Someone, somewhere made a mistake. Not the people who used the word Free to describe un-encumbered software, but the guys who built the base of the english language. The French had Liberte and Gratuit. One of them means Free in a good way (free of hinderances, patents, ability to see source, etc.) The other (gratuit) means free in a way that turns most people into greedy, useless bums.
The superhighway (God how I hate that word!) now has people begging on the offramps. Wonderful. What is it with people that makes them believe they have a right to everything they want without paying for it? Tell that same person he's not getting a paycheck this month and watch the brown stuff collide with the rotating airblowing thingy.
I see people crying their eyes out on/. everyday, about how America should be Free. How the principles of fair competition should succeed. Then I see the same people sprouting communist crap about 'Why should I have to pay for this?' 'They owe it to me'.
Give it a rest. No-one is buying it. Companies need to make money so they can pay you greedy gits to have the lifestyles you want. Don't keep trying to stop them. Especially ones that are doing innovative things. MS is not innovative. They rip you off, tie you into bad security and privacy, and are generally a nasty company. But Tivo are good. You are whinging about paying $10 a month for cool stuff. Yet there are people in countries who gladly spend a weeks salary every month JUST ON LOCAL PHONE CALLS, because they have no choice and value communication so much.
If you don't like the way Tivo are doing it, get off your beer guzzling, tv drooling rear, and go and do something about it. Do it better. Then I'll listen. Until then, you're a whinging luser!
My copy of decss is at http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/stand/DeCSS.zip
The links to that, and css-auth are at
http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/wayne/index.sht ml
And these pages are in the U.K. Can they still sue me? More importantly, do I care ? There is no DMCA here (yet!) /* Wayne Pascoe
Seeing as the MPAA have decided that we are all a bunch of criminal zealots for deciding to spend our time and resources writing software and then giving it away, can't the Apache Foundation change their licence to prohibit the MPAA from using Apache on their servers? Then they can see the joys of Free software in it's proper light. This stuff isn't just written so that there can be free software. It's written so that there can be BETTER software.
Ah screw it... What do hollywood know about quality? /* Wayne Pascoe
What's left for God to do?
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
I guess he could play hide and seek with what DNA he doesn't want us to have ?;-) /* Wayne Pascoe
No, this is what happens when large chunks of the community ignore the problem until it's too late. Had enough people mobilised early enough, then something could have been done. Organisations like stand did. Many of us did. I abused confidentiality and knowledge that my fiance had in order to harrass more important people about this.
This has nothing to do with lack of consitition. This has everything to do with lack of backbone! /* Wayne Pascoe
Riiiiggggghhhtt... So this is news now? Why wasn't this news when we were begging places like/. to post about it over the past several months? We've been trying to stop it. We've been writing our mp's. And no-one cared. Now that it's through suddenly everyone notices... Oh, look. The horse is gone... Better bolt that barn door. Arrrggghh! This makes me sick!
See http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/stand if you want to see a letter from a member of parlaiment blatently admitting that the 'intercept regime' as she calls it is already in place! See the rest of her fob off. Then work out why we were scared !
Thanks for noticing. Now notice sooner next time please!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from the article, we're looking at a best case of two years before we see this. They say that they're only presenting in January 2001, and:
In the best-case scenario, the itrace rollout will take 18 months.
In that time, shouldn't we be approaching IPV6 time anyway, and doesn't IPV6 already have mechanism in place to prevent spoofing of address headers, making the trace a lot easier using traceroute? Maybe I'm being thick, but this looks redundant before it even gets going.
I've seen some posts here saying that 'The DMCA said so, and you have to live by that.'
Yes. If you're an American. This is not just an American forum though. There are actually countries where region locking is considered anti-competitive and hence illegal. Look at New Zealand. It's only because the American public willing surrender their rights little by little, that you're prepared to live with this.
In other places, there is nothing remarkable about this player. In South Africa, most shops will show you the region beating features before you take the player out the door. I had three different sales people explain the region-defeating features of three different players, in one afternoon. /* Wayne Pascoe
I might be wrong, but isn't the reason that they have to keep the features limited down to the fact that you have to compile the driver against a kernel version (even if it's available as a module) ? Which means that they either have to maintain binary modules for each and every kernel that comes around (which is lots) or they can release a limited functionality version as source that everyone can compile against the current kernel.
Because Linux development is fairly fast paced, there is generally a new kernel out every month or so. For a company to have to keep their binary modules current, can be a drain on resources. Creative labs failed miserably with the SB Live drivers... I was running a kernel with severe NFS problems, just to be able to have my sound card working. For them, opensourcing the driver worked. I'm not sure how you'd deal with it if you couldn't! /* Wayne Pascoe
A friend of mine recently lost a database on his site by someone 'social-engineering' a username and password to the web interface from one of his staff. The site logged the ip that the person doing the deletions came from, but it was a proxy's IP. The ISP in question didn't store their cache logs for more than a day or two, and so could not tell him the account he was attacked from. They had backups of the data and were back up in minutes, and the pleb who leaked the password was beaten soundly, but it would have been nice to know who-dunnit:-) /* Wayne Pascoe
I've read the article. And now I've read the comments. But so what? So girls don't wanna be geeks for the most part? And this is bad, why?
It takes all types of people doing all kinds of things to make the world go round. These days, so many school leaving males wan't to rush out and be an MSCE, that there need to be people pursuing other things. Women often offer us a 'sanity mirror' that we can look into and see just how mental we're being about things. They have good perspective as a rule. Men lack this. That is why Windows exists:-)
So if women want to do other things, I say go for it. If women want to be geeks too, I'm all for that. Just don't complain if you date a geek and you find out she doesn't have time for you when you want it, because she's working on a cool hack. Been there. Didn't enjoy it. Find a woman who understands and supports what you do, but has her own life as well!
The 1x1 pixel gif is used by many adserving products. They normally deliver it with every ad, and the cookie that the adserver sets is normally attached to this gif. This gif is used to count how many ads are delivered. Clicking on the main image / flash feature will then count the click, by having an href that normally looks something like : A Href="http://bad.evil.adserver.com/Software/ads/cl ick_an_ad.cgi/SITENAME/PAGENAME/CAMPAIGN NAME?_REDIRCT_TO="http://theadvertiserssite.com""
The sitename, pagename and campaignname are normally variables in whatever ad tag code you are putting on your page. These are then parsed by the adserver when it serves the ad and filled in with data that is meaningful to the server. This data can normally be completely meaningless to the web server that is serving it. The pagename doesn't have to match the pagename on the webserver, but merely the commonly agreed upon name. So I could lable a page as www.mysite.com/apage and schedule ads to that. But the site itself, would actually be www.mysite.co.uk/anotherpage.html and would just ask the server for an ad for www.mysite.com/apage
When you click on an ad, that data is sent back to the adserver so that it knows what ad you are trying to click through on, and what campaign to assign the click-through to.
This is all from memory and may be slightly flawed. But if you can read passed my garbled wording and see the idea, you'll have the picture.
DISCLAIMER: I used to work with web adverting but I'm just an (ab)normal sysadmin now. /* Wayne Pascoe
I have nothing against banner ads. They used to pay my salary. As long as they're non-intrusive and relevant to the audience of the site, I think they're great.
But then you look at things like a recent levis campaign. Every time you went to the home page of a site you got to be the proud downloader of between 80 and 100k of flash video for a popup levis ad. And you'd be sitting reading something, and it pops up right over what you're reading. Now this is intrusive and is starting to interfere with my browsing experience.
What's even worse is the Compaq non-stop campaign. My natural reaction to a popup ad is to click the x in the corner and kill it. The idea behind the compaq ad, was Compaq are non-stoppable. So they made their ad KEEP coming back up about 4 or 5 times. This is just plain annoying and adds stress and extra mouse movement to my already ruined wrists and my already stressed life. I don't need this.
So I guess, yeah, lawsuits are dumb, but as what happened with the Prof vs Demon where they settled, maybe this will scare the hell out of advertisers and sites that use this kind of advertising, and we'll all have a more pleasant browse experience. /* Wayne Pascoe
Re:Diversion from the main task/ counterproductive
on
Terminus Demo Released
·
· Score: 1
I think you're missing something really important here. The slashdot name - News for nerds, stuff that matters. It's not Slashdot - News for busexecs, stuff that counts:-)
More importantly, this is not really a Linux site. It's a technology site, and us nerds (or geeks as I prefer) like our games. So this is a news article for nerds, and it does matter. Most importantly, it highlights the ongoing acceptance of the Linux platform by developers! So I don't really think that this is at all counterproductive!
I don't know what proverb you mean, but the closed source model is about security with obscurity! The open source model is the exact opposite. That's how we find and fix problems. In public. And that's what makes us faster!
I have a Sony laptop. Well, I make the monthly payments on a Sony vaio. My better half has kidnapped it. When it arrived it was horribly configured with tons of extra crap that I didn't want or need on it. I still use windows for games, so I thought I'd leave a gig for windows and use the other 5 for Linux. Because of the way the recovery CD works, I ended up using my oem cd of win98SE from the office to do the reinstall. I don't see this as being wrong, because I am licenced for the copy that came with the Sony, and I used that key, but what a pain in the ass!
The best is trying to get warranty stuff out of Sony though. Their standard response (including to '2 keys on the keyboard don't work') is to reinstall from the recovery CD. Which just trashes everything else that you have on the machine. To make a long story short, I've just moved completely to a Linux environment on all bar one of my machines (my big games box) and now life is good. If MS do this to all machines, not just laptops, they're going to be pushing customers to Linux. Ain't it great ?
The main reason for complaints by people who are trying to mirror things when announcements get posted on/., is that it makes their life hard.
These people are trying to do us all a favour by carrying software that we want and letting us get to it quicker. These people make no money from us. They are doing us a _BIG_ favour. By/. making announcements before the mirrors have the download, they make it hard for the mirrors to get the download. They did it to helix-gnome the other day as well. And this pisses mirror maintainers off because they now have to expend a lot of time and effort so that we can moan because they don't update fast enough.
Help our mirror maintainers to help you. Request/. to be responsible when making announcements!
I've worked in South Africa and the United Kingdom, and I can definitely say that age does count against you. And it's not got anything to do with being brighter or better. It's got to do with being more exploitable. Every job ad I've seen in the last year has said 'young programmer' or 'young sysadmin'. When I was leaving my last job I was helping them replace me. I was a sysadmin there. And they _WOULD NOT_ look at anyone over 25. So it's there even in sysadmin.
I believe that the current crop of geeks are doing this to ourselves. I was working 14 hours a day there, and I was on standby the rest of the day. I was also on standby all weekend every weekend for 6 months. No partying. No getting drunk. No going anywhere that I couldn't get a phone line and jack in to work should the need arise. Mind you, my perl got a lot better during that time;-) But we let companies do this to us, and they know that they can get away it. They couldn't with an older person or a person with a family. Why do you think they always want to know if you're married at the interview?
So for those of you who are taking solace in the thought of quitting the coding and going sysadmin when you get older, make other plans. I figure I've got till I'm 30 at the current rate. And then I'll put a bullet in my head.
I've seen a lot of people here saying that Metallica don't get it. That we're just peacefully sharing information. While I agree that there is an important aspect that they don't get, this isn't it. We're not sharing information. We're sharing the fruits of their labour and they're seeing _NOTHING_ in return. To get this out the way fast, I believe that they don't understand the advertising potential of mp3's. My CD collection has almost doubled in the last 8 months. I hear a song on the radio, download a couple of mp3's from the artist, then buy some of their cd's if I like them. And if I don't like them, I have more cd money to spend on a band that I do like, and the mp3's get binned.
On every other point, I believe they are right. I've never seen anyone here advocating that we rush out and copy (pir8) MS Software. I see people advocating that we choose alternatives to MS software. Why is that? Because copying the software would be wrong! Plain and simple! MS chose that they want us to pay for their software. Linus Torvalds said we could have his for free. As did RMS. So we use Linus's and RMS's software and we leave MS's alone. If you have a problem with buying Metallica's music, then you have no right to it. Same way you have no right to Microsoft's software. Choose an alternative, or dig out your wallet. But don't steal.
Subject line with apologies to the disclaimer on Ixnay on the Hombre
Question. What is the difference between me stealing a car and stealing an mp3 (piece of work that someone sweated to make and wants to make money off of)... Answer... If the cops hunt me down for the car I go to jail. If someone tracks me down for the mp3, hundreds of ill infomed anarchists come to my defence and say how wrong it is.
Why is it not ok for someone to defend their right to copyright something in the manner of their choosing? None of us complain when someone goes to the wall and screams lawyers in cases of GPL violation. Even though these are often unintentional! But let someone try and protect something that we want for free, and it's battle stations.
Lose the dual standards. Never has my sig been more valid!
It's always nice to see that we're not clouding this issue with little things like facts!
Here is a quote from Mr Valenti : For example, in analog you have to go down to a Blockbuster store, then you have to copy it, then it has to be sent physically. Somebody's got to take a truck or a car or DHL and get it to another country. There is a brutish kind of awkward distribution system. Not so on the Internet, where some obscure person sitting in a basement can throw up on the Internet a brand new motion picture, and with the click of a button have it go with the speed of light to 6 billion people around the world, instantaneously. It's totally different, totally different. First off, there is still the akward situation where someone has to go and buy this DVD. Secondly, I don't know that many obscure people sitting in their basements who have the bandwidth to distribute +- 5Gig of data to the 6 billion people in question. Let alone at the speed of light being discussed. For even one person to download a 5gig dvd image you'd have to have a ton of available bandwidth. For 4 or 5 people, even more. For 6 billion people downloading this 5gig image at a realistic speed, you would have to have more bandwidth going into the back of your machine that you can buy. And all this to save £18 pound on a DVD? I don't think so!
While we're on the point of all this bandwidth that you'd need to have, take into account that America is one of the few places with unmetered Internet access. It's coming to Britian, but slowly. And the rest of the world? I used to pay for my 'net access by the minute back home in South Africa. Same goes for most of the world. The cost of downloading this 5gig file would just not be worth it.
But I would like to make it known that if this is the kind of bandwidth floating about down at the MPAA, I'd like a job there... I only have 320K... Light speed would be nicer. Someone please beat this man with a clue-stick!
Just a quickie here... I see a lot of people posting who seem to be under the impression that distributed DoS attacks implicitly imply co-operation of more than one person. In many cases this is not true. The core to a Distributed DoS is to gain unauthorised access to many machines and then to use all those machines at once to Deny Service to your target. This can, with some simple scripting all be done by one person once they have gained unauthorised access to enough machines.
So we're not necesarily looking at a new era in anarchistic co-operation:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Someone, somewhere made a mistake. Not the people who used the word Free to describe un-encumbered software, but the guys who built the base of the english language. The French had Liberte and Gratuit. One of them means Free in a good way (free of hinderances, patents, ability to see source, etc.) The other (gratuit) means free in a way that turns most people into greedy, useless bums.
/. everyday, about how America should be Free. How the principles of fair competition should succeed. Then I see the same people sprouting communist crap about 'Why should I have to pay for this?' 'They owe it to me'.
The superhighway (God how I hate that word!) now has people begging on the offramps. Wonderful. What is it with people that makes them believe they have a right to everything they want without paying for it? Tell that same person he's not getting a paycheck this month and watch the brown stuff collide with the rotating airblowing thingy.
I see people crying their eyes out on
Give it a rest. No-one is buying it. Companies need to make money so they can pay you greedy gits to have the lifestyles you want. Don't keep trying to stop them. Especially ones that are doing innovative things. MS is not innovative. They rip you off, tie you into bad security and privacy, and are generally a nasty company. But Tivo are good. You are whinging about paying $10 a month for cool stuff. Yet there are people in countries who gladly spend a weeks salary every month JUST ON LOCAL PHONE CALLS, because they have no choice and value communication so much.
If you don't like the way Tivo are doing it, get off your beer guzzling, tv drooling rear, and go and do something about it. Do it better. Then I'll listen. Until then, you're a whinging luser!
HTML needs a rant tag - Alan Cox
/* Wayne Pascoe
My copy of decss is at http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/stand/DeCSS.zipt ml
The links to that, and css-auth are at
http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/wayne/index.sh
And these pages are in the U.K. Can they still sue me? More importantly, do I care ? There is no DMCA here (yet!)
/* Wayne Pascoe
Seeing as the MPAA have decided that we are all a bunch of criminal zealots for deciding to spend our time and resources writing software and then giving it away, can't the Apache Foundation change their licence to prohibit the MPAA from using Apache on their servers? Then they can see the joys of Free software in it's proper light. This stuff isn't just written so that there can be free software. It's written so that there can be BETTER software.
Ah screw it... What do hollywood know about quality?
/* Wayne Pascoe
I guess he could play hide and seek with what DNA he doesn't want us to have ? ;-)
/* Wayne Pascoe
Those who exchange their freedom for security shall have neither. Can't remember who said it. But take note of it!
/* Wayne Pascoe
Can't remember who it was that said
"Those who sacrifice their freedom for security shall have neither!"
Heed this!
/* Wayne Pascoe
No, this is what happens when large chunks of the community ignore the problem until it's too late. Had enough people mobilised early enough, then something could have been done. Organisations like stand did. Many of us did. I abused confidentiality and knowledge that my fiance had in order to harrass more important people about this.
This has nothing to do with lack of consitition. This has everything to do with lack of backbone!
/* Wayne Pascoe
Riiiiggggghhhtt... So this is news now? Why wasn't this news when we were begging places like /. to post about it over the past several months? We've been trying to stop it. We've been writing our mp's. And no-one cared. Now that it's through suddenly everyone notices... Oh, look. The horse is gone... Better bolt that barn door. Arrrggghh! This makes me sick!
See http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/stand if you want to see a letter from a member of parlaiment blatently admitting that the 'intercept regime' as she calls it is already in place! See the rest of her fob off. Then work out why we were scared !
Thanks for noticing. Now notice sooner next time please!
/* Wayne Pascoe
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from the article, we're looking at a best case of two years before we see this. They say that they're only presenting in January 2001, and :
In the best-case scenario, the itrace rollout will take 18 months.
In that time, shouldn't we be approaching IPV6 time anyway, and doesn't IPV6 already have mechanism in place to prevent spoofing of address headers, making the trace a lot easier using traceroute? Maybe I'm being thick, but this looks redundant before it even gets going.
/* Wayne Pascoe
I've seen some posts here saying that 'The DMCA said so, and you have to live by that.'
Yes. If you're an American. This is not just an American forum though. There are actually countries where region locking is considered anti-competitive and hence illegal. Look at New Zealand. It's only because the American public willing surrender their rights little by little, that you're prepared to live with this.
In other places, there is nothing remarkable about this player. In South Africa, most shops will show you the region beating features before you take the player out the door. I had three different sales people explain the region-defeating features of three different players, in one afternoon.
/* Wayne Pascoe
I might be wrong, but isn't the reason that they have to keep the features limited down to the fact that you have to compile the driver against a kernel version (even if it's available as a module) ? Which means that they either have to maintain binary modules for each and every kernel that comes around (which is lots) or they can release a limited functionality version as source that everyone can compile against the current kernel.
Because Linux development is fairly fast paced, there is generally a new kernel out every month or so. For a company to have to keep their binary modules current, can be a drain on resources. Creative labs failed miserably with the SB Live drivers... I was running a kernel with severe NFS problems, just to be able to have my sound card working. For them, opensourcing the driver worked. I'm not sure how you'd deal with it if you couldn't!
/* Wayne Pascoe
A friend of mine recently lost a database on his site by someone 'social-engineering' a username and password to the web interface from one of his staff. The site logged the ip that the person doing the deletions came from, but it was a proxy's IP. The ISP in question didn't store their cache logs for more than a day or two, and so could not tell him the account he was attacked from. They had backups of the data and were back up in minutes, and the pleb who leaked the password was beaten soundly, but it would have been nice to know who-dunnit :-)
/* Wayne Pascoe
Take a look at
http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/stand/hoc2.jpg
This is a letter from my MP on the RIP issue. The first line states :
The Bill is designed to ensure that the intercept regime, which already exists, takes proper account of technological developments.
This is a letter from a member of parliament in England, on official House of Commons letterhead paper. (take a look at hoc1.jpg for proof)
So what's to investigate ? =:-0
/* Wayne Pascoe
I've read the article. And now I've read the comments. But so what? So girls don't wanna be geeks for the most part? And this is bad, why?
:-)
It takes all types of people doing all kinds of things to make the world go round. These days, so many school leaving males wan't to rush out and be an MSCE, that there need to be people pursuing other things. Women often offer us a 'sanity mirror' that we can look into and see just how mental we're being about things. They have good perspective as a rule. Men lack this. That is why Windows exists
So if women want to do other things, I say go for it. If women want to be geeks too, I'm all for that. Just don't complain if you date a geek and you find out she doesn't have time for you when you want it, because she's working on a cool hack. Been there. Didn't enjoy it. Find a woman who understands and supports what you do, but has her own life as well!
Too tired to be coherent.
/* Wayne Pascoe
The 1x1 pixel gif is used by many adserving products. They normally deliver it with every ad, and the cookie that the adserver sets is normally attached to this gif. This gif is used to count how many ads are delivered. Clicking on the main image / flash feature will then count the click, by having an href that normally looks something like :l ick_an_ad.cgi/SITENAME/PAGENAME/CAMPAIGN NAME?_REDIRCT_TO="http://theadvertiserssite.com""
A Href="http://bad.evil.adserver.com/Software/ads/c
The sitename, pagename and campaignname are normally variables in whatever ad tag code you are putting on your page. These are then parsed by the adserver when it serves the ad and filled in with data that is meaningful to the server. This data can normally be completely meaningless to the web server that is serving it. The pagename doesn't have to match the pagename on the webserver, but merely the commonly agreed upon name. So I could lable a page as www.mysite.com/apage and schedule ads to that. But the site itself, would actually be www.mysite.co.uk/anotherpage.html and would just ask the server for an ad for www.mysite.com/apage
When you click on an ad, that data is sent back to the adserver so that it knows what ad you are trying to click through on, and what campaign to assign the click-through to.
This is all from memory and may be slightly flawed. But if you can read passed my garbled wording and see the idea, you'll have the picture.
DISCLAIMER: I used to work with web adverting but I'm just an (ab)normal sysadmin now.
/* Wayne Pascoe
I have nothing against banner ads. They used to pay my salary. As long as they're non-intrusive and relevant to the audience of the site, I think they're great.
But then you look at things like a recent levis campaign. Every time you went to the home page of a site you got to be the proud downloader of between 80 and 100k of flash video for a popup levis ad. And you'd be sitting reading something, and it pops up right over what you're reading. Now this is intrusive and is starting to interfere with my browsing experience.
What's even worse is the Compaq non-stop campaign. My natural reaction to a popup ad is to click the x in the corner and kill it. The idea behind the compaq ad, was Compaq are non-stoppable. So they made their ad KEEP coming back up about 4 or 5 times. This is just plain annoying and adds stress and extra mouse movement to my already ruined wrists and my already stressed life. I don't need this.
So I guess, yeah, lawsuits are dumb, but as what happened with the Prof vs Demon where they settled, maybe this will scare the hell out of advertisers and sites that use this kind of advertising, and we'll all have a more pleasant browse experience.
/* Wayne Pascoe
I think you're missing something really important here. The slashdot name - News for nerds, stuff that matters. It's not Slashdot - News for busexecs, stuff that counts :-)
More importantly, this is not really a Linux site. It's a technology site, and us nerds (or geeks as I prefer) like our games. So this is a news article for nerds, and it does matter. Most importantly, it highlights the ongoing acceptance of the Linux platform by developers! So I don't really think that this is at all counterproductive!
My 2c worth.
/* Wayne Pascoe
I don't know what proverb you mean, but the closed source model is about security with obscurity! The open source model is the exact opposite. That's how we find and fix problems. In public. And that's what makes us faster!
I have a Sony laptop. Well, I make the monthly payments on a Sony vaio. My better half has kidnapped it. When it arrived it was horribly configured with tons of extra crap that I didn't want or need on it. I still use windows for games, so I thought I'd leave a gig for windows and use the other 5 for Linux. Because of the way the recovery CD works, I ended up using my oem cd of win98SE from the office to do the reinstall. I don't see this as being wrong, because I am licenced for the copy that came with the Sony, and I used that key, but what a pain in the ass!
The best is trying to get warranty stuff out of Sony though. Their standard response (including to '2 keys on the keyboard don't work') is to reinstall from the recovery CD. Which just trashes everything else that you have on the machine. To make a long story short, I've just moved completely to a Linux environment on all bar one of my machines (my big games box) and now life is good. If MS do this to all machines, not just laptops, they're going to be pushing customers to Linux. Ain't it great ?
The main reason for complaints by people who are trying to mirror things when announcements get posted on /., is that it makes their life hard.
/. making announcements before the mirrors have the download, they make it hard for the mirrors to get the download. They did it to helix-gnome the other day as well. And this pisses mirror maintainers off because they now have to expend a lot of time and effort so that we can moan because they don't update fast enough.
/. to be responsible when making announcements!
These people are trying to do us all a favour by carrying software that we want and letting us get to it quicker. These people make no money from us. They are doing us a _BIG_ favour. By
Help our mirror maintainers to help you. Request
I've worked in South Africa and the United Kingdom, and I can definitely say that age does count against you. And it's not got anything to do with being brighter or better. It's got to do with being more exploitable. Every job ad I've seen in the last year has said 'young programmer' or 'young sysadmin'. When I was leaving my last job I was helping them replace me. I was a sysadmin there. And they _WOULD NOT_ look at anyone over 25. So it's there even in sysadmin.
;-) But we let companies do this to us, and they know that they can get away it. They couldn't with an older person or a person with a family. Why do you think they always want to know if you're married at the interview?
I believe that the current crop of geeks are doing this to ourselves. I was working 14 hours a day there, and I was on standby the rest of the day. I was also on standby all weekend every weekend for 6 months. No partying. No getting drunk. No going anywhere that I couldn't get a phone line and jack in to work should the need arise. Mind you, my perl got a lot better during that time
So for those of you who are taking solace in the thought of quitting the coding and going sysadmin when you get older, make other plans. I figure I've got till I'm 30 at the current rate. And then I'll put a bullet in my head.
I've seen a lot of people here saying that Metallica don't get it. That we're just peacefully sharing information. While I agree that there is an important aspect that they don't get, this isn't it. We're not sharing information. We're sharing the fruits of their labour and they're seeing _NOTHING_ in return. To get this out the way fast, I believe that they don't understand the advertising potential of mp3's. My CD collection has almost doubled in the last 8 months. I hear a song on the radio, download a couple of mp3's from the artist, then buy some of their cd's if I like them. And if I don't like them, I have more cd money to spend on a band that I do like, and the mp3's get binned.
On every other point, I believe they are right. I've never seen anyone here advocating that we rush out and copy (pir8) MS Software. I see people advocating that we choose alternatives to MS software. Why is that? Because copying the software would be wrong! Plain and simple! MS chose that they want us to pay for their software. Linus Torvalds said we could have his for free. As did RMS. So we use Linus's and RMS's software and we leave MS's alone. If you have a problem with buying Metallica's music, then you have no right to it. Same way you have no right to Microsoft's software. Choose an alternative, or dig out your wallet. But don't steal.
Subject line with apologies to the disclaimer on Ixnay on the Hombre
Question. What is the difference between me stealing a car and stealing an mp3 (piece of work that someone sweated to make and wants to make money off of)... Answer... If the cops hunt me down for the car I go to jail. If someone tracks me down for the mp3, hundreds of ill infomed anarchists come to my defence and say how wrong it is.
Why is it not ok for someone to defend their right to copyright something in the manner of their choosing? None of us complain when someone goes to the wall and screams lawyers in cases of GPL violation. Even though these are often unintentional! But let someone try and protect something that we want for free, and it's battle stations.
Lose the dual standards. Never has my sig been more valid!
Here is a quote from Mr Valenti :
For example, in analog you have to go down to a Blockbuster store, then you have to copy it, then it has to be sent physically. Somebody's got to take a truck or a car or DHL and get it to another country. There is a brutish kind of awkward distribution system. Not so on the Internet, where some obscure person sitting in a basement can throw up on the Internet a brand new motion picture, and with the click of a button have it go with the speed of light to 6 billion people around the world, instantaneously. It's totally different, totally different. First off, there is still the akward situation where someone has to go and buy this DVD. Secondly, I don't know that many obscure people sitting in their basements who have the bandwidth to distribute +- 5Gig of data to the 6 billion people in question. Let alone at the speed of light being discussed. For even one person to download a 5gig dvd image you'd have to have a ton of available bandwidth. For 4 or 5 people, even more. For 6 billion people downloading this 5gig image at a realistic speed, you would have to have more bandwidth going into the back of your machine that you can buy. And all this to save £18 pound on a DVD? I don't think so!
While we're on the point of all this bandwidth that you'd need to have, take into account that America is one of the few places with unmetered Internet access. It's coming to Britian, but slowly. And the rest of the world? I used to pay for my 'net access by the minute back home in South Africa. Same goes for most of the world. The cost of downloading this 5gig file would just not be worth it.
But I would like to make it known that if this is the kind of bandwidth floating about down at the MPAA, I'd like a job there... I only have 320K... Light speed would be nicer. Someone please beat this man with a clue-stick!
Just a quickie here... I see a lot of people posting who seem to be under the impression that distributed DoS attacks implicitly imply co-operation of more than one person. In many cases this is not true. The core to a Distributed DoS is to gain unauthorised access to many machines and then to use all those machines at once to Deny Service to your target. This can, with some simple scripting all be done by one person once they have gained unauthorised access to enough machines.
:-)
So we're not necesarily looking at a new era in anarchistic co-operation