Posts by jwenting

Garth Brooks is a brilliant musician and composer. Just because you don't like his style of music doesn't give you any rights to slander him and call him names, kiddo.

Garth has an exclusive arrangement with Walmart, which has its own online store.
This is a sad thing for his international fanbase (which may be larger than his US base) as it means his work is now unavailable to all of us living outside the United States.

The rights to the Beatles' music rest with Apple music, who just settled a major legal dispute with Apple computing a few months ago. I doubt they'll be available through iTunes any time soon.

read the thread about relaxing while coding.
Many people code to music.
The iTunes license apparently does not allow one to use iTunes for that while designing a weapon of mass destruction or its control software unless authorised to do so by the US government.

Sounds reasonable to me :)

I wouldn't want an iPhone at that price, or just about any price.
They're bulky, the user interface looks pathetic (designed for looks rather than usability), and the featureset as you notice is not what I want either.

I'd rather have a Samsung i780 or something similar (and in fact I do have just that one).

next step, sueing these ISPs for violation of their contracts with their customers to provide unlimited access.
Even though I don't like child porn, and would never knowingly download any (sometimes one does get tricked into visiting sites one doesn't want when they're misrepresented by search engines), blocking them when you sign a contract with your customers that you won't limit their internet access is a contract violation.
But I doubt anyone will dare take that step lest they be branded a pedophile themselves, loose their jobs, get forced to change their name and move out of state to avoid the vigilantes firebombing their houses and cars, etc. etc.
And of course the ACLU won't be anywhere near when it happens.

Next step, force ISPs to block content that radical Muslims don't like because such content would upset radical Muslims...

The Linux crowd has been saying that for over a decade Ken, it ain't happened yet and I don't see it happening any time soon.
As long as they're as anal about doing things different from Windows for no other reason than to be seen as being different, and are as hostile as they are towards outsiders trying to get help, it's never going to happen.

Support is a laugh. The highest level of support I've ever gotten from a Linux support forum or IRC channel was a "read the f*cking man-page".
I've seen people get that sneer when asking how to use the man command...
These people have a massive god-complex. They think they're "better" than others for being Linux "experts" and think that sneering at others and putting them down is the way to show that superiority.

Keep on dreaming. As long as Linux SUCKS when it comes to software support, as long as people expect their machines to run Windows software (which they quite logically do, that being the vast majority of available software, with Linux and Mac versions being usually unavailable and if available more often than not more expensive than the Windows version), as long as Linux support for hardware is as bad as it is (the hardware in that box isn't the only hardware people plug in you know, there's such things as printers, network routers, DSL and cable modems, scanners, digital cameras, etc. etc. all of which have very limited if any Linux support unless you're willing to modify driver source code, compile things (which often means installing new kernels and compilers from source), etc. etc., all things users aren't going to want to do), Linux isn't going to make a major impact on the end-user desktop (let alone the professional desktop).

People are more likely to buy Macs, if Apple gets their head screwed on straight and stops expecting customers to pay several times the price of a Windows based system just because it has the Apple branding.

demagogues have always been good at "reaching out" to get their message across.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and now Obama are all examples of that.

the problem isn't that people are buying online to get a bargain (though that's often a delusion, and in the end puts more people out of work locally which is bad for the economy and thus your wallet) but WHAT they buy.
Many of them buy pirated music, movies, and software or other stolen goods from shady websites rather than sticking to reputable stores doing legitimate business.
In Europe that happens a lot more apparently than it does in the US, which goes a long way to explain why more creditcard information ends up getting stolen here.
Another reason might be cosmetic, with possibly more people here going to the police rather than just getting their credit company to block the card and issue a new one.

everyone knows that you have no privacy whatsoever when using ANY service provided by Goooooooogle or any of their subsidiairies...
Goooooooogle stores and collects everything they can and sell it to the highest bidder, that's their entire business model.

the entire "manmade global warming" scare is a massive fraud enterprise based on a hoax.
There is no "manmade global warming", only natural climate fluctuations.
And thinking that anything we can do will influence those to any more than minimal degree and on a global scale is tantamount to insanity.
It's also a clear sign of a massively inflated ego to think mankind can either cause or prevent climate change on a more than extremely local and smallscale level.

Of course powermad politicians see the entire thing as an ideal way to give themselves more power.

correct. Offering support for touchscreens out of the box doesn't mean you won't be able to use a keyboard any longer.
Microsoft isn't crazy, they know they'd never be able to sell the product if 99.9999% of their userbase won't be able to use it because they lack a touchscreen or can't use it.

guess what, it doesn't matter. The vast majority of real downloads ARE upgrading users, FF market share in what people actually use is pretty flat and has been for a year or so.
But all that is irrelevant. To get that "record" we're going to see a lot of fanboyz just starting programs that download FF files like mad. Each of them should be able to get a few hundred or for the ones with really fat connections thousands of downloads a day.

Another company releasing a failed product as "open source" in the hope it will get them some positive press which might generate some more sales and so recover at least a bit of the cost of creating that failed product.

I actually have one of those things, courtesy of my employer.
The Samsung i780 works like a charm.
Only gripes are the short battery life when using the GPS unit (which a car charger alleviates, it will keep the unit fully charged at all times), and the poor GPS signal reception indoors (unless you're pointing the thing out an open door or window you have no reception when more than a few centimeters away from a window and forget getting reception through metal-coated blinds).

But in the car it works very well indeed. Initial signal aqcuisition can take a few minutes (usually under 2 when not parked in a parking garage, see above), after that it's stable (I've not tried it in between tall buildings, might cause reception trouble).

Highly recommended at about €500 + the price of the Garmin software (out of the box the phone comes with a trial version) if you want an all-in-one device.
Great as a PDA, effective as a phone and satnav unit, excellent sound for use as a music/video player, cheaper than buying a Blackberry, an iPaq, an iPod touch, and a TomTom.

The kleptocrats in Brussels have all read 1984 and found it a pretty good idea...
They've been working to implement EngSoc all over Europe for the last 40 years, and now they have the technology to make it work.
Of course in their vision for the world Airstrip One is part of Eurasia.

and don't worry about the data getting out onto the street. There are no security requirements on it, any police investigator or prosecutor will be able to access anyone's data without a court order or search warrant so there's nothing to be kept secure.

Nothing new there.
Under EU legislation ratified by the EC (and therefore under the EU "this is not a constitution" legally binding in all member states) ALL EU member nations will have to do that from next year.
And it's not just email either. It's also all phone calls, IM conversations, and all IP addresses visited and URIs retrieved.
Requirements to also store the actual content retrieved from those addresses and the actual conversations undertaken by telephone were dropped when it was made clear that the storage volume required would be impossible to provide.

The ONLY thing countries get to decide on their own is how long the information should be stored, as long as it is no less than 6 months.
Most countries seem to be adopting periods of at least a year.

and next week a cargo ship with produce arrives from in England from the Bahamas...
Let's hope the critters don't survive in our wet and chilly climes.

ISPs have a duty to ALL their customers, and that means preventing users of Pirate 2 Pirate software from bogging down their networks by throttling their bandwidth to the point where there's enough capacity for everyone.
Those kids are already stealing the stuff they're downloading, why should the ISPs let them steal bandwidth as well?

Not my experience.
Roughly 60% of the spam I get is advertising for various goods and services (the rest are attempts at identity theft).
Of that, roughly 80% is for medicines (fake or otherwise), mostly Viagra and similar products.
The rest is about a mix of pirated software, porn (I assume from the titles), fake watches and clothes, and miscellaneous other things (with the majority being pirated software).

That's a rough analysis over about 10.000 spam messages received over the last week on my main mail account (which gets about 50-100 real messages in the same week).

So Google has found another way to steal peoples' personal data, this time by leeching it from social networking sites they can't index because the pages are password protected.
Good call by Facebook to block the spyware.

I don't care for an "online backup" I don't have any control over.
Give me a backup of my own instead.

Services fine, as long as my data is and remains mine and isn't tied so tightly to the software of the service provider that it is useless if that service provider decides to shut me off (or simply goes out of business).
And that's the second big risk of all those "online" applications. Not only is your data held hostage by a third party because they control your access to it, but it is in a format that you don't even know and if you do know it is such that it's useless without that "online" application.

I'd sooner go offline than submit myself to such a stranglehold scenario.

Ah, another one who's stuck in the mainframe era...
I'd NEVER trust my data to some 3rd party, especially one like Google whose sole interest in me is as a target for advertising and a place to leech money out of.
And most people agree, the entire "web application" hype is already old.

The people who matter couldn't care less whether something is CDDL, GPL2, GPL3, or whatever, or if they care they want the product to choose have any license BUT GPL (in whatever form).
Only religious fanatics do want GPL, and among those the fight between adherents of GPL2 and GPL3 are as fanatical in their fighting as any 2 religious sects.

The idea is that the money will go (in part) to the record companies to compensate them for the losses due to music piracy.
Of course many kids will interpret that as a free ticket to pirate whatever they like, after all they've paid the tax haven't they?

nothing new.
There is already a tax on all devices with memory capacity that will go into effect in the EU shortly.
That covers all mp3 players, harddisk DVD recorders, etc.
Computer components are excluded though, as are video and digital photo cameras (the latter only after massive public outcry about people buying digicams having to pay a tax to recover losses due to music piracy).

And Asus probably expects to have to provide more support on those Linux boxes as well compared to the Windows boxes.

you've apparently never worked in banking...
The computers themselves are sensitive. If it works like the banks I worked for the server will allow network connections based on which hardware is connecting.
Have the right computer and you can get onto the network, without it you can't.

Of course there's still user level security as well, but with each of those systems the first security barrier is already breached for intruders, making it that much easier for them to get into the banking systems.

We had such a case about a decade ago. Major burglary at a branch office, all the workstations were stolen.
We went into overdrive not just getting that office back up and running, but also killing the authentication for all the old workstations to prevent intruders from using them.

That's why banks don't generally sell their old hardware on the second hand market. It gets shredded and burned.
Literally shredded and burned, we had a shredder in the basement of one building where harddisks, CPUs, network cards, and motherboards were turned into confetti sized chunks before being sent off to the incinerator for total annihillation.
Only printers and screens were kept or sold, and some small parts like cables and floppy disk drives which were retained as spares.

well said scru.
OpenSolaris is aimed squarely at the high end enthousiast and corporate market, a market where a hobby system like Linux is totally inappropriate.

They should have filed suit for the posession of those mp3 files, which (in the absence of the physical media) is a clear sign of illegal activity, rather than the fact that pirate 2 pirate software was installed.

But maybe they also did that (I don't know the details of the case) and this is only a partial ruling.
The software itself is indeed not illegal, its use as a tool for copyright infringement however is.
If you wrote it correctly the case was thrown out only because the person actually responsible for the infringement could not be decided, not because there was no infringement.

nono, it's not "a trick", it's "trikz".

As you say, nothing new.
And had the responsible agencies and companies that manage the core infrastructure not been vigilant and constantly increasing capacity we'd have hit the limit years ago.

As it is the main problem we're facing today is not that the capacity of the network in bandwidth is getting critically congested, but that the address space if filling up rapidly.
And with IPv6 adoption still going at a glacial pace I don't see that problem going away any time soon, in fact it may not go away until people are pressed into it with their noses when they can't acquire an IP address because there are none to be had.

Nope, none of the above.
Not only are you woefully behind the times in places, in other places you completely miss the mark.

Companies will NOT move to Linux desktops in large numbers. The maintenance and training cost is simply way too high and the lost productivity due to the poor quality and performance of Linux desktop systems too great a price to pay.

And in the server room there are already a lot of Unix based servers, with those companies not using them yet in the most part doing so for very good reasons so there's no reason for them to switch to Linux now or possibly ever.

But nothing you "predict" is new. We've been hearing it regularly enough you can set your clock by it for about a decade now that for whatever reason companies would "real soon now" make the "move to Linux" in droves, killing Microsoft and all commercial off the shelf software in one fell swoop.

The entire OLPC project is a farce.
It's NOT "for every child", not even "for every poor child".
It's only available to governments of specific third world countries, not to parents everywhere.
Why can Zimbadwe order a thousand of the things (in theory) and distribute them to the entire extended family of Robert Mugabe but a schoolteacher in a school in rural Kansas where the children have never seen a computer because their parents all depend on foodstamps and can't afford them is can't because the US is "too rich"?
To say the very least it's dishonest.

Switching the OS to Windows is actually a good idea. It WILL make the thing (which so far is a dismal failure in sales) more appealing as it is, like it or not, the world standard for operating systems.
System requirements are no higher than for a decent modern version of Linux.
And with Microsoft and the Gates Foundation behind it it's quite likely it will be available to the project at a hefty discount and probably for free for machines donated to charitable organisations.

You just can't help wanting to be negative about Microsoft, can you?

Of course they'll support the operating systems they create software for first and foremost.
And Microsoft knows full well that the Linux crowd isn't going to use their products anyway for religious reasons, and the Linux community is small enough that supporting the platform for the few users who aren't religious Microsoft "hating" zealots isn't economically feasible.

But what I expect is that they're going to make the Mesh available as a series of web services, which are operating system and programming language agnostic.
Microsoft is after all one of the major pushers for web services and has been for a long time, something else ignored by the Microsoft "hating" slashdot kiddos.

And with docx now an official ECMA standard, noone can blame Microsoft if the slashdot kiddos fail to support it in their own vaunted "open" operating system and applications.
By them choosing to ignore Microsoft in their own products they only show their own parochial nature, their unwillingness to deal with the de-facto world standard while expecting Microsoft to bend over backwards to please them (while knowing full well they'll never be pleased).

Gosh, that post reads like something written in 2001.
Most companies by now know better, know that the quality of what comes out of offshoring projects to India and other low wage countries is usually abysmal as well as leading to major cost overruns and missed deadlines.
They know that their customers no longer accept helpdesk workers who don't speak their language (or have an extremely thick accent), have no knowledge of the product they're supporting, know nothing about the culture of the people they're helping, and are often rude.

it infringes on copyrights because it doesn't pay royalties.
In some countries radio stations may not have to pay royalties, in the EU they rightfully do.

What surprises me most is the stupidity of using company resources for private purposes in any way whatsoever...

If I want to do something with a computer that has nothing to do with work while at home I boot up one of my own systems and use that...
Just as I'm not going to use my company cellphone to make private phonecalls...

hmm. Vista performs well, is rock stable, and gives no headaches whatsoever.
And like everyone who claims "I'm no Microsoft basher" you're exactly that.

EVERY piece of software is a work in progress, kid.
If Microsoft were to state that it's complete, there is no need for further updates, you'd be up in arms screaming that "Microsoft is abandoning customers". In fact people were screaming that already when Microsoft stopped support on Windows 98 a decade after it was released, and when there were 2 replacement products on the market.
Can't have it all kid. Either it's a work in progress or it's end of life.

So the guy finally turned realist and admitted that Linux isn't the "Windows killing perfect super operating system for the common man" that the slashdot kiddos claim it is.
Good for him.

such "studies" are rather pointless.
I'd give them something in exchange for the chocolate, but that something wouldn't be my credentials. It would be something completely useless.

uh. No. an OS is designed to run apps. Its its function hence OPERATING system.

Sure, to run applications designed to work on it.
Vista is a different operating system to XP, let alone Windows 1.0.
There were a lot of programs designed for Windows 98 that would no longer work on XP either, yet at the time noone seemed to care about that.
Of course back then most of them were games people were no longer interested in.

It's the nature of the game. Either you loose compatibility with older software at some point or you get a bloated, insecure, impossible to maintain, and quite probably glacially slow, monstrosity.

Microsoft does a lot to ensure things will remain working, but they can't test everything and sometimes have to make tough decisions.
They also provide software makers with information (and prerelease versions) quite a long time before a new OS is released to manufacturing, giving them plenty of time to update and test their products if they so wish. If not all of them do that that's not Microsoft's problem, yet you blame them for the laxness of those other companies.

I quite disagree with you that Vista is "crap", jbennet. I'm using it on 2 machines, it's rockstable and quite performant.
Some applications may give problems, but that can't be blamed on the operating system as those applications were never designed for the operating system.

I remember Gartner saying the same back about a decade ago, when they predicted that Windows 2000 would fail.

They even state that Windows is too old and that Linux has the future, an even more bloated (who needs 500 text editors, 10 office suits, 20 window managers, etc. etc. installed as standard but no decent way to set up a printer?) and even older operating system (it's based on the 30 year old System V).

Maulth, it's not about criminal cases. It's about abuse of privacy sensitive material by the search engine companies themselves.
And especially the extremely privacy hostile practices employed by Google, who have so much information about hundreds of millions of people that, were they a government department anywhere outside a communist dictatorship, they'd be in violation of privacy laws.

Google knows enough about most people in the "free world" to do whatever they want with your identity.
Essentially they own you, they know more about you than you know yourself.
And with the acquisition of more and more companies that profile is getting ever more complete.
If they aren't stopped, soon you'll be utterly at their mercy, unable to do anything without their knowledge and permission.

it's about time someone did something about Google's ever more intrusive spying into peoples' lives.
And these people probably took that into consideration when they decided to challenge Google's business practice of not asking permission before publishing things they have no right to publish without permission.

Google did the same (or planned to) with their "Google library" where they were to publish the content of entire books online unless the author told them not to afterwards, in the full knowledge that doing so is a breach of copyright law.
But Google thought they could get away with it because they're so powerful, so they don't care about the law.

Of course as soon as someone does something Google doesn't like, they're onto them like a ton of bricks.

it's hardly surprising that the growth of malware is explosive.
2nd generation script kiddies have access to ever more clever tooling as the first generation script kiddies enter university CS courses and learn real skills they combine with their illegal activities.
Mitnick was one of the first, he won't be the last (and after seeing his example many will be far more careful).

well, they're right that they support millions of colours.
The videocard supports it so if you plug in a monitor that supports it as well you'll get it.
Maybe the supplied (at a surcharge I think?) monitor does not support it, but does Apple make the claim about that device as well or don't they?

Don't be surprised if that's the argumentation Apple is going to use, and which may well win them the day (though in the US legal system where such cases are usually decided by the greed of the jurors rather than the legalities of the case you never know, and those jury members aren't going to want the court to set a legal precedent that might at some point turn out to deny them a fat check from some other company).

ONLY 42000?
I'm currently getting something like 2000+ per DAY, That's 42000 every 2 weeks or so...

Twitter, like all "social networking" sites, is a major waste of time and a great way for computer criminals and spammers to select their victims.