Re:Traditional Business People
on
Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 1
Fortunately, I can drink beer and type, not simultaneously, but in close proximity. While you, sir, are still rude. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Traditional Business People
on
Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 2
There are times when I'll take free beer over free speech. Because sometimes you just want to shut up and drink some beer. But it's good to see that the Open Source community is having an effect on traditional business models, even if traditional businessmen still don't get it.
Yeah, it'll probably be released under the SCSL again. Big deal. We need a generic, DFSG-compliant (or whatever it's called this week) software license that doesn't scare corporate lawyers. Convincing them to use that because its good for them would be a big step for hackers everywhere.
(Almost as big as stopping people from taking our stuff because we code programs that lawyers do not like or understand. My favorite, IIRC, is probably when they did this to Steve Jackson Games in The Hacker Crackdown. That was a classic.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. All of these were or are conspiracies to limit the rights, freedom, and usefulness of hackers and computer professionals. Especially "First Post".:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, do we have to see this happen *every* decade? The only difference between this one and the last one is that the police might get suspicious if you took your hard drive out by now.
Other than that it looks like no one else has learned anything apart from the usual "Computer crime is bad. Hackers should be punished. Computer crime is anything computer-related that I don't understand but someone says is bad. Big corporations are there to protect me..." Of course, we hackers know the difference. But that hasn't changed, either.
Yo, NSA and MPA(A)! I can watch DVDs on my computer, break your patented triple-XOR encryption in my head, and therefore decrypt your 31337 secret K0deZ. Better send someone here to shut me up real quick and steal my stuff without cause, 'cause you know I'm an evil HaX0r commie pinko, and I deserve whatever I get, no matter how illegal it is for you to do it!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It looks like INT gets caught in the kernel, trapped by vm86(). And DOSEmu doesn't emulate much hardware, besides maybe faking some hard-drive layout stuff and some memory addresses. As much as possible, they've made it run just like a DOS virtual machine, otherwise protected mode would be much easier to fully implement, and you'd all be running Win '98 or whatever on DOSEmu...
...but the performance is really incredible. When I tested it with the BYTEMarks, it would only be a couple percent slower than the real thing, and in anything involving disk access, it's faster, because Linux caches the drives so much better than DOS ever did. And as I've mentioned before, you can tell DOSEmu the maximum amount of RAM you want it to use, but it should never start out using more than 4MB or so, unlike VMWare.
The I/O seems to work fine the way they have it, and this is of course bug-for-bug compatible with the original. But yes, I would be very happy if it handled video better! Maybe some X DGA stuff. Of course, sometime I'd love to work on this stuff myself, but not yet... it seems like I'm always going to school or working. Oh well, I'll just have to find the time to needlessly confuse myself with the source code.:)
And yes, programs fiddle with DOS data structures in memory all the time. That's why DOSEmu just gives them their memory and makes sure they don't access beyond it or touch anything really sensitive, otherwise giving crufty old programs free reign to check whatever stupid memory locations they can... It's the easiest way to make sure it all works. I bet my code that set the BIOS bits (and messed with the CAPS/NUM/SCROLL LOCK lights) doesn't work except *maybe* in raw keyboard mode, but I should try it sometime.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think I echo the other anti-NT comments by saying:
"You would have to eat 12 bowls of Windows NT to get the features found in one bowl of Linux! Also, NT is lacking in Iron, Stability, Support, and other vital nutrients."
Please, guys, keep it funny. It's a funny post.:)
Or, for the English-impaired:
grep -iv FUD funny.post --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Of course, MS-DOS 6.22 is the most "compatible" DOS around, because everybody wrote for its bugs and quirks and used its drivers. What features do you want to see implemented better for compatibility? Also, have you guys considered (do any of you) work on the DOSEmu project? (I've been tempted to, just because I'd *love* to be able to properly run the Second Reality demo again...)
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Also, maybe we should try to interview the DOSEmu guys sometime, 'cause I have more questions for them.
DOSEmu issues (not necessarily your problem:)
The stuff I've had the biggest problems with under DOSEmu are probably Sound Support, DPMI, Video Support, and Mouse Support, in that order.
I've managed to get MIDI working before (but I want to try it through Timidity)
I've gotten sound on Star Control 2, (b/c it does DMA writes) and that's about it for sound. Other applications detect it, but can't use it, or they hang. (I realize there isn't much sound code fleshed out there...:)
I had DPMI problems under OpenDOS, and when I tried FreeDOS it probably wasn't as far along as it is now. (good thing I still own MS-DOS 6.22:)
Video much over 320x200 generally doesn't work well for me, I don't know much about this in DOSEmu. Also palette support in X could use some work.
And I had fun configuring the mouse options, and deciding whether I wanted to fake a Serial port and use the Microsoft drivers, or trust gpm to do it for me. I've gotten varying results, but eventually it works.
Also, how's the DOSEmu project going, if anyone knows? I saw an update to the stable stuff, but nothing in development for a while. Do they need fresh blood sacrifices, or have people just lost interest? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
In that case, Caldera should sue Caldera for diluting their trademark on the name "Caldera". Then you'd have Caldera OpenLinux, and "The company formerly known as Caldera" OpenDOS...
Personally, I'd much rather own Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) stock than Caldera stock. Maybe I'd change my mind if Caldera opened up their secret archive of funny and off-color text files....but then they'd probably just sue Microsoft for e-mailing the darn things to everyone... (can I collect that money from Bill Gates now? I forwarded the message...;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too. Actually, what struck me was the $96 figure cropping up again for the Celerons--I believe that's the same price Transmeta was quoted at for one of their chips too.
And I thought it was really suspicious that no one mentioned Transmeta right after their huge announcement about mobile computing, being a competitor in the laptop market, etc., etc.
...and I never got a story posted before. Gee.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
God, I didn't realize how much slashdot truly sucks these days... All those patent stories were bad enough (and now there are *too many* company-doing-foo-with-linux announcements to post. Oh darn. Well, here's a hint, next time you're posting "Big Corporation Sues Bobby Over Cheerios", say "Wait, I've got this cool corporation porting product FOO to Linux article here, too. Hmm."
Lest you think this is unsubstantiated, read some of Linux Weekly News. How could slashdot have sunk so low as to not post an article by The Gartner Group? That's some important press, and it sounds like it's getting better. Heck, I haven't even seen a good Linux opinion story in a while, and I like to see what the mainstream is being told even when the articles are mostly just recycled. This is more important, because this is what the *corporations* are being told.
(Patiently waiting for a Linux+Crusoe server announcement. Hopefully they'll wait a bit before the other-VLIW-chip-makers try to crush them...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I haven't upgraded some parts of my system since RedHat 6.0, (legacy cruft, don't ask) but I understand that Gnome has come a long way. What I have is already fairly usable, but I'll be happy to see it get better. Here's what I want:
* a better (more intuitive) filemanager for Unix.
Even if I don't end up using it, (CLI rules!) I'd love to see at least *one* decent filemanager for Unix, because there are a *lot* of crappy, unfinished ones out there. What KDE has looks pretty neat, at least. (and, once it's completely free, we can borrow / steal it all, ha ha ha!)
* Interoperability between toolkits / widget sets.
This is an idea I've had for a while. A consistent theming interface might make my idea obsolete, but in any case, I'd love to have a library that had a front end to handle the different function calls and a back end to map them onto a chosen widget set. Sort of like the GGI project with displays, except for widgets.
I know how hard this would be to implement, but think about it, 'cause it could save a lot of duplication of effort in the long run. Maybe we could end up working together, and have one awesome set of Unix desktop tools, instead of two pretty good ones.
* Window manager?
As far as window managers go, I really like Sawmill. And it looks fast enough and flexible enough to be used for... whatever. Also, now that I'm getting into Lisp and Scheme, it's good to see how useful they can still be... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) Quite right, fighting FUD with FUD... Microsoft didn't convince me on the BIND issue, or the LDAP implementation, but we'll see. "Standards-compliance" has always been iffy with them, just like NT is "POSIX-compliant".
Of course, we could apply the same tactics to basic facts, and I'm sure we'd get different responses to them.
"Did you know that Windows 2000 hasn't been released yet? Even though Microsoft has announced that it is finished working on it and has distributed it to certain major players, it is not publically available yet."
"Did you know that Netware 5 has been released? Even though Novell can't publicize a paper bag, it is possible to get a copy of Netware 5 now."
"Did you know that Microsoft traditionally does lousy disk caching anyhow? Defragmenting a drive on a Microsoft Operating System is better done under Linux. (tested with DOSEmu:)"
"Did you know that the Earth is spiraling into the sun? Even though it's getting there very slowly, it will eventually become uninhabitable."
Incidentally, if you're running Windows, load up a copy of RegEdit, and change your Windows Tips. Now *that's* fun. "Do not, under any circumstances, eat the yellow snow"... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ah, thanks, that definitely clears things up. If you actually own the CD, you should be able to get the.mp3--i.e., you could make it yourself. Of course, if you borrowed the CD from a friend, that doesn't mean you own it, yet you could still download the.mp3's. However, you could also rip them yourself, probably in less time. So I think the point here is moot. And it should be just as legal to compile a vast database (of mp3's apparently, that makes sense) as it is to compile a small one, otherwise people with 20 CD's (owned, ripped) might be legal while people with 200 CD's wouldn't be, and that's just arbitrary. I'm sure mp3.com owns all of the music in question. (If they don't, then there would be a real issue...)
Geez, it's my fourth year here at State. But since we both went to S&M, I guess me and my friends are either unknown, or we're the stuff of legend. I'm sure we vaguely know some people in common, at least. What was your take on the "FETC"? (Frederick was a real jerk, it's great that he's finally gone) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. That's a good point, but all I could find in the article talked about how it "is not legal to compile a vast database of our member's sound recordings with no permission and no license."
That's what didn't make sense to me. It's not about copying, it's about making a list of what CD's people have. At least, that's what that sentence sounds like to me. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
? Why does this surprise you? Blame Tipper Gore, while you're at it. Many women do the censorship / moral grandstanding / campaigning for *rights* for blah blah blah that ends up taking away rights.
I'm just glad the women I know aren't like that.
Of course, there are men who do this too, Jesse Helms being the best example to come to mind. But women can apparently play the "protecting the family" / "protecting the defamation of" [whatever] angle better. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The RIAA is saying that you need permission from them and a license to find out what CD's someone bought, and they can't just *tell* you? I figured they'd be against the vast compilation of mp3's.
So, if a site wants to know what other books I might be interested in, and I send them a list of all the books I own, is there any sane reason why publishers get mad? Do we go apeshit over Nielsen ratings, to find out what shows people watch?
Did I misinterpret this entirely, or does this lawsuit / article have absolutely no basis in reality? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) No, no, no, you've got it all wrong! Use the famous, incredible, all-powerful XOR algorithm! Not only can it encrypt more than 26 characters, but to *decrypt* it, you have to know the magic word!
Jeez, this whole thing is too silly. Of course, once I file my patent on my incredible "one-click-XOR-playback" technology, they will all owe me money, ha ha ha ha ha!
Ah well. Another sad legal day in the history of slashdot. I guess I'll wait patiently for more Crusoe info to cheer me up.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. Recursive acronym. Well, the obvious start would be: "Tinkerbell Is Not", but past that you've got me stumped. Maybe words like "Karma", "Leet", "Eleet", or "Troll" might creep in there somewhere? You do use all the letters coherently, right? With T standing for Tinkerbell?
Oh, and... yo, moderators, lighten up. I remember when MEEPT! used to get moderated up. Because it was funny. I didn't think this was terribly funny, but more deserving of 0 than -1, at least. Redundant? Please, it's the second post.
And heck, expect some crap in an AOL story. At least we don't have the porn spam mail on slashdot like almost every AOL user gets... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Didn't the old AOL do this, too? I remember you couldn't really telnet then. I'm not too surprised, since AOL's web browser is still based on Internet Explorer, and they're all still evil.
Anyhow, yet another reason not to upgrade from AOL 4.0, and wait for them to switch to Mozilla, (Netscape 5.0, when it's released...) and hope they don't screw up again. I feel sorry for all those people stuck with AOL, for whatever reason.
AOL: we make your life simpler provided you don't know what you're doing... and we intend to keep it that way! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The purely computational reasoning you propose is flawed, and always will be until the exponential advances in technology and algorithms are figured into the calculations.
Distributed.net is *not* the end-all, be-all of decryption. It *is* a massive display of brute-force, cracking power. That's it.
...and if 128-bit encryption is safe enough, why can't we legally be more paranoid? That's the real question. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
All I can say is, it's about time. People have been whining about the duplication of effort on the SETI@Home project for a while.
This abundance of processor time is actually a pretty good argument for a good, open, generic distributed project framework. (unfortunately, most of them don't look as *cool* as SETI.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This means the movie company feels that it has "lost" $50,000,000, which has been "stolen" from them, since obviously no one will ever see this movie in the theatre or buy their own copy again now that someone has managed to play it under Linux...
I quote from "the Bible" on stupid government hacker punishment, Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, 4:2 and a few pages down... (feel free to read more, it's all relevant--in this case, I didn't even quote *enough*.)
The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally been valued at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence booty, the E911 Document was not software - it was written in English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this value - for a twelve-page bureaucratic document - frankly incredible. In his "Crime and Puzzlement" manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will probably never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though I like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."
As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in fact, eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by whom - but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was over.
Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as follows:
1.A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200. 2.A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742. 3.Two days of editing cost $367. 4.A box of order labels cost five dollars. 5.Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129. 6.Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858. 7.Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the twelve-page Document. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, I can drink beer and type, not simultaneously, but in close proximity. While you, sir, are still rude.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There are times when I'll take free beer over free speech. Because sometimes you just want to shut up and drink some beer. But it's good to see that the Open Source community is having an effect on traditional business models, even if traditional businessmen still don't get it.
Yeah, it'll probably be released under the SCSL again. Big deal. We need a generic, DFSG-compliant (or whatever it's called this week) software license that doesn't scare corporate lawyers. Convincing them to use that because its good for them would be a big step for hackers everywhere.
(Almost as big as stopping people from taking our stuff because we code programs that lawyers do not like or understand. My favorite, IIRC, is probably when they did this to Steve Jackson Games in The Hacker Crackdown. That was a classic.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. All of these were or are conspiracies to limit the rights, freedom, and usefulness of hackers and computer professionals. Especially "First Post". :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, do we have to see this happen *every* decade? The only difference between this one and the last one is that the police might get suspicious if you took your hard drive out by now.
:)
Other than that it looks like no one else has learned anything apart from the usual "Computer crime is bad. Hackers should be punished. Computer crime is anything computer-related that I don't understand but someone says is bad. Big corporations are there to protect me..." Of course, we hackers know the difference. But that hasn't changed, either.
Yo, NSA and MPA(A)! I can watch DVDs on my computer, break your patented triple-XOR encryption in my head, and therefore decrypt your 31337 secret K0deZ. Better send someone here to shut me up real quick and steal my stuff without cause, 'cause you know I'm an evil HaX0r commie pinko, and I deserve whatever I get, no matter how illegal it is for you to do it!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It looks like INT gets caught in the kernel, trapped by vm86(). And DOSEmu doesn't emulate much hardware, besides maybe faking some hard-drive layout stuff and some memory addresses. As much as possible, they've made it run just like a DOS virtual machine, otherwise protected mode would be much easier to fully implement, and you'd all be running Win '98 or whatever on DOSEmu...
:)
:)
...but the performance is really incredible. When I tested it with the BYTEMarks, it would only be a couple percent slower than the real thing, and in anything involving disk access, it's faster, because Linux caches the drives so much better than DOS ever did. And as I've mentioned before, you can tell DOSEmu the maximum amount of RAM you want it to use, but it should never start out using more than 4MB or so, unlike VMWare.
The I/O seems to work fine the way they have it, and this is of course bug-for-bug compatible with the original. But yes, I would be very happy if it handled video better! Maybe some X DGA stuff. Of course, sometime I'd love to work on this stuff myself, but not yet... it seems like I'm always going to school or working. Oh well, I'll just have to find the time to needlessly confuse myself with the source code.
And yes, programs fiddle with DOS data structures in memory all the time. That's why DOSEmu just gives them their memory and makes sure they don't access beyond it or touch anything really sensitive, otherwise giving crufty old programs free reign to check whatever stupid memory locations they can... It's the easiest way to make sure it all works. I bet my code that set the BIOS bits (and messed with the CAPS/NUM/SCROLL LOCK lights) doesn't work except *maybe* in raw keyboard mode, but I should try it sometime.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think I echo the other anti-NT comments by saying:
:)
"You would have to eat 12 bowls of Windows NT to get the features found in one bowl of Linux! Also, NT is lacking in Iron, Stability, Support, and other vital nutrients."
Please, guys, keep it funny. It's a funny post.
Or, for the English-impaired:
grep -iv FUD funny.post
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Of course, MS-DOS 6.22 is the most "compatible" DOS around, because everybody wrote for its bugs and quirks and used its drivers. What features do you want to see implemented better for compatibility? Also, have you guys considered (do any of you) work on the DOSEmu project? (I've been tempted to, just because I'd *love* to be able to properly run the Second Reality demo again...)
:)
:)
:)
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Also, maybe we should try to interview the DOSEmu guys sometime, 'cause I have more questions for them.
DOSEmu issues (not necessarily your problem
The stuff I've had the biggest problems with under DOSEmu are probably Sound Support, DPMI, Video Support, and Mouse Support, in that order.
I've managed to get MIDI working before (but I want to try it through Timidity)
I've gotten sound on Star Control 2, (b/c it does DMA writes) and that's about it for sound. Other applications detect it, but can't use it, or they hang.
(I realize there isn't much sound code fleshed out there...
I had DPMI problems under OpenDOS, and when I tried FreeDOS it probably wasn't as far along as it is now. (good thing I still own MS-DOS 6.22
Video much over 320x200 generally doesn't work well for me, I don't know much about this in DOSEmu. Also palette support in X could use some work.
And I had fun configuring the mouse options, and deciding whether I wanted to fake a Serial port and use the Microsoft drivers, or trust gpm to do it for me. I've gotten varying results, but eventually it works.
Also, how's the DOSEmu project going, if anyone knows? I saw an update to the stable stuff, but nothing in development for a while. Do they need fresh blood sacrifices, or have people just lost interest?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
In that case, Caldera should sue Caldera for diluting their trademark on the name "Caldera". Then you'd have Caldera OpenLinux, and "The company formerly known as Caldera" OpenDOS...
...but then they'd probably just sue Microsoft for e-mailing the darn things to everyone... (can I collect that money from Bill Gates now? I forwarded the message... ;)
Personally, I'd much rather own Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) stock than Caldera stock. Maybe I'd change my mind if Caldera opened up their secret archive of funny and off-color text files.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too. Actually, what struck me was the $96 figure cropping up again for the Celerons--I believe that's the same price Transmeta was quoted at for one of their chips too.
:)
And I thought it was really suspicious that no one mentioned Transmeta right after their huge announcement about mobile computing, being a competitor in the laptop market, etc., etc.
...and I never got a story posted before. Gee.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
God, I didn't realize how much slashdot truly sucks these days... All those patent stories were bad enough (and now there are *too many* company-doing-foo-with-linux announcements to post. Oh darn. Well, here's a hint, next time you're posting "Big Corporation Sues Bobby Over Cheerios", say "Wait, I've got this cool corporation porting product FOO to Linux article here, too. Hmm."
Lest you think this is unsubstantiated, read some of Linux Weekly News. How could slashdot have sunk so low as to not post an article by The Gartner Group? That's some important press, and it sounds like it's getting better. Heck, I haven't even seen a good Linux opinion story in a while, and I like to see what the mainstream is being told even when the articles are mostly just recycled. This is more important, because this is what the *corporations* are being told.
(Patiently waiting for a Linux+Crusoe server announcement. Hopefully they'll wait a bit before the other-VLIW-chip-makers try to crush them...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I haven't upgraded some parts of my system since RedHat 6.0, (legacy cruft, don't ask) but I understand that Gnome has come a long way. What I have is already fairly usable, but I'll be happy to see it get better. Here's what I want:
* a better (more intuitive) filemanager for Unix.
Even if I don't end up using it, (CLI rules!) I'd love to see at least *one* decent filemanager for Unix, because there are a *lot* of crappy, unfinished ones out there. What KDE has looks pretty neat, at least. (and, once it's completely free, we can borrow / steal it all, ha ha ha!)
* Interoperability between toolkits / widget sets.
This is an idea I've had for a while. A consistent theming interface might make my idea obsolete, but in any case, I'd love to have a library that had a front end to handle the different function calls and a back end to map them onto a chosen widget set. Sort of like the GGI project with displays, except for widgets.
I know how hard this would be to implement, but think about it, 'cause it could save a lot of duplication of effort in the long run. Maybe we could end up working together, and have one awesome set of Unix desktop tools, instead of two pretty good ones.
* Window manager?
As far as window managers go, I really like Sawmill. And it looks fast enough and flexible enough to be used for... whatever. Also, now that I'm getting into Lisp and Scheme, it's good to see how useful they can still be...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) Quite right, fighting FUD with FUD... Microsoft didn't convince me on the BIND issue, or the LDAP implementation, but we'll see. "Standards-compliance" has always been iffy with them, just like NT is "POSIX-compliant".
:)"
Of course, we could apply the same tactics to basic facts, and I'm sure we'd get different responses to them.
"Did you know that Windows 2000 hasn't been released yet? Even though Microsoft has announced that it is finished working on it and has distributed it to certain major players, it is not publically available yet."
"Did you know that Netware 5 has been released? Even though Novell can't publicize a paper bag, it is possible to get a copy of Netware 5 now."
"Did you know that Microsoft traditionally does lousy disk caching anyhow? Defragmenting a drive on a Microsoft Operating System is better done under Linux. (tested with DOSEmu
"Did you know that the Earth is spiraling into the sun? Even though it's getting there very slowly, it will eventually become uninhabitable."
Incidentally, if you're running Windows, load up a copy of RegEdit, and change your Windows Tips. Now *that's* fun. "Do not, under any circumstances, eat the yellow snow"...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ah, thanks, that definitely clears things up. If you actually own the CD, you should be able to get the .mp3--i.e., you could make it yourself. Of course, if you borrowed the CD from a friend, that doesn't mean you own it, yet you could still download the .mp3's. However, you could also rip them yourself, probably in less time. So I think the point here is moot. And it should be just as legal to compile a vast database (of mp3's apparently, that makes sense) as it is to compile a small one, otherwise people with 20 CD's (owned, ripped) might be legal while people with 200 CD's wouldn't be, and that's just arbitrary. I'm sure mp3.com owns all of the music in question. (If they don't, then there would be a real issue...)
Geez, it's my fourth year here at State. But since we both went to S&M, I guess me and my friends are either unknown, or we're the stuff of legend. I'm sure we vaguely know some people in common, at least. What was your take on the "FETC"? (Frederick was a real jerk, it's great that he's finally gone)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
"What's that smell?"
"I got spammed!"
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. That's a good point, but all I could find in the article talked about how it "is not legal to compile a vast database of our member's sound recordings with no permission and no license."
That's what didn't make sense to me. It's not about copying, it's about making a list of what CD's people have. At least, that's what that sentence sounds like to me.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Called the 'iSmell'?
There's a website that needs some deodorant.
Transmeta.com -- it smells nice, but you just can't put your finger on what it is.
Freebsd.org -- sulfur? brimstone?
Microsoft.com -- sulfur? brimstone?
www.tux.org -- It's, cool, crisp, and... someone burped. Herring? What?
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? Why does this surprise you? Blame Tipper Gore, while you're at it. Many women do the censorship / moral grandstanding / campaigning for *rights* for blah blah blah that ends up taking away rights.
I'm just glad the women I know aren't like that.
Of course, there are men who do this too, Jesse Helms being the best example to come to mind. But women can apparently play the "protecting the family" / "protecting the defamation of" [whatever] angle better.
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The RIAA is saying that you need permission from them and a license to find out what CD's someone bought, and they can't just *tell* you? I figured they'd be against the vast compilation of mp3's.
So, if a site wants to know what other books I might be interested in, and I send them a list of all the books I own, is there any sane reason why publishers get mad? Do we go apeshit over Nielsen ratings, to find out what shows people watch?
Did I misinterpret this entirely, or does this lawsuit / article have absolutely no basis in reality?
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:) No, no, no, you've got it all wrong! Use the famous, incredible, all-powerful XOR algorithm! Not only can it encrypt more than 26 characters, but to *decrypt* it, you have to know the magic word!
:)
Jeez, this whole thing is too silly. Of course, once I file my patent on my incredible "one-click-XOR-playback" technology, they will all owe me money, ha ha ha ha ha!
Ah well. Another sad legal day in the history of slashdot. I guess I'll wait patiently for more Crusoe info to cheer me up.
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Geez, that would be like Microsoft admitting they had a security problem, or like the US loosening regulations on encryption...
Strange times we live in, indeed.
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Hmm. Recursive acronym. Well, the obvious start would be: "Tinkerbell Is Not", but past that you've got me stumped. Maybe words like "Karma", "Leet", "Eleet", or "Troll" might creep in there somewhere? You do use all the letters coherently, right? With T standing for Tinkerbell?
Oh, and... yo, moderators, lighten up. I remember when MEEPT! used to get moderated up. Because it was funny. I didn't think this was terribly funny, but more deserving of 0 than -1, at least. Redundant? Please, it's the second post.
And heck, expect some crap in an AOL story. At least we don't have the porn spam mail on slashdot like almost every AOL user gets...
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Didn't the old AOL do this, too? I remember you couldn't really telnet then. I'm not too surprised, since AOL's web browser is still based on Internet Explorer, and they're all still evil.
Anyhow, yet another reason not to upgrade from AOL 4.0, and wait for them to switch to Mozilla, (Netscape 5.0, when it's released...) and hope they don't screw up again. I feel sorry for all those people stuck with AOL, for whatever reason.
AOL: we make your life simpler provided you don't know what you're doing... and we intend to keep it that way!
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DES is dead. Long live DES.
The purely computational reasoning you propose is flawed, and always will be until the exponential advances in technology and algorithms are figured into the calculations.
Distributed.net is *not* the end-all, be-all of decryption. It *is* a massive display of brute-force, cracking power. That's it.
...and if 128-bit encryption is safe enough, why can't we legally be more paranoid? That's the real question.
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All I can say is, it's about time. People have been whining about the duplication of effort on the SETI@Home project for a while.
:)
This abundance of processor time is actually a pretty good argument for a good, open, generic distributed project framework. (unfortunately, most of them don't look as *cool* as SETI.
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This means the movie company feels that it has "lost" $50,000,000, which has been "stolen" from them, since obviously no one will ever see this movie in the theatre or buy their own copy again now that someone has managed to play it under Linux...
I quote from "the Bible" on stupid government hacker punishment, Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, 4:2 and a few pages down... (feel free to read more, it's all relevant--in this case, I didn't even quote *enough*.)
The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally been valued at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence booty, the E911 Document was not software - it
was written in English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this value - for a twelve-page bureaucratic document - frankly incredible. In his "Crime and Puzzlement" manifesto for EFF,
Barlow commented: "We will probably never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though I like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas
Pynchon."
As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in fact, eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by whom - but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was
over.
Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as
follows:
1.A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200
hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2.A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3.Two days of editing cost $367.
4.A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5.Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.
6.Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7.Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken
five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which
was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II
computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the
twelve-page Document.
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