but, if I get off my fat ass and run the 4 miles home from work, I might build up enough to be able to call and order a pizza.:-)
And of course, we can run full circle and say this brings us back to fair use. I would have a right to make backups of my originals and stow them away so they don't get lost or stolen and then mod my PS2 to play from the backups instead.
I would say this is fair use. The DMCA may say otherwise but then that's still being debated. I don't know Canadian law.
Just playing devils advocate. Of course, this dude is in trouble for selling copyrighted works, not the chips.
If any of you/.ers are running qmail and managing your own email server, i wholeheartedly reccommend you investigate tmda.
Looks great. But unfortunately, the majority of the people (myself included) that are anoyed by spam don't run their own mail server. It would be way cooler if it had a client side interface/mail client for me to configure it... and some way to convince my ISP to run it.
Unless I missed something on their web site that addressed this, this isn't a solution for the masses.:-(
My sister (a four cat owner) suggested purchasing one of those inexpensive laser pointers to keep the cats busy. Sure enough, two of our three felines, Molly and Junior, love chasing the laser beam wherever I happen to point it--typically all over our family room
You can't unlearn what you have learned. I've tried. Never a Jedi will I be.:-(
I've written a lot of code at my current company to solve certain problems. Now, that code is riddled with my company's copyright headers and such. I can't take that code home, write my own shareware or open source applications with it. I can't take it to my next employer after I get fired for writing this. But, I've solved the problems once. If I end up facing the same problems again, I will most likey solve them the same way. Unless someone poses a better solution.
It is a fine line. Is the technique patented? If it is, you may as well bend over. Is it generic enough to be used in completely different domains? For instance, an inter process communications layer that supports a domain specific application vs. a domain specific application. A company may consider their signal processing algorithm IP but maybe not some generic layer used to pass the signal data between processes. If it's not unique enough to the domain, it would be tough to claim it as IP (like say a socket wrapper class).
IANAL. That's who you need to talk to. I'm just giving my $0.02
A Just in Time compiler will compile all the byte code to native code before it is executed and run it on the hardware. Performance hit at the start of each execution but ultimately faster than interpreting byte code. Note that the JIT is probably not the best optimizer so it still won't be as efficient as platform specific binaries. (among other reasons...)
An optimized VM will recognize instructions or code sequences within the bytecode that can be directly mapped to native code and execute it directly on the hardware. Not as fast as JIT but faster than interpreting everything.
Both are still slower than platform specific binaries but that's just the nature of the beast.
Near-misses are going to be awful lot more common than an actual head-on collision. Enough sensationalism people.
Very true. The near-misses are just that. Misses. The fact that it was close doesn't change the fact that it missed. Or would have missed if we saw it coming.
The ones we need to worry about are the ones that ARE on a collision course with Earth.
Or maybe the really really large ones with enough gravity that a close encounter would cause us problems. Anyone remember Thundar the Barbarian!:-)
Has anyone done the calculations to determine where the thing would have landed if it had impacted Earth?
You can't calculate that. It missed. Which means, if we discovered it before it passed, we could have calculated that it would miss us.
We could say hypathetically, if the earth had been xx slower/faster, we could calculate it as hitting anywhere we wanted it to. If the earth was xx slower/faster it could hit the Atlantic, or yy slower/faster, it could hit L.A.
What happens if signals get crossed and you pick up on someone else's conversation? How would you know you weren't just going nuts? I'm not sure if I could distinguish it from all the other voices in my head!:-)
This is really great and all but is it really ready? Granted, I've never run Lindows but, given my experience with Linux, I can't see an average Joe Walmart shopper getting along with it very well.
I can't see a local Walmart associate being able to trouble shoot more serious Windows problems let alone Lindows. You know people are going to seek support in the electronics section of their local Walmart.
*No offense to Walmart associates, I'm just implying that Walmart is not an experienced computer retailer like Dell, Compac, Gateway (or even Circuit City or other electronics retailers but...) and does not have the support staff.
Am I off my rocker on this? Is Lindows really that good that it can replace Windows for the average user? If it is, why haven't I seen more about it posted here?
...become the victim of an ever-growing bookmark file that might freeze your system...
Who uses bookmarks anymore? It's easier to use auto complete for the sites I visit most (i.e. sl<tab> = slashdot.org) and Google is good usually good enough to find whatever other information I need.
Our computer teacher would give us passes to get out of study hall to play Wings of Fury! on our state of the art Apple IIe's. Anyone remember them! He also taught CAD/CAM but was off running around for the office most of the time so literally, out of the 9 weeks of class, all but 2 days were spent playing either Wing of Fury or Montazuma's Revenge... Ahhh... those were the days.
Sorta true... For the most part I agree. It would probably take a hell of a lot for my (and your) demand for broadband to diminish. I hate to say it but, if they decided to charge me more, I'd probably pay. Wouldn't be too happy about it but it would take a helluva lot to get me to go back to dial-up.
However, if it's more than what I could get for DSL, I'll switch. There is some broadband competition even though there may not be competing cable companies servicing the same area.
On the other hand, my parents won't get broadband simply because they won't use what they pay for. Some people won't need much motivation to switch back to dial-up. Right now broadband is just becoming available to most people so demand is high. Prices will jump because of it. Once the novelty wears off and people realize how much they actually use for what they are paying, some will jump ship.
Give the market some time, it will eventually level itself out. The greedy companies will fold. Grandma will go back to dialup. And the prices will become somewhat reasonable.:-)
You are correct about lack of competition because of the monopolies. If there was decent competition in the market, the prices would level out to an even more reasonable amount.
All the logic is there an the anti-junk-fax laws. It just needs to be applied to e-mail. This way it would be much easier to prosecute groups like monsterhut.
Unfortunately, it's much harder to track down the source of an e-mail than it is the source of a phone call.
Ok, ok... I had to quit reading half way through before I got too pissed to not rant in this reply so forgive me if I missed something.
It is probably true that Star Wars won't beat out Spiderman at the box office. Spiderman, in most peoples opinion may be a better movie. But Lucas and his movies have not outgrown their audience.
Was it not the Star Wars campers that needed to be moved when Spiderman opened? I don't seem to recall droves of people camping out for Spiderman. When I walked in to see Spiderman, there were kids camped out with laptops watching the Starwars bootleg outside the door. The hype is still there and it always will be.
Spiderman was a long time in the making. It would have been just as successful regardless of Star Wars. Likewise, Star Wars would have performed just the same regardless of Spiderman. Spiderman was such a ground breaking move for the movie industry I'm surprised it didn't do better. Star Wars isn't a new concept and hell... we all already know what happens. So the droves aren't going to rush out to see it. I went to see Starwars on Saturday and I'll be damned if I was standing in that line. So I didn't make it till Monday so my $7.75 wasn't counted in the weekend earnings.
You can't compare the two movies at all. They are in two completely different situations.
Personally, I thought AotC was awesome. Except for the crappy romance scenes. They weren't quite like Han and Lea. But then, the mystery wasn't there either. We already know they are gonna do it.:-) A couple times!
Thanks to all who replied. I didn't realize all that Mozilla had to offer over Netscape. I've been motivated to get the latest and start using it for a while to see how it goes. Looks like I may make a permanent switch.
One other question however... What's the deal with the huge memory footprint? I'm looking at 27680K ram for Mozilla vs. 13568K for Netscape. This is fine for this dual Ghz 1GB Ram machine, and my 800 Mhz 512M Ram machine at home, however, I have an old POS with 40M Ram that choked on Mozilla. I'll still have to run Netscape on that box unless something is done about this memory problem.
Could somone enlighten me on why someone would ever want to use Netscape again?
Well, the version I have, 0.9.8, doesn't work well with Junkbuster. I've been too lazy to submit bug reports or upgrade. My lazy choices are to not use Junkbuster or use Netscape.:-)
Has anyone had problems with 1.0 and Junkbuster? Maybe one of these days when I get some free time I'll try it.
For those interested in my problem, try this. While configured to use Junkbuster, load slashdot. Enter my.yahoo.com in the address bar and hit enter. Most of the time, the page does not load correctly. It has once or twice but most of the time it fails. If I don't use Junkbuster it works ok. I don't have any problems with Junkbuster and Netscape.
That little piece of paper you get at the end of the 4 years is worth gold. Even though 80 percent of what I use today I learned on my own (and the other 20 percent I could have gotten from my local Barnes and Noble), I would not be sitting at this desk typing right now.
You may already know alot about what you want to do. I was coding long before I went to college. But, no kidding, if you are competing for a job against others who happen to have that degree above you, who do you think is going to get it. And, even if by some chance you managed to beat out someone with a degree, you sure won't get paid as much as if you had your degree.
I was a late starter and boy do I regret it. I didn't go to college till I was 25. I'm now 31 and have about 6 years less corporate experience than my peers, not programming experience, however, I'm 6 years behind them in staff level/salary.
So get in there you big furry oaf! I don't care what you smell!:-)
I'm not trying to be a troll and no offense to Gnutella as I use it also, but at least with my experience, Gnutella is not as big and fast a network as Kazaa (et al). I get way less hits from Gnutella and I have yet to get downloads speeds over 10K/s. When Morpheus bit the bullet I made the switch but I was spoiled by the performance I had been getting. I cringed but damnit! I need more Space Ghost episodes! So I installed Kazaa and the Spyware. I disabled the spyware shortly after. Kazaa Lite is a gift to those not so tech savvy.
Don't worry. Once Kazaa drives themselves out of the picture like they are, more people will be making the switch and the Gnutella network will grow (and hopefully be as fast). But as long as Kazaa has more of what people want, no one is going to abandon it.
I wouldn't say it's so much people who don't want to pay although there are a few who abuse that. I fully support commercial software as well as free (as in speech) software... As long as it's not crap. Which is why these trial versions are cool.
30 days is hardly ever enough to fully evaluate a software package. When I evaluate software at work, I can install it, but evaluating that software package is not my sole responsibility for the next 30 days. I may not actually get around to working with the product for a while. I mean actually sitting down with it and running through the tutorials is a lot different than clicking pretty buttons for a few minutes. To fully evaluate it, you must actually use it in it's intended environment or else how would you know it would actually fit. Then, after it's been fully evaluated and it's decided that it is the tool for the job, my company or contract is legally obligated to purchase a license to actually use it in support of the project, otherwise it must be uninstalled. Which is fine by me cause it's no skin off my wallet.
At home it's a little different. I don't have any corporate dollars purchasing software for me so my views are changed slightly. I still support commercial software. But I only register when it makes sense. For instance, I use WinZip when I'm in Windows like it's another extention to my body. It was well worth the $$ I sent them to register it. (Even the extra $50 for the self extractor that I hardly ever use) And I registered every trial version I use regularly when the $$ <= benefits. I havn't registered my trial version of Paint Shop Pro and I probably won't any time soon. Not because I don't like it but because it's not worth the $$ for what I use it for. I think I used it once or twice about a year or so ago to make a pretty widget for my personal web page. It did the job but I don't make money off my web page and what I used it for I couldn't justify the $100 or so for what I got out of it. If I actually start making money off my website (ie. some small business of some sort) I will not hesitate to register it because I will be using it more and profiting from its output. (although I may just keep using Gimp.:-) Point is, if I registered every crappy piece of software that I used once and forgot about, I'd be in the poor house. Some of these registration fees are pretty outragious for what you get.
Then there is the professional software for home hobbiests. Even the student price for MS Visual Studio was outragious on a "thank you come again" wage while I was in college... but then, since I'm out of college and making money, I've got a legal copy of that now too.:-)
God no I'm not giving my email address to these software companies until I actually register something. When I'm looking for a tool for some job, I do a search and may evaluate software from 5-15 different companies. I don't have the time to sit and read each of their privacy policies to see wether or not I'll start getting spam from them or one of their business partners or email list customers. There is no reason anyone needs my email address for me to evaluate something. If they require it, I move on to something else.
Seriously though... I don't need to preach to the choir about how bad of an idea this is. The hax0r will soon be extinct since skill will no longer be necessary. Identity theft will now be only a back button away!
Slashdot Mirror
...like our global friends, we don't acknowledge the DMCA. It's just an American thing is it not?
One would think so. But we probably should ask Dmitry Sklyarov for his opinion first.
I'm guessing this dude didn't have US customers so that's why the DMCA doesn't apply? I don't know if Canadian law has something similar... Either way, I don't believe the mod chips, or even installing them for a fee should be (or is?) illegal. There are laws in existance already that protect copyright and IP. Laws like the DMCA are unneccessary and interfere with our (constitutional - for Americans, God given for everyone else) rights.
What about strapping the thing you your belt and harness the kinetic energy from your movements. There are some things like watches that do this. Of course cell phones use more power than that but, if I get off my fat ass and run the 4 miles home from work, I might build up enough to be able to call and order a pizza. :-)
And of course, we can run full circle and say this brings us back to fair use. I would have a right to make backups of my originals and stow them away so they don't get lost or stolen and then mod my PS2 to play from the backups instead.
I would say this is fair use. The DMCA may say otherwise but then that's still being debated. I don't know Canadian law.
Just playing devils advocate. Of course, this dude is in trouble for selling copyrighted works, not the chips.
If any of you /.ers are running qmail and managing your own email server, i wholeheartedly reccommend you investigate tmda.
:-(
Looks great. But unfortunately, the majority of the people (myself included) that are anoyed by spam don't run their own mail server. It would be way cooler if it had a client side interface/mail client for me to configure it... and some way to convince my ISP to run it.
Unless I missed something on their web site that addressed this, this isn't a solution for the masses.
My sister (a four cat owner) suggested purchasing one of those inexpensive laser pointers to keep the cats busy. Sure enough, two of our three felines, Molly and Junior, love chasing the laser beam wherever I happen to point it--typically all over our family room
I could have sworn I've seen this before:
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05443036__
I've written a lot of code at my current company to solve certain problems. Now, that code is riddled with my company's copyright headers and such. I can't take that code home, write my own shareware or open source applications with it. I can't take it to my next employer after I get fired for writing this. But, I've solved the problems once. If I end up facing the same problems again, I will most likey solve them the same way. Unless someone poses a better solution.
It is a fine line. Is the technique patented? If it is, you may as well bend over. Is it generic enough to be used in completely different domains? For instance, an inter process communications layer that supports a domain specific application vs. a domain specific application. A company may consider their signal processing algorithm IP but maybe not some generic layer used to pass the signal data between processes. If it's not unique enough to the domain, it would be tough to claim it as IP (like say a socket wrapper class).
IANAL. That's who you need to talk to. I'm just giving my $0.02
A Just in Time compiler will compile all the byte code to native code before it is executed and run it on the hardware. Performance hit at the start of each execution but ultimately faster than interpreting byte code. Note that the JIT is probably not the best optimizer so it still won't be as efficient as platform specific binaries. (among other reasons...)
An optimized VM will recognize instructions or code sequences within the bytecode that can be directly mapped to native code and execute it directly on the hardware. Not as fast as JIT but faster than interpreting everything.
Both are still slower than platform specific binaries but that's just the nature of the beast.
Very true. The near-misses are just that. Misses. The fact that it was close doesn't change the fact that it missed. Or would have missed if we saw it coming.
The ones we need to worry about are the ones that ARE on a collision course with Earth.
Or maybe the really really large ones with enough gravity that a close encounter would cause us problems. Anyone remember Thundar the Barbarian! :-)
You can't calculate that. It missed. Which means, if we discovered it before it passed, we could have calculated that it would miss us.
We could say hypathetically, if the earth had been xx slower/faster, we could calculate it as hitting anywhere we wanted it to. If the earth was xx slower/faster it could hit the Atlantic, or yy slower/faster, it could hit L.A.
What happens if signals get crossed and you pick up on someone else's conversation? How would you know you weren't just going nuts? I'm not sure if I could distinguish it from all the other voices in my head! :-)
I can't see a local Walmart associate being able to trouble shoot more serious Windows problems let alone Lindows. You know people are going to seek support in the electronics section of their local Walmart.
*No offense to Walmart associates, I'm just implying that Walmart is not an experienced computer retailer like Dell, Compac, Gateway (or even Circuit City or other electronics retailers but...) and does not have the support staff.
Am I off my rocker on this? Is Lindows really that good that it can replace Windows for the average user? If it is, why haven't I seen more about it posted here?
Who uses bookmarks anymore? It's easier to use auto complete for the sites I visit most (i.e. sl<tab> = slashdot.org) and Google is good usually good enough to find whatever other information I need.
Our computer teacher would give us passes to get out of study hall to play Wings of Fury! on our state of the art Apple IIe's. Anyone remember them! He also taught CAD/CAM but was off running around for the office most of the time so literally, out of the 9 weeks of class, all but 2 days were spent playing either Wing of Fury or Montazuma's Revenge... Ahhh... those were the days.
However, if it's more than what I could get for DSL, I'll switch. There is some broadband competition even though there may not be competing cable companies servicing the same area.
On the other hand, my parents won't get broadband simply because they won't use what they pay for. Some people won't need much motivation to switch back to dial-up. Right now broadband is just becoming available to most people so demand is high. Prices will jump because of it. Once the novelty wears off and people realize how much they actually use for what they are paying, some will jump ship.
Give the market some time, it will eventually level itself out. The greedy companies will fold. Grandma will go back to dialup. And the prices will become somewhat reasonable. :-)
You are correct about lack of competition because of the monopolies. If there was decent competition in the market, the prices would level out to an even more reasonable amount.
Unfortunately, it's much harder to track down the source of an e-mail than it is the source of a phone call.
It is probably true that Star Wars won't beat out Spiderman at the box office. Spiderman, in most peoples opinion may be a better movie. But Lucas and his movies have not outgrown their audience.
Was it not the Star Wars campers that needed to be moved when Spiderman opened? I don't seem to recall droves of people camping out for Spiderman. When I walked in to see Spiderman, there were kids camped out with laptops watching the Starwars bootleg outside the door. The hype is still there and it always will be.
Spiderman was a long time in the making. It would have been just as successful regardless of Star Wars. Likewise, Star Wars would have performed just the same regardless of Spiderman. Spiderman was such a ground breaking move for the movie industry I'm surprised it didn't do better. Star Wars isn't a new concept and hell... we all already know what happens. So the droves aren't going to rush out to see it. I went to see Starwars on Saturday and I'll be damned if I was standing in that line. So I didn't make it till Monday so my $7.75 wasn't counted in the weekend earnings.
You can't compare the two movies at all. They are in two completely different situations.
Personally, I thought AotC was awesome. Except for the crappy romance scenes. They weren't quite like Han and Lea. But then, the mystery wasn't there either. We already know they are gonna do it. :-) A couple times!
One other question however... What's the deal with the huge memory footprint? I'm looking at 27680K ram for Mozilla vs. 13568K for Netscape. This is fine for this dual Ghz 1GB Ram machine, and my 800 Mhz 512M Ram machine at home, however, I have an old POS with 40M Ram that choked on Mozilla. I'll still have to run Netscape on that box unless something is done about this memory problem.
Well, the version I have, 0.9.8, doesn't work well with Junkbuster. I've been too lazy to submit bug reports or upgrade. My lazy choices are to not use Junkbuster or use Netscape. :-)
Has anyone had problems with 1.0 and Junkbuster? Maybe one of these days when I get some free time I'll try it.
For those interested in my problem, try this. While configured to use Junkbuster, load slashdot. Enter my.yahoo.com in the address bar and hit enter. Most of the time, the page does not load correctly. It has once or twice but most of the time it fails. If I don't use Junkbuster it works ok. I don't have any problems with Junkbuster and Netscape.
You may already know alot about what you want to do. I was coding long before I went to college. But, no kidding, if you are competing for a job against others who happen to have that degree above you, who do you think is going to get it. And, even if by some chance you managed to beat out someone with a degree, you sure won't get paid as much as if you had your degree.
I was a late starter and boy do I regret it. I didn't go to college till I was 25. I'm now 31 and have about 6 years less corporate experience than my peers, not programming experience, however, I'm 6 years behind them in staff level/salary.
So get in there you big furry oaf! I don't care what you smell! :-)
... to start pissing people off by trading these on Kazaa! Oh joy of joys! :-)
Don't worry. Once Kazaa drives themselves out of the picture like they are, more people will be making the switch and the Gnutella network will grow (and hopefully be as fast). But as long as Kazaa has more of what people want, no one is going to abandon it.
... at least the copy protection will be easy to break. I was worried for a second. Whew!
...Now I can hack a "Kick Me" pop-up ad on my friends back and do away with this nasty paper and tape!
30 days is hardly ever enough to fully evaluate a software package. When I evaluate software at work, I can install it, but evaluating that software package is not my sole responsibility for the next 30 days. I may not actually get around to working with the product for a while. I mean actually sitting down with it and running through the tutorials is a lot different than clicking pretty buttons for a few minutes. To fully evaluate it, you must actually use it in it's intended environment or else how would you know it would actually fit. Then, after it's been fully evaluated and it's decided that it is the tool for the job, my company or contract is legally obligated to purchase a license to actually use it in support of the project, otherwise it must be uninstalled. Which is fine by me cause it's no skin off my wallet.
At home it's a little different. I don't have any corporate dollars purchasing software for me so my views are changed slightly. I still support commercial software. But I only register when it makes sense. For instance, I use WinZip when I'm in Windows like it's another extention to my body. It was well worth the $$ I sent them to register it. (Even the extra $50 for the self extractor that I hardly ever use) And I registered every trial version I use regularly when the $$ <= benefits. I havn't registered my trial version of Paint Shop Pro and I probably won't any time soon. Not because I don't like it but because it's not worth the $$ for what I use it for. I think I used it once or twice about a year or so ago to make a pretty widget for my personal web page. It did the job but I don't make money off my web page and what I used it for I couldn't justify the $100 or so for what I got out of it. If I actually start making money off my website (ie. some small business of some sort) I will not hesitate to register it because I will be using it more and profiting from its output. (although I may just keep using Gimp. :-) Point is, if I registered every crappy piece of software that I used once and forgot about, I'd be in the poor house. Some of these registration fees are pretty outragious for what you get.
Then there is the professional software for home hobbiests. Even the student price for MS Visual Studio was outragious on a "thank you come again" wage while I was in college... but then, since I'm out of college and making money, I've got a legal copy of that now too. :-)
God no I'm not giving my email address to these software companies until I actually register something. When I'm looking for a tool for some job, I do a search and may evaluate software from 5-15 different companies. I don't have the time to sit and read each of their privacy policies to see wether or not I'll start getting spam from them or one of their business partners or email list customers. There is no reason anyone needs my email address for me to evaluate something. If they require it, I move on to something else.
Seriously though... I don't need to preach to the choir about how bad of an idea this is. The hax0r will soon be extinct since skill will no longer be necessary. Identity theft will now be only a back button away!