Have you actually READ the EULA for Microsoft products? Protected? From what?
Or, pick another EULA for a closed source product. Let use Adobe, shall we?
"Stock Files may not be used in the production of libelous, defamatory, fraudulent, lewd, obscene or pornographic material..."
WTF does the actually mean? Isn't it completely dependent on the actual jurisdiction?
The GPL is simple. You DO NOT HAVE TO AGREE TO IT. You may use the software anyway. The ONLY time it comes into play is if you decide to distribute the software. Which is something you CANNOT do under these "closed source licenses" or under Copyright.
Just follow Copyright, and the GPL doesn't come into play at all! The GPL is a grant of additional rights, beyond Copyright. Do you want to use "Stock Files" to produce a picture of a woman showing her face (considered obscene in parts of the World)? Go ahead -- you won't need a lawyer. No usage constraints are imposed. No auditing constraints are imposed (you can tell the BSA to pound sand).
In other words, as a user of software, the GPL is completely reasonable -- use it for anything you want, on as many machines as you want, with no further issues. If you want to use GPL software in your own projects, go ahead, there are no further issues. If you want to give the software to other people, go ahead -- just point them to the place you got it from (or, if you are "sophisticated", give them the source).
That's it.
Anything else only kicks in if you want to distribute, or use GPL software in your own projects that you will distribute. But then, you are at the level of developer or systems integrator; not so much an "end user" anymore. In this position it would be sensible to actually READ the EULAs and GPL!
He used accounts WITH NO PASSWORD. And, pretty much all he wants to do is stay in the UK.
But, anyway, what YOU are telling me, is that the US Security for gov and nasa is SO WEAK that it relies on legal elements alone. Man, the US is going to fall hard...
About the only thing that is reasonable here is to buy the man a beer, and thank him for the probe. And THANK YOUR DEITY that it was ONLY that much.
Extradition? Pah. US prosecution? Go stick your head back into your anus, and fight the real fight... for air.
What is the Internet? It isn't a protocol, or a transmission method, or Google. The Internet existed as a concept before ISPs and "wifi". It was BBS and UUCP. The Internet is the idea that computers communicating are powerful; and that the communication itself can have value. This is the Zen of the Internet.
With the idea that the Internet is simply computers communicating, the control and organization of the Internet should be pushed to those computers, and not be a centralized function. This is the Zen of the structure of the Internet.
Both of these ideas are powerful. It means that the Internet is not a company; nor can a company have control. I don't want devices controlled by operators.
Why doesn't wifi allow "hand-off"? Because the designers didn't believe that co-operation would work. They were thinking centralization ("access point" vs limited peer to peer). So, yes, the wifi protocols should be altered. But LTE is not the answer, either.
Of COURSE you can be locked into a plain-text editor.
Let me show you one easy way. Create "attribute styles" for text. This would let you apply formatting to plain text. Split the file into a plain text part and a proprietary attribute marker file. For example, this would let you apply italic and bold face to comments (or coloring).
Get your source code and plain text documentation into the closed source editor, and, presto, soon enough you will have locked-in users.
I am rather surprised that the Microsoft development environment DOESN'T have this feature.
WARNING
This man page is an extract of the documentation of GNU make. It is
updated only occasionally, because the GNU project does not use nroff.
For complete, current documentation, refer to the Info file make.info
which is made from the Texinfo source file make.texi.
in the man page? And then, of course, "info make" gives
This file documents the GNU `make' utility, which determines automatically which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues the commands to recompile them.
This is Edition 0.70, last updated 1 April 2006, of `The GNU Make Manual', for GNU `make' version 3.81.
and you already know that manual is the one you wanted. Typing "info" by itself gives an index page. On my (Fedora 8 based) netbook, it indexes around 2000 topics.
A commercial vendor was praised for moving to hyper-linked documentation (chm files?) and yet you seem to be treating this as a negative for the GNU project.
Of course, you can indict the "unix"-ish system, asking why make is not known as gmake. After all, it IS GNU make, right? But, there is a standard! POSIX tells you that the command shall be called "make", and GNU make is a superset of POSIX make. POSIX does not standardize an implementation -- just a feature set. To quote "info make",
GNU `make' conforms to section 6.2 of `IEEE Standard 1003.2-1992' (POSIX.2).
In that documentation, you will see that conditionals are not (portably) supported. Use cpp or m4 instead.
First, there is no such thing as "non-copyright" material. Material may be public domain, or have an active copyright. Of course, you may have permission to copy (if you are the author, or use GPL, or are exercising fair use, or have permission to copy).
Second, the law specifically introduces the levy, and also introduces the personal copy provision. The personal copy provision allows you to copy music for your own use. It makes no other distinction. The levy is applied even if the use of the medium is for other than music.
If you download, or copy via P2P, you are (arguably) simply exercising your personal copy provision. You cannot make the material available on a BBS, or other service. But, if you simply download, someone else may have broken that law already. Indeed, simply supplying torrent files shouldn't trigger any violation either (see your lawyer, etc.).
The CRIA (so far) has been smart enough to not test this. I would imagine that there would be a major smackdown if if were tried.
Right now, it's legal in Canada to copy music under the personal copy provision. In exchange, we pay a levy (not a tax) on blank media.
Extending this to ipods (and, in general other personal media players) makes sense. Especially if those devices play media other than just music. Perhaps the levy will then have to be extended to cover tv programming and movies. After all, the ipod touch I use can certainly play stuff other than music (spoken books, movies and tv shows come to mind).
In answer to "do the artists get the money"? my reply is "I don't really care -- that, in particular, is not my problem". I just don't want to be bothered with being branded a "pirate", kthnxbye.
We do that "outsourced admin" work for clients. Yes, we have a reputation to uphold, and all of our processes are auditable (ISO 9000). We take secrecy seriously. But...
If you want, we can supply an admin to be onsite. After all, you ARE the customer. It will cost you, though. It will cost you MORE than hiring your own admin. It has to, because our company wants a cut too.
Why would you want to pay more? And, having the admin work "part-time" doesn't really save you much. Simply because travel (the drive over if local, or the flight) is YOUR expense, and the "opportunity cost" is also your expense.
If you don't trust the admin, you are going to have to do something like "shoulder cruising". I have worked in environments where I wasn't allowed to actually touch the keyboard! Just remember, it'll end up costing you money.
Charlie and Collin look for these bugs AS A HOBBY. Not as a job. The reward they get is the response from the talk they deliver at the next conference.
At three bugs (one per platform) they had enough for the conference.
Why did they find these bugs? Because the "professional" developers and QA people either hadn't found them, or the products (ALL of them) were released with known bugs.
All this tells me is that vendors are releasing buggy products. And that there are at least two hobbyists who find it interesting to look for the defects. Why do they do that? I don't know; that's their itch to scratch. Why do the vendors not apply more quality? That would be money.
All of which makes your final comment
"The hobbyist is still just a user. The real developers do it as their job."
Because the vendor of the shifter doesn't say "If you use this shifter, you must accept this license. This license allows us to audit you at any time at your expense. If you do not agree to these terms, you may return this shifter for a refund."
I am sure that if your shifter (or radio, or seats, whatever) came with those provisions, you may seek relief.
A "pointer" is not an "address". It is not legal to dereference a pointer containing 0. If "0" is a valid address, AND an object could be located there, it would still be necessary to refer to it by something other than "0".
Now, it so happens that addresses are typically used as pointers, and "0" is simply not allowed as an object address. Which also works.
But, it is true that a dereference from 0 gives undefined behaviour, so, to preserve semantics the compiler CAN make this assumption. This transformation is just as legal as:
if (!p) do1(); if (!p) do2();
if do1() has no way of reaching p, transform to:
if (!p) {do1(); do2();}
Of course, if p is global, or otherwise reachable from do1(), this transformation isn't legal. But, in this case, tun can be assumed non-NULL, and the optimization made, because the OTHER interpretation allows it as well (undefined, eg. better than turning your computer into a goat or something).
Um... its a LAPTOP. In an AIRPORT. Won't be running a web server, or any other common "server" on this puppy. I don't even have the software loaded.
I have run nmap against it (and do so occasionally) when running the limited software I use. Passes:
[user@ariel bin]$ nmap 192.168.1.16
Starting Nmap 4.52 ( http://insecure.org/ ) at 2009-07-19 14:34 EDT All 1714 scanned ports on ariel.lan (192.168.1.16) are closed
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.230 seconds [user@ariel bin]$ nmap localhost
Starting Nmap 4.52 ( http://insecure.org/ ) at 2009-07-19 14:34 EDT Interesting ports on localhost (127.0.0.1): Not shown: 1713 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 631/tcp open ipp
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.195 seconds [user@ariel bin]$
This is with all application software I use running -- nothing there.
My servers? Dedicated SEPARATE firewall. All I'm saying is that mandating firewall SOFTWARE is kind of silly for most rational users. I don't even have the kernel module for firewalling loaded on this system.
Ok, you are suggesting that my network driver has an exploitable bug, and that's why I need a firewall --
Um... What network driver does the firewall use? The only way this works is if I carry a separate firewall hardware component with me.
So, the firewall software is just as "at-risk" to a network driver bug. Indeed, there is simply more software to exploit in the path What if there is a bug in the firewall software?
"asshat" "You don't have this luxury in linux. There is no right way to distribute binaries, so the best they can do is offer Windows junk and assume if you have Linux, you probably occasionally boot into Windows anyway when you have to complete grownup work." "Windows has a much better grasp of the PC specification" "I assume that, like every other PC system, they don't understand the PC specification either"
Well, I could try arguing here, but somehow I feel that it would be a waste of time. To keep it short and simple:
Fuck you.
As a clue for others (malevolentjelly, stop reading):
A statically linked binary will work. Just have a console application.
"You still *need* a firewall on your local machine" (emphasis mine).
Why? My laptop responds to ICMP packets, but has no open ports. None. Whatever would I be firewalling?
If I actually open a port, it would actually be a reverse SSH tunnel. So, what would I be firewalling?
You are welcome to TRY hacking my laptop. Unless you can sneak through the web browser, or attack me with a specifically formatted email, I doubt you will have any success. Good luck with that -- I use NoScript and disable even image loading on email.
Indeed, take it as an pwn2own challenge.
Can you explain why a firewall would improve things for me?
And, on to the original topic -- I don't care if my network connection is "snooped". In fact, I EXPECT that it is being monitored and tracked. That's why I have a little "Tor" button in my browser.
"The larger companies (Google, Amazon) can afford the large iron and backend storage stacks [1]. For the uptimes that modern cloud storage has, the equipment costs are tremendous, because the machines that are able to do the large volume I/O over the net not just have to have performance, but be engineered around reliability, and that means large clusters distributed over geographically different regions storing identical data."
Google is based on Intel systems, although they have redesigned them a bit:
which gives a review of how good (or not) SMART is on drives.
Google (for one) uses commodity hardware -- lots of it. I would imagine that it would be too painful to FIND a failed system. They probably just ignore them and work around them (after all, they currently use 400,000 or 500,000 servers, maybe more). It's the "RAID" principle applied to systems. Not all 500,000 servers are going down at the same time, and new servers can be (and probably are being) continually deployed. An individual server has little redundancy (except for the battery Google puts in).
Amazon (S3, EC2) has to offer more redundancy to ensure that the customers image isn't lost. Google couldn't care -- at worst a bit of web indexing would need to be redone, or a client would have to reissue a search request. So, Amazon would have more "big iron" in the disk department.
But it is still (probably) cheaper to use two commodity drives!
I never considered wasting money to be "honorable". Or engaging in enterprise to be dishonorable.
Anyway, the main problem is that the software is STILL valued at $600+. And is tied to employment. Which means that it will be seen by the revenue service as a taxable benefit. Taxes on that would come to around $200, making the purchase price ~$240 (after tax), with a tax burden of around $220.
Now, it is true that very few people will declare this purchase, but that WOULD be criminal. However, I don't consider it honorable to induce x10 tax burdens without warning the employee!
I guess that leaves Microsofts honor. Care to explain how not reselling has anything to do with that?
I have purchased only one copy of Windows(tm) in the last years; XP Professional(tm), and I paid almost $300 for it (all in, after taxes). Yes, I know I was taken for a fool, more on this later.
Now, I know that OEMs can't possibly be paying anything CLOSE to that, because I can buy a computer now WITH Windows and pay just a bit more than that.
So, I was led to believe that as a single consumer, I was being ripped off, and the only way to get a reasonable price for Windows was with a new computer. Simple, right?
Wrong. My wife works as a middle-school teach in the TDSB (Toronto District School Board). They have, what, 40,000 (more?) employees. My wife just got an offer - buy Windows Vista(tm) (Business?) for $21, and Office(tm) for $21. As far as I can tell (from the literature), there don't seem to any resale restrictions. And no "OEM" restrictions. The literature also mentions that the retail price for Office is north of $600.
How much DO Windows and Office cost? Since only idiots would buy retail Windows or Office (yes, I used to be in that category), the only reason to have ANY "suggested retail price" is to attempt to establish some sort of valuation.
"It's expensive, it MUST be good",
but no-one actually pays that price
"but I got a GREAT deal on the software!".
And now the suggested retail pricing pops up here, just to help spread the meme.
Of course, it is possible that the purchase was subsidized by the TDSB, in which case I will be very upset. The TDSB just ok'd the use of OpenOffice, and thus should have no need to spend the money.
In 1996 I had a Pentium Pro with 64MB. I also used a SPARC based Ultra 10 (or was it a 5? My memory is a bit flaky...). Yes, Java was sluggish. I would even call it glacial, when compared to C/C++... I don't think it had a JIT, either (Hotspot was released in 2000).
Unfortunately, the common carrier can be simply construed as the internet as proxied by ISPs. Identifiers can simply be IP addresses - when viewed as a tuple (ap, ip) the ips are unique. Note that it does not logically matter which ap or isp is chosen for a network connection. My laptop certainly maintains a list (database) of access points, and attendant information (passwords).
I can pick one from the list, or one will be automatically chosen.
The iPhone is even more interesting here; it even switches between cellular and wifi.
As far as I can tell, this patent locks up everything currently in play for wifi - Linux NetworkManager conflicts, as does the iPhone, and, I believe Windows.
iwconfig and ifconfig in Linux would NOT conflict, but, outside of some techies, no one uses that layer directly. Private networks are also not affected.
The most interesting question is: who should pay? The invention doesn't come together until a number of elements are combined - the ap, a common network, a connection list. Remove any one of these elements, and (from my read) the invention ceases to exist. We won't be getting rid of the common network, so it will be "client side" payouts -- either on the aps, or the software that remembers aps. aps themselves don't infringe, so the only item left is the software that maintains and manages the connection list. NetworkManager.
My response to that? They would be serious asshats to actually USE this patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you actually READ the EULA for Microsoft products? Protected? From what?
Or, pick another EULA for a closed source product. Let use Adobe, shall we?
"Stock Files may not be used in the production of libelous, defamatory, fraudulent, lewd, obscene or pornographic material..."
WTF does the actually mean? Isn't it completely dependent on the actual jurisdiction?
The GPL is simple. You DO NOT HAVE TO AGREE TO IT. You may use the software anyway. The ONLY time it comes into play is if you decide to distribute the software. Which is something you CANNOT do under these "closed source licenses" or under Copyright.
Just follow Copyright, and the GPL doesn't come into play at all! The GPL is a grant of additional rights, beyond Copyright. Do you want to use "Stock Files" to produce a picture of a woman showing her face (considered obscene in parts of the World)? Go ahead -- you won't need a lawyer. No usage constraints are imposed. No auditing constraints are imposed (you can tell the BSA to pound sand).
In other words, as a user of software, the GPL is completely reasonable -- use it for anything you want, on as many machines as you want, with no further issues. If you want to use GPL software in your own projects, go ahead, there are no further issues. If you want to give the software to other people, go ahead -- just point them to the place you got it from (or, if you are "sophisticated", give them the source).
That's it.
Anything else only kicks in if you want to distribute, or use GPL software in your own projects that you will distribute. But then, you are at the level of developer or systems integrator; not so much an "end user" anymore. In this position it would be sensible to actually READ the EULAs and GPL!
What?
He used accounts WITH NO PASSWORD. And, pretty much all he wants to do is stay in the UK.
But, anyway, what YOU are telling me, is that the US Security for gov and nasa is SO WEAK that it relies on legal elements alone. Man, the US is going to fall hard...
About the only thing that is reasonable here is to buy the man a beer, and thank him for the probe. And THANK YOUR DEITY that it was ONLY that much.
Extradition? Pah. US prosecution? Go stick your head back into your anus, and fight the real fight... for air.
Stick the word "computer" in, and everything changes, right?
The man is guilty of mischief.
The woman is guilty of stupidity.
The hospital -- they are guilty of violating a BUNCH of laws.
You -- are guilty of being an asshole.
What is the Internet? It isn't a protocol, or a transmission method, or Google. The Internet existed as a concept before ISPs and "wifi". It was BBS and UUCP. The Internet is the idea that computers communicating are powerful; and that the communication itself can have value. This is the Zen of the Internet.
With the idea that the Internet is simply computers communicating, the control and organization of the Internet should be pushed to those computers, and not be a centralized function. This is the Zen of the structure of the Internet.
Both of these ideas are powerful. It means that the Internet is not a company; nor can a company have control. I don't want devices controlled by operators.
Why doesn't wifi allow "hand-off"? Because the designers didn't believe that co-operation would work. They were thinking centralization ("access point" vs limited peer to peer). So, yes, the wifi protocols should be altered. But LTE is not the answer, either.
Of COURSE you can be locked into a plain-text editor.
Let me show you one easy way. Create "attribute styles" for text. This would let you apply formatting to plain text. Split the file into a plain text part and a proprietary attribute marker file. For example, this would let you apply italic and bold face to comments (or coloring).
Get your source code and plain text documentation into the closed source editor, and, presto, soon enough you will have locked-in users.
I am rather surprised that the Microsoft development environment DOESN'T have this feature.
So, you skipped right over
WARNING
This man page is an extract of the documentation of GNU make. It is
updated only occasionally, because the GNU project does not use nroff.
For complete, current documentation, refer to the Info file make.info
which is made from the Texinfo source file make.texi.
in the man page? And then, of course, "info make" gives
File: make.info, Node: Top, Next: Overview, Prev: (dir), Up: (dir)
GNU `make'
**********
This file documents the GNU `make' utility, which determines
automatically which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled,
and issues the commands to recompile them.
This is Edition 0.70, last updated 1 April 2006, of `The GNU Make
Manual', for GNU `make' version 3.81.
Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, ...
1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software
Foundation, Inc.
and you already know that manual is the one you wanted. Typing "info" by itself gives an index page. On my (Fedora 8 based) netbook, it indexes around 2000 topics.
A commercial vendor was praised for moving to hyper-linked documentation (chm files?) and yet you seem to be treating this as a negative for the GNU project.
Of course, you can indict the "unix"-ish system, asking why make is not known as gmake. After all, it IS GNU make, right? But, there is a standard! POSIX tells you that the command shall be called "make", and GNU make is a superset of POSIX make. POSIX does not standardize an implementation -- just a feature set. To quote "info make",
GNU `make' conforms to section 6.2 of `IEEE Standard 1003.2-1992'
(POSIX.2).
In that documentation, you will see that conditionals are not (portably) supported. Use cpp or m4 instead.
First, there is no such thing as "non-copyright" material. Material may be public domain, or have an active copyright. Of course, you may have permission to copy (if you are the author, or use GPL, or are exercising fair use, or have permission to copy).
Second, the law specifically introduces the levy, and also introduces the personal copy provision. The personal copy provision allows you to copy music for your own use. It makes no other distinction. The levy is applied even if the use of the medium is for other than music.
If you download, or copy via P2P, you are (arguably) simply exercising your personal copy provision. You cannot make the material available on a BBS, or other service. But, if you simply download, someone else may have broken that law already. Indeed, simply supplying torrent files shouldn't trigger any violation either (see your lawyer, etc.).
The CRIA (so far) has been smart enough to not test this. I would imagine that there would be a major smackdown if if were tried.
Right now, it's legal in Canada to copy music under the personal copy provision. In exchange, we pay a levy (not a tax) on blank media.
Extending this to ipods (and, in general other personal media players) makes sense. Especially if those devices play media other than just music. Perhaps the levy will then have to be extended to cover tv programming and movies. After all, the ipod touch I use can certainly play stuff other than music (spoken books, movies and tv shows come to mind).
In answer to "do the artists get the money"? my reply is "I don't really care -- that, in particular, is not my problem". I just don't want to be bothered with being branded a "pirate", kthnxbye.
We do that "outsourced admin" work for clients. Yes, we have a reputation to uphold, and all of our processes are auditable (ISO 9000). We take secrecy seriously. But...
If you want, we can supply an admin to be onsite. After all, you ARE the customer. It will cost you, though. It will cost you MORE than hiring your own admin. It has to, because our company wants a cut too.
Why would you want to pay more? And, having the admin work "part-time" doesn't really save you much. Simply because travel (the drive over if local, or the flight) is YOUR expense, and the "opportunity cost" is also your expense.
If you don't trust the admin, you are going to have to do something like "shoulder cruising". I have worked in environments where I wasn't allowed to actually touch the keyboard! Just remember, it'll end up costing you money.
Your take on this is... interesting.
Charlie and Collin look for these bugs AS A HOBBY. Not as a job. The reward they get is the response from the talk they deliver at the next conference.
At three bugs (one per platform) they had enough for the conference.
Why did they find these bugs? Because the "professional" developers and QA people either hadn't found them, or the products (ALL of them) were released with known bugs.
All this tells me is that vendors are releasing buggy products. And that there are at least two hobbyists who find it interesting to look for the defects. Why do they do that? I don't know; that's their itch to scratch. Why do the vendors not apply more quality? That would be money.
All of which makes your final comment
"The hobbyist is still just a user. The real developers do it as their job."
rather laughable.
Because the vendor of the shifter doesn't say "If you use this shifter, you must accept this license. This license allows us to audit you at any time at your expense. If you do not agree to these terms, you may return this shifter for a refund."
I am sure that if your shifter (or radio, or seats, whatever) came with those provisions, you may seek relief.
You are confusing the two things --
A "pointer" is not an "address". It is not legal to dereference a pointer containing 0. If "0" is a valid address, AND an object could be located there, it would still be necessary to refer to it by something other than "0".
Now, it so happens that addresses are typically used as pointers, and "0" is simply not allowed as an object address. Which
also works.
But, it is true that a dereference from 0 gives undefined behaviour, so, to preserve semantics the compiler CAN make this assumption. This transformation is just as legal as:
if (!p) do1();
if (!p) do2();
if do1() has no way of reaching p, transform to:
if (!p) {do1(); do2();}
Of course, if p is global, or otherwise reachable from do1(), this transformation isn't legal. But, in this case, tun can be assumed non-NULL, and the optimization made, because the OTHER interpretation allows it as well (undefined, eg. better than turning your computer into a goat or something).
Um... its a LAPTOP. In an AIRPORT. Won't be running a web server, or any other common "server" on this puppy. I don't even have the software loaded.
I have run nmap against it (and do so occasionally) when running the limited software I use. Passes:
[user@ariel bin]$ nmap 192.168.1.16
Starting Nmap 4.52 ( http://insecure.org/ ) at 2009-07-19 14:34 EDT
All 1714 scanned ports on ariel.lan (192.168.1.16) are closed
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.230 seconds
[user@ariel bin]$ nmap localhost
Starting Nmap 4.52 ( http://insecure.org/ ) at 2009-07-19 14:34 EDT
Interesting ports on localhost (127.0.0.1):
Not shown: 1713 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
631/tcp open ipp
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.195 seconds
[user@ariel bin]$
This is with all application software I use running -- nothing there.
My servers? Dedicated SEPARATE firewall. All I'm saying is that mandating firewall SOFTWARE is kind of silly for most rational users. I don't even have the kernel module for firewalling loaded on this system.
Ok, you are suggesting that my network driver has an exploitable bug, and that's why I need a firewall --
Um... What network driver does the firewall use? The only way this works is if I carry a separate firewall hardware component with me.
So, the firewall software is just as "at-risk" to a network driver bug. Indeed, there is simply more software to exploit in the path What if there is a bug in the firewall software?
"asshat"
"You don't have this luxury in linux. There is no right way to distribute binaries, so the best they can do is offer Windows junk and assume if you have Linux, you probably occasionally boot into Windows anyway when you have to complete grownup work."
"Windows has a much better grasp of the PC specification" "I assume that, like every other PC system, they don't understand the PC specification either"
Well, I could try arguing here, but somehow I feel that it would be a waste of time. To keep it short and simple:
Fuck you.
As a clue for others (malevolentjelly, stop reading):
A statically linked binary will work. Just have a console application.
Joke ---->
You.
I mean "basically", you really didn't get it? Missed out on the "jovial" side of programming?
"You still *need* a firewall on your local machine" (emphasis mine).
Why? My laptop responds to ICMP packets, but has no open ports. None. Whatever would I be firewalling?
If I actually open a port, it would actually be a reverse SSH tunnel. So, what would I be firewalling?
You are welcome to TRY hacking my laptop. Unless you can sneak through the web browser, or attack me with a specifically formatted email, I doubt you will have any success. Good luck with that -- I use NoScript and disable even image loading on email.
Indeed, take it as an pwn2own challenge.
Can you explain why a firewall would improve things for me?
And, on to the original topic -- I don't care if my network connection is "snooped". In fact, I EXPECT that it is being monitored and tracked. That's why I have a little "Tor" button in my browser.
Your basic premise is wrong
"The larger companies (Google, Amazon) can afford the large iron and backend storage stacks [1]. For the uptimes that modern cloud storage has, the equipment costs are tremendous, because the machines that are able to do the large volume I/O over the net not just have to have performance, but be engineered around reliability, and that means large clusters distributed over geographically different regions storing identical data."
Google is based on Intel systems, although they have redesigned them a bit:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
No "big iron" here, except that these systems are deployed 1,160 at a time.
Indeed, Google has so many consumer-level drives that they can publish stuff like:
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
which gives a review of how good (or not) SMART is on drives.
Google (for one) uses commodity hardware -- lots of it. I would imagine that it would be too painful to FIND a failed system. They probably just ignore them and work around them (after all, they currently use 400,000 or 500,000 servers, maybe more). It's the "RAID" principle applied to systems. Not all 500,000 servers are going down at the same time, and new servers can be (and probably are being) continually deployed. An individual server has little redundancy (except for the battery Google puts in).
Amazon (S3, EC2) has to offer more redundancy to ensure that the customers image isn't lost. Google couldn't care -- at worst a bit of web indexing would need to be redone, or a client would have to reissue a search request. So, Amazon would have more "big iron" in the disk department.
But it is still (probably) cheaper to use two commodity drives!
What are you on about? The answer is lots. Certainly Solaris 10 can run SunOS 4 a.out binaries.
Oh, wait -- you specifically discluded those big old Unix OSs. Sorry, my bad.
(for the humour impaired, this is meant to be mildly funny).
You would be correct. Linux isn't the first "hot patch" system.
Multics (1965) was designed for 24/7/365 operation, and could replace any component by design. Hardware or software.
http://www.multicians.org/
The "honor system".
Whose honor? Mine? The TDSBs? Microsofts?
I never considered wasting money to be "honorable". Or engaging in enterprise to be dishonorable.
Anyway, the main problem is that the software is STILL valued at $600+. And is tied to employment. Which means that it will be seen by the revenue service as a taxable benefit. Taxes on that would come to around $200, making the purchase price ~$240 (after tax), with a tax burden of around $220.
Now, it is true that very few people will declare this purchase, but that WOULD be criminal. However, I don't consider it honorable to induce x10 tax burdens without warning the employee!
I guess that leaves Microsofts honor. Care to explain how not reselling has anything to do with that?
I have purchased only one copy of Windows(tm) in the last years; XP Professional(tm), and I paid almost $300 for it (all in, after taxes). Yes, I know I was taken for a fool, more on this later.
Now, I know that OEMs can't possibly be paying anything CLOSE to that, because I can buy a computer now WITH Windows and pay just a bit more than that.
So, I was led to believe that as a single consumer, I was being ripped off, and the only way to get a reasonable price for Windows was with a new computer. Simple, right?
Wrong. My wife works as a middle-school teach in the TDSB (Toronto District School Board). They have, what, 40,000 (more?) employees. My wife just got an offer - buy Windows Vista(tm) (Business?) for $21, and Office(tm) for $21. As far as I can tell (from the literature), there don't seem to any resale restrictions. And no "OEM" restrictions. The literature also mentions that the retail price for Office is north of $600.
How much DO Windows and Office cost? Since only idiots would buy retail Windows or Office (yes, I used to be in that category), the only reason to have ANY "suggested retail price" is to attempt to establish some sort of valuation.
"It's expensive, it MUST be good",
but no-one actually pays that price
"but I got a GREAT deal on the software!".
And now the suggested retail pricing pops up here, just to help spread the meme.
Of course, it is possible that the purchase was subsidized by the TDSB, in which case I will be very upset. The TDSB just ok'd the use of OpenOffice, and thus should have no need to spend the money.
Um... no.
A real shell is a POSIX XCU compatible one. Microsoft does offer this as SFU
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=896C9688-601B-44F1-81A4-02878FF11778&displaylang=en
bash is then available (may have to install it separately -- not too sure anymore). This also supplies NIS and NFS.
Read the comment again.
1996. Sluggish Java.
In 1996 I had a Pentium Pro with 64MB. I also used a SPARC based Ultra 10 (or was it a 5? My memory is a bit flaky...). Yes, Java was sluggish. I would even call it glacial, when compared to C/C++... I don't think it had a JIT, either (Hotspot was released in 2000).
Unfortunately, the common carrier can be simply construed as the internet as proxied by ISPs. Identifiers can simply be IP addresses - when viewed as a tuple (ap, ip) the ips are unique. Note that it does not logically matter which ap or isp is chosen for a network connection. My laptop certainly maintains a list (database) of access points, and attendant information (passwords).
I can pick one from the list, or one will be automatically chosen.
The iPhone is even more interesting here; it even switches between cellular and wifi.
As far as I can tell, this patent locks up everything currently in play for wifi - Linux NetworkManager conflicts, as does the iPhone, and, I believe Windows.
iwconfig and ifconfig in Linux would NOT conflict, but, outside of some techies, no one uses that layer directly. Private networks are also not affected.
The most interesting question is: who should pay? The invention doesn't come together until a number of elements are combined - the ap, a common network, a connection list. Remove any one of these elements, and (from my read) the invention ceases to exist. We won't be getting rid of the common network, so it will be "client side" payouts -- either on the aps, or the software that remembers aps. aps themselves don't infringe, so the only item left is the software that maintains and manages the connection list. NetworkManager.
My response to that? They would be serious asshats to actually USE this patent.