Microsoft sued first, then TomTom filed a suit in retaliation. The speculation was that TomTom had notified Microsoft that it was infringing their map software patents, and Microsoft's response was to sue for infringing the FAT patent. I wasn't able to find any citations to prove that speculation, but here was the original Slashdot article about the TomTom suit:
Plus metric measurements are generally too small (cm) or too big (m) to be practical for day to day uses.
Excellent point. It is too bad that there is no measurement between the two. Hmm, maybe we should email the SI about this? It could be 1/10th of a meter, and how about "deci" (to indicate 10) as the prefix? I think it might solve the problem!
Did Chrome import settings from IE? The other possibility I can think of is that Bing was setup with some sort of DNS NX record hijacking. I highly doubt Google Chrome would have set Bing by default.
It doesn't even sound like the feeds themselves would be under threat. What this appears to apply to would be RSS readers and podcatchers that do the automatic downloading.
Wouldn't that mean that because podcasts do not check for space for the download, that they would not be affected? On the other hand, the myriad of podcatcher applications out there might be under threat.
September 2000 - The first system that enabled the selection, automatic downloading and storage of serial episodic audio content on PCs and portable devices was launched by September 2000 [2] from another early MP3 player manufacturer, i2Go. To supply content for its portable mp3 players, i2Go, makers of the eGo player, introduced a digital audio news and entertainment service called MyAudio2Go.com that enabled users to download episodic news, sports, entertainment, weather, and music in audio format for listening on a PC, the eGo portable audio player, or other MP3 players. The i2GoMediaManager and the eGo file transfer application could be programmed to automatically download the latest episodic content available from user selected content types to a PC or portable device as desired. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the i2Go company ran out of capital during the dotcom crash and folded.
Hmm, didn't know you could softmod 360s (or is it a solderless chip?). Is there at least a homebrew scene though? I softmodded my Wii for SCUMMVM mainly, but there are quite a few interesting homebrew apps for the Wii with the motion controls. One that I found particularly interesting used IR emitters on a hat and use the Wii remote set down facing you to do head tracking. Then again, I didn't find it interesting enough to duct-tape the "sensor bar" to my head.
Is that all there is to prevent pirated or "backup" copies? The DVD drive firmware?? I thought you had to chip the console to do that. It sounds more like they wanted to punish those who took it upon themselves to fix the crappy DVD drives that scratch discs all the time. Please correct me if I am incorrect about this.
I agree that it is their right on the part of banning from Xbox Live specifically. However, the machines also had some other functionality removed. There may be others, but one function reportedly removed from banned xboxes was the ability to install games to the hard drive.
In my eyes, this would be akin to Nvidia remotely disabling the S-video port on your video card for overclocking it. Just banning you from Xbox live would have been more like banning you from a Team Fortress 2 server for using hacked maps.
and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes.
In order to get a patent repealed, I believe the prior art needs to cover the entire thing. I don't recall automatically receiving episodes back when I was a subscriber (I think it was actually called "sponsor", but whatever). I had to go to the website every release day and check if a new episode was available.
I could be misunderstanding, though, and by automatically they just mean the content is available automatically to subscribers, not that you would automatically receive it. Also, I do not know the context of "subscribers" here. When referring to magazines and newspapers, "subscribers" receive the content via whatever the delivery method (mail or paper route, normally). When referring to podcasts, a subscriber just adds the RSS or Atom feed to their podcatcher, which then actively checks for new content and retrieves it. The data is not pushed to you, it is pulled by you and that difference could be significant.
I'll bite, this is a package to limit user access, most of which is configurable with policies without the package. The other part is a disk lock that uses disk diffing that resets when the computer is rebooted. This prevents any direct writes to the hard drive. I believe it is included with 7, and possibly Vista, but not XP.
It adds no stability, and security only in the sense that when you reboot, any malware that the user picked up would be gone.
Had you been given Windows Server 2008 Core to use as a web server, you would very likely have been in the same position. IIS might have been installed (no SQL or PHP support is on the Server 2008 disc), but without the ability to access some documentation, you would have been in the same state as if you were with Red Hat(look at instructions for IIS + PHP + MySQL here). Your point that "linux" does not have a unified installer strategy is just as valid with Windows. My point is that there are valid reasons for different installer strategies among distros, not just excuses.
I vote you can keep your geek card, because you googled it. If you had just posted "PEBKAC, what the fuck does that mean?! Damn kids and their txt speak", we would kindly ask you to hand in your geek card and resume lawn-guarding duties.
Erm, the GPL is a distribution license. You are free to run, modify, print and use as toilet paper, or do whatever as long as you do not distribute. If you wish to distribute the code, you need to follow the license and include your changes with it. I think even the biggest FLOSS zealots understand this. Why can't you?
As for this:
Have you ever bought a book? Furniture? Clothing? A toaster, microwave or television? Did you have to agree to a license before you could use any of these items? NO.
You don't have to with GPL code either. If you were to copy the book, or make knock-off furniture or clothing and then sold or distributed, you could likely be sued for it. If you sell or distribute GPL code, you just have to follow the license.
I thought OpenSolaris had its own package management system. Maybe it is practically apt, but it is not actually apt. Nexenta is an OpenSolaris distro that uses apt, so maybe that is what you are thinking of?
There is no unified installer strategy because different distros can be as different as an Xbox is to an Xbox 360 or Windows XP or Server 2008 Core and those all at least come from the same company. All of them have a Windows NT kernel, yet all of them are very different in the way you install and configure software. "Linux" is just a kernel, and the distros are different operating systems based on that kernel. Sure, they will share lots of other software for want of not reinventing the wheel each time, but the software installation is done in a way that suits the group or company that develops the distro. Some of them will find that another tool is better and drop their own (I believe Red Hat dropped up2date for yum), but for the most part the package system is what keeps people using one distro over another. Gentoo's portage can be configured to optimize everything to your specific hardware. Debian's apt is known for excellent dependency handling. I'm not sure what advantages yum and yast have, because I have not worked with yast and yum seems nearly identical to apt in my limited use(maybe its just a matter of rpm vs deb files?).
Interesting, I've never really looked that hard at an SAS connector. Our clients normally buy servers with the drives preloaded, and usually buy cheaper SATA drives when they need additional storage, so it is rare for me to need to take the SAS drives out.
Thanks for the correction and update. Does anyone know how the open-source driver compares with the binary blob on newer ATI cards? Are they feature-complete minus the DRM? I would probably consider the lack of DRM a feature itself, but that's just me.
I am honestly surprised that running wampserver in XP can pass for milspec. Also, I can understand your frustration in in using an unfamiliar distro without the aid of google, but you really shouldn't blame Red Hat in this case. In XP it was easy because you are used to it and knew about wampserver and had a copy with you(nice to hear they added an updater, last I used it they did not and updating was an annoyance), but if you did not have it with you, installing an AMP stack in windows would have been impossible. If they had a copy of Red Hat, I'm surprised they didn't have any of the documentation. I also thought Red Hat had links to the local documentation in the main menu on the desktop. Unless of course the admin chose workstation and no GUI during the install, which would baffle me.
I do not have any PPC stuff myself, but I often see Yellow Dog linux recommended. I have heard that PS3 development has started to overshadow the Mac development though.
At least those do not have the configuration accessable from the WAN by default. Also, they normally have either instructions or a setup wizard that sets up security for them. This is a case of WAN-accessable config pages that let unauthenticated users download the config file, which stores the username and password in plain text. The difference is clueless users versus extremely insecure design.
This is the difference between a linux box configured with insecure settings and a Windows 98 box sitting on the WAN with no firewall.
Or, how about a car analogy:
You can drive a brand new car with tons of safety features 100 mph into a brick wall and still die, or you can drive a Pinto which is likely to explode if someone rear-ends you.
Most distros are based on one of the major ones but with their own little tweaks toward their purpose. This means that they all pretty much boil down to a few different package management systems, that do their own dependency and version management. Some of the major distros and the package management system used:
Debian: apt Red Hat: yum Gentoo: portage SUSE: yast
I primarily use Debian or distros that are based on it, such as Ubuntu and Mint. If you have a GUI, the simplest will be the Add/Remove Programs. More powerful but still GUI-based is Synaptic. On a command-line, you will use aptitude or apt-get to install software.
With Red hat based distros, such as CentOS and Fedora, I am not quite as familiar although i do some management of a CentOS box. "yum search [query]" will help search for what application you are looking for. And "yum install [application]" will install it. My CentOS box is headless so I cannot help with the GUI portion.
Your best bet with finding the right distro for you is to think about what you are looking to do. One of the base distros will usually have everything but the kitchen sink, but you will probably need to work to get it going. If you are looking to replace your desktop, search for "desktop linux" and see what is popular. You will likely find Ubuntu or Mint. Search for network storage linux and you will probably find Openfiler. Search for linux firewall and you will probably find out about IP Cop or Smoothwall. Search for linux web server and you may find that Debian or Ubuntu Server is a popular LAMP server distro. Since most of these specialize in one area, they are usually easy to configure to do what you want. But if you want to turn something like Openfiler into a general desktop, you are going to be in for a world of hurt trying to do it.
You were trying to install a webserver without internet access? Where then did you find out about and get wampserver from? On a base install of windows there is no AMP stack and nothing telling you how to install software that you are looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft sued first, then TomTom filed a suit in retaliation. The speculation was that TomTom had notified Microsoft that it was infringing their map software patents, and Microsoft's response was to sue for infringing the FAT patent. I wasn't able to find any citations to prove that speculation, but here was the original Slashdot article about the TomTom suit:
yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/20/0215215
Plus metric measurements are generally too small (cm) or too big (m) to be practical for day to day uses.
Excellent point. It is too bad that there is no measurement between the two. Hmm, maybe we should email the SI about this? It could be 1/10th of a meter, and how about "deci" (to indicate 10) as the prefix? I think it might solve the problem!
Did Chrome import settings from IE? The other possibility I can think of is that Bing was setup with some sort of DNS NX record hijacking. I highly doubt Google Chrome would have set Bing by default.
It doesn't even sound like the feeds themselves would be under threat. What this appears to apply to would be RSS readers and podcatchers that do the automatic downloading.
Wouldn't that mean that because podcasts do not check for space for the download, that they would not be affected? On the other hand, the myriad of podcatcher applications out there might be under threat.
From the article:
September 2000 - The first system that enabled the selection, automatic downloading and storage of serial episodic audio content on PCs and portable devices was launched by September 2000 [2] from another early MP3 player manufacturer, i2Go. To supply content for its portable mp3 players, i2Go, makers of the eGo player, introduced a digital audio news and entertainment service called MyAudio2Go.com that enabled users to download episodic news, sports, entertainment, weather, and music in audio format for listening on a PC, the eGo portable audio player, or other MP3 players. The i2GoMediaManager and the eGo file transfer application could be programmed to automatically download the latest episodic content available from user selected content types to a PC or portable device as desired. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the i2Go company ran out of capital during the dotcom crash and folded.
That seems pretty relevant to this case.
Hmm, didn't know you could softmod 360s (or is it a solderless chip?). Is there at least a homebrew scene though? I softmodded my Wii for SCUMMVM mainly, but there are quite a few interesting homebrew apps for the Wii with the motion controls. One that I found particularly interesting used IR emitters on a hat and use the Wii remote set down facing you to do head tracking. Then again, I didn't find it interesting enough to duct-tape the "sensor bar" to my head.
Is that all there is to prevent pirated or "backup" copies? The DVD drive firmware?? I thought you had to chip the console to do that. It sounds more like they wanted to punish those who took it upon themselves to fix the crappy DVD drives that scratch discs all the time. Please correct me if I am incorrect about this.
I agree that it is their right on the part of banning from Xbox Live specifically. However, the machines also had some other functionality removed. There may be others, but one function reportedly removed from banned xboxes was the ability to install games to the hard drive.
In my eyes, this would be akin to Nvidia remotely disabling the S-video port on your video card for overclocking it. Just banning you from Xbox live would have been more like banning you from a Team Fortress 2 server for using hacked maps.
I don't think they fit this part:
and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes.
In order to get a patent repealed, I believe the prior art needs to cover the entire thing. I don't recall automatically receiving episodes back when I was a subscriber (I think it was actually called "sponsor", but whatever). I had to go to the website every release day and check if a new episode was available.
I could be misunderstanding, though, and by automatically they just mean the content is available automatically to subscribers, not that you would automatically receive it. Also, I do not know the context of "subscribers" here. When referring to magazines and newspapers, "subscribers" receive the content via whatever the delivery method (mail or paper route, normally). When referring to podcasts, a subscriber just adds the RSS or Atom feed to their podcatcher, which then actively checks for new content and retrieves it. The data is not pushed to you, it is pulled by you and that difference could be significant.
IANAL, etc.
I'll bite, this is a package to limit user access, most of which is configurable with policies without the package. The other part is a disk lock that uses disk diffing that resets when the computer is rebooted. This prevents any direct writes to the hard drive. I believe it is included with 7, and possibly Vista, but not XP.
It adds no stability, and security only in the sense that when you reboot, any malware that the user picked up would be gone.
# man enough
No manual entry for enough
Same for OpenSolaris and centOS. Can no operating system man enough?!
I have some debian 4 servers running as Xen virtual machines:
# sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=4096
error: "vm.mmap_min_addr" is an unknown key
# echo "vm.mmap_min_addr = 65536" > /etc/sysctl.d/mmap_min_addr.conf /etc/sysctl.d/mmap_min_addr.conf: No such file or directory
-bash:
Are Xen kernels not affected? If they are, any ideas on the above? Thanks!
Had you been given Windows Server 2008 Core to use as a web server, you would very likely have been in the same position. IIS might have been installed (no SQL or PHP support is on the Server 2008 disc), but without the ability to access some documentation, you would have been in the same state as if you were with Red Hat(look at instructions for IIS + PHP + MySQL here). Your point that "linux" does not have a unified installer strategy is just as valid with Windows. My point is that there are valid reasons for different installer strategies among distros, not just excuses.
I vote you can keep your geek card, because you googled it. If you had just posted "PEBKAC, what the fuck does that mean?! Damn kids and their txt speak", we would kindly ask you to hand in your geek card and resume lawn-guarding duties.
Erm, the GPL is a distribution license. You are free to run, modify, print and use as toilet paper, or do whatever as long as you do not distribute. If you wish to distribute the code, you need to follow the license and include your changes with it. I think even the biggest FLOSS zealots understand this. Why can't you?
As for this:
Have you ever bought a book? Furniture? Clothing? A toaster, microwave or television? Did you have to agree to a license before you could use any of these items? NO.
You don't have to with GPL code either. If you were to copy the book, or make knock-off furniture or clothing and then sold or distributed, you could likely be sued for it. If you sell or distribute GPL code, you just have to follow the license.
I thought OpenSolaris had its own package management system. Maybe it is practically apt, but it is not actually apt. Nexenta is an OpenSolaris distro that uses apt, so maybe that is what you are thinking of?
There is no unified installer strategy because different distros can be as different as an Xbox is to an Xbox 360 or Windows XP or Server 2008 Core and those all at least come from the same company. All of them have a Windows NT kernel, yet all of them are very different in the way you install and configure software. "Linux" is just a kernel, and the distros are different operating systems based on that kernel. Sure, they will share lots of other software for want of not reinventing the wheel each time, but the software installation is done in a way that suits the group or company that develops the distro. Some of them will find that another tool is better and drop their own (I believe Red Hat dropped up2date for yum), but for the most part the package system is what keeps people using one distro over another. Gentoo's portage can be configured to optimize everything to your specific hardware. Debian's apt is known for excellent dependency handling. I'm not sure what advantages yum and yast have, because I have not worked with yast and yum seems nearly identical to apt in my limited use(maybe its just a matter of rpm vs deb files?).
Interesting, I've never really looked that hard at an SAS connector. Our clients normally buy servers with the drives preloaded, and usually buy cheaper SATA drives when they need additional storage, so it is rare for me to need to take the SAS drives out.
Thanks for the correction and update. Does anyone know how the open-source driver compares with the binary blob on newer ATI cards? Are they feature-complete minus the DRM? I would probably consider the lack of DRM a feature itself, but that's just me.
I am honestly surprised that running wampserver in XP can pass for milspec. Also, I can understand your frustration in in using an unfamiliar distro without the aid of google, but you really shouldn't blame Red Hat in this case. In XP it was easy because you are used to it and knew about wampserver and had a copy with you(nice to hear they added an updater, last I used it they did not and updating was an annoyance), but if you did not have it with you, installing an AMP stack in windows would have been impossible. If they had a copy of Red Hat, I'm surprised they didn't have any of the documentation. I also thought Red Hat had links to the local documentation in the main menu on the desktop. Unless of course the admin chose workstation and no GUI during the install, which would baffle me.
I do not have any PPC stuff myself, but I often see Yellow Dog linux recommended. I have heard that PS3 development has started to overshadow the Mac development though.
At least those do not have the configuration accessable from the WAN by default. Also, they normally have either instructions or a setup wizard that sets up security for them. This is a case of WAN-accessable config pages that let unauthenticated users download the config file, which stores the username and password in plain text. The difference is clueless users versus extremely insecure design.
This is the difference between a linux box configured with insecure settings and a Windows 98 box sitting on the WAN with no firewall.
Or, how about a car analogy:
You can drive a brand new car with tons of safety features 100 mph into a brick wall and still die, or you can drive a Pinto which is likely to explode if someone rear-ends you.
Most distros are based on one of the major ones but with their own little tweaks toward their purpose. This means that they all pretty much boil down to a few different package management systems, that do their own dependency and version management. Some of the major distros and the package management system used:
Debian: apt
Red Hat: yum
Gentoo: portage
SUSE: yast
I primarily use Debian or distros that are based on it, such as Ubuntu and Mint. If you have a GUI, the simplest will be the Add/Remove Programs. More powerful but still GUI-based is Synaptic. On a command-line, you will use aptitude or apt-get to install software.
With Red hat based distros, such as CentOS and Fedora, I am not quite as familiar although i do some management of a CentOS box. "yum search [query]" will help search for what application you are looking for. And "yum install [application]" will install it. My CentOS box is headless so I cannot help with the GUI portion.
Your best bet with finding the right distro for you is to think about what you are looking to do. One of the base distros will usually have everything but the kitchen sink, but you will probably need to work to get it going. If you are looking to replace your desktop, search for "desktop linux" and see what is popular. You will likely find Ubuntu or Mint. Search for network storage linux and you will probably find Openfiler. Search for linux firewall and you will probably find out about IP Cop or Smoothwall. Search for linux web server and you may find that Debian or Ubuntu Server is a popular LAMP server distro. Since most of these specialize in one area, they are usually easy to configure to do what you want. But if you want to turn something like Openfiler into a general desktop, you are going to be in for a world of hurt trying to do it.
You were trying to install a webserver without internet access? Where then did you find out about and get wampserver from? On a base install of windows there is no AMP stack and nothing telling you how to install software that you are looking for.