The old saw says that an attorney who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer. Whoever made that up didn't envisage Novak, who is serving as his own lawyer. Novak doesn't have a law degree, but he is an old hand at legal wranglings. Talk to him and he cites case law, chapter and verse.
"It's my hobby," he said.
Novak was able to consolidate the case in federal court. "It's only five miles for me," he said. "All these people have to come here at their own expense."
If all the info on the net is true (virtually all is posted by defendants), we can only hope the defendants ask the court to fine him, or some of them file an anti-slapp suit against him.
But that won't happen without donations to the defense fund, or someone with deep pockets and an interest in free speech on the internet (google??) gets involved and makes an example of Robert Novak.
Why shouldn't companies slap whatever restrictions they want on their products?
<sarcasm style="situation: hypothetical;">
Just off the plane, late for a meeting, with dozens of other impatient customers waiting in line behind you, why shouldn't you scrutinize every word in the fine print on that rental car agreement?
Microsoft's EULA could state that by opening the wrapper I agree to eat the contents. If I don't agree to that, I don't buy the product.
After all, if you don't like those terms and conditions, you could go wait in another long line for a different car rental place (though in the software biz, there's a monopoly, in case anyone hasn't been paying attention). Sure, you don't have a confirmation and that other company will likely have similar term and conditions...
As consumers, we have no right to demand certain products. We do have the right not to buy a product we don't like.
Yep, you should expect all that fine print to be totally unreasonable. You'll either have to agree to it (in a hurry to make it to your meeting), you your alternative is to walk there and completely miss your appointment. You have absolutely no right to expect that the terms and conditions, which you couldn't even see until you already got off the plane, would be reasonable. You have no rights.
</sarcasm>
Fortunately, the laws and case law doesn't work this way. Consumers do have rights. Software EULA's have probably gone "too far", but it takes time until they're challenged. Eventually, the software biz will settle on "norms" as it matures over the next few decades, just like other industries have.
And if history repeats itself, comsumers will have rights and unreasonable and unconscionable terms won't hold up.
So what prevents a more corrupt administration from creating more legisltation that repeals this bill, and others like it?
Not much, except perhaps:
Private interests (technology companies mostly) who stand to lose money and will lobby against it
Public outcry (yes, slashdot, other less mainstream news, etc). If it makes the news, the slant/bias will matter (notice that some places are calling the p2p hacking bill "sagotage"...)
Of course, if the decision makers are "corrupt" then neither of these will matter. While our system in the US isn't perfect, it tends to only be really unjust when one side lobbies and the other side is silent. For many years, the RIAA and MPAA have lobbied hard and nobody made much noise. Looks like those days are over. Sure, they've got a few key senators in their pockets, but it takes a lot more to pass sweeping laws with broad implications.
I ended up writing a home-grown java-applet-based encryption thing. Works on all major browsers, doesn't require any support time (which was a huge deal, we were large and very decentralized), doesn't require computer-savvy user to import cert themselves, doesn't require dealing with a CA
And probably doesn't have good security against imposters or man-in-the-middle attacks (other than security through obscurity). Just because you're encrypting the data doesn't mean you're sure the entity on the other end really is who they appear to be. For that, you need some trusted third party (the CA).
this applet would take user input, encrypt it, encode it into base-36 and then redirect the browser where the encrypted string was passed via GET. URLs ended up being about 300 characters long and looked like this: http://site.com/x.php?c=897aasdf698sad897b789l2345 jkh3lk45h345 and so on. Worked beautifully:)
Yes, it "works", in that it functions, but how secure is it?? It sounds like all the details of the algorithm AND the key you used are encoded in the java bytecodes you transmitted to the client. Because they have the applet bytecode, they could easily do some known plaintext trials. Perhaps you change the java applet's bytecodes to use a key key every time and then allow each one to be used just once and automatically expire after some time?
Even if your algorithm is strong and you're not always using the same key, there's no assurance that the string will be transmitted to the correct destination. You're entrusting that to the browser, which is in turn entrusting it to DNS.
That is the whole purpose of the cert and the CA (who's job it is to make sure the organization receiving the cert is "for real" and the info in the cert is correct).
A few months ago I had casually mentioned in a conversation with a co-worker something regarding an interesting comment here on slashdot. He's one of those many who _sometimes_ look at the main page but doesn't both with the comments. His opinion of the comments was something like:
They rip on everything... there was even a story about Linus and they ripped on him too.
Now I know that _occasionally_ there's a few really informed comments at +4 and +5.... I just wanted to share this little (verbal) comment to put slashdot into the perspective of the "average user" who doesn't bother with the comments.... for all those who've taken the trouble to read enough to find this among the sea of other comments.
What amazing timing... the meta keyword tag is declared dead on the same day I (finally) got around to setting up a search engine for my website.
Starting this morning I began reading the docs and installing the ht://Dig search engine. There are a lot of configurable settings.
When I first got it working, I immediately realized that the 350-some static html files on my site really only have a couple dozen different sets of meta tags (due to starting new pages by copying existing ones). In fact, many of my pages don't even have really unique title that differentiate them from other similar pages on the site. If you're interested in seeing it, it's not yet linked from the rest of the site, but will be soon, at this new search page. The results still suck, mostly due to my poor meta and title tags.
That's not ht://Dig's fault, of course, and they do have you options to configure the weight for various things... and luckily I've used <h2>l and <h3> tags for labeling sections on almost all the pages, so I turned up the weighting for the text in those and in the link text on the site.
Still I have a lot of work to do to make my little site nicely searchable... and most of it is in the titles and meta tags. The keyword meta tags are the one place where you can list words that you can be certain a local search engine like ht://Dig will make use of them and display those pages.
Too bad the meta keyword tag was declared dead today.
So if one of the say, 10 companies gets sued for $2,000,000 and put out of business, don't you think that the other 9 will start looknig elsewhere?
And even if my 90% weren't true, and ALL spam is from random people, prosecuting one will still put the "fear of God" in them and many will think twice before sending any spam.
This approach didn't work for well for the RIAA... taking down Napster and others only drove Sharman Networks (Kazaa) to move operations to an island where they're harder to touch, and it's only encouraging up-and-coming fully decentralized development (gnutella, freenet, etc) of other p2p apps.
I really do hope this doesn't also happen with spammers, but they're such a seedy bunch that it's not hard to image.
Linewidth scaling makes *any* CPU design faster. CISC was abandoned because it was very hard to pipeline, not because of some magical barrier to linewidth stepping.
Yes, it is true that a CISC design will run faster with smaller/faster transistors, but a typical CISC design isn't very adaptable to make use of the much larger number of transistors that become available (assuming that the die size stays similar).
RISC doesn't magically allow more transitors to be used either, but it does tend to enable using multiple execution units and larger branch history/prediction tables tend to help performance as the pipeline is grown to more, faster stages.
Either way, to truely take advantage of a significantly smaller geometry process (for performance instead of cost), the CPU needs to be redesigned to make use of a LOT more transistors as well as their faster speed.
Re:Best part - REAL cost of Windows being exposed
on
AOL's new Linux PC
·
· Score: 2
No Modem? And after Microtel fixed the softmodem issue in their Mandrake Version? This makes no sense.
According to the article, and Walmart's site, the computer is $230 if you want it with a modem.
Makes perfect sense... attract attention with the $200 price tag, and then "up sell" to a better one. If you look at the walmart site, you'll see they have many similar machines in steps from $200 to $500... but the next jump is $230 to $300.
What doesn't make so much sense, is that Walmart's site suggests buying a $350 flat panel monitor. How smart is that suggestion, pairs with a bargain-basement PC ?? They ought to be suggesting the cheapest monitor. Oh well.
Why would someone finally decide to buy a computer??
Re:Best part - REAL cost of Windows being exposed
on
AOL's new Linux PC
·
· Score: 2
... that fact that Wal-Mart is selling the same computer for a $100 more that includes windows is significant.
Don't forget that the REAL cost of Lindows is $99/year OR learning to download and install software the "linux way" (or perhaps Debian or Redhat way would be more accurate). It can only be good for the free software community if people who opted for a cheap $199 computer also opt for the cheaper way of obtaining free software.
And the $100 extra includes the $30 modem not present in the $199 computer, so in truth you're paying $70 for 'doze. Still, that's 35% of the cost of the basic machine.
What percentage of the worlds population do you think would care even if they did know all about it? Less than one percent I'll bet. I know my mom and sisters and grandparents certainly wouldn't give a crap.
The key words that are "even if they did know all about it".
Most people are appreciative when they get something for free from others. Perhaps the feeling is short-lived, but it's polite and most people at least say the word "thanks", or perhaps think about it briefly if the source is unknown. It's that brief moment where the message they get matters.
The open-source message is something like:
This software was the result of a natural process that is more efficient than proprietary software. The developers had "an itch to scratch", and a side-effect is that in the random case where this program fits your needs, you get a superior piece for software for free.
Compare to the free-software message:
This software was crafted as part of a larger project to allow all users the freedom to exchange ideas. The developers believe so strongly in promoting free exchange of idea (expressed in programming code) that they've created this free software for you and the rest of the world.
Your mom, sisters and grandparents are probably nice people. One of these messages is quite likely to appeal to them, and perhaps elicit a feeling of gratitude. They probably would care. When they talk about the software with others, they _might_ mention it. Even if they quickly forget, perhaps later when Microsoft is spewing FUD on television or other media, they might recognize it for lies.
Every person's impression matters... even your mom and grandparents.
...growing of Linux is because is eating Unix share, not microsoft...
In every unix-to-linux conversion, a potential sale for Microsoft is lost.
In each case, the "linux mindshare" is increased. Linux is legitimized by its wider deployment, and word-of-mouth communication. Linux's initial success in some parts of an organization pave the way for wider adoption, which only means more lost sales opportunities.
And worst of all for Microsoft, linux capturing a very substantial share of the market means that (almost) nobody will tollerate lack of operability between Microsoft's client/desktop software and linux servers. Had linux not come along (or had MS figured out how to write a true 32 bit protected memory operating system many years earlier), Microsoft would have been able to capture most of the server market with NT (as people were predicting in the late 90s)... and then they'd be in a strong position to dictate communication protocols that marginalize the small remaining fraction of installed competitive software.
A man works hard to help other and make the world a better place, with little gain for himself, devoting almost 20 years to a project which eventually leads to a completely free (speech/beer) operating system and applications, and what do people say....
If this isn't evidence of Stallman's mental illness, I don't know what is.
The man's been called crazy by many for a long time now...
In the first 10-12 years when there was not complete workable system, yet he labored away sacrificing personal wealth. A man such as this has a thick skin... you're just not going to phase him with the name "crazy" after others have tried repeatedly for two decades!
Oh, the problem isn't with us, it's with everyone else . We insist that people use this ludicrous name that no one can cleanly pronounce, and if anyone disagrees, clearly they are dividing the community.
The same could, and has many times been said, over the whole debate of the merits of Free vs Proprietary software. Remember, RMS started this whole crazy idea and stuck with it in the early years. Yes, years. Nowadays people regularily talk how GPL's software (or open source) has its advantages and the whole idea appeals to more than a small handful of hackers who easily written off as zealots.
I personally call it "linux" in conversation, and I rarely write GNU/Linux, but I don't say rude things like this:
Stallman, how about this: you call it whatever you want. And how about respecting other people's decision on what they want to call it, and stop notoriously refusing to talk to anyone who disagrees with you.
As an experiment, try this:
Quit your job
Start an overwhelming project, with the overall goal of allowing everyone to have freedom to make changes
Work with little or no pay for almost 20 years
Watch it finally become widely used
Observe people promote it for different reasons than why you started and kept with the project all those years
Listen to people talk about what started as your project, without knowing about you or the ideals you've tried to promote for 20 years
Sit by silently as millions fail to "get it" (the overall purpose, freedom vs proprietary)
Still, if the next version of Office requires Palladium, so what?
Forget office... think on-line banking (perhaps the only way in the future without paying teller fees)
Think on-line gov't services (renew your driver's license, etc).
Think on-line access to utility and phone billing (at a worthwhile discount, since it eliminates mailing you the bill and processing your written check).
Think long term....
This isn't about the next version of stand-alone software. It's about internet-enabled services of the future, which are likely to become quite pervasive as internet connected computers become as common as telephones, and as companies offer on-line services that provide much of the benefit of personal interaction as virtually no cost.
Think of internet-connected computers like telephones... and then imagine using an off-brand phone that doesn't talk to many of the places you'd like to call.
That's what Palladium is all about, or at least the concerns about it.
The movie industry can't even kill DVD (there's too many players out there), so it's not even like you won't be able to watch Hollywood movies in Linux without Palladium.
They could easily entice you into using Palladium. Well, maybe not you, but millions of other "consumers".
Hypothetically speaking, perhaps they mass-mail a cdrom with DRM/Palladium controlled clips of dozens of movies currently selling on DVD... perhaps the first 15 minutes of each, but to watch you've got to have a passport account and a Palladium enabled PC. Maybe it even offers you an electronic coupon after viewing (and of course transmitting your personal info and viewing habbit). Hell, maybe they even give you a couple whole movies at 160x90 pixels, such as kids films that your kids will watch over and over, and thus tie up the computer (further enticing you to buy the DVD). Hell, that'd be a great bargain for most folks, and since the disc was free you can't complain much about having to do something special like create a free passport/palladium setup.
Who knows, maybe the sorry state of broadband will be fixed and they could even do this over the 'net? Watch 1/2 the film, but only once (they know who you are), and then get promotional material to entice you to rent/buy the DVD.
Sure, you could just buy the DVD, but that doesn't mean some new, lower cost and attractive services (that compell people to use palladium-enabled systems) won't spring up. There's a lot of value and convience that internet-enabled apps could bring that you just don't get with a DVD...
I use gcc regularily, and just last week I spent a couple solid days using Visual C++ (version 6). It's pretty, and it has all sorts of cute features, but the compiler's parser is greatly inferior to gcc.
To be specific, all sorts of minor errors, like omitting a semicolon or close currly brace '{' can cause the parser to spew dozens to hundreds of errors, where gcc is much smarter and gives you only a couple message that are much more useful. Lots of other less trivial errors that gcc gives nice insightful messages end up spewing off-target messages in Visual Studio. Using -Wall, gcc catches lots of little things that really help, but Microsoft lets them slide and you find out later
The editor's colors and syntax highlighting are also not nearly as useful as the default Vim config shipped with Redhat 7.3. Comments are green and keywords are highlighted blue (like "int" and "long", but not DWORD, HANDLE, LPCSTR, and all sorts of other common microsoft types. On the comments, the common "#if 0" doesn't cause a section to turn into the comment color as Vim does. But these trivial syntax highlighting differences are only the beginning, because Visual Studio's editor only does trivial syntax highlighting.
Compare to Vim (default shipped with redhat 7.3), where strings are highlighted magenta/red so if you miss that ending quote (or you mistakenly get the backslashes wrong when using quotes inside your string) a lot of extra code turns red and you instantly know. In the world of Visual Studio, the syntax highlighting won't show you, and the inferior parser in the compiler will spew lots of errors instead of a nice "run away string, possibly beginning at ###"
Vim also tracks pairs of brackets, parens and currly braces [ ] ( ) { }, so if you mismatch them all or don't nest them correctly, all the ones that don't match up turn a very visible red background. You instantly see that you missed that last close paren ')'. Microsoft's parser does a reasonable job of this, but it's clearly a case where their editor's syntax highlighting does only the trivial thing that look pretty but don't really help you avoid common errors.
Now maybe they've done a better job in the new.net versions... I don't have it to try. The intergation is done really well, and they are pretty, but the beauty is only skin-deep.
Considering that the Palladium standard requires that the BIOS allow Palladium to be deactivated
It's been said over and over, yet it needs to be said again, that...
The whole idea is get enough public services requiring Palladium/DMR on the client side and refusing to talk without it, that nearly everyone will turn it on for one reason or another (some service they value more than their privacy). It won't matter that you _could_ turn it off at the bios, because you won't. You'll need it turned on to accomplish at least some tasks that are important to you. You absolutely won't be able to turn it off by default and enable it only for certain sites and services. It'll be an all-or-nothing at boot time, and unless you like rebooting a lot, you'll just have to turn it on. At least that's the orwellian DRM future.
But it's a chicken-and-egg problem... nobody will require use of Palladium clients until nearly every potential customer has it, and with enough publicity (hopefully) a lot of people will abstain from "upgrading"... just like the market rejected divx discs.
Microsoft probably hopes to keep their 90-95% market share and simply discontinue 2000, (today's) XP and everything else that isn't Pallidium, and prehaps even auto-update most NT/2000/XP systems to have Pallidium features.
That just might work for them if they do is very quickly, before gnome/kde/linux and macos-x gain more market share.
It's not illegal until you're a monopoly
on
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
From Scott McCollum of the World Tech Tribune:
After years of protestation and lawsuits against Microsoft giving away IE for free, is Sun hypocritically hoping to create an illegal monopoly of their own by giving StarOffice 6 to students for free?
Obviously Scott hasn't paid much attention to the FACT (as estabished in court and held up on appeal) that Microsoft has monopoly, but Sun does not.
Sun's bundling their entry to the productivity software market with low-end PCs would be illegal, and hypocracy, if Sun has a monopoly in low-end PC hardware.
Last time I checked, Sun did not have a monopoly in low-end PC hardware. In fact, nobody has any market share in PC hardware that even remotely resembles a monopoly.
Scott ovbious likes Microsoft a lot (or rehashed some press material to meet a deadline...) For example:
Consumers want quality products like Microsoft Office XP, but they'd buy Sun's StarOffice 6 in a heartbeat if it did all the same stuff for $400 less.
The article goes on trashing Sun... they're losing money, they might not be serious out the productivity software because they sell hardware (yes, fear, uncertainty and doubt... pure speculation), Sun's throwing away 5.7 billion by giving it away for free.... how many people outside software, music labels and movie studios really believe that all those people who accepted it for free would have paid full retail ??
Just today, someone sent me an RTF with two pictures embedded. Word (from office 97) was able to show them, but Abiword could not... apparantly the Abiword in RH7.2 only supports PNG, but it did recognize the embedded images.
It's pretty safe to say that RTF can embed pictures.
In a nutshell, the "other side" of the issue is that unpaid developers deserve their work to be recognizable as theirs, and not to be superficially altered to appear as if it were written by other well-known developers.
To quote a particularly one-sided phrase:
Who *cares* about RH's default theme?
I personally don't (as long as it's reasonably good), but
I think it's pretty obvious that some people do care very deeply, and it isn't too hard to guess who they are.
It's almost certainly advocates on one desktop... generally users who've made an emotional investment in the progress of their desktop of choice (eg, "my dad can beat up your dad")
This group or people might also include real developers, who've worked long unpaid hours conjuring their code from raw ideas. Far above ordinary users, unpaid developers deserve some recognition for their work. It's grossly unfair (and against the license) to take a developers name off the product, whereever it reasonably appears. Many reasonable people feel it's also unfair to dramatically change the appearance of a developers work, particularly in a manner which makes it appear in a style commonly associated with other well-known developers.
Redhat likens the issue to advertising on race cars, which is an effective analogy at belittling the developer's reasonable expectation that their unpaid work will be recognizable as their (as opposed to being superficially changed to appear as if it had been written by someone else).
The core issue is between recognition for unpaid developers and ease of use for end users.
This slashdot discussion is filled with comments from end users and non-developer open-source advocates, who apparantly can't see the other side of this issue. I hope some of those people see this comment or others like it, because the "other side" of this issue is important.
I am a developer (mostly firmware, though I've contributed in small ways to some "normal" free software projects). I can speak from experience about some of these issues.
It's easy to get burned out or disillusioned as a developer writing free software. A little rejection goes a long way. The thought process goes something like "well fine, if they don't appreciate my efforts, I'll go do something else". Most of the developers are unpaid, and while getting famous (even if only among the geek community) isn't a major goal... loosing some recognition you once had can be a major disappointment.
All you linux advocates, please consider this trade-off. Sure, better ease-of-use and gui integration will help end users and the adoption of these desktops into the mainstream market......
.... but at what cost? Some temporary flame wars among vocal users are no big deal, but if real developers become disillusioned, it could really hurt the long-term future. A lot of developers have poured a good part of their lives into this software. They deserve respect and recognition. Look and feel of their software is a part of that. How to balance integration for end users against developers legitimate expectation to be recognized for their work is a difficult question.
I hope Redhat and other distros make wise decisions. I also hope other slashdot readers will see this comment amoung the flood of "end user intergration is the most important factor" and reconsider what effect this branding might have on developers. It's easy to forget (as many posts here have) that all this great software is written by real people, mostly unpaid, who have real emotions and likely will have opinions about their software being comsetically altered to appear like programs associated with different developers.
I am (was?) a more die-hard Linux user than most on Slashdot.
Ok, die-hard linux user....
But the split between GNOME and KDE, and therein between GNOME 1.x and 2.x, prompted me to drop Linux as a desktop platform
Not!
This inflamatory message (yes, mod me down, yadda, yadda) is let you know that your seld description is far from "die-hard linux user". Sorry, you're just not. It matters not that you're a secretary of your local LUG.
Among the many things that come to mind associated with a "die-hard linux user" are:
Often installs "bleeding edge" unstable software,
if only to know what's coming next and submit timely bug reports to developers
Recompiles software and/or kernels for optimum performance
Tends to be an developer on at least some project in at least some capacity, perhap minor tweaks or helps with writing or correcting documentation
Extensive use of command-line... primarily uses gui to manage multiple shells
Writes perl or shell scripts to automate most tasks
Values philosophy of free/open-source software (perhaps in general, or perhaps strongly aligned with the GPL or BSD approach)
Not all of these apply to all die-hard linux users, but there is a general trend here.
Above all that, anyone who could reasonably be considered a "die-hard linux user" appreciates that the linux desktops and particularly their applications are still in their formative stages. Whereas a consumer-oriented individual looks upon bugs and deficiencies and decides to switch to a mature and polished commercial project, the "die-hard linux user" appreciates the tremendous project and even in the absence of activly contributing (even in small ways like timely bug reports on the unstable bleeding edge), at least feels a sense of "being there" as it happens.
So the point of this little rant, is that "Lack of Unification" didn't kill your linux desktop. You killed your linux desktop when you deleted it. That's your choice to make... my only gripe involves you calling yourself a "die-hard linux user". It didn't all look the same, nice and pretty, and parts of it didn't work similarly to other parts, so you dropped it and went to the highly polished, but commercial closed-source MacOS-X desktop. How "die-hard" is that??
.... anyone with admin privileges on any computer (that is connected to the Internet) is effectively an administrator and has to act accordingly on issues like security.
While you pine for utopia, you could perhaps add quality assurance, use of automated code checking tools, extensive testing, and just more attention to eliminating bugs on the part of software vendors. When you think of social responsibility, you could wish that all default settings would avoid running servers, and when servers are activated their defaults would lean towards security. You could even wish for security in the overall design, such as operating systems that don't set the execute bits on virtual memory pages that contain data, and by default don't allow programs to modify their code at run-time.
That's how other industries work, you know. Manufactures are responsible to make their products safe when used in a reasonable manner. Consumers aren't expected to review the design of cars, appliances, toys or other products to make sure they are mechanically safe.
It's just unreasonable to expect ordinary consumers to understand network security. You can say "you have responsibility... to make your system as secure as possible", but it just ain't gonna happen any sooner than every driver carefully inspecting every part under the hood of their car to make sure their car is as safe as possible and thereby making the world a safer place for everybody.
I did the update today, and it turned out my
system has two copies of SSL... both old.
One was installed from source, the other
from RPM.
It's also possible that mod_ssl and openssl may be build statically into your apache.
You should upgrade apache too, since you're at 1.3.23, which is before the
chunked
encoding bug. You generally need to updade apache and mod_ssl together, so plan on upgrading both of them.
all of us temporarily lost something more important: the chance to create a usable, accessible Web built on common industry standards. We lost it when designers and developers, scrambling to keep up with production demands during the short-lived Internet boom, learned non-standard, browser-specific ways of creating sites, thus bringing us to our current pass whose name is obsolescence.
Yeah, that's right. It was the fault of all those developers who didn't have the forsight to see the standards that would eventually be approved years later. What were they thinking?
It didn't have anything to do with the standards process being slow, or diverging from the needs/demands of the market (HTML 3.0). And even after the standards were finally approved with buy-in from the browser makers, no blame rests with both Microsoft and Netscape for serious bugs in their 4.x browsers, often causing their browsers to crash on many CSS features.
Yep, those developers were at fault. They learned bad techniques, when those techniques were the only way to accomplish what their customers wanted. They continued to use them when the 4.x browsers would crash on standard-based markup. Even after the really serious problems were cleared up in IE5.x, they still used their old tricks. And now, damn them, that 6.x browsers have been available for only a year or so, they haven't redesigned all the world's websites to be fully standards compliant (and broken on 4.x and some 5.x browsers which are still in heavy use).
You could have followed the link to our website,
and then clicked on
About Paul/Robin.
The message even says "(yes, we're all very geeky... even Robin... see our website for more info about us)".
Slashdot Mirror
That's rather unfair, as Robert Novak is neither a lawyer or a reasonable sample of the society at large.
Quoting from this Long Island Business News article:
If all the info on the net is true (virtually all is posted by defendants), we can only hope the defendants ask the court to fine him, or some of them file an anti-slapp suit against him.
But that won't happen without donations to the defense fund, or someone with deep pockets and an interest in free speech on the internet (google??) gets involved and makes an example of Robert Novak.
<sarcasm style="situation: hypothetical;">
Just off the plane, late for a meeting, with dozens of other impatient customers waiting in line behind you, why shouldn't you scrutinize every word in the fine print on that rental car agreement?
Microsoft's EULA could state that by opening the wrapper I agree to eat the contents. If I don't agree to that, I don't buy the product.
After all, if you don't like those terms and conditions, you could go wait in another long line for a different car rental place (though in the software biz, there's a monopoly, in case anyone hasn't been paying attention). Sure, you don't have a confirmation and that other company will likely have similar term and conditions...
As consumers, we have no right to demand certain products. We do have the right not to buy a product we don't like.
Yep, you should expect all that fine print to be totally unreasonable. You'll either have to agree to it (in a hurry to make it to your meeting), you your alternative is to walk there and completely miss your appointment. You have absolutely no right to expect that the terms and conditions, which you couldn't even see until you already got off the plane, would be reasonable. You have no rights.
</sarcasm>
Fortunately, the laws and case law doesn't work this way. Consumers do have rights. Software EULA's have probably gone "too far", but it takes time until they're challenged. Eventually, the software biz will settle on "norms" as it matures over the next few decades, just like other industries have.
And if history repeats itself, comsumers will have rights and unreasonable and unconscionable terms won't hold up.
Not much, except perhaps:
- Private interests (technology companies mostly) who stand to lose money and will lobby against it
- Public outcry (yes, slashdot, other less mainstream news, etc). If it makes the news, the slant/bias will matter (notice that some places are calling the p2p hacking bill "sagotage"...)
Of course, if the decision makers are "corrupt" then neither of these will matter. While our system in the US isn't perfect, it tends to only be really unjust when one side lobbies and the other side is silent. For many years, the RIAA and MPAA have lobbied hard and nobody made much noise. Looks like those days are over. Sure, they've got a few key senators in their pockets, but it takes a lot more to pass sweeping laws with broad implications.And probably doesn't have good security against imposters or man-in-the-middle attacks (other than security through obscurity). Just because you're encrypting the data doesn't mean you're sure the entity on the other end really is who they appear to be. For that, you need some trusted third party (the CA).
this applet would take user input, encrypt it, encode it into base-36 and then redirect the browser where the encrypted string was passed via GET. URLs ended up being about 300 characters long and looked like this: http://site.com/x.php?c=897aasdf698sad897b789l2345 jkh3lk45h345 and so on. Worked beautifully :)
Yes, it "works", in that it functions, but how secure is it?? It sounds like all the details of the algorithm AND the key you used are encoded in the java bytecodes you transmitted to the client. Because they have the applet bytecode, they could easily do some known plaintext trials. Perhaps you change the java applet's bytecodes to use a key key every time and then allow each one to be used just once and automatically expire after some time?
Even if your algorithm is strong and you're not always using the same key, there's no assurance that the string will be transmitted to the correct destination. You're entrusting that to the browser, which is in turn entrusting it to DNS.
That is the whole purpose of the cert and the CA (who's job it is to make sure the organization receiving the cert is "for real" and the info in the cert is correct).
They rip on everything... there was even a story about Linus and they ripped on him too.
Now I know that _occasionally_ there's a few really informed comments at +4 and +5.... I just wanted to share this little (verbal) comment to put slashdot into the perspective of the "average user" who doesn't bother with the comments.... for all those who've taken the trouble to read enough to find this among the sea of other comments.
Starting this morning I began reading the docs and installing the ht://Dig search engine. There are a lot of configurable settings.
When I first got it working, I immediately realized that the 350-some static html files on my site really only have a couple dozen different sets of meta tags (due to starting new pages by copying existing ones). In fact, many of my pages don't even have really unique title that differentiate them from other similar pages on the site. If you're interested in seeing it, it's not yet linked from the rest of the site, but will be soon, at this new search page. The results still suck, mostly due to my poor meta and title tags.
That's not ht://Dig's fault, of course, and they do have you options to configure the weight for various things... and luckily I've used <h2>l and <h3> tags for labeling sections on almost all the pages, so I turned up the weighting for the text in those and in the link text on the site.
Still I have a lot of work to do to make my little site nicely searchable... and most of it is in the titles and meta tags. The keyword meta tags are the one place where you can list words that you can be certain a local search engine like ht://Dig will make use of them and display those pages.
Too bad the meta keyword tag was declared dead today.
And even if my 90% weren't true, and ALL spam is from random people, prosecuting one will still put the "fear of God" in them and many will think twice before sending any spam.
This approach didn't work for well for the RIAA... taking down Napster and others only drove Sharman Networks (Kazaa) to move operations to an island where they're harder to touch, and it's only encouraging up-and-coming fully decentralized development (gnutella, freenet, etc) of other p2p apps.
I really do hope this doesn't also happen with spammers, but they're such a seedy bunch that it's not hard to image.
Yes, it is true that a CISC design will run faster with smaller/faster transistors, but a typical CISC design isn't very adaptable to make use of the much larger number of transistors that become available (assuming that the die size stays similar).
RISC doesn't magically allow more transitors to be used either, but it does tend to enable using multiple execution units and larger branch history/prediction tables tend to help performance as the pipeline is grown to more, faster stages.
Either way, to truely take advantage of a significantly smaller geometry process (for performance instead of cost), the CPU needs to be redesigned to make use of a LOT more transistors as well as their faster speed.
According to the article, and Walmart's site, the computer is $230 if you want it with a modem.
Makes perfect sense... attract attention with the $200 price tag, and then "up sell" to a better one. If you look at the walmart site, you'll see they have many similar machines in steps from $200 to $500... but the next jump is $230 to $300.
What doesn't make so much sense, is that Walmart's site suggests buying a $350 flat panel monitor. How smart is that suggestion, pairs with a bargain-basement PC ?? They ought to be suggesting the cheapest monitor. Oh well.
Wrong question. The right one is....
Why would someone finally decide to buy a computer??
Don't forget that the REAL cost of Lindows is $99/year OR learning to download and install software the "linux way" (or perhaps Debian or Redhat way would be more accurate). It can only be good for the free software community if people who opted for a cheap $199 computer also opt for the cheaper way of obtaining free software.
And the $100 extra includes the $30 modem not present in the $199 computer, so in truth you're paying $70 for 'doze. Still, that's 35% of the cost of the basic machine.
The key words that are "even if they did know all about it".
Most people are appreciative when they get something for free from others. Perhaps the feeling is short-lived, but it's polite and most people at least say the word "thanks", or perhaps think about it briefly if the source is unknown. It's that brief moment where the message they get matters.
The open-source message is something like:
Compare to the free-software message:
Your mom, sisters and grandparents are probably nice people. One of these messages is quite likely to appeal to them, and perhaps elicit a feeling of gratitude. They probably would care. When they talk about the software with others, they _might_ mention it. Even if they quickly forget, perhaps later when Microsoft is spewing FUD on television or other media, they might recognize it for lies.
Every person's impression matters... even your mom and grandparents.
In every unix-to-linux conversion, a potential sale for Microsoft is lost.
In each case, the "linux mindshare" is increased. Linux is legitimized by its wider deployment, and word-of-mouth communication. Linux's initial success in some parts of an organization pave the way for wider adoption, which only means more lost sales opportunities.
And worst of all for Microsoft, linux capturing a very substantial share of the market means that (almost) nobody will tollerate lack of operability between Microsoft's client/desktop software and linux servers. Had linux not come along (or had MS figured out how to write a true 32 bit protected memory operating system many years earlier), Microsoft would have been able to capture most of the server market with NT (as people were predicting in the late 90s)... and then they'd be in a strong position to dictate communication protocols that marginalize the small remaining fraction of installed competitive software.
If this isn't evidence of Stallman's mental illness, I don't know what is.
The man's been called crazy by many for a long time now...
In the first 10-12 years when there was not complete workable system, yet he labored away sacrificing personal wealth. A man such as this has a thick skin... you're just not going to phase him with the name "crazy" after others have tried repeatedly for two decades!
Oh, the problem isn't with us, it's with everyone else . We insist that people use this ludicrous name that no one can cleanly pronounce, and if anyone disagrees, clearly they are dividing the community.
The same could, and has many times been said, over the whole debate of the merits of Free vs Proprietary software. Remember, RMS started this whole crazy idea and stuck with it in the early years. Yes, years. Nowadays people regularily talk how GPL's software (or open source) has its advantages and the whole idea appeals to more than a small handful of hackers who easily written off as zealots.
I personally call it "linux" in conversation, and I rarely write GNU/Linux, but I don't say rude things like this:
Stallman, how about this: you call it whatever you want. And how about respecting other people's decision on what they want to call it, and stop notoriously refusing to talk to anyone who disagrees with you.
As an experiment, try this:
Forget office... think on-line banking (perhaps the only way in the future without paying teller fees)
Think on-line gov't services (renew your driver's license, etc).
Think on-line access to utility and phone billing (at a worthwhile discount, since it eliminates mailing you the bill and processing your written check).
Think long term....
This isn't about the next version of stand-alone software. It's about internet-enabled services of the future, which are likely to become quite pervasive as internet connected computers become as common as telephones, and as companies offer on-line services that provide much of the benefit of personal interaction as virtually no cost.
Think of internet-connected computers like telephones... and then imagine using an off-brand phone that doesn't talk to many of the places you'd like to call.
That's what Palladium is all about, or at least the concerns about it.
The movie industry can't even kill DVD (there's too many players out there), so it's not even like you won't be able to watch Hollywood movies in Linux without Palladium.
They could easily entice you into using Palladium. Well, maybe not you, but millions of other "consumers".
Hypothetically speaking, perhaps they mass-mail a cdrom with DRM/Palladium controlled clips of dozens of movies currently selling on DVD... perhaps the first 15 minutes of each, but to watch you've got to have a passport account and a Palladium enabled PC. Maybe it even offers you an electronic coupon after viewing (and of course transmitting your personal info and viewing habbit). Hell, maybe they even give you a couple whole movies at 160x90 pixels, such as kids films that your kids will watch over and over, and thus tie up the computer (further enticing you to buy the DVD). Hell, that'd be a great bargain for most folks, and since the disc was free you can't complain much about having to do something special like create a free passport/palladium setup.
Who knows, maybe the sorry state of broadband will be fixed and they could even do this over the 'net? Watch 1/2 the film, but only once (they know who you are), and then get promotional material to entice you to rent/buy the DVD.
Sure, you could just buy the DVD, but that doesn't mean some new, lower cost and attractive services (that compell people to use palladium-enabled systems) won't spring up. There's a lot of value and convience that internet-enabled apps could bring that you just don't get with a DVD...
I use gcc regularily, and just last week I spent a couple solid days using Visual C++ (version 6). It's pretty, and it has all sorts of cute features, but the compiler's parser is greatly inferior to gcc.
To be specific, all sorts of minor errors, like omitting a semicolon or close currly brace '{' can cause the parser to spew dozens to hundreds of errors, where gcc is much smarter and gives you only a couple message that are much more useful. Lots of other less trivial errors that gcc gives nice insightful messages end up spewing off-target messages in Visual Studio. Using -Wall, gcc catches lots of little things that really help, but Microsoft lets them slide and you find out later
The editor's colors and syntax highlighting are also not nearly as useful as the default Vim config shipped with Redhat 7.3. Comments are green and keywords are highlighted blue (like "int" and "long", but not DWORD, HANDLE, LPCSTR, and all sorts of other common microsoft types. On the comments, the common "#if 0" doesn't cause a section to turn into the comment color as Vim does. But these trivial syntax highlighting differences are only the beginning, because Visual Studio's editor only does trivial syntax highlighting.
Compare to Vim (default shipped with redhat 7.3), where strings are highlighted magenta/red so if you miss that ending quote (or you mistakenly get the backslashes wrong when using quotes inside your string) a lot of extra code turns red and you instantly know. In the world of Visual Studio, the syntax highlighting won't show you, and the inferior parser in the compiler will spew lots of errors instead of a nice "run away string, possibly beginning at ###"
Vim also tracks pairs of brackets, parens and currly braces [ ] ( ) { }, so if you mismatch them all or don't nest them correctly, all the ones that don't match up turn a very visible red background. You instantly see that you missed that last close paren ')'. Microsoft's parser does a reasonable job of this, but it's clearly a case where their editor's syntax highlighting does only the trivial thing that look pretty but don't really help you avoid common errors.
Now maybe they've done a better job in the new .net versions... I don't have it to try. The intergation is done really well, and they are pretty, but the beauty is only skin-deep.
It's been said over and over, yet it needs to be said again, that...
The whole idea is get enough public services requiring Palladium/DMR on the client side and refusing to talk without it, that nearly everyone will turn it on for one reason or another (some service they value more than their privacy). It won't matter that you _could_ turn it off at the bios, because you won't. You'll need it turned on to accomplish at least some tasks that are important to you. You absolutely won't be able to turn it off by default and enable it only for certain sites and services. It'll be an all-or-nothing at boot time, and unless you like rebooting a lot, you'll just have to turn it on. At least that's the orwellian DRM future.
But it's a chicken-and-egg problem... nobody will require use of Palladium clients until nearly every potential customer has it, and with enough publicity (hopefully) a lot of people will abstain from "upgrading"... just like the market rejected divx discs.
Microsoft probably hopes to keep their 90-95% market share and simply discontinue 2000, (today's) XP and everything else that isn't Pallidium, and prehaps even auto-update most NT/2000/XP systems to have Pallidium features.
That just might work for them if they do is very quickly, before gnome/kde/linux and macos-x gain more market share.
Obviously Scott hasn't paid much attention to the FACT (as estabished in court and held up on appeal) that Microsoft has monopoly, but Sun does not.
Sun's bundling their entry to the productivity software market with low-end PCs would be illegal, and hypocracy, if Sun has a monopoly in low-end PC hardware.
Last time I checked, Sun did not have a monopoly in low-end PC hardware. In fact, nobody has any market share in PC hardware that even remotely resembles a monopoly.
Scott ovbious likes Microsoft a lot (or rehashed some press material to meet a deadline...) For example:
The article goes on trashing Sun... they're losing money, they might not be serious out the productivity software because they sell hardware (yes, fear, uncertainty and doubt... pure speculation), Sun's throwing away 5.7 billion by giving it away for free.... how many people outside software, music labels and movie studios really believe that all those people who accepted it for free would have paid full retail ??
Just today, someone sent me an RTF with two pictures embedded. Word (from office 97) was able to show them, but Abiword could not... apparantly the Abiword in RH7.2 only supports PNG, but it did recognize the embedded images.
It's pretty safe to say that RTF can embed pictures.
To quote a particularly one-sided phrase:
I personally don't (as long as it's reasonably good), but I think it's pretty obvious that some people do care very deeply, and it isn't too hard to guess who they are.
It's almost certainly advocates on one desktop... generally users who've made an emotional investment in the progress of their desktop of choice (eg, "my dad can beat up your dad")
This group or people might also include real developers, who've worked long unpaid hours conjuring their code from raw ideas. Far above ordinary users, unpaid developers deserve some recognition for their work. It's grossly unfair (and against the license) to take a developers name off the product, whereever it reasonably appears. Many reasonable people feel it's also unfair to dramatically change the appearance of a developers work, particularly in a manner which makes it appear in a style commonly associated with other well-known developers.
Redhat likens the issue to advertising on race cars, which is an effective analogy at belittling the developer's reasonable expectation that their unpaid work will be recognizable as their (as opposed to being superficially changed to appear as if it had been written by someone else).
The core issue is between recognition for unpaid developers and ease of use for end users.
This slashdot discussion is filled with comments from end users and non-developer open-source advocates, who apparantly can't see the other side of this issue. I hope some of those people see this comment or others like it, because the "other side" of this issue is important.
I am a developer (mostly firmware, though I've contributed in small ways to some "normal" free software projects). I can speak from experience about some of these issues.
It's easy to get burned out or disillusioned as a developer writing free software. A little rejection goes a long way. The thought process goes something like "well fine, if they don't appreciate my efforts, I'll go do something else". Most of the developers are unpaid, and while getting famous (even if only among the geek community) isn't a major goal... loosing some recognition you once had can be a major disappointment.
All you linux advocates, please consider this trade-off. Sure, better ease-of-use and gui integration will help end users and the adoption of these desktops into the mainstream market......
I hope Redhat and other distros make wise decisions. I also hope other slashdot readers will see this comment amoung the flood of "end user intergration is the most important factor" and reconsider what effect this branding might have on developers. It's easy to forget (as many posts here have) that all this great software is written by real people, mostly unpaid, who have real emotions and likely will have opinions about their software being comsetically altered to appear like programs associated with different developers.
Ok, die-hard linux user....
But the split between GNOME and KDE, and therein between GNOME 1.x and 2.x, prompted me to drop Linux as a desktop platform
Not!
This inflamatory message (yes, mod me down, yadda, yadda) is let you know that your seld description is far from "die-hard linux user". Sorry, you're just not. It matters not that you're a secretary of your local LUG.
Among the many things that come to mind associated with a "die-hard linux user" are:
Not all of these apply to all die-hard linux users, but there is a general trend here.
Above all that, anyone who could reasonably be considered a "die-hard linux user" appreciates that the linux desktops and particularly their applications are still in their formative stages. Whereas a consumer-oriented individual looks upon bugs and deficiencies and decides to switch to a mature and polished commercial project, the "die-hard linux user" appreciates the tremendous project and even in the absence of activly contributing (even in small ways like timely bug reports on the unstable bleeding edge), at least feels a sense of "being there" as it happens.
So the point of this little rant, is that "Lack of Unification" didn't kill your linux desktop. You killed your linux desktop when you deleted it. That's your choice to make... my only gripe involves you calling yourself a "die-hard linux user". It didn't all look the same, nice and pretty, and parts of it didn't work similarly to other parts, so you dropped it and went to the highly polished, but commercial closed-source MacOS-X desktop. How "die-hard" is that??
While you pine for utopia, you could perhaps add quality assurance, use of automated code checking tools, extensive testing, and just more attention to eliminating bugs on the part of software vendors. When you think of social responsibility, you could wish that all default settings would avoid running servers, and when servers are activated their defaults would lean towards security. You could even wish for security in the overall design, such as operating systems that don't set the execute bits on virtual memory pages that contain data, and by default don't allow programs to modify their code at run-time.
That's how other industries work, you know. Manufactures are responsible to make their products safe when used in a reasonable manner. Consumers aren't expected to review the design of cars, appliances, toys or other products to make sure they are mechanically safe.
It's just unreasonable to expect ordinary consumers to understand network security. You can say "you have responsibility ... to make your system as secure as possible", but it just ain't gonna happen any sooner than every driver carefully inspecting every part under the hood of their car to make sure their car is as safe as possible and thereby making the world a safer place for everybody.
It's also possible that mod_ssl and openssl may be build statically into your apache.
You should upgrade apache too, since you're at 1.3.23, which is before the chunked encoding bug. You generally need to updade apache and mod_ssl together, so plan on upgrading both of them.
Yeah, that's right. It was the fault of all those developers who didn't have the forsight to see the standards that would eventually be approved years later. What were they thinking?
It didn't have anything to do with the standards process being slow, or diverging from the needs/demands of the market (HTML 3.0). And even after the standards were finally approved with buy-in from the browser makers, no blame rests with both Microsoft and Netscape for serious bugs in their 4.x browsers, often causing their browsers to crash on many CSS features.
Yep, those developers were at fault. They learned bad techniques, when those techniques were the only way to accomplish what their customers wanted. They continued to use them when the 4.x browsers would crash on standard-based markup. Even after the really serious problems were cleared up in IE5.x, they still used their old tricks. And now, damn them, that 6.x browsers have been available for only a year or so, they haven't redesigned all the world's websites to be fully standards compliant (and broken on 4.x and some 5.x browsers which are still in heavy use).
Yep, if anyone's to blame, it's those developers.
You could have followed the link to our website, and then clicked on About Paul/Robin. The message even says "(yes, we're all very geeky... even Robin... see our website for more info about us)".
Oh well.