Re:Tag CDs which are copy controlled
on
Amazon Goes Wiki
·
· Score: 1
It's right below the Editorial Reviews section, at least for me and at least for now. My original wiki entry was made on November 11th, then it seemed that the wikis disappeared from Amazon.com for a few weeks, and now they're back, so they appear to be turning the feature on and off for whatever reason (maybe testing).
Re:Tag CDs which are copy controlled
on
Amazon Goes Wiki
·
· Score: 1
Well, I also added a wiki entry for Sean Paul - The Trinity awhile back too, which is a little more popular, and it's still around. Granted, it's not exceedingly negative (I just noted that the track listing is a little off) and the CD isn't the #1 best seller, so you could certainly be right.
Tag CDs which are copy controlled
on
Amazon Goes Wiki
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you've bought a CD through Amazon.com which is copy controlled, this is a good opportunity to tag it as such by leaving a note in the wiki. For example, I did this here - nothing inflammatory, just a friendly note for others who are thinking about buying the CD. This is information that I personally would like to know before deciding to purchase a CD, and I expect some others here feel the same.
That's the first I have seen JFileSync, so I'm not 100% sure of what features are there or not, but from a cursory look it appears that the advantages of MMB would be 1) the files stored on the server are encrypted and 2) you only need a commodity web hosting account that supports PHP. I didn't see anything about what security features are in JFileSync (I very well could have missed it), but it looks like the files are stored in the clear on the server, and possible transferred that way over the network too (I'm not sure). It also looks like you need to be able to run a custom Java program on the server - I'm not sure how easily that could be shoehorned into what hosting providers typically allow. Obviously, you could run that if you have a managed server, but not necessarily if you just have a web hosting account.
Well, for the ultimate in control, you could do it yourself. That's fairly easy if you're running Linux - 'cron', plus 'gpg', plus 'scp' is relatively simple and secure. You just need a server at a managed hosting provider like Rackspace or ServerMatrix.
Windows may be a different story. I have been toying around with the idea of releasing some software that let's you do something similar in Windows. I've written some peer to peer backup software that will let you share backups among the computers in your office. It also has an experimental feature that let's you also backup offsite to a web server running PHP (so you can use a commodity provider which is generally far cheaper than managed hosting). I haven't released that feature yet, but will probably do so if enough people express interest.
How do the update times for security updates on RHEL and CentOS compare with Fedora and Debian stable/testing? I need to upgrade my desktop soon and timeliness of security updates along with ease of updating and length of support are probably going to be major factors in which distro I go with. Are Fedora security updates usually released before, after, or around the same time as RHEL? If they are released after RHEL, is the lag greater than CentOS?
Not true. MIT gave me many scholarships when I was there and I they continue to give scholarships as well (they explicitly list scholarships as a category that alumni can donate to when they run fundraising drives, so they haven't stopped the practice). I didn't get the scholarships because I was particularly bright, but rather because of financial need. Financial need alone is enough to get you a scholarship once you are admitted, though I have a feeling that might not apply to people who aren't US citizens (or maybe it applies to a lesser extent), so the kids in the article may be out of luck, but MIT does indeed give scholarships.
My Mail Plus account was upgraded to 2G last year, whenever it was that they last increased their free storage. Note that The Register doesn't say that Mail Plus users are getting "upgraded", just that they will be getting 2G. I would guess that this means that either we won't be getting another bump in storage or Yahoo! hasn't announced that yet (or that The Register is unaware of it, at least).
Make sure everybody calls your cell and use your land line for internet.
Alternatively, many phone companies will let you automatically forward your calls to another number if your phone is busy or you don't pick up. This would work well for a landline when you are dialed in because your calls will be forwarded to your cell phone right away. It's also nice when you're away from home because if you don't pick up after a few rings the call will be transferred. This service is generally around $2 or $3 per month, and in fact could end up saving you money if you already pay for voicemail on your landline since you could just cancel that and use your cell phone's voicemail.
I actually discovered this option when I was thinking about the race condition of picking up my land-line phone to see if I have voicemail at the same time somebody is calling me. I know, I'm crazy to worry about something so rare, but it led me to find a solution that has many practical advantages, such as voicemail consolidation and the fact that I only need to give out one phone number now.
I beg to differ. Apache 1 or 2 for that matter is no where near the maximum performance level when it come sto serving static content.
As projects such as thttpd, tux, boa, lighttpd and many others clearly demonstrate. In fact the performance of Apache 1/2 is no where near what the solutions I've mentioned offer.
Quite true. I've improved the performance in the past of a very high traffic website by switching what content I could from Apache to Boa. Boa performed substantially better than both Apache 1.3 and 2.0. If you need further evidence, look at the HTTP response headers for one of Slashdot's own images - they are serving images using Boa instead of Apache for a reason.
This isn't to say that Apache is worthless. On the contrary, it is an exceptionally good server. It just doesn't scale as well as some others for static content.
I realised a few years ago that the only sane way to protect my data was to have it all online all the time. I store my data on redundant arrays of disks in two geographical locations (my house and my parents' house, synced nightly via rsync).
What if somebody hacks your primary machine and erases your data? This would propagate to your backup server as well. I see at least two solutions to this: 1) make a WORM copy every so often and/or 2) write to the backup server is a journaled manner so that older data isn't automatically deleted. Of course, solution #1 is still prone to bit-rot and solution #2 doesn't protect you if somebody hacks your backup server as well (which should be substantially easier if they made it onto your primary machine). Anybody have additional suggestions? I've been thinking about this problem for a backup program I'm working on and am curious if anybody can improve upon the reliability.
I usually only see the resellers selling for $3 or $4 less on most products though, so not sure how much this will help sales.
I bought an iBook from
Small Dog Electronics a few months ago for several hundred dollars less than everywhere else was charging. I'm not sure why they were the only ones that seemed to be substantially cheaper than buying direct from Apple, but I was quite happy with the purchase.
I wonder if they are aware of the open source (GPL) version of Settlers of Catan. Some guy wrote it for his thesis because writing the AI for a game where negotiation plays such a big role posed an interesting challenge. I was addicted to this version for several weeks when I came across it last year and I'd hate to see it disappear (but on the other hand, I don't think it was ever officially sanctioned by the owners of Settlers).
If you have more than one computer on your local network, then why not have them backup to each other? It's much more convenient (and reliable) than messing with CD-Rs. On Linux this is pretty simple to do with 'cron' and 'rsync'. On Windows, there are some tools coming onto the market right now to do the same thing and I'm going to shamelessly plug my own. It's called Magic Mirror Backup and you can download it at http://www.pensamos.com/mmb/ . Version 1.0 is free, it works on Windows and Linux, and it will make automatic, daily backups for you without having to mess with CD-Rs, tapes, or other media.
What happens if something like a hurricane destroys all your computers at once? (Realistically, you would need to ask yourself the same question if you used CD-Rs or tapes - if something wipes out your home/office, those backups are likely to be gone too.) There is also an option to backup to an off-site server. The server software is plain old PHP and should run on most commodity $3/month web hosting services, making for a relatively cheap, do-it-yourself backup. I haven't decided yet whether to just offer a (paid) monthly service myself or to release the PHP code so that people can set up their own servers. I'm open to feedback. The local P2P backup will remain free for the first version, in any case.
I must say, Python might be a nice language and all, but as it's making inroads everywhere it's also wrecking havoc on ones ability to convert older hardware into a competent server.
Spamassassin is actually written in Perl, not Python. I'm not saying your point about certain languages making it difficult to maintain older machines isn't valid, I'm just clarifying what Spamassassin uses.
I've been working on something like this for awhile. It's not entirely the same as what Cringely proposed, but it's a step in that direction and I'd like to continue working on it and making it more evolved if there is interest in it. Currently, it's meant for intranet use, so the machines in your office can easily backup to each other. That's obviously not hurricane-proof, but it does help protect against a single point of failure. Also, I am about to add the option to let you make backups to an off-site server as well - I will be running the off-site servers initially, but the server software will work on any commodity $3/month PHP web hosting service, so people could theoretically run it themselves if keeping data internal ends up being a big concern.
I am going to release the first beta "real soon now" (sorry - my time is limited since I'm getting married next month), and there is currently an alpha version out for Windows and Linux at: http://www.pensamos.com/mmb/ The alpha version is a little rough around the edges, but I plan to smooth things out over time if there is enough interest. I welcome all feedback. Thank you.
Your ellipses excluded the Many photographers will let you make whatever copies you want part, which is exactly the situation you describe.
Actually, I described a full transfer of rights, which you said no photographers will do. My photographer said there would be a full transfer, not a limited license.
We will sell our customers a limited copyright release, which will allow them to make whatever copies they want for whatever purpose, but we don't actually transfer the copyright. Doing so would prevent us from making copies.
I don't understand how not owning the copyright would inherently prevent you from making copies. In fact, you said that the customer would not own the copyright and yet could make unrestricted copies, so owning the copyright therefore can't be a necessary condition to making legal copies. What is the difference between the situation where you own the copyright with a limited copyright release for the customer and the situation where the customer owns the copyright with a limited copyright release for you? Both you and the customer would be able to make copies in either case. The only practical difference I see is that the copyright holder has the right to let third parties make copies as well, which is a separate issue unless I am misinterpreting what you mean when you say that you will be making copies.
Please don't think that I'm trying to give you a hard time at all, I'm just trying to understand the needs of photographers better. My goal is to be able to do whatever I want with my wedding picture a few years from now (no problem if the photographer wants to be the exclusive source for prints for the first X years) and that includes allowing third parties (e.g., my family) to make copies. I am just concerned that I wouldn't be able to do whatever I wanted with a limited copyright release and it would be safer to have the copyright myself with the photographer retaining a license to do what he wants with it. For instance, 15 years ago a limited license allowing unrestricted prints would have seemed reasonably sufficient, but then the web was invented and such a license would not have granted me permission to put my own wedding pictures on my own website. Viewed in that light, copyright ownership is a way to future proof my own wedding pictures - I have no problem with the photographer doing what he wants with the images as well. I suppose the argument could be made that the photographer would also want to future proof the agreement for himself by retaining the copyright, but the difference is that he will have many clients coming through the door in the future and can adjust the agreement to cover new uses as technology changes - I, on the other hand, will hopefully only ever have one wedding, so I have a higher personal stake in having the least amount of restrictions on use of these particular pictures.
No photographer will ever sell the copyright... no photographer is going to give up his right to make copies.
What's to stop him from selling the copyright to you with the stipulation that he is still allowed to make copies? In essence, you get the copyright and he simultaneously gets a license from you to reproduce the images for his own promotional purposes. I found a photographer for my wedding with an attractive portfolio who was in fact willing to transfer full use and ownership rights with the negatives so long as he could use the images for promotion. This seems reasonable to me. I was willing to pay a premium for this too (I'm not sure how much of one I might have paid because his prices were middle of the road compared with other quotes that didn't include such a stipulation). As luck would have it, he also had one of the nicer portfolios that we looked at, so we didn't need to compromise on quality to get this.
Admittedly it'd be hard to deal with live data (databases, open files, etc.) using your system, but it's a good idea.
I think that's generally true of any backup system. MMB will, however, alert you when it wasn't able to back up a file because it was open, so at least you'll know. I would like to add "plugin" support at some point so that you can tell it to run "pg_dump", "mysqldump", or any other program beforehand to take a consistent snapshot of database data, etc. If and when I add that is going to depend mostly upon user demand.
I like the fact that you provide both Windows and Linux versions. I might give it a try! Thanks.
I'd like to do an OSX version too. It actually already works fine in OSX, although I would need to polish up the look and feel before releasing it. Anyway, that too will happen if and when there is demand for it.
But the only thing short of a really long tape that you can backup these things to in one media is another 400GB hdd. (it would still be 86 4.7GB DVDs)
The nice thing about that is that it makes for a great excuse to have a second machine (yeah you're backing up to another 400GB hdd, it just happens to be in another machine). It's a symbiotic relationship - each machine backs up to another. I don't for the life of me see why any small business with more than 1 PC would not do this. This is really very easy to set up in Linux with 'rsync' and 'cron', and in Windows... well, I'm working on it. The program I'm working on won't exactly handle 400GB very well because it makes a full backup every time, but I do plan to address this by adding incremental support if there is enough interest in it. Also, it's free as in beer (and some of the libraries it uses are LGPL).
I have always wondered WHY there is no "open taxes" projects going.
we could simply create a framework that run's say a python script thtat describs the rules and calculations of the tax form and simply print out the postscript from there...
One would think with lots of API documentation available that a near perfect compatibility layer should have been feasible by now. This has not happened and many people (myself included) don't really understand why.
That assumes that the APIs work as advertised in Windows. Each version of Windows has its own set of set of bugs which break things in different and often times subtle ways. I remember looking at WINE awhile back and it struck me that they had to implement a lot of things a dozen different ways just to emulate the bugs that are in various versions of Windows. The "near perfect compatibility layer" that you are asking for would actually fail to work with a lot of Windows programs because they rely on functionality that was either incorrectly implemented or not fully specified in various versions of Windows. You actually need a compatibility layer that can mimic the loads of imperfections in all versions of Windows. Writing such a layer sounds like a horrendous task to me and not one that can be fixed merely with API documentation of how things are supposed to work. Hats off to the WINE folks for tackling this.
No. He's clearly saying that he believes MS has 50 or more lawsuits that it will back
I think that he's actually talking about Microsoft defending against 50 or more lawsuits, or at least being ambiguous about it. Look at how he starts the paragraph:
In a world where there are $500 million dollar patent infringement lawsuits imposed on OS companies (although this is not completely settled yet), how would somebody like Red Hat compete when 6 months ago they only had $80-$90 million in cash? At that point they could not even afford to settle a fraction of a single judgment without devastating their shareholders. I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue.
It sounds to me like he's talking about the Eolas suit against Microsoft in the first sentence. He leads off talking about how Microsoft has needed to defend its turf because of the nature of the OS business, says that RedHat would be crushed by a judgment of the same kind which Microsoft was handed (the fine was $500M), and then points out that the Eolas suit is not unique and that Microsoft faces suits like that quite frequently. That would seem to be how the sentence was meant given the lead-in, but maybe he intentionally phrased things ambiguously enough to be taken either way.
Sure. But what will they learn? How the code processes MouseEvent.MOUSE_CLICKED? How you use sockets? How you show that nifty splash screen? I mean... who cares?
"Super-secret" algorithms aside, it's not so much that I'm worried they will learn how to do what I did, it's more that I don't want people reusing my code without permission. I've found people who have copied pages from my website almost verbatim, and even one person who blatantly plagiarized a page of my and changed "Copyright Tim Macinta" to "Copyright his name"! Granted, that's a little easier to do with HTML than with Java, but if it's simple to protect against by using an obfuscator, then why not? I really wouldn't mind people learning from my code, it is actually reusing the code without permission and without attribution that I am protecting against. I'm not just being paranoid - I had somebody email me the source code to an applet I wrote once (which he apparently decompiled) with a note along the lines of "Ha, ha! Now I have your source!" I don't know what motivates these people, but there are enough of them out there that I have since started obfuscating almost everything as a basic precaution.
Thanks. It's not as off-topic as you think. I used obfuscation with MMB (which is a client side Java app) to prevent plagiarism and reduce the siez (barely). Nothing about it is "super-secret", although it is a little more complex than just routing MouseEvents around.
Slashdot Mirror
It's right below the Editorial Reviews section, at least for me and at least for now. My original wiki entry was made on November 11th, then it seemed that the wikis disappeared from Amazon.com for a few weeks, and now they're back, so they appear to be turning the feature on and off for whatever reason (maybe testing).
Well, I also added a wiki entry for Sean Paul - The Trinity awhile back too, which is a little more popular, and it's still around. Granted, it's not exceedingly negative (I just noted that the track listing is a little off) and the CD isn't the #1 best seller, so you could certainly be right.
If you've bought a CD through Amazon.com which is copy controlled, this is a good opportunity to tag it as such by leaving a note in the wiki. For example, I did this here - nothing inflammatory, just a friendly note for others who are thinking about buying the CD. This is information that I personally would like to know before deciding to purchase a CD, and I expect some others here feel the same.
That's the first I have seen JFileSync, so I'm not 100% sure of what features are there or not, but from a cursory look it appears that the advantages of MMB would be 1) the files stored on the server are encrypted and 2) you only need a commodity web hosting account that supports PHP. I didn't see anything about what security features are in JFileSync (I very well could have missed it), but it looks like the files are stored in the clear on the server, and possible transferred that way over the network too (I'm not sure). It also looks like you need to be able to run a custom Java program on the server - I'm not sure how easily that could be shoehorned into what hosting providers typically allow. Obviously, you could run that if you have a managed server, but not necessarily if you just have a web hosting account.
Windows may be a different story. I have been toying around with the idea of releasing some software that let's you do something similar in Windows. I've written some peer to peer backup software that will let you share backups among the computers in your office. It also has an experimental feature that let's you also backup offsite to a web server running PHP (so you can use a commodity provider which is generally far cheaper than managed hosting). I haven't released that feature yet, but will probably do so if enough people express interest.
How do the update times for security updates on RHEL and CentOS compare with Fedora and Debian stable/testing? I need to upgrade my desktop soon and timeliness of security updates along with ease of updating and length of support are probably going to be major factors in which distro I go with. Are Fedora security updates usually released before, after, or around the same time as RHEL? If they are released after RHEL, is the lag greater than CentOS?
Thanks,
- Tim
My Mail Plus account was upgraded to 2G last year, whenever it was that they last increased their free storage. Note that The Register doesn't say that Mail Plus users are getting "upgraded", just that they will be getting 2G. I would guess that this means that either we won't be getting another bump in storage or Yahoo! hasn't announced that yet (or that The Register is unaware of it, at least).
I actually discovered this option when I was thinking about the race condition of picking up my land-line phone to see if I have voicemail at the same time somebody is calling me. I know, I'm crazy to worry about something so rare, but it led me to find a solution that has many practical advantages, such as voicemail consolidation and the fact that I only need to give out one phone number now.
This isn't to say that Apache is worthless. On the contrary, it is an exceptionally good server. It just doesn't scale as well as some others for static content.
I'm not sure if this is too dissimilar or not, but using peer to peer networks for backups should generally be non-infringing.
I wonder if they are aware of the open source (GPL) version of Settlers of Catan. Some guy wrote it for his thesis because writing the AI for a game where negotiation plays such a big role posed an interesting challenge. I was addicted to this version for several weeks when I came across it last year and I'd hate to see it disappear (but on the other hand, I don't think it was ever officially sanctioned by the owners of Settlers).
What happens if something like a hurricane destroys all your computers at once? (Realistically, you would need to ask yourself the same question if you used CD-Rs or tapes - if something wipes out your home/office, those backups are likely to be gone too.) There is also an option to backup to an off-site server. The server software is plain old PHP and should run on most commodity $3/month web hosting services, making for a relatively cheap, do-it-yourself backup. I haven't decided yet whether to just offer a (paid) monthly service myself or to release the PHP code so that people can set up their own servers. I'm open to feedback. The local P2P backup will remain free for the first version, in any case.
I am going to release the first beta "real soon now" (sorry - my time is limited since I'm getting married next month), and there is currently an alpha version out for Windows and Linux at: http://www.pensamos.com/mmb/ The alpha version is a little rough around the edges, but I plan to smooth things out over time if there is enough interest. I welcome all feedback. Thank you.
Please don't think that I'm trying to give you a hard time at all, I'm just trying to understand the needs of photographers better. My goal is to be able to do whatever I want with my wedding picture a few years from now (no problem if the photographer wants to be the exclusive source for prints for the first X years) and that includes allowing third parties (e.g., my family) to make copies. I am just concerned that I wouldn't be able to do whatever I wanted with a limited copyright release and it would be safer to have the copyright myself with the photographer retaining a license to do what he wants with it. For instance, 15 years ago a limited license allowing unrestricted prints would have seemed reasonably sufficient, but then the web was invented and such a license would not have granted me permission to put my own wedding pictures on my own website. Viewed in that light, copyright ownership is a way to future proof my own wedding pictures - I have no problem with the photographer doing what he wants with the images as well. I suppose the argument could be made that the photographer would also want to future proof the agreement for himself by retaining the copyright, but the difference is that he will have many clients coming through the door in the future and can adjust the agreement to cover new uses as technology changes - I, on the other hand, will hopefully only ever have one wedding, so I have a higher personal stake in having the least amount of restrictions on use of these particular pictures.