I'm not sure why I'll waste my time helping you, as you clearly seem to know better than what you write, except that someone else might not know better. You say:
Open sourcing something isn't a magical fairy spell which creates security. Just like it isn't one which creates less bugs or software that is better than commercial software available. A hackable version of Apache is no different than a hackable version of IIS...
While free software may not be magic in and of itself, it does garuntee that anyone can fix it. Closed source software is garunteed unfixable. It's not just a matter of time for fix, it's a matter of the form of the fix and the thouroghness of the fix. Apache is a good example, thank you. When Apache has a problem because some underlying library has a flaw, more than apache is fixed. The library is fixed and all software compiled with it will be fixed and for anyone who needs it. In the Windoze world, only one developer has the fixed library and everything made without it is broken. Broken libraries can last for years in the Windoze world because M$ does not simply share the source code, but charges money for binaries. Where those libraries end up at the average company making windows software is a mystery and often people put off buying new libraries as long as possible. In one situation, you can be sure that all developers have the best libraries available all the time. In the other, you can be sure that developers don't and can't find out.
Once people learn to give a fuck about their security... security not being trumpeted by smelly nerds who like to PGP their grepballed tarzips before sending their SSH'ed e-mail FTPs to each other via cryptic commands would help.... easy to understand education of basic computer hygene is needed.
Your need to wash your mouth and keyboard out with soap, you flaming troll.
Some people say vi zealots are unreasonable. I disagree, I think you should have to press a special sequence of characters before you can edit a document.;)
M$ Word zealots think they should pay for an editor they can not use from a remote terminal without having special software installed that displays a desktop so you can mouse over a link that tries to call software on the local box anyway. Brain dead.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
This man could never work for IBM, now could he. Gates did not last long either.
It's big of you to call for "a somber, factual, reasonable, respectful debate" after calling RMS a "rude", "interupting", "unpresentable", "shrill", "adversarial", "divise" and bigoted messenger. More name calling, how typical. Go away no one here needs closed source binaries and I'm tired of your form of debate.
and in a couple of years I look at and ask, "What on Earth were you thinking?" After a few hours, I might understand what I was doing and am pleased, or feel stupid.
What a flame. Is that how you got all those -1 flamebait mods? Everything offensive, where to start?
Poorly organized. Lynx-optimized website (with only two pages)
You would prefer Power Point slides as an invitiation? What's missing?
only two months to write papers,
You don't think people have papers ready? Whole books have been written on the subject.
an overly broad topic,
Yah, yah, security is like that.
and being held in a pseudo-third world country away from the main countries where most research is being done
Kiss my ass. What godforsaken little grey town are you from to brag about? Got any chip fab nearby?
I'll be surprised if they register more than 500 attendees.
Singapore might have more than that in it's LUG. The only problem these folks might have is that one or two of them take Windoze seriously, but that will be corrected when the presentations hit the screens and the questions bubble up and the truth is found.
Passphrase. Pull a book, preferably an older one, off the shelf next to you and highlight an interesting sentence to memorize. Now use the first or some other number letter of each word in that sentance as your password. Phrases are easy to remember, yours is published, and sitting right next to you.
I know your post-it notes were a joke, but I just had to pass along what seems to be a good practice. There are so many bad practices out there already. Pet names, silly web based password generators, which leave themselves in chache, kid names, so easy to guese.
Some companies base their security around no-one knowing anything about it. Microsoft is trying to do great things with UI the ease of use, but in doing so they destroy security. You also use the term "IE" about ten times.
Worse, the 10 Priciples linked above are demonstrated with Windoze! Ah, what a waste. The trade off between ease of use and security is fictional. Best practices, such as unprivalidged user accounts, are just as easy to implement as an email account that automaticaly executes code sent by strangers. Sadly, many people think that M$ is the path of least resistance and that if only it can be secured, the world will be better off.
The problem of security in M$ apps is the distribution method - closed source. This can not be fixed and so Windoze can not be made secure. Don't take my word for it. Allow me to quote the this excellent summary from Sonnenreich and Yate's "Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls", John Wiley and Sons, 1999. It was true then, M$ has admitted most of it by now, and it will be true tomorrow because the model is the same:
The Windows platform was never built with security in mind; security was added as an afterthought. There are fundamental weakenesses in the operating system that can't be cured with a bandage. For example, background processes can run in a was such that they cannot be detected.... Part of the problem stems from the fact that the vast majority of Windows packages are closed source. This means that only the original developers can identify and fix bugs in the software. Most Windows-based software products that aren't compiled directly from GNU licensed Unix source code are security disasters.
To make matters worse, companies confuse issues by claiming security though strong encryption. While the data in transit might be secure, that has nothing to do with wheter the program is secure on a fundamental level. For example, often encryption keys and passwords are stored on disks so users don't have to type them in every time. Regardless of how complex the scheme, the orignial information can always be recovered if the password is stored on disk and can be recovered by the program without user input.
Many windows applications are developed using common development libraries, most of which come from Microsoft. Hackers have repeatedly found insecurities such as buffer overflow conditions in these libraries. It becomes trivail to detaermine if an application has been built using such a library.... These libraries have provided hackers with a reliable and consistent set of exploits.
Laplinck, NetMeeting, PC Anywhere and other remote session control systems for Windows all rely on proprietary unpublished transport mechanisms to create an aura of security. While you may be unable to determine what these programs are doing with your data, rest assured that hackers know exactly how the data are being transported... Since nobody can see the source conde, and since only the vendor can created and distribute fixes, these programs are a hacker's dream.
Add to this the fact that M$ charges an arm and a leg for said development libraries while refusing to be responsible for them and you start to understand why there's a new IE hole every month and how those holes can be persistent and how binary "patches" can introduce just as many problems as they fix.
This flawed distribution model makes Windows the path of highest resistance for securing PC desktops. Microsoft's entire business model of crushing competition and devowering the profit for any and all innovation brought to the masses depends on it and they are unwilling to change. Their "Shared Source" initiative, MSDN and all do fail to share the libraries at fault. Microsoft steadfastly refused to share those libraries throughout their conviction and "remedy" for anti-competitive practices. Time and time again, they have used the power of their postion for abuse of their users instead of following better practices and I have little faith they will do any beter in the future. Follow M$ at your perril.
You do realize that this: He can't have a disk larger than 60G, bios trouble. (Coupled with above, he has lower capacity than even old tivos.)
Is a troll?
BIOS concerns are only a problem for boot. He used a floppy because he had one or because he wanted more drive space on the IDE. It has nothing to do with disk size once you have booted. For instance, my old 486 was limited to two 540MB IDE hard drives by BIOS, if and only if I were running some inferior operating system that does not check for itself like those from M$. That did not stop me from booting off a 540MB disk and having as large a second drive as I could afford to stick on. I'm told that a boot partition can overcome this problem too, but I have not bothered. Nor have I tried to boot off a compact flash card, though that's also an option. A PC that old does not generally suffer from inferior hard drives, and I've got enough 540MB disks. Please don't give people false impressions and confuse people about hardware versus Linux limitations.
On the plus side... I have fun playing with my toys too.
You should play some more! Can you export your movies from your Tivo via X windows to any PC in your house? Can you ftp chunks of movies you like to other computers? He can. I'll bet he can also change his programing from work through secure shell if he hears about some kind of "can't miss" TV program. Sometimes a "shoddy substitute" you build yourself does much more than some what the entertianment industry will let you buy.
It's strange to see so many negative posts. This article encouraged me to look into video recording again. I failed miserably, but one day I'll get it. The site is bookmarked so I can follow along later.
You've shown no evidence that small vendors will be put out of business by a tax like this. What evidence do you have that their slice of the market will suddenly reduce? That their prices will disproportionately rise above those of larger vendors?
It's a matter of scale. Big companies can absorb the costs of regulations better than small ones can. Extreem examples of this are aircraft, automobile and motorcycle manufacture. Regulation is the prime reason the US has three automakers, poor civilian aviation and one motorcycle maker. While there are some advantages to scale and size in those industries, can you tell me why there's only one US manufacturer of motorbikes? PCs don't pose the threat to health and public safety the way motorized transportation does and this spurious "waste" issue is the only thing HP etc can fix on to get rid of small PC makers.
Now because I have posed some real harm this can do, I throw the burden of proff onto you and those who would change things. Show me studies where electronic goods have managed polute groundwater. Heck, I'd be satisfied if you could simply point to widespread evidence of sanitary landfill failure in general. If what I say is true, and small PC makers get squashed, I'm sure that I'll pay more for my next PC when I can't find the next upstart Dell dude in his dorm room. I don't want to trade that for some kind of silly PC only law that fails to stop any real harm by blocking all the larger stream of poison to the landfill from all other consumer electronic devices. In other words prove it's a problem and prove that proposed fees will fix the problem. If you can't I'm not going for it.
According to the report, they use keyword filters:
Email. When border routers in China discard packets destined to or received from certain hosts, we understand that they typically do so without regard for the specified protocol of communications. As a result, email messages are typically filtered when sent to or received from blocked sites.
So the next English email you get from China may have missing words, not just bad English.
Twitter knows no Asian language, not even Sanscrit and that's been around forever. Shame.
So why is it that they don't block porn? I know, they don't care about porn, they care about people who promote freedom. They blocked Slashdot too. I'm not sure about the Red Lobster thing, but Limbaugh's show is sponsored by Red Lobster restaurants. might have something to do with it, let's go see! Nope, nothing there. Looks like another corporate suck site, much like China itself.
Why not indeed? Why is it that PC cases have gone from PC to AT to ATX and beyond? The old forms worked and still work. I've got a AMD k6/2 450 running happily in an XT case with a 150 watt power supply. Worse, why is it that the cases have been tossed out with the guts even when there has been no change in form factor? Even worse than that, why is it that perfectly useful components get thrown away because of software "upgrades"? Hmmmm. Might it be because certian companies are discouraging modularization and reuse of their components, the Winmodem being the most glaring example? How about printers and scanners that also take "drivers" despite having enought computing power to have common interfaces like HP's printer command language, post script, or SCSI? Answer these questions and you will know why we have more dead PCs than living people.
Now, the next question is if PC waste is significanly greater and more damaging than other consumer electronic wastes. Are PCs worse than credenza stereos, TVs, and all the other junk thrown out combined? How is my old 9600 baud modem any worse than my old jam box? What problem will recycling fees really solve?
Put the two questions together and you might see the purpose of this as limitation of entry to PC manufacturing. Dell was started in a dorm room, you don't think they want any new entrants do you?
Combine this with media consolidation, increased government censorship and information monitoring, and you might think a confluence of interests lies in limiting the number of PC makers so that DRM like Paladium can be implimented. Can't have indepenent makers around offering "insecure" computers can we? And so it was uttered in private, and so it was done against the public good, without public input, and certianly not reseombling anything really American. A governement for the people, by the people and of the people? Nah, HP did it, that must be good enough for you and me.
In Germany...manufacturers are responsible...for the cost of recycling waste...[and] assuring that it is actually done...Most companies, especially small ones, comply by joining the Grüne Punkt [commercialangles.com] (Green Dot) program, which takes care of the waste for the company. It doesn't really create a barrier to entry, because the fees are based on weight of packaging material and don't cost a small company any more than a big one.
So how small an operation can afford Green Dot fees? The site you pointed at shows some marked disadvantages for those small companies:
The costs of the licence depend on the type of packaging and its weight. As a rule of thumb the cost of the licence is about £1 per Kg of packaging. The definition of packaging is wide and includes CD cases, straw and carrier bags for example. Small companies with low sales in Germany are required to pay their fees in advance whereas larger companies may make quarterly sales statements. At the end of the year all licencees must submit an audit report to show they have complied with the regulations.
So smaller companies must pay larger shipping costs and do so up front, where larger companies simply put a few spare file clerks on the case. Hmmmm. Your site also talks about how the EU has cited this as anti-competitive and abusive as well as wasteful. Thanks for the link, it's good to see what the old world looks like so we can appreciate how good things are here before we ruin them.
Now, you can only get your oil changed at one of the really big Oil Filter Changing companies. It's impossible to find anyone who'll change it who isn't part of a giant oil changing concern....Oh, wait. I'm talking bollocks. And White Box PC manufacturers can simply pay the disposal fee, something that's per-sale, like everyone else, like they did when ethernet boards became standard parts of modern computers, and hard drives became standard parts, etc, etc.
First, your bad analogy might be true. What kind of non-big oil affiliated lubricant can anyone purchase? Who else but big oil can recycle used oil?
Second, waste oil has buyers. Who's going to want to purchase your broken cell phone or PC?
Third, PCs are only a small chunk of the waste stream, unlike automotive oil. We've been throwing out electronic gadgets with transistors, solder, phospohrs and all for a long time now without concern. PCs have only been around since 1980 or so. Waste oil from automobiles was a demostrated hazard which had no larger contributors, except maybe carcenoginic aditives to gasoline.
What is really acomplished here and what's it going to cost? Are those costs worth the problem?
First, show me evidence of a problem. While improper disposal of PC's in China is reprehensible, I'd like to see some direct evidence that PCs on their own are poluting groudwater or other resources elswhere.
If you can demonstrate a problem, tell me the method and cost of proper disposal. I don't have a disposal problem myself because I have yet to throw away any PC I've ever owned. Yep, I've got the mother board for the first XT I bought in my closet and it would work if something better were not in it's case. Other computers I have are all 486 and above and are just as useful today as they were the day I bought them thanks to free software. Just the same, I'll take my things to the right place if you can show it's required.
In the mean time, quit talking bollocks. I've taken care of my things and don't want to pay a tax or see small vendors put out of business because large compnaies like HP and M$ have been irresponsible.
I can see it now: some impoverished nation will be saddled with a National Department of Rain, complete with overpaid, slovenly employees and mounds of red tape, which will manage to get the rainclouds set up two days after the crops have all died, or right in the middle of a soccer game.
Opposed to impoverished nations saddled with Red Cross famine relief agents?
The zero sum game always amazes me. Why is it that people just can't see beyond it. The article says:
Professor Salter told the BBC: "We are trying to break through the layer of rather stagnant, humid air that's at the very, very bottom of the atmosphere, in contact with the sea surface, and lift large volumes of water through this and squirt them out from 10 metres up in the air as a very fine spray, with a very big surface area."
This is creation, not theft. They are taking moisture from the sea and putting it in the air. As all that water will end up back in the sea and the chances that this project will lower sea level are nil, no one has lost anything. Those who feel the rain will have gained much.
If ten meters is all you need, I would try chimneys to suck the moist air up. No moving parts, cheap to prefabricate, easy to errect.
Subliminal adverts are below concious perception because the mind typically does not want to see what's there. Typical images that can be seen in ads are of death, rejection and failure and other things that cause emotional distress. Just visit Budwiser, download their images and LOOK at them with higher zoom levels for a while. It's frightening, it's real and it works.
Farnsworth: It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. [He holds up an egg and injects it with liquid. The egg explodes.] Although in reality it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.
Is this saying that broadcast media is the injector? That it's creators are intentionally modifying our dreams for their own ends and that they don't care about the side effects?
My cell phone plays "batman." I stand in the street and have my wife call me. When she does, I dance around with a cup and demand quarters. It's a great way to make my fees and pay for the phone.
Humm it with me, "God Bless America, my home sweet home!" Now pay up, sucker.
After all, nobody's charging you for the upgrades. It's still a pain to have to make sure everything works, etc, but at least you can do it for nothing but time.
We must oppose this to the problem of things not working in the closed world. When you change out there and things don't work, all the time in the world is useless. You get to reboot until someone else fixes your problem or does not. Amazing that the cost of the other 2k, which has yet to be changed out, were compared to costs of a desktop that has yet to be tried out in the last five years. Ha ha.
OK, after five years Red Hat recomends an upgrade. Not bad, considering it could have been changed out at no cost and without interuption for better performance four years ago.
The long term solution must be the introduction of a trust network. The technology to make to possible is readily available in public key cryptography, what is lacking is the WILL. A system like this need not compromise anonymity, there are cryptographic protocols that allow for the establishment of anonymous trust with virtual identities. These same system can also be used to ensure email is cryptographically secure.
There's a difference between real spam and the shower of BS you typically see in your mailbox. Real spam is designed to actually sell something, and therefore has a real contact. The BS shower is designed to destroy email and a large portion of it has no real contact, product or anything.
Think about who would want to destroy email as a communications media and why they would spend money to do this. Comercial entities are despirarately trying to make the internet just like other media. They are working to erect barriers for entry so they can continue to sell their obsolete "services" the same way they always have, but with lower costs.
Your trust network that would "legitimise" comerical/bulk email from a bank, reeks of capitulation all around. My email box woould end up looking like my real mail box where the one or two pieces of real mail I get are easily lost in a sea of credit card offers and crap. New entrants, bannned to low bandwith and low trust server ghettos, have to compete with unfair disadvantages. You understand, of course, that your trust network would soon be extended to web and other services, don't you? You also understand that "anonymous trust with virtual identities" is an oxymoron. Either your system makes it so I don't "trust" someone, or it does not. So I get screwed and business returns to normal afrer a few high profile arrests and the infrastructure of the web is changed forever.
Rather than "legitimise" the transformance of a media that should remain pull into push, let's just outlaw spam and punish those who would destroy email. You can, and people have traced down the "spammers" before. Fines, big fines and jail time, for those caught, double when the "product" is not real.
At first they will be expensive, then they will be in the $599 desktops. Why wouldn't you use them?
Could it be for the same reason people who have "high speed internet connections" still place charge by the minute long distance calls instead of using voice over IP, or crawl to a company like Yahoo to be a middleman? Look to Redmond, there you will see the answer. Anti-competitive, greedy stupid shit. Remember the 64 bit Alpha? You would think it would be cheap to make by now, no? Sorry, that might hurt someone's bottom line.
In short, I'd love to use one but I'm not going to get my hopes up.
is M$ quiet about anything?
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
MS have been quietly getting ready for 64 bit for at least 2 years; they've been shipping a 64 bit SDK on my MSDN disks for over a year. There are 64 bit NVidia drivers for WinXP-64. What makes you think MS isn't already there?
Spare me the smoke and vapor. Don't you remember the sad story of Mica, errr, NT on Alpha? Loudly proclaimed, quietly killed, that's why I think they are not there. If you consider the number of bugs and holes in 32bit M$ work, you might conclude they never arived anywhere.
In the mean time, you can get Linux and BSD on Alpha and other 64 bit platoforms:
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies
I have to ask you, what's important? State records of live births on microfilm? Church recods of marriage? Death certificates? Survey maps of property? How about regular family photos?
A government of a modern state with lots of money tried to do what all of us would like to do and failed due to closed and propriatory data standards and the inability to make those copies. Obviously, no one passed the multimilion dollar projects onto new media. What makes you think you will do any better? Do you think your local state office is doing better with their rotting celophane and acid paper? No, I'm afraid that a real promblem has been shown here. The only reason the BBC failed first is because they tried first. They did better than NPR's audio tape disaster because the disks are still here, but failed because no one makes the readers. It's a problem that will get worse as Paladium etc, moves in to make sure that only a few can do so much as read "important" information, much less copy it. Do you have your CDs so well managed that you can actually transfer the information before CD readers are no more?
Slashdot Mirror
Open sourcing something isn't a magical fairy spell which creates security. Just like it isn't one which creates less bugs or software that is better than commercial software available. A hackable version of Apache is no different than a hackable version of IIS...
While free software may not be magic in and of itself, it does garuntee that anyone can fix it. Closed source software is garunteed unfixable. It's not just a matter of time for fix, it's a matter of the form of the fix and the thouroghness of the fix. Apache is a good example, thank you. When Apache has a problem because some underlying library has a flaw, more than apache is fixed. The library is fixed and all software compiled with it will be fixed and for anyone who needs it. In the Windoze world, only one developer has the fixed library and everything made without it is broken. Broken libraries can last for years in the Windoze world because M$ does not simply share the source code, but charges money for binaries. Where those libraries end up at the average company making windows software is a mystery and often people put off buying new libraries as long as possible. In one situation, you can be sure that all developers have the best libraries available all the time. In the other, you can be sure that developers don't and can't find out.
Once people learn to give a fuck about their security ... security not being trumpeted by smelly nerds who like to PGP their grepballed tarzips before sending their SSH'ed e-mail FTPs to each other via cryptic commands would help.... easy to understand education of basic computer hygene is needed.
Your need to wash your mouth and keyboard out with soap, you flaming troll.
Some people say vi zealots are unreasonable. I disagree, I think you should have to press a special sequence of characters before you can edit a document. ;)
M$ Word zealots think they should pay for an editor they can not use from a remote terminal without having special software installed that displays a desktop so you can mouse over a link that tries to call software on the local box anyway. Brain dead.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
It's big of you to call for "a somber, factual, reasonable, respectful debate" after calling RMS a "rude", "interupting", "unpresentable", "shrill", "adversarial", "divise" and bigoted messenger. More name calling, how typical. Go away no one here needs closed source binaries and I'm tired of your form of debate.
It starts like this:
#include std_beauty
#include std_hack
and in a couple of years I look at and ask, "What on Earth were you thinking?" After a few hours, I might understand what I was doing and am pleased, or feel stupid.
Very much like poetry, no?
Poorly organized. Lynx-optimized website (with only two pages)
You would prefer Power Point slides as an invitiation? What's missing?
only two months to write papers,
You don't think people have papers ready? Whole books have been written on the subject.
an overly broad topic,
Yah, yah, security is like that.
and being held in a pseudo-third world country away from the main countries where most research is being done
Kiss my ass. What godforsaken little grey town are you from to brag about? Got any chip fab nearby?
I'll be surprised if they register more than 500 attendees.
Singapore might have more than that in it's LUG. The only problem these folks might have is that one or two of them take Windoze seriously, but that will be corrected when the presentations hit the screens and the questions bubble up and the truth is found.
I know your post-it notes were a joke, but I just had to pass along what seems to be a good practice. There are so many bad practices out there already. Pet names, silly web based password generators, which leave themselves in chache, kid names, so easy to guese.
Some companies base their security around no-one knowing anything about it. Microsoft is trying to do great things with UI the ease of use, but in doing so they destroy security. You also use the term "IE" about ten times.
Worse, the 10 Priciples linked above are demonstrated with Windoze! Ah, what a waste. The trade off between ease of use and security is fictional. Best practices, such as unprivalidged user accounts, are just as easy to implement as an email account that automaticaly executes code sent by strangers. Sadly, many people think that M$ is the path of least resistance and that if only it can be secured, the world will be better off.
The problem of security in M$ apps is the distribution method - closed source. This can not be fixed and so Windoze can not be made secure. Don't take my word for it. Allow me to quote the this excellent summary from Sonnenreich and Yate's "Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls", John Wiley and Sons, 1999. It was true then, M$ has admitted most of it by now, and it will be true tomorrow because the model is the same:
The Windows platform was never built with security in mind; security was added as an afterthought. There are fundamental weakenesses in the operating system that can't be cured with a bandage. For example, background processes can run in a was such that they cannot be detected. ... Part of the problem stems from the fact that the vast majority of Windows packages are closed source. This means that only the original developers can identify and fix bugs in the software. Most Windows-based software products that aren't compiled directly from GNU licensed Unix source code are security disasters.
To make matters worse, companies confuse issues by claiming security though strong encryption. While the data in transit might be secure, that has nothing to do with wheter the program is secure on a fundamental level. For example, often encryption keys and passwords are stored on disks so users don't have to type them in every time. Regardless of how complex the scheme, the orignial information can always be recovered if the password is stored on disk and can be recovered by the program without user input.
Many windows applications are developed using common development libraries, most of which come from Microsoft. Hackers have repeatedly found insecurities such as buffer overflow conditions in these libraries. It becomes trivail to detaermine if an application has been built using such a library. ... These libraries have provided hackers with a reliable and consistent set of exploits.
Laplinck, NetMeeting, PC Anywhere and other remote session control systems for Windows all rely on proprietary unpublished transport mechanisms to create an aura of security. While you may be unable to determine what these programs are doing with your data, rest assured that hackers know exactly how the data are being transported... Since nobody can see the source conde, and since only the vendor can created and distribute fixes, these programs are a hacker's dream.
Add to this the fact that M$ charges an arm and a leg for said development libraries while refusing to be responsible for them and you start to understand why there's a new IE hole every month and how those holes can be persistent and how binary "patches" can introduce just as many problems as they fix.
This flawed distribution model makes Windows the path of highest resistance for securing PC desktops. Microsoft's entire business model of crushing competition and devowering the profit for any and all innovation brought to the masses depends on it and they are unwilling to change. Their "Shared Source" initiative, MSDN and all do fail to share the libraries at fault. Microsoft steadfastly refused to share those libraries throughout their conviction and "remedy" for anti-competitive practices. Time and time again, they have used the power of their postion for abuse of their users instead of following better practices and I have little faith they will do any beter in the future. Follow M$ at your perril.
He can't have a disk larger than 60G, bios trouble. (Coupled with above, he has lower capacity than even old tivos.)
Is a troll?
BIOS concerns are only a problem for boot. He used a floppy because he had one or because he wanted more drive space on the IDE. It has nothing to do with disk size once you have booted. For instance, my old 486 was limited to two 540MB IDE hard drives by BIOS, if and only if I were running some inferior operating system that does not check for itself like those from M$. That did not stop me from booting off a 540MB disk and having as large a second drive as I could afford to stick on. I'm told that a boot partition can overcome this problem too, but I have not bothered. Nor have I tried to boot off a compact flash card, though that's also an option. A PC that old does not generally suffer from inferior hard drives, and I've got enough 540MB disks. Please don't give people false impressions and confuse people about hardware versus Linux limitations.
On the plus side... I have fun playing with my toys too.
You should play some more! Can you export your movies from your Tivo via X windows to any PC in your house? Can you ftp chunks of movies you like to other computers? He can. I'll bet he can also change his programing from work through secure shell if he hears about some kind of "can't miss" TV program. Sometimes a "shoddy substitute" you build yourself does much more than some what the entertianment industry will let you buy.
It's strange to see so many negative posts. This article encouraged me to look into video recording again. I failed miserably, but one day I'll get it. The site is bookmarked so I can follow along later.
It's a matter of scale. Big companies can absorb the costs of regulations better than small ones can. Extreem examples of this are aircraft, automobile and motorcycle manufacture. Regulation is the prime reason the US has three automakers, poor civilian aviation and one motorcycle maker. While there are some advantages to scale and size in those industries, can you tell me why there's only one US manufacturer of motorbikes? PCs don't pose the threat to health and public safety the way motorized transportation does and this spurious "waste" issue is the only thing HP etc can fix on to get rid of small PC makers.
Now because I have posed some real harm this can do, I throw the burden of proff onto you and those who would change things. Show me studies where electronic goods have managed polute groundwater. Heck, I'd be satisfied if you could simply point to widespread evidence of sanitary landfill failure in general. If what I say is true, and small PC makers get squashed, I'm sure that I'll pay more for my next PC when I can't find the next upstart Dell dude in his dorm room. I don't want to trade that for some kind of silly PC only law that fails to stop any real harm by blocking all the larger stream of poison to the landfill from all other consumer electronic devices. In other words prove it's a problem and prove that proposed fees will fix the problem. If you can't I'm not going for it.
Email. When border routers in China discard packets destined to or received from certain hosts, we understand that they typically do so without regard for the specified protocol of communications. As a result, email messages are typically filtered when sent to or received from blocked sites.
So the next English email you get from China may have missing words, not just bad English.
Twitter knows no Asian language, not even Sanscrit and that's been around forever. Shame.
So why is it that they don't block porn? I know, they don't care about porn, they care about people who promote freedom. They blocked Slashdot too. I'm not sure about the Red Lobster thing, but Limbaugh's show is sponsored by Red Lobster restaurants. might have something to do with it, let's go see! Nope, nothing there. Looks like another corporate suck site, much like China itself.
Why not indeed? Why is it that PC cases have gone from PC to AT to ATX and beyond? The old forms worked and still work. I've got a AMD k6/2 450 running happily in an XT case with a 150 watt power supply. Worse, why is it that the cases have been tossed out with the guts even when there has been no change in form factor? Even worse than that, why is it that perfectly useful components get thrown away because of software "upgrades"? Hmmmm. Might it be because certian companies are discouraging modularization and reuse of their components, the Winmodem being the most glaring example? How about printers and scanners that also take "drivers" despite having enought computing power to have common interfaces like HP's printer command language, post script, or SCSI? Answer these questions and you will know why we have more dead PCs than living people.
Now, the next question is if PC waste is significanly greater and more damaging than other consumer electronic wastes. Are PCs worse than credenza stereos, TVs, and all the other junk thrown out combined? How is my old 9600 baud modem any worse than my old jam box? What problem will recycling fees really solve?
Put the two questions together and you might see the purpose of this as limitation of entry to PC manufacturing. Dell was started in a dorm room, you don't think they want any new entrants do you?
Combine this with media consolidation, increased government censorship and information monitoring, and you might think a confluence of interests lies in limiting the number of PC makers so that DRM like Paladium can be implimented. Can't have indepenent makers around offering "insecure" computers can we? And so it was uttered in private, and so it was done against the public good, without public input, and certianly not reseombling anything really American. A governement for the people, by the people and of the people? Nah, HP did it, that must be good enough for you and me.
So how small an operation can afford Green Dot fees? The site you pointed at shows some marked disadvantages for those small companies:
The costs of the licence depend on the type of packaging and its weight. As a rule of thumb the cost of the licence is about £1 per Kg of packaging. The definition of packaging is wide and includes CD cases, straw and carrier bags for example. Small companies with low sales in Germany are required to pay their fees in advance whereas larger companies may make quarterly sales statements. At the end of the year all licencees must submit an audit report to show they have complied with the regulations.
So smaller companies must pay larger shipping costs and do so up front, where larger companies simply put a few spare file clerks on the case. Hmmmm. Your site also talks about how the EU has cited this as anti-competitive and abusive as well as wasteful. Thanks for the link, it's good to see what the old world looks like so we can appreciate how good things are here before we ruin them.
Now, you can only get your oil changed at one of the really big Oil Filter Changing companies. It's impossible to find anyone who'll change it who isn't part of a giant oil changing concern....Oh, wait. I'm talking bollocks. And White Box PC manufacturers can simply pay the disposal fee, something that's per-sale, like everyone else, like they did when ethernet boards became standard parts of modern computers, and hard drives became standard parts, etc, etc.
First, your bad analogy might be true. What kind of non-big oil affiliated lubricant can anyone purchase? Who else but big oil can recycle used oil?
Second, waste oil has buyers. Who's going to want to purchase your broken cell phone or PC?
Third, PCs are only a small chunk of the waste stream, unlike automotive oil. We've been throwing out electronic gadgets with transistors, solder, phospohrs and all for a long time now without concern. PCs have only been around since 1980 or so. Waste oil from automobiles was a demostrated hazard which had no larger contributors, except maybe carcenoginic aditives to gasoline.
What is really acomplished here and what's it going to cost? Are those costs worth the problem?
First, show me evidence of a problem. While improper disposal of PC's in China is reprehensible, I'd like to see some direct evidence that PCs on their own are poluting groudwater or other resources elswhere.
If you can demonstrate a problem, tell me the method and cost of proper disposal. I don't have a disposal problem myself because I have yet to throw away any PC I've ever owned. Yep, I've got the mother board for the first XT I bought in my closet and it would work if something better were not in it's case. Other computers I have are all 486 and above and are just as useful today as they were the day I bought them thanks to free software. Just the same, I'll take my things to the right place if you can show it's required.
In the mean time, quit talking bollocks. I've taken care of my things and don't want to pay a tax or see small vendors put out of business because large compnaies like HP and M$ have been irresponsible.
Opposed to impoverished nations saddled with Red Cross famine relief agents?
Professor Salter told the BBC: "We are trying to break through the layer of rather stagnant, humid air that's at the very, very bottom of the atmosphere, in contact with the sea surface, and lift large volumes of water through this and squirt them out from 10 metres up in the air as a very fine spray, with a very big surface area."
This is creation, not theft. They are taking moisture from the sea and putting it in the air. As all that water will end up back in the sea and the chances that this project will lower sea level are nil, no one has lost anything. Those who feel the rain will have gained much.
If ten meters is all you need, I would try chimneys to suck the moist air up. No moving parts, cheap to prefabricate, easy to errect.
Subliminal adverts are below concious perception because the mind typically does not want to see what's there. Typical images that can be seen in ads are of death, rejection and failure and other things that cause emotional distress. Just visit Budwiser, download their images and LOOK at them with higher zoom levels for a while. It's frightening, it's real and it works.
Is this saying that broadcast media is the injector? That it's creators are intentionally modifying our dreams for their own ends and that they don't care about the side effects?
Humm it with me, "God Bless America, my home sweet home!" Now pay up, sucker.
We must oppose this to the problem of things not working in the closed world. When you change out there and things don't work, all the time in the world is useless. You get to reboot until someone else fixes your problem or does not. Amazing that the cost of the other 2k, which has yet to be changed out, were compared to costs of a desktop that has yet to be tried out in the last five years. Ha ha.
OK, after five years Red Hat recomends an upgrade. Not bad, considering it could have been changed out at no cost and without interuption for better performance four years ago.
There's a difference between real spam and the shower of BS you typically see in your mailbox. Real spam is designed to actually sell something, and therefore has a real contact. The BS shower is designed to destroy email and a large portion of it has no real contact, product or anything.
Think about who would want to destroy email as a communications media and why they would spend money to do this. Comercial entities are despirarately trying to make the internet just like other media. They are working to erect barriers for entry so they can continue to sell their obsolete "services" the same way they always have, but with lower costs.
Your trust network that would "legitimise" comerical/bulk email from a bank, reeks of capitulation all around. My email box woould end up looking like my real mail box where the one or two pieces of real mail I get are easily lost in a sea of credit card offers and crap. New entrants, bannned to low bandwith and low trust server ghettos, have to compete with unfair disadvantages. You understand, of course, that your trust network would soon be extended to web and other services, don't you? You also understand that "anonymous trust with virtual identities" is an oxymoron. Either your system makes it so I don't "trust" someone, or it does not. So I get screwed and business returns to normal afrer a few high profile arrests and the infrastructure of the web is changed forever.
Rather than "legitimise" the transformance of a media that should remain pull into push, let's just outlaw spam and punish those who would destroy email. You can, and people have traced down the "spammers" before. Fines, big fines and jail time, for those caught, double when the "product" is not real.
When you think it's OK to screw people for buisness reasons, that's what you will get.
Could it be for the same reason people who have "high speed internet connections" still place charge by the minute long distance calls instead of using voice over IP, or crawl to a company like Yahoo to be a middleman? Look to Redmond, there you will see the answer. Anti-competitive, greedy stupid shit. Remember the 64 bit Alpha? You would think it would be cheap to make by now, no? Sorry, that might hurt someone's bottom line.
In short, I'd love to use one but I'm not going to get my hopes up.
Spare me the smoke and vapor. Don't you remember the sad story of Mica, errr, NT on Alpha? Loudly proclaimed, quietly killed, that's why I think they are not there. If you consider the number of bugs and holes in 32bit M$ work, you might conclude they never arived anywhere.
In the mean time, you can get Linux and BSD on Alpha and other 64 bit platoforms:
Oh, it hurts so much to remember and think!
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies
I have to ask you, what's important? State records of live births on microfilm? Church recods of marriage? Death certificates? Survey maps of property? How about regular family photos?
A government of a modern state with lots of money tried to do what all of us would like to do and failed due to closed and propriatory data standards and the inability to make those copies. Obviously, no one passed the multimilion dollar projects onto new media. What makes you think you will do any better? Do you think your local state office is doing better with their rotting celophane and acid paper? No, I'm afraid that a real promblem has been shown here. The only reason the BBC failed first is because they tried first. They did better than NPR's audio tape disaster because the disks are still here, but failed because no one makes the readers. It's a problem that will get worse as Paladium etc, moves in to make sure that only a few can do so much as read "important" information, much less copy it. Do you have your CDs so well managed that you can actually transfer the information before CD readers are no more?