Criminals by definition do not consider the repercussions of their crimes
Total nonsense. Criminals balance risk and reward, just like anyone else. Some crazy criminals probably don't, but that's because they are crazy.
I lived in England as well, and I heard of far less homicides and shootings than I see on American TV everyday.
More people get stabbed in America, too. And more people get beaten to death with fists. Knives and fists aren't any more available in America than in England.
I suggest you read the book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy by Kopel (here's the Amazon page). This book lays out the differences between countries and how they do and do not affect violence.
Culture has a lot to do with violence. England was always pretty peaceful; disarming the average person in England didn't make the place more peaceful.
It's a bad thing because anti-gun web sites are passed through, but the NRA is blocked. One side is being favored over the other side.
It's disingenuous to say "just enable weapon pages". Some people never do figure out how to do that. People using computers in libraries aren't permitted to do that.
What has the NRA ever done to you? How do you know enough about the NRA to dislike them?
Are you upset because NRA offers firearms safety classes? Are you annoyed because the Eddy Eagle program teaches small children to "Stop. Don't touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult."?
Is there some law the NRA is trying to pass or repeal, and you personally think the NRA is on the wrong side?
Or is your dislike fueled by what you have seen in the media? Because if you only know the NRA through the media, you don't know the NRA at all.
For years I knew little of the NRA, but I had this vague idea that they were evil. Once I found out more about the NRA, I found this is not the case. The NRA is similar to the ACLU, except with a much narrower field of interest.
You are absolutely right: we can expect no help on this issue from the ACLU. (At least the national-level one; some state-level ACLUs might actually believe in supporting all ten of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights.)
I can't find it now, but a few years ago I saw a web site with a photo of a Bill of Rights poster put out by the national-level ACLU. The Amendments were not numbered, and the Second Amendment was not on the poster! And IIRC they had split up one of the longer Amendments (the Fourth?) so it looked like two Amendments, so it wasn't obvious that there were only nine on the poster instead of ten.
While I was looking for that, I checked out the ACLU web site. They offer an "Illustrated Bill of Rights" poster. I can't find a big image, and it's hard to make out details of the little one, but I don't think the Second Amendment is on this poster either. (If you have seen this poster full size and can say for sure whether the Second Amendment is on there, please do!)
I can't at the moment remember where I read the "IDE disks RAID" howto; there doesn't seem to be an official HOWTO that matches what I remember. I can summarize it for you easily, though: IDE RAID is just fine, as long as you have one IDE disk per IDE controller. Those cables that let you hook up two drives to one controller? Don't use them. This means that for most motherboards, you will only be able to hook up two drives, and if you want to do RAID 5 you will need a PCI IDE controller board.
Why only one driver per controller? Two reasons: first, IDE sucks with multiple devices so performance suffers; second, if an IDE drive dies, it might confuse the controller, which would take out another drive if both drives are on the same controller. RAID can survive one drive out but not two!
If you need to have a CD or DVD on your RAID computer, and it is an IDE device, hook it up to one of the controllers on the motherboard. I have never yet gotten a CD or DVD to work with a PCI IDE controller. I haven't tried it recently, so maybe with the latest devices it might work. (I sure hope it works with SATA!)
software RAID 5 is simply not an option on an older system
It might be, if the older system is set up as a server, and you don't care how busy its CPU gets as long as it can keep up with a 100 Mbit Ethernet connection.
But certainly if you can score some affordable hardware RAID, there is no reason not to use it!
I'm using pure Linux software RAID. My old server is a RAID 1, and the new one is RAID 5 with 3 disks. Both are IDE, with one IDE drive per controller, as recommended in the IDE RAID HOWTO.
I have both Samba and NFS running. All our computers run Linux now, but some used to have Windows, and some are dual-boot. Samba works very well.
No need for an "honest-to-dog hardware RAID". Linux software RAID is simply great.
Set up a server with multiple hard disks in a Linux software RAID, and run Samba and NFS on that. The Linux software RAID HOWTO explains all you need to know.
0) Mirroring (RAID 1) takes double the disk space; but you could use RAID 5 instead. A 4 disk RAID 5 would take 4/3 as much disk space as you get to use.
1) You could make a partition that is 10% of your disk, make another identical one on another disk, and mirror those. Then put your 10% critical data in there.
2) Do what I do: set up a RAID server, and keep all critical data on that. This is good if you have a home network with multiple computers. It also makes data sharing easy among the computers.
I hate how laws like the DMCA require many court battles to figure out what effect they actually have. The DMCA is so far-reaching, there will be lots more lawsuits like this one, each one hammering out a specific precedent for a specific situation.
With a situation like this, you will always need a lawyer to advise you on what effect the DMCA might have on you.
I'd really rather just see the DMCA gone. I hate seeing long, drawn-out court battles that burn time and money and just peck around the edges.
It's possible that with enough time and money and lawyers, someone could battle through and get a ruling that it's legal to use free software to play DVDs that you own. I'd be happy about that, but it would still be a mixed happiness.
Ack. I just realized that episode 19 isn't the ending. It's just the last one they have done so far. There are supposed to be 22 episodes, so the ending has yet to happen.
I'm sure there will be plenty more silliness before the end.
Even if Microsoft somehow worked around printscreen, users can still take pictures of their screen, or write down what is on the screen.
There is no way to make a system like this totally secure.
handle the X11 protocol in a certain way.
I forgot to say it, but of course you would want to tunnel the X11 through ssh to make it much harder to eavesdrop on the X11 session. That's all the security you need there. I'm sure there are Win32 X servers that can deal with an ssh tunnel.
You can bet Microsoft would bring that up
And anyone promoting the *NIX solution could bring up the total cost, including client access licenses, of the Microsoft solution.
Can it keep the "Administrator" user from reading documents that the higher-ups don't want him to read?
I seriously doubt it. If this system can lock out the admin, then the admin can't fix the system when it breaks!
I can't see what huge benefits this has over a fileserver with proper permissions
Once you let the user copy the file to a non-locked-down filesystem, the file isn't locked down anymore. If Joe Bob with his Windows 98 workstation can pull the file off the fileserver onto his C: drive, what is going to stop him from making copies for his friends? If he can load the file into Word 95, what is going to stop him from saving it to his floppy disk drive or whatever?
My solution requires everyone to log in and edit documents on a secure server. Microsoft's solution, as I understand it, requires everyone to run Windows XP or newer, run Office 2003, and use a Windows 2003 server. I wonder how long it will take the haxx0r crowd to crack Office 2003 and make a version that lets you save local copies of protected documents?
I think the general idea is to control who can see the document. And the implementation requires that your run the digital restrictions management server (Windows Server 2003).
So instead of shred(1), the equivalent free software solution is to set up a *NIX server and keep the documents on that. Set up a remote graphics protocol (X11 or VNC) so that workers can log in to look at the documents under control. Don't set up any kind of network file system; keep those files bottled up. Use *NIX security to control which users can read which files, and which users can edit which files (using tools on the server, of course).
You could even set up some sort of groupware to run purely on the server; email, or maybe even a one-computer USENET!
This won't control emails sent outside the company, but then, nothing really will.
The best part is that the free software solution will cost so much less than Windows Sever 2003 plus all the client licenses. It'll run on much cheaper hardware, too.
I'd say the biggest improvement is that HTML emails don't automatically load images.
The PC World review described this feature, and it sounds like Microsoft has done this exactly the same way that Ximian Evolution does it.
Trolls can try to make hay with that if they like, but I say it's just the obviously right way to handle the problem, so it's no shock that MS did it the same way.
This feature was the one "killer feature" that convinced me to switch to Ximian Evolution. I don't want spammers to be able to confirm my email address using HTML mail. It's good for Outlook users that MS added this feature.
Until Tuesday, SCO had not indicated that its Linux licensing plan is available only to the Fortune 1000, a term generally used to denote the world's 1,000 largest corporations. "We didn't articulate that at the time, and probably should have," Stowell said.
I've been wondering if Stowell is dishonest, or if he really believes the things SCO is saying. (I wonder the same thing about Darl McBride.)
This quote makes it obvious: he's dishonest. The plan was, all along, to only go after the Fortune 1000... but they promised to sue the world, and said that everyone needed to buy licenses, and when individuals called SCO they were not told about the Fortune 1000 thing?
And why did they feel the need to make this particular lie? Why can't they just say "We have now decided to let the little guy slide on the license for a while so we can focus on the big companies." Why try to pretend that was the plan all along?
Do you realy think, people who earns billions with black oil would allow you sell a car/machine/... that will destroy their imperium.
Do you really think, in the age of the Internet, that a secret like this could be kept? You say you have been trying this out; you seem to be still alive.
And that's more than enough of my time spent on this. Have a nice life.
There is not only a sensor, there is also a valve that is operated electrically. This new gizmo will not provide enough power to operate the valve.
Also, at least in the US, the federal government has mandated how much water a toilet can use when flushing (that sound you hear is Thomas Jefferson, spinning in his grave). Toilets need all the pressure from the water to flush away waste; if you make the pressure work to provide electricity, you may have a toilet that doesn't work very well as a toilet.
Toilets either have a battery for the sensor, or they are hooked up to mains power. I think even a battery lasts a long time for this application, so I don't think anyone is really worried about it.
P.S. I think all the auto-toilets should have a button you can push to manually flush when the sensor is not working. Many of them do, but not all of them.
If this were true, this would be huge. But there's no way this is true.
When you burn hydrogen and oxygen, you get water. You are trying to tell us that you can take water and crack it apart into hydrogen and oxygen, and then when you burn it you will get more energy than it took to crack it? How can this work? Where does the extra energy come from?
This is exactly like claiming that you can pump water uphill for X energy cost, then run the water through a generator and get back 40% more energy than it took to pump it uphill.
"Nobody can sell it without risking his life" -- you are either trolling, or deluded.
I'm trying to use nothing but free software.[1] I've discovered that this is very rapidly getting easier. OpenOffice improved a lot in the last year, for example; Scribus shipped a 1.0 release; Evolution is all I want in an email client; GIMP 1.3 is slick and I can't wait for it to ship as GIMP 2.0.
With free software getting better all the time, it's even worse idiocy than ever to start jacking up commercial software with "product activation" codes!
When people ask me if I have any trouble with my free software, I tell them that all software has problems, and I prefer the problems I have with the free software. I do have problems, for example, editing some documents from proprietary software; but I never have problems that my software decides it isn't authorized and won't run. And I don't have to type in long codes just to reinstall things.
On the other hand, I think there has never been a better time for dongles![2]
In the past, dongles were a pain to deal with. Now, with USB, dongles are about as convenient as a software usage restriction scheme can be. Hot-pluggable, because it's USB. Users who are out of USB ports can buy a USB hub. Someone who wants to make a hot spare system can borrow the dongle, set up the spare system, and then return the dongle to the main system.
Yes, software pirates will hack the software so it doesn't need the dongle anymore, and ship the hacked version. Just like they will hack the "product activation" version so it doesn't need to be "activated" anymore. Any software restriction scheme will only inconvenience the people who actually buy the software; the people willing to steal it will be delayed exactly long enough for one person to crack the protection, which isn't long, and then they will suffer less than the paying customers.
I think the chief attraction of "product activation" for companies like Adobe is that it will end any market in used software. They are probably hoping that companies will buy extra copies of their software, e.g. for hot spare computers. Dongles won't have these effects. (I guess you could require a company to trade in the old dongles when they buy upgrades. I'd ship the new dongles out first, however, to keep the customers happy!)
If companies like Adobe want to lock down their software, they should remember that any scheme they use has to compete with free software that just works. They had better use a scheme that is minimally painful for the users.
[1] This rule doesn't apply to games; I'll cheerfully buy a proprietary game, just as I cheerfully pay to buy a new book. With somewhat less cheer, I'll also run proprietary software to view media clips, such as movie trailers in QuickTime.
[2] "Dongle" is a slang term for a bit of hardware that needs to be plugged in to a system to authorize software to run. Story has it that this word is derived from the name of a pioneer in dongles, Don Gall.
He says that he never said it, I never saw any details of where and when he was supposed to have said it, and I cannot think of any reason why a guy as smart as Gates would say such a stupid thing. I don't think he ever said it. Actual evidence could change my mind, of course.
the IBM PC design dumped the video memory at the 640K location, thus splitting the memory and making the top third almost useless.
It's true that video memory was placed at the 640K location. However, I can easily forgive the hardware designers who made that decision.
You were supposed to use the BIOS to write all your software. All of your IO was supposed to be through the BIOS, and if a newer machine came out with more than 640K of RAM, there would be a newer BIOS that would handle it.
The problem was that IBM's BIOS sucked. There was no "write a string" command in the BIOS; there was only "write one character". (Later versions of the BIOS did fix this but it was too late.) Since there was overhead to calling the BIOS, and since those early PCs were dog-slow anyway, no one wanted to use the BIOS like you were supposed to; it was so much faster and easier to just detect the video, figure out the address of the character buffer, and blast the characters directly into the video card.
Because there were so many apps that hard-coded the address of the video card, it would have been very painful to have moved the video buffers higher in memory. Thus the 640K limit.
If only the BIOS had provided a call that returned the address of the video buffer, and all those applications had used that. Then later PCs could have moved the video card up and we could easily have run 800K DOS apps. Oh, well.
The true moral of the story: don't design an API that's so bad no one will use it. Or to quote Cooper's Law of Standards: "If it doesn't work, it won't stay standard."
Slashdot Mirror
Look at Europe
Europe is not homogeneous. In England, almost no guns are legal anymore; in Switzerland, almost every home has a loaded assault rifle in it.
"let's keep guns legal and easy to acquire, so that I can shoot my neighbours and/or my family when I want to"
Guns cause crime, eh? How often do people in Switzerland pull out their assault rifles and shoot their neighbors and families?
steveha
Criminals by definition do not consider the repercussions of their crimes
Total nonsense. Criminals balance risk and reward, just like anyone else. Some crazy criminals probably don't, but that's because they are crazy.
I lived in England as well, and I heard of far less homicides and shootings than I see on American TV everyday.
More people get stabbed in America, too. And more people get beaten to death with fists. Knives and fists aren't any more available in America than in England.
I suggest you read the book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy by Kopel (here's the Amazon page). This book lays out the differences between countries and how they do and do not affect violence.
Culture has a lot to do with violence. England was always pretty peaceful; disarming the average person in England didn't make the place more peaceful.
steveha
It's a bad thing because anti-gun web sites are passed through, but the NRA is blocked. One side is being favored over the other side.
It's disingenuous to say "just enable weapon pages". Some people never do figure out how to do that. People using computers in libraries aren't permitted to do that.
steveha
Okay, seriously. Not flaming here. Not trolling.
What has the NRA ever done to you? How do you know enough about the NRA to dislike them?
Are you upset because NRA offers firearms safety classes? Are you annoyed because the Eddy Eagle program teaches small children to "Stop. Don't touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult."?
Is there some law the NRA is trying to pass or repeal, and you personally think the NRA is on the wrong side?
Or is your dislike fueled by what you have seen in the media? Because if you only know the NRA through the media, you don't know the NRA at all.
For years I knew little of the NRA, but I had this vague idea that they were evil. Once I found out more about the NRA, I found this is not the case. The NRA is similar to the ACLU, except with a much narrower field of interest.
steveha
You are absolutely right: we can expect no help on this issue from the ACLU. (At least the national-level one; some state-level ACLUs might actually believe in supporting all ten of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights.)
I can't find it now, but a few years ago I saw a web site with a photo of a Bill of Rights poster put out by the national-level ACLU. The Amendments were not numbered, and the Second Amendment was not on the poster! And IIRC they had split up one of the longer Amendments (the Fourth?) so it looked like two Amendments, so it wasn't obvious that there were only nine on the poster instead of ten.
While I was looking for that, I checked out the ACLU web site. They offer an "Illustrated Bill of Rights" poster. I can't find a big image, and it's hard to make out details of the little one, but I don't think the Second Amendment is on this poster either. (If you have seen this poster full size and can say for sure whether the Second Amendment is on there, please do!)
http://www.aclu.org/Store/Store.cfm?ID=92&c=5
Expect no help at all from the ACLU.
steveha
Debian GNU/Linux. I'm using the "unstable" branch on my desktops, and "stable" on my servers.
http://www.debian.org
steveha
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other- formats/html_single/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html
- formats/html_single/NFS-HOWTO.html
That's the big one.
I can't at the moment remember where I read the "IDE disks RAID" howto; there doesn't seem to be an official HOWTO that matches what I remember. I can summarize it for you easily, though: IDE RAID is just fine, as long as you have one IDE disk per IDE controller. Those cables that let you hook up two drives to one controller? Don't use them. This means that for most motherboards, you will only be able to hook up two drives, and if you want to do RAID 5 you will need a PCI IDE controller board.
Why only one driver per controller? Two reasons: first, IDE sucks with multiple devices so performance suffers; second, if an IDE drive dies, it might confuse the controller, which would take out another drive if both drives are on the same controller. RAID can survive one drive out but not two!
If you need to have a CD or DVD on your RAID computer, and it is an IDE device, hook it up to one of the controllers on the motherboard. I have never yet gotten a CD or DVD to work with a PCI IDE controller. I haven't tried it recently, so maybe with the latest devices it might work. (I sure hope it works with SATA!)
As for NFS, I just read the NFS HOWTO:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other
My Linux distribution had already set up the NFS server software, so I just needed to set up the config files.
steveha
software RAID 5 is simply not an option on an older system
It might be, if the older system is set up as a server, and you don't care how busy its CPU gets as long as it can keep up with a 100 Mbit Ethernet connection.
But certainly if you can score some affordable hardware RAID, there is no reason not to use it!
steveha
I'm using pure Linux software RAID. My old server is a RAID 1, and the new one is RAID 5 with 3 disks. Both are IDE, with one IDE drive per controller, as recommended in the IDE RAID HOWTO.
I have both Samba and NFS running. All our computers run Linux now, but some used to have Windows, and some are dual-boot. Samba works very well.
steveha
How to do this is spelled out in the book Linux Server Hacks by Rob Flickenger. See tips #41 and #42.
s /
Or see online:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshot
The beauty part: export the snapshots back to the users with NFS. When they lose a file they can get it back without asking the sysadmin to do it!
steveha
No need for an "honest-to-dog hardware RAID". Linux software RAID is simply great.
Set up a server with multiple hard disks in a Linux software RAID, and run Samba and NFS on that. The Linux software RAID HOWTO explains all you need to know.
steveha
0) Mirroring (RAID 1) takes double the disk space; but you could use RAID 5 instead. A 4 disk RAID 5 would take 4/3 as much disk space as you get to use.
1) You could make a partition that is 10% of your disk, make another identical one on another disk, and mirror those. Then put your 10% critical data in there.
2) Do what I do: set up a RAID server, and keep all critical data on that. This is good if you have a home network with multiple computers. It also makes data sharing easy among the computers.
steveha
I hate how laws like the DMCA require many court battles to figure out what effect they actually have. The DMCA is so far-reaching, there will be lots more lawsuits like this one, each one hammering out a specific precedent for a specific situation.
With a situation like this, you will always need a lawyer to advise you on what effect the DMCA might have on you.
I'd really rather just see the DMCA gone. I hate seeing long, drawn-out court battles that burn time and money and just peck around the edges.
It's possible that with enough time and money and lawyers, someone could battle through and get a ruling that it's legal to use free software to play DVDs that you own. I'd be happy about that, but it would still be a mixed happiness.
steveha
Ack. I just realized that episode 19 isn't the ending. It's just the last one they have done so far. There are supposed to be 22 episodes, so the ending has yet to happen.
I'm sure there will be plenty more silliness before the end.
steveha
Different people, different tastes, I guess. I loved every episode, right up until the end.
I didn't really like the ending, though. Not goofy enough. They had this great silly tone going on, and the ending didn't quite match.
steveha
The problem is they can still printscreen
Even if Microsoft somehow worked around printscreen, users can still take pictures of their screen, or write down what is on the screen.
There is no way to make a system like this totally secure.
handle the X11 protocol in a certain way.
I forgot to say it, but of course you would want to tunnel the X11 through ssh to make it much harder to eavesdrop on the X11 session. That's all the security you need there. I'm sure there are Win32 X servers that can deal with an ssh tunnel.
You can bet Microsoft would bring that up
And anyone promoting the *NIX solution could bring up the total cost, including client access licenses, of the Microsoft solution.
steveha
Can it keep the "Administrator" user from reading documents that the higher-ups don't want him to read?
I seriously doubt it. If this system can lock out the admin, then the admin can't fix the system when it breaks!
I can't see what huge benefits this has over a fileserver with proper permissions
Once you let the user copy the file to a non-locked-down filesystem, the file isn't locked down anymore. If Joe Bob with his Windows 98 workstation can pull the file off the fileserver onto his C: drive, what is going to stop him from making copies for his friends? If he can load the file into Word 95, what is going to stop him from saving it to his floppy disk drive or whatever?
My solution requires everyone to log in and edit documents on a secure server. Microsoft's solution, as I understand it, requires everyone to run Windows XP or newer, run Office 2003, and use a Windows 2003 server. I wonder how long it will take the haxx0r crowd to crack Office 2003 and make a version that lets you save local copies of protected documents?
steveha
I think the general idea is to control who can see the document. And the implementation requires that your run the digital restrictions management server (Windows Server 2003).
So instead of shred(1), the equivalent free software solution is to set up a *NIX server and keep the documents on that. Set up a remote graphics protocol (X11 or VNC) so that workers can log in to look at the documents under control. Don't set up any kind of network file system; keep those files bottled up. Use *NIX security to control which users can read which files, and which users can edit which files (using tools on the server, of course).
You could even set up some sort of groupware to run purely on the server; email, or maybe even a one-computer USENET!
This won't control emails sent outside the company, but then, nothing really will.
The best part is that the free software solution will cost so much less than Windows Sever 2003 plus all the client licenses. It'll run on much cheaper hardware, too.
steveha
I'd say the biggest improvement is that HTML emails don't automatically load images.
The PC World review described this feature, and it sounds like Microsoft has done this exactly the same way that Ximian Evolution does it.
Trolls can try to make hay with that if they like, but I say it's just the obviously right way to handle the problem, so it's no shock that MS did it the same way.
This feature was the one "killer feature" that convinced me to switch to Ximian Evolution. I don't want spammers to be able to confirm my email address using HTML mail. It's good for Outlook users that MS added this feature.
steveha
Until Tuesday, SCO had not indicated that its Linux licensing plan is available only to the Fortune 1000, a term generally used to denote the world's 1,000 largest corporations. "We didn't articulate that at the time, and probably should have," Stowell said.
I've been wondering if Stowell is dishonest, or if he really believes the things SCO is saying. (I wonder the same thing about Darl McBride.)
This quote makes it obvious: he's dishonest. The plan was, all along, to only go after the Fortune 1000... but they promised to sue the world, and said that everyone needed to buy licenses, and when individuals called SCO they were not told about the Fortune 1000 thing?
And why did they feel the need to make this particular lie? Why can't they just say "We have now decided to let the little guy slide on the license for a while so we can focus on the big companies." Why try to pretend that was the plan all along?
steveha
Do you realy think, people who earns billions with black oil would allow you sell a car/machine/... that will destroy their imperium.
Do you really think, in the age of the Internet, that a secret like this could be kept? You say you have been trying this out; you seem to be still alive.
And that's more than enough of my time spent on this. Have a nice life.
steveha
There is not only a sensor, there is also a valve that is operated electrically. This new gizmo will not provide enough power to operate the valve.
Also, at least in the US, the federal government has mandated how much water a toilet can use when flushing (that sound you hear is Thomas Jefferson, spinning in his grave). Toilets need all the pressure from the water to flush away waste; if you make the pressure work to provide electricity, you may have a toilet that doesn't work very well as a toilet.
Toilets either have a battery for the sensor, or they are hooked up to mains power. I think even a battery lasts a long time for this application, so I don't think anyone is really worried about it.
P.S. I think all the auto-toilets should have a button you can push to manually flush when the sensor is not working. Many of them do, but not all of them.
steveha
If this were true, this would be huge. But there's no way this is true.
When you burn hydrogen and oxygen, you get water. You are trying to tell us that you can take water and crack it apart into hydrogen and oxygen, and then when you burn it you will get more energy than it took to crack it? How can this work? Where does the extra energy come from?
This is exactly like claiming that you can pump water uphill for X energy cost, then run the water through a generator and get back 40% more energy than it took to pump it uphill.
"Nobody can sell it without risking his life" -- you are either trolling, or deluded.
steveha
I'm trying to use nothing but free software.[1] I've discovered that this is very rapidly getting easier. OpenOffice improved a lot in the last year, for example; Scribus shipped a 1.0 release; Evolution is all I want in an email client; GIMP 1.3 is slick and I can't wait for it to ship as GIMP 2.0.
With free software getting better all the time, it's even worse idiocy than ever to start jacking up commercial software with "product activation" codes!
When people ask me if I have any trouble with my free software, I tell them that all software has problems, and I prefer the problems I have with the free software. I do have problems, for example, editing some documents from proprietary software; but I never have problems that my software decides it isn't authorized and won't run. And I don't have to type in long codes just to reinstall things.
On the other hand, I think there has never been a better time for dongles![2]
In the past, dongles were a pain to deal with. Now, with USB, dongles are about as convenient as a software usage restriction scheme can be. Hot-pluggable, because it's USB. Users who are out of USB ports can buy a USB hub. Someone who wants to make a hot spare system can borrow the dongle, set up the spare system, and then return the dongle to the main system.
Yes, software pirates will hack the software so it doesn't need the dongle anymore, and ship the hacked version. Just like they will hack the "product activation" version so it doesn't need to be "activated" anymore. Any software restriction scheme will only inconvenience the people who actually buy the software; the people willing to steal it will be delayed exactly long enough for one person to crack the protection, which isn't long, and then they will suffer less than the paying customers.
I think the chief attraction of "product activation" for companies like Adobe is that it will end any market in used software. They are probably hoping that companies will buy extra copies of their software, e.g. for hot spare computers. Dongles won't have these effects. (I guess you could require a company to trade in the old dongles when they buy upgrades. I'd ship the new dongles out first, however, to keep the customers happy!)
If companies like Adobe want to lock down their software, they should remember that any scheme they use has to compete with free software that just works. They had better use a scheme that is minimally painful for the users.
[1] This rule doesn't apply to games; I'll cheerfully buy a proprietary game, just as I cheerfully pay to buy a new book. With somewhat less cheer, I'll also run proprietary software to view media clips, such as movie trailers in QuickTime.
[2] "Dongle" is a slang term for a bit of hardware that needs to be plugged in to a system to authorize software to run. Story has it that this word is derived from the name of a pioneer in dongles, Don Gall.
steveha
I have heard that Gates never said this
He says that he never said it, I never saw any details of where and when he was supposed to have said it, and I cannot think of any reason why a guy as smart as Gates would say such a stupid thing. I don't think he ever said it. Actual evidence could change my mind, of course.
the IBM PC design dumped the video memory at the 640K location, thus splitting the memory and making the top third almost useless.
It's true that video memory was placed at the 640K location. However, I can easily forgive the hardware designers who made that decision.
You were supposed to use the BIOS to write all your software. All of your IO was supposed to be through the BIOS, and if a newer machine came out with more than 640K of RAM, there would be a newer BIOS that would handle it.
The problem was that IBM's BIOS sucked. There was no "write a string" command in the BIOS; there was only "write one character". (Later versions of the BIOS did fix this but it was too late.) Since there was overhead to calling the BIOS, and since those early PCs were dog-slow anyway, no one wanted to use the BIOS like you were supposed to; it was so much faster and easier to just detect the video, figure out the address of the character buffer, and blast the characters directly into the video card.
Because there were so many apps that hard-coded the address of the video card, it would have been very painful to have moved the video buffers higher in memory. Thus the 640K limit.
If only the BIOS had provided a call that returned the address of the video buffer, and all those applications had used that. Then later PCs could have moved the video card up and we could easily have run 800K DOS apps. Oh, well.
The true moral of the story: don't design an API that's so bad no one will use it. Or to quote Cooper's Law of Standards: "If it doesn't work, it won't stay standard."
steveha