And most people running Linux probably can, unless their grandkids are running some kind of experiment on them. Macs probably not. But for people who care about whether the year of Linux on the desktop is ever going to get here, this kind of thing matters.
It ends up being kind of cyclical. Linux is maybe getting on to more desktops but Comcast has no incentive to support it because the people who put it there aren't calling because they can handle their own tech support. Maybe the solution is for Linux users to call Comcast every day whether they have problems or not.
Those of us with Macs will just lobby Apple to sell us a tech support contract for our Comcast connections.
I'm afraid to ask how Comcast handles Linux... They don't. If they come to your house to set up your account and you have only Linux machines, they either use their own laptop or your connection doesn't get connected.
They also offer no support. If you call with a trouble report you'd better pretend you are using a Windows machine when they give you their step by step connection test instructions. If they say "click Start -> Control Panel" and you say "I have neither", the problem is obviously on your end.
This is also true if you have only Macs and Linux, which I did at both my home and my studio when I first set those up. Luckily the guy who handled them had his Windows laptop.
By the way, Wild Blue satellite, same thing. They have independent installers, but Wild Blue tech support can't help them if they run into a problem on and only Linux machines are on the customer's end.
Similarly, one has to be taught to fear certain aspects of combat I'm not sure about that. When I was in Somalia (Marines) there were people who, on patrols, became nearly paralyzed with fear at the sound of distant gunfire without ever having seen the result themselves. And then there were people who, while we were taking direct fire and after having seen those beside them take hits, never raised their voice when they spoke to me.
Some dangerous things are kind of nebulous. Electricty, heat, germs. It took mankind a good long while to trace illness to invisible bugs, so it doesn't suprise me that the concept of them being dangerous would be difficult to develop in the mind of a child.
But associating loud noises with a negative result is more tangible. I'd think that while it might not be entirely innate, it is probably learned early enough in life by a wide enough variety of people to be nearly inescapable.
Profits, every dollar, come from the businesses customers. Every dollar spent to pay a fine came from them and every dollar spent to recoup that fine will as well. Customers pay the businesses fines, just like taxes.
It doesn't necessarily have to come in the form of higher prices. There are dozens of ways to 'pass it along'.
I bet, in most of these cases, the cost of the action just gets passed on to future consumers. This is the way it is in every case, well, from future and past customers, because that is the only place a corporation has to get its money.
For some of the categories of works currently covered by copyright, for example music, the introduction of open access along with some form of alternative compensation system promises to deliver significant gains both to creators and to consumers. That all seems delightful, but I have yet to see a workable system that would bring this about. I'd like to think that after every The Black Keys show those guys go back to their hotel rooms and find a bag of money has mysteriously appeared on the nightstand, but I know that doesn't happen because I watch half the audience bail out as soon as the music stops, without buying a CD or a shirt and maybe they drank a couple beers that the Keys will get a half a cent out of.
How that is going to be any different when people get their music (legally) through some open distribution system I can't quite figure out. Hidden more or less anonymously out there in cyberwonderland the social obligation to pay anything at all, even a nickel per album, is going to have to be pretty strong.
His text is pretty broad, but unless by 'open' he means something like iTunes Plus, I don't see how that will work out.
As a peon freelance photographer, 14 years is plenty for me. I doubt it would diminish my for hire work or that of most of my peers.
I still don't see why the Slashdot crowd cares one way or the other about the length of copyright terms, apart from it providing an opportunity to post generic anti-copyright rambling without being moderated offtopic. No sensible balance between creators and consumers will have a measurable impact on the geek oriented practice of file sharing. Most of the popular content moving across the internet via torrents is nowhere near 14 years old, not even 14 months.
I have worked on projects in manufacturing environments that used KVM-over-IP (Avocent Longview hardware mostly). This allowed the PCs that run the machine interfaces to be placed in a proper server room type setup while the touchscreens were located at workstations on the factory floor. We used to stuff them into electrical cabinets and hope no code inspectors showed up.
Huge drawbacks of doing that with copper include the hardware not getting anywhere close to its advertised working distance with a real world cabling install. I have seen units advertised to work at 1000'degrade to worthless at 500'. I'd guess fiber would be a better fit. There are also limits to display resolution that, with monitors getting bigger all the time, will soon be unacceptable. 1280x1024 is about the best I've seen.
As required by Slashdot Code, I didn't RTFA so the following may not be possible or it may already work: I'd like to think at some point Matrox's transmitters could go through a fiber switch so that several of them could send KVM over the same piece of fiber and drop to multiple displays. Do that and I know of an aluminum plant in northern Michigan that is interested in replacing 300 Avocent Longviews.
But Feynman was gifted when it came to that sort of thing, the ice water / o-ring demonstration to Congress being another beautiful example.
I think the problem our former Surgeon General ran into was both that he didn't have Feynman's skills and that his audience not only didn't care about the science in question but they were actively seeking ways to discredit it.
I have a machine that dual boots XP and Ubuntu 7.04. I've switched the Windows partition around a couple of times betwen various Vista betas and RCs and finally back to XP (like the rest of the world!). GRUB never had a problem getting any of them to boot fine.
I would suggest doing as the previous poster suggested with the addendum of manually creating a partition first, or at least after the XP/Vista install, with a dedicated disk editor like Acronis Director. I say this because while the Ubuntu installer can handle creating a partition itself I think its interface for that task is a bit confusing for those not familiar with Unix terminology for devices. It is fairly easy to wipe out your Windows install and have to start over.
Of course if you are using two disks this isn't an issue, as long as you know which disk is which inside the Ubuntu installer.
Organizational tools are a 'middle ground' of digital imaging software that needs serious attention. Especially with consumer grade SLRs becoming more popular and probably bringing RAW formats with them, considering that no popular OSs natively organize RAW images in any useful way.
Photoshop Lightroom is quite good from a number of standpoints (UI being one of them). It provides reasonable editing tools, I'm a pro and I can do a good chunk of what I need without switching to Photoshop. Even when I do need to doing so is seamless. Of course it is worthless for handling large libraries of images because it falls apart completely.
iView Media Pro was nice but Microsoft bought them and I'm not sure where they plan to take it. Most likely they intend to intergrate a bunch of garbage that no one wants.
Darkroom is good but really intended for pro studios. All of the apps I have seen that come bundled with digital cameras are complete garbage.
I assume from your 3 digit ID and your electronic repair skills that you are an old school geek. Like me, you might be suprised to discover that many of these new age geeks do not own a soldering iron. Many of them do not even know how to solder!
The two big DSLR camera makers, Canon and Nikon, say never to clean the low pass filter on their cameras yourself, which is something that has to be done regularly. They don't warrant any damage done to it by cleaning (which is a far greater crime against decency than Apple's battery). They'll replace the filter but their prices start at $300 with a three week turn around time. They'll sell the filter itself for less than $100 and ship it to you next day but the installation requires, horror of horrors, desoldering a contact or two.
So now a couple of third party low pass filter replacement businesses have sprung up as well as an entire industry selling specialized sensor cleaning products. I guess maintaining a voodoo atmosphere around electronic devices is good business.
People who did not like the iPhone yesterday are using this as an opportunity to post a topical complaint (youm, for instance). People who liked it yesterday don't think that $79 is a big deal.
And really, if you are still actively upset with Steve Jobs himself over an issue with your Performa 575's power supply you might want to consider avoiding Apple related articles in the future.
To say that any given thing was 'the' problem with the dot com bust is doomed to be wrong and accomplishes little more than letting everyone know what your particular gripe is when it comes to business in general.
There was plenty of pointless excess to go around. From the people who generated the ideas to the people who funded them to the marginally skilled grads who took the $100k jobs ($50k of that is going to be in the form of stock options.....which could be make us all billionaires BTW!) Ask ESR, who publicly counted the money he didn't have. Or Commander "What kind of car does a wealthy young geek drive" Taco.
I admit to skimming privacy policies most of the time, but I have never heard of any business specifically noting that they may indeed, as part of their privacy policy, repeat a person's own name back to them.
That would kind of seem to go without having to be stated. If my bank updates their policy and mails me a copy my name and address are necessary parts of doing that. It seems silly to me that I might open their letter and find that in their policy they took the pains to point out that they might include my name and address on correspondence mailed to me when doing such is required by the post office in in order for them to know where to deliver the aforementioned correspondence.
They might also want to note that sometimes the bank teller might greet me by name, if he or she recognizes me.
If this is the direction business transparency is going we seem to have pushed things to ridiculous lengths.
I haven't looked at the details but the plans don't seem to be anything new. I have a RAZR with AT&T right now and pay $39.99 for (I think) 450 minutes per month. There are some night & weekend minutes in there somewhere. I added $19.99 per month for unlimited data. Here in the US midwest this is the least expensive route to have a reasonable number of voice minutes combined with unlimited data.
Slashdot Mirror
And most people running Linux probably can, unless their grandkids are running some kind of experiment on them. Macs probably not. But for people who care about whether the year of Linux on the desktop is ever going to get here, this kind of thing matters.
It ends up being kind of cyclical. Linux is maybe getting on to more desktops but Comcast has no incentive to support it because the people who put it there aren't calling because they can handle their own tech support. Maybe the solution is for Linux users to call Comcast every day whether they have problems or not.
Those of us with Macs will just lobby Apple to sell us a tech support contract for our Comcast connections.
If they bought the guy for a laptop they got the deal of the century.
They also offer no support. If you call with a trouble report you'd better pretend you are using a Windows machine when they give you their step by step connection test instructions. If they say "click Start -> Control Panel" and you say "I have neither", the problem is obviously on your end.
This is also true if you have only Macs and Linux, which I did at both my home and my studio when I first set those up. Luckily the guy who handled them had his Windows laptop.
By the way, Wild Blue satellite, same thing. They have independent installers, but Wild Blue tech support can't help them if they run into a problem on and only Linux machines are on the customer's end.
Some dangerous things are kind of nebulous. Electricty, heat, germs. It took mankind a good long while to trace illness to invisible bugs, so it doesn't suprise me that the concept of them being dangerous would be difficult to develop in the mind of a child.
But associating loud noises with a negative result is more tangible. I'd think that while it might not be entirely innate, it is probably learned early enough in life by a wide enough variety of people to be nearly inescapable.
Profits, every dollar, come from the businesses customers. Every dollar spent to pay a fine came from them and every dollar spent to recoup that fine will as well. Customers pay the businesses fines, just like taxes.
It doesn't necessarily have to come in the form of higher prices. There are dozens of ways to 'pass it along'.
Ok then. Maker sense.
I suppose I just expect every fron page story even peripherally related to copyright to devolve into some immature rant about the RIAA.
I can see the angle for books. Science journals as well, considering the cost to read anything other abstracts is too much to bear for an individual.
How that is going to be any different when people get their music (legally) through some open distribution system I can't quite figure out. Hidden more or less anonymously out there in cyberwonderland the social obligation to pay anything at all, even a nickel per album, is going to have to be pretty strong.
His text is pretty broad, but unless by 'open' he means something like iTunes Plus, I don't see how that will work out.
True.
As a peon freelance photographer, 14 years is plenty for me. I doubt it would diminish my for hire work or that of most of my peers.
I still don't see why the Slashdot crowd cares one way or the other about the length of copyright terms, apart from it providing an opportunity to post generic anti-copyright rambling without being moderated offtopic. No sensible balance between creators and consumers will have a measurable impact on the geek oriented practice of file sharing. Most of the popular content moving across the internet via torrents is nowhere near 14 years old, not even 14 months.
I have worked on projects in manufacturing environments that used KVM-over-IP (Avocent Longview hardware mostly). This allowed the PCs that run the machine interfaces to be placed in a proper server room type setup while the touchscreens were located at workstations on the factory floor. We used to stuff them into electrical cabinets and hope no code inspectors showed up.
Huge drawbacks of doing that with copper include the hardware not getting anywhere close to its advertised working distance with a real world cabling install. I have seen units advertised to work at 1000'degrade to worthless at 500'. I'd guess fiber would be a better fit. There are also limits to display resolution that, with monitors getting bigger all the time, will soon be unacceptable. 1280x1024 is about the best I've seen.
As required by Slashdot Code, I didn't RTFA so the following may not be possible or it may already work: I'd like to think at some point Matrox's transmitters could go through a fiber switch so that several of them could send KVM over the same piece of fiber and drop to multiple displays. Do that and I know of an aluminum plant in northern Michigan that is interested in replacing 300 Avocent Longviews.
I agree with you 100%.
Why anyone would bother to specify the Basic version when they could, with less effort, impugn the entire suite of versions, is beyond me.
But Feynman was gifted when it came to that sort of thing, the ice water / o-ring demonstration to Congress being another beautiful example.
I think the problem our former Surgeon General ran into was both that he didn't have Feynman's skills and that his audience not only didn't care about the science in question but they were actively seeking ways to discredit it.
I have a machine that dual boots XP and Ubuntu 7.04. I've switched the Windows partition around a couple of times betwen various Vista betas and RCs and finally back to XP (like the rest of the world!). GRUB never had a problem getting any of them to boot fine.
I would suggest doing as the previous poster suggested with the addendum of manually creating a partition first, or at least after the XP/Vista install, with a dedicated disk editor like Acronis Director. I say this because while the Ubuntu installer can handle creating a partition itself I think its interface for that task is a bit confusing for those not familiar with Unix terminology for devices. It is fairly easy to wipe out your Windows install and have to start over.
Of course if you are using two disks this isn't an issue, as long as you know which disk is which inside the Ubuntu installer.
http://www.expressdigital.com/products/darkroom.sh tm
It has a lot of integration with printing houses. Big with wedding photographers, school pictures outfits, etc.
Organizational tools are a 'middle ground' of digital imaging software that needs serious attention. Especially with consumer grade SLRs becoming more popular and probably bringing RAW formats with them, considering that no popular OSs natively organize RAW images in any useful way.
Photoshop Lightroom is quite good from a number of standpoints (UI being one of them). It provides reasonable editing tools, I'm a pro and I can do a good chunk of what I need without switching to Photoshop. Even when I do need to doing so is seamless. Of course it is worthless for handling large libraries of images because it falls apart completely.
iView Media Pro was nice but Microsoft bought them and I'm not sure where they plan to take it. Most likely they intend to intergrate a bunch of garbage that no one wants.
Darkroom is good but really intended for pro studios. All of the apps I have seen that come bundled with digital cameras are complete garbage.
It's someone else on the trigger for those who aren't.
Methanol and a kimwipe is the preferred method.
For the one you linked though, I'd use a spray can of contact cleaner.
I assume from your 3 digit ID and your electronic repair skills that you are an old school geek. Like me, you might be suprised to discover that many of these new age geeks do not own a soldering iron. Many of them do not even know how to solder!
The two big DSLR camera makers, Canon and Nikon, say never to clean the low pass filter on their cameras yourself, which is something that has to be done regularly. They don't warrant any damage done to it by cleaning (which is a far greater crime against decency than Apple's battery). They'll replace the filter but their prices start at $300 with a three week turn around time. They'll sell the filter itself for less than $100 and ship it to you next day but the installation requires, horror of horrors, desoldering a contact or two.
So now a couple of third party low pass filter replacement businesses have sprung up as well as an entire industry selling specialized sensor cleaning products. I guess maintaining a voodoo atmosphere around electronic devices is good business.
No one is suprised.
People who did not like the iPhone yesterday are using this as an opportunity to post a topical complaint (youm, for instance). People who liked it yesterday don't think that $79 is a big deal.
And really, if you are still actively upset with Steve Jobs himself over an issue with your Performa 575's power supply you might want to consider avoiding Apple related articles in the future.
To say that any given thing was 'the' problem with the dot com bust is doomed to be wrong and accomplishes little more than letting everyone know what your particular gripe is when it comes to business in general.
There was plenty of pointless excess to go around. From the people who generated the ideas to the people who funded them to the marginally skilled grads who took the $100k jobs ($50k of that is going to be in the form of stock options.....which could be make us all billionaires BTW!) Ask ESR, who publicly counted the money he didn't have. Or Commander "What kind of car does a wealthy young geek drive" Taco.
Plenty to go around.
Wait just a minute here, you are saying that a for-profit company in a capitalist economy is trying to get my money?
The most they can you say?
Well this is an unsettling development.
No way, I don't buy that argument.
I admit to skimming privacy policies most of the time, but I have never heard of any business specifically noting that they may indeed, as part of their privacy policy, repeat a person's own name back to them.
That would kind of seem to go without having to be stated. If my bank updates their policy and mails me a copy my name and address are necessary parts of doing that. It seems silly to me that I might open their letter and find that in their policy they took the pains to point out that they might include my name and address on correspondence mailed to me when doing such is required by the post office in in order for them to know where to deliver the aforementioned correspondence.
They might also want to note that sometimes the bank teller might greet me by name, if he or she recognizes me.
If this is the direction business transparency is going we seem to have pushed things to ridiculous lengths.
I haven't looked at the details but the plans don't seem to be anything new. I have a RAZR with AT&T right now and pay $39.99 for (I think) 450 minutes per month. There are some night & weekend minutes in there somewhere. I added $19.99 per month for unlimited data. Here in the US midwest this is the least expensive route to have a reasonable number of voice minutes combined with unlimited data.