Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Norwegian, Nader, Handheld
Putting it all online. "As earlier reported on Slashdot, poor Ottar Grepstad has difficulties getting into his database. Now they're available for download! This is one geeky challenge you don't want to miss. :-) You'll find the story here (click on 'the password mystery'). 'use Xbase;', anyone? :-)"
The loyal opposition. Helmholtz Coil writes "Yahoo! is carrying a rebuttal to the letter James Love and Ralph Nader wrote to the OMB, from the fine folks at ZDNet. Some interesting points, very interesting tone to the whole piece. The question is, though-when can we expect a rebuttal to the rebuttal?"
They need a Free OS focus group :) Gecko writes "Remember the PCs without a pre-installed operating system, selling at Wal-Mart's? OSNews got their hands on one of these and they test Windows, Linux and BeOS. Apparently, the company behind these products had immediately replaced the on-board winmodem with a hardware PCI one, in order to be compatible with Linux, but their new AthlonXP/Duron PC models now come with a newer S3 Savage4 DDR integrated graphics card that is not supported by XFree86. One keeps wondering why they sell these PCs without Windows, if they are not able to test their hardware with other OSes before sending them to Wal-Mart for sale."
A new meaning for Pocket Rocket. Hot on the heels of XScale introductions and announcements from Toshiba and Fujitsu, Brian writes "Acer, Inc. today announces the Acer n20 series, eight months after announcing support for the Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 platform, the announcement also made Acer one of the few manufacturers to support both the Palm and Pocket PC platform. PDA LIVE.com again has the scoop and the photos :)"
I hope the pace picks up on the introduction of machines based on Intel's XScale processor.
Dog Star. DHR writes "An update to an earlier story shows that Sirius the satellite radio provider has finally come to their senses and withdrawn their petition to restrict the 2.4GHz band."
Intermission. bubblegoose writes "Yahoo has a story about Film88 being taken down by the MPA. They say it's because the servers were in the Netherlands, I think it more likely due to a good /.'ing."
NO SHIT!
I don't think Linux users are the target buyer for these PCs. I suspect most of them are being sold to:
Both of these categories are in violation of MS EULA, but I would guess 80% of the machines end up with Windows on them. Most people who install an OEM copy of Windows will have no idea that they're breaking the law, which I believe is a large part of the reason click-wrap licensing gets away with so much.
I'm curious, how prominently are these PCs advertised as not having an OS? Is Wal-Mart getting many returns because nothing happened when the machine was turned on?
And Linux on the drive would certainly help address the issue of support for the shipped hardware!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Basically, they agree that the OMB could, and should, weild their budget power to ensure security is maximized and to lower prices, increase interoperability, etc. But where they differ from Nader, and the only real disagreement is whether there should be any mandate on forcing Microsoft to release source, sell source, etc. They're arguing that the OMB should absolutely try to sway Microsoft's behavior, but that it should do so only through well-reasoned business cases, not through pseudo-enforcement of anti-trust violations.
The password is "ladepujd", but the msback.exe I linked to in another post says the version is wrong for a restore. It does do a catelogue though.
Please tell me your kidding. Comparing sweatshops to slavery is ludicrous (and to think I've seen people complaing that calling copyright violation "piracy" was bad...).
People in sweatshops are there by choice (unless they are actually slaves, which does happen (rarely) but then the problem is the slavery, not the sweatshops). The reason people choose to work in sweatshops is because the alternatives are WORSE. Is it a awful thing for a 13 year old kid to be working 12 hours a day for a few cents? Yeah. Would it be better if he was starving on the street instead? Not really.
Also, don't make the mistake of judging wages in terms of the price of a cup of Starbucks Super Mocha Java. In China, it's common for young women from the interior to go work in sweatshops on the coast for a few months, then go back home to the village, where they're now quite well off (yes, even at sweatshop wages), and can easily find a husband.
What is your boycot going to do? Well, actually, you'll probably just get ignored, but if you do have an impact, it'll probably be that Walmart's suppliers shift production to automated factories in Mexico. Yeah, that'll sure help the starving kids in Myanmar...
If you want to have an impact, calculate the difference in price between everything you buy that was made in a sweatshop, and it's factory-made equivalent, then donate that money to a charity. You'll do far more good.
Files successfully extracted and emailed, using my old copy of MS-DOS 6.2 Backup, with the compliments of Slashdot :)
' Ore stabit fortis a fine placet ore stat '
- found on a park bench
which is Reidar Djupedal (the guy who owned the collection)'s last name spelled backward.
Not quite "password" but not a particularly secure pw...
Well said systemaster. Except, anything that isn't the keyboard, mouse, or monitor is the "hard drive."
I see the situation as pretty analogous to some leases I've signed over the years. They have clauses saying that if I don't pay the rent, the landlord can take posession of the property and all my belongings, and so on. Well, it may say that in the lease but the landlord-tenant laws will override the parts of our agreement that are illegal.
The thing is, we're sailing into uncharted waters with all this IP legislation stuff. We've already seen the corporate power grab embodied in the Sony Bono Copyrights Forever Act, which if I'm not mistaken will be before some high court any day now. We have laughable patents on ridiculous "business processes" and there's patent pending on the pop-under ad, which according to the story here on slashdot is all of two lines of javascript.
Hey, look, a soapbox called History... People, we are living through a revolution akin to Gutenberg's invention of movable type, and Martin Luther's reformation of the Catholic Church. What am I talking about? Prior to Gutenberg, it was prohibitively expensive to create printed matter; teams of monks dedicated their *lives* to copying important texts. Concomitant with the scarcity of literature was a vast illiterate population, who had to be told what the bible meant by their local clergy.
Gutenberg stood the status quo on its ear. Now, anyone with some molten lead and a few hard workers could turn out in days the same "content" that used to take YEARS to produce. People could now be taught to read the bible for themselves, and didn't have to rely on the interpretation spoon-fed to them by the Church. In short, people gained an incredible freedom, the freedom to THINK FOR THEMSELVES, and the all-powerful Catholic Church (you know, the guys who changed the calendar in October 1582) (look at your unix calendar, it's there) was dealt a blow from which it has never recovered.
How exactly does all this relate to IP law and the RIAA/MPAA DMCA Gabba Gabba Hey? I'm not quite sure, but you bet your pinhead they're related. The Church didn't need IP lawyers and patents, they would simply Darn You To Heck! if you got uppity. They had a copyright, if you will, on the freakin' alphabet! To us that sounds ridiculous, but a copyright and a horde of rapacious IP lawyers provides the same "Game Over" result today that Excommunication did five hundred years ago.
Revolutions of this sort play out over decades, and we are riding the first waves of this one. Meanwhile, I'm stepping down off the soapbox before JonKatz starts pelting me with AOL Platinum 7.0 CDs.
and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you
Are you sure they wouldn't keep it in Norway?
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
You probably overestimate the difference between being a slave and working in a sweat shop. An economic position where one must work hard for 18 hours purely to survive is pretty close to slavery. I suspect that the workers would be better off if they really were slaves - the owners would then have more incentive to invest in training and would be inclined to take better care of actual property.
You're right up to a point. It is worse for those working in sweatshops for you to simply boycott sweatshops' products.
People used to argue that it would be wrong to boycott slave manafactured products because unless the slaves were productive and profitable they would probably be executed. Again, it's a reasonable argument, but it misses the point slightly.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I downloaded a demo MSbackup cracker that gave me the first letter, then I found the word in the file, but reversed. I shouldn't have needed to look in the file, once I knew the first letter I really should have noticed it was the last letter of the guys last name and put 2 and 2 together...