In this case, only CURRENT versions of these programs are blocked, because they access Windows internals which causes instability on XP. They just need to be adjusted to work with XP correctly.
It is such a stretch of imagination to believe that Microsoft could improve the APIs that are used to "access windows internals" so that it's simply not possible to "cause instability on XP"?
...but personally, I could never support an injunction against company dumping toxic waste into rivers and streams. Isn't this just like not giving those tree huggers the time of day in the mainstream media? The day we let uncle sam get in the way of ordinary chemical production is the day we've thrown out all our principles of capitalism and the free market.
Meddling in ordinary business practives, while it might give some satisfaction to some poor folks who have to drink tap water, but it won't really solve anything, and it certainly sets a dangerous precedent. Personally, I don't see what they're complaining about. I buy premium bottled water, and I've seen nothing in the polution infested public water utility that'd make we want to stop. We've got lots of great clean bottled water brands at every store, so why's everyone so scared over a few chemicals?
and yes, I know it was a troll, but I just couldn't resist....
Many people of a religious bent seem to be of the notion that this planet is special and unique, that we are THE (as in, the only) children of God, and that the idea of intelligent life out there is just so much poppycock. Were life to be discovered "out there", it would become rather more difficult to hold that position.
One of Levin's friends conjectures that Levin has suffered from not being a true member of the "life detection fraternity." "Gil's a sanitary engineer, he's not a biologist," said James S. Martin, who was the Viking project manager and who, at 80, still does some consulting work for NASA. "I've often wondered if one of his problems was that he wasn't a member of the club."
This Washington Post story obviously takes a slant towards Levin, but there are some interesting comments from NASA... that other experiments onboard Viking failed to confirm life, problems with Levin's approach, etc.
The record labels steal from the artists, and the public steals from the record labels. There's a nice symmetry to the situation.
It would be something like "symmetry" if the "public" that "stole" from artists were to pay the artists directly. So far, efforts to make that happen have failed miserably.
Ugly as spam is, it simply is not a contageuos disease.
Simply hosting a (non-spam related) site within the same netblock as some spammers does not somehow influence that site to start sending large volumes of unsolicited email.
A quarantine is also used only when the disease is fatal. Nobody can quarantine people to prevent the spread of a disease like the common cold or flu.
Spam isn't fatal. I get about 3-8 spams daily, and I just delete them. Sure, spam is annoying, but it's nowhere near serious enough (fatal) to declare a quarantine or other similarily drastic actions.
I'm glad to see people fighting spam... but when they start intentionally hurting innocent people who are mere bystanders, they've crossed over the line.
If you're helping pay the rent for the crackhouse, then yeah, you should go to jail.
The key word is "if". If you actually went so far as to pay for a portion of a spammer's bill to their ISP, then your statement might make some sense. Nobody willingly pays someone else's ISP bills, just as nobody walks over to their undesirable neighbors house and offers them cash to help pay their rent.
The simple fact that this hypothetical crackhouse happens to be owned by the same landlord and you happen to send your monthy rent check to that same landlord does not somehow make you a drug dealer.
Luckily law enforcement (in the US) isn't free to harrass mere bystanders without "probable cause", and ultimately there is "due process" in the courts. It's not a perfect system, but it does generally tend to prevent rampant and unchecked abuse of power. The same can not be said of MAPS.
Your financial support of a spam-friendly ISP is what keeps them in business.
The bitter hatred of spam that many tech-types hold has an amazing power to justify as rightous harming innocent bystanders. Amazing.
The subject of this thread, "vigilantes" is particularily approapriate. This attitude, that (maybe) hindering some spammers justifies hampering many innocent people simply because they live in the wrong part of town, is truely the mindset of a vigilante who's lost touch with reality.
This is bull. If you got listed your a spammer or an open relay.
There have been numerous well known cases where MAPS created an entire netblock against "spam friendly" ISPs, in an attempt to put pressure on that ISP to change its policy and stop selling bandwidth or other services to spammers. This tactic has the effect of blocking all of that ISPs customers, spammers and legitimate businesses and users alike. Not long ago, slashdot
ran a story about peacefire.org and others getting blocked by MAPS.
Your belief that everything listed by MAPS must be spammers is clearly false if examples can be shown where non-spammers have been blocked, and I believe that link above is just such an example.
Even without a hard example, it's a well known fact that MAPS uses large netblocks against entire ISPs who they consider "spam friendly", without any regard for the other innocent bystanders who just happen to be other (unsuspecting) customers of that ISP.
These services would not be worth squat if they did not work as advertised.
It is debatable how effective MAPS is. In
this C/net article
MAPS blocked very few spams and also blocked many non-spam messages. MAPS was the only spam blocking service among the ones tested that blocked non-spam messages. That C/net ran a test and found MAPS to block a significant number of non-spam messages further shows how naive it is to blindly trust MAPS.
I suspect that time will shortly prove that MAPS is in fact "not worth squat". Such questionable effectiveness coupled together with blocking legitimate emails isn't great from a free service, but when you're paying your expectations change.
"It strikes a blow against corporate America," Braun continued. "It might tip the balance too far towards First Amendment rights. Defamation is not protected by the First Amendment."
Now that's a change from the typical slashdot "corporations are taking over everything" news.
but ~$600?! I'll sacrifice my familiarity with PhotoShop and just use the GIMP for that price...
I used photoshop for a few days back in '96, on someone else's computer (presumably legitimately licensed, since they had the box on the nearby shelf).
In the last couple years, I've been using the gimp on linux. It did take a bit more effort to get used to the gimp... version 1.2 (and betas leading up to it) fixed some of the strangeness in selecting stuff and made some many other minor improvements that I find it to be quite useful and all the bitmap graphic manipulation I need. Even if Adobe ported Photoshop to linux and offered me a complmentary license, I probably wouldn't even bother to install it. Photoshop probably is better, but as of 1.2, the gimp is pretty damn good and plenty good enough for me that I wouldn't bother relearning photoshop, even if I could get it for free (as in free beer, of course).
I suspect that in a year or two, many more gnome & kde apps will be "good enough" that people who've invested time learning them probably wouldn't bother relearning proprietary software even if it were offered to them at no cost.
Coupled together with recent trends to "crack down" on unlicensed proprietary software (forcing users to learn the free programs that are or will soon be "good enough"), I predict some troubled times for various proprietary software vendors who dominate their respective markets today.
I am not the original poster, of whom JohnZed asks:
Do you personally spend lots of time trying to get Microsoft-supported games to work on Linux? I sure don't.
I did buy the official linux quake3 from the shelf at Fry's, only days after it appeared. I spend "lots of time"... well, about two evenings, of installing various Mesa, libgart, kernels, Xfree versions, etc. In the end, I played it for a few hours at the lowest resolution and lowest quality and the 'bots kicked my ass. I was truely impressed by the visual quality of the high quality settings, but I never did manage to get more than a few frames per second on my matrox g400 (selected specifically because of matrox's good disclosure to the xfree team).
JohnZed does have a good point, that "we" suggests involvement as a developer in the project. As my own little (non-game)
project has been building up a user base, I see a lot of users with strong opinions about development. It's easy to brush them off as "back seat drivers" or "armchair critics", but sometimes, some of them actually write a bit of code and get involved in the project... and it's hard to predict which ones those will be.
Don't like your school?? Are your teachers a bunch of jerks? Maybe you just don't like getting out of bed early in the morning?
Now's your change to "get back" at them and cause them some pain. Quoting from the article:
Once discovered -- typically through tips that come via hotlines like 1-800-RU-LEGIT -- they're treated just like any other violator, says Jenny Blank, BSA's director of enforcement.
So there you have it: the number to call. It might help to actually know there's some unlicensed software on a particular machine or two... but my guess is they'd be glad to have any tip, even a lie, as an excuse to conduct an audit (there will almost certainly be machines with unlicensed software, which means profit for the BSA)
Of course, it's Summer, so to maximize the pain for your school district, you'll probably want to wait until shortly before or right about the time school starts back up. In the end, doing this will only make the environment worse for everyone (except the BSA and maybe Microsoft), but it will put a lot of additional stress on teachers and administrators in the short term.
From their main page (today): "You can now subscribe to Kuro5hin, and browse the site ad-free."
I just went to K5 to see for myself, and sure enough, Junkbuster filtered the banner ad quite effectively, just like it does for nearly every other site on the web.
K5 is cool... maybe someday I'll kick the slashdot habbit and read K5 instead, and maybe even send 'em five dollars.
But it won't be due to banner ads. Junkbuster takes a bit of work, and you have to get a good blocklist built
( Stefan Waldherr's site is a good place to start). Maybe Junkbuster is too difficult for most mainsteam users, but I'd guess the average slashdot or K5 reader could set up Junkbuster about as easily as setting up a Paypal account... and it works for almost all websites for free (zero dollars, and GPL freedom to hack).
It's like people at work that think they have a "right" to not have their email or web usage monitored. You're using someone elses resources, you have to follow their rules. If you don't like it, don't use it.
What about the company telephones? How about during the lunch hour? It is socially acceptable that employers would "monitor" voice phone calls, even personal calls to/from family members or friends, even during breaks and lunch hour?
Maybe email and voice phone calls are fundamentally different, but they're both simple human-to-human communication. Maybe it's "using someone elses resources" in your world, but at least in the US, local phone service and email are sold on a flat-fee basis. Aside from time lost from working, there is no additional cost to an employer for a brief phone call or a normal email message.
The only thing that is fundamentally different about email is that it can be easily copied, archived, searched and indexed. Today (except perhaps for the NSA), voice phone calls can't be automatically converted to text and monitored as cheaply and automatically as email can. That's today. Someday it will be possible. When that day is upon us, I certainly hope your anti-privacy opinion isn't the general public sentiment.
The one exception today, for voice phone calls, is monitoring of customer service calls to assure quality of service. It's generally accepted practice, and even required by law in some states, to disclose at the beginning of the call that it may be monitored. Saddly, email doesn't enjoy the same privacy protections as voice phone calls and postal (snail) mail.
Do I have the right to sell something to someone, then barge into their house several months later and rummage through his stuff to make sure he didn't steal anything from me? If they suspect I pirated software, they can contact the authorities, gather evidence, then audit me, but unless they have legally acceptable evidence,
Copyright infringment (duplicating copyrighted digital bits without authorization) is fundamentally different than stealing physical goods. It's unfortunate that people interchange the words.
I've heard several stories, some first hand accounts from people who've worked at a company that got busted. In every story, the BSA got a call from a former employee who told them there was pirated software.
The sworn statement of your former employee that you've got pirated software is the "gather evidence" stage.
Sure, you could turn them away at the door and insist they go get a warrant. If they do, you can be sure things will get ugly, even if you're 100% properly licensed. Once they have that warrant, they're under no obligation to minimize their disruption of your business... and since at that point you'll be a criminial in their minds.
If your business is anything like most small to mid-size ones, you've probably got at least a few computers running "what came with the computer"... but you don't have the original invoice or that original invoice doesn't specifically indicate the computer came with that software. The original manuals/holograms got shuffled into a desk somewhere, lost or filed away where nobody will find them, or perhaps fell on the floor and were cleaned up by a janitor.
If your business doesn't have a regular policy of auditing the machines, it's entirely possible that an employee installed some "harmless" program, or someone made a simple mistake. Often times, in the rush to meet a deadline or solve a problem for a customer, an employee might need to quickly load a copy of some program (say the customer emails a powerpoint file with purchase requirements and needs a quote within hours, and it's a big opportunity, but first your machine can't read his PPT file, you really want to bid for an opportunity at this sale and don't want to get off on the wrong foot and also precious time asking for a different format because your computer can not read the same attachment he sent to you and your competitors, and the clock is ticking)... the disc was sitting right there, and "we'll take care of it later", etc. These sorts of things really do happen all the time in "normal" companies.
BSA: Where I work, we have a excellent network consultant who audits all our computers every several months and orders anything that isn't proven to be licensed properly (once I lost the papers for a legally purchased win98 and months later when I couldn't find them he put it on the "need to buy" list, Doh!)... in case anyone from the BSA is reading this post.
Sure, you're innocent until proven guilty... at least in fifth-grade civics class. There are two realities about going to court: 1) it is expensive and rarely can you recover all costs even when you win, and 2) the outcome is uncertain, even when there is considerable evidence in your favor. If there's not absolutely certainty your "100% legal", the BSA will probably demand a fee to drop the whole matter instead of going to court. Maybe they won't sue if you pay... if you're smart you'll evaluate your options and choose the least expensive one, and paying will probably be the answer.
> No matter what three they pick, they're going to get slammed here on slashdot.
Ok it's official: I've gotten tired of comments like the above where someone thinks there's something profound and revelatory about the notion that skepticism is a common practice amongst slashdot readers
I'm sorry that is was my post that broke the camel's back, so to speak.
It is well known that slashdot readers (at least the tiny subset that post) are generally skeptics. There's nothing prefound about that.
My post was directed at Michael's skepticism, the slashdot editor, not any particular slashdot readers.
I expect many slashdot readers to take skeptical and negative viewpoints, though there's often a good number of well reasoned posts, some skeptical, others optimistic. When I read user comments, I expect to see complaints that AOL chose some of its largest competitors for open access (aka whining). I even expect to see even more senseless reasoning, first posts, etc.
But, I expect slashdot editors, who post to a news site with very wide readership, to adhere to the same sort of editorial standards as major newspapers and magazines regularily do. The big difference between slashdot and conventional print media is that when they print sub-standard editorials, I can feel like I got what I paid for!
I suppose there also isn't anything profound about slashdot editors commonly being skeptical.
I'm sorry it was my post that annoyed you so much.
Yes, it's a bit questionable that they managed to negotiate for only three competitors, but accepting that that's finalized, what three competitors would be acceptable to you, oh slashdot editor?
No matter what three they pick, they're going to get slammed here on slashdot. It's a no-win situation (for a postive or even neutral editorial on slashdot). The only way they could make a slashdot editor happy would be to decide, purely out of good-will to allow more than the required three competitors... and since they're a publically held company, they'd have one hell of a time explaining that to their shareholders (who would rightly sue if AOL doesn't do what's in the shareholder's best interests profit-wise, that is).
Frankly, the fact that two of the largest ISPs are on the list is relatively good news. Had it been three tiny players without much presence, think of what this slashdot editorial would have said.... AOL picks non-starter competitors that they're just going to buy up as soon as the FTC isn't looking!
Sure, the FTC could have required more than three, but they didn't and that fact is old news. If you don't like these three, then I ask, what three could have made you happier?
One of the worthy ideals behind trademarks is to protect consumers. The social goal is to prevent someone from selling a different product with the same name, of a "confusingly similar" name that consumers already know and have formed an expectation of what they will get.
The example that gets thrown around most often is "Coca-Cola" and "Coke". If it weren't for trademark protection, all sorts of folks would try to make cheap knock-offs of Coke and sell them in red cans designed to look the same on the shelf. Fortunately, as a consumer, when you see the can that looks like Coca-Cola, you can be sure you're going to get what you expect. It's quite legal to make a similar cola, and many companies do, but if you make the can the same red/white color and use similar fonts, you've stepped over the line.
As far as Adobe is concerned, it's easy to see their concern that their customers (or perspective customers) may be looking at various linux (gnu/linux) distributions and say to themselves "Wow, Linux now has KIllustrator, and Illustrator is the thing that's been holding me back from giving Linux a try", or even "Illustrator is expensive, but it I buy this cheap Linux CD, it comes with the 'K' version of Illustrator; what a bargain!" It's easy to see how someone could mistake it for a "lite" version of the "real thing".
What does seem strange is Adobe's demand for a relatively small sum of money. I would have expected them to demand an immediate name change.
LVD SCSI... put that 10000 rpm drive 50 feet away!
on
Building the Quiet PC
·
· Score: 2
I went on the quiet PC hunt about a year ago, with a few hundred dollars in hand. I had one of those really fast 10000 rpm SCSI hard drives, and it's very noisy. The simple (but expensive) solution was to get a very long cable, from
these guys who make all sorts of special SCSI cables.
The SCSI LVD (80 Mbyte/sec) signals can be run for at least 25 meters (approx 75 feet), and you can go much farther if it's just a point-to-point (only the PC and one drive). 25 feet was plenty to get the drive into a closet. Together with a bit of foam in the walls and door in the closet, that nasty 10000 rpm noise is almost completely gone.
It's good that ATA/ATAPI-6 will have a spec for 48 bit LBA, though it probably should have been done much earlier. The fifo approach is interesting (keeping all control within the original 8 bit ISA...)
But this won't be the end of "storage barriers". As a quick example, Linux 2.4.0 had a maximum size for any volume (even LVM & RAID) of only 1 TB last time I checked. Maxtor's white paper mentioned 2 TB limits in nearly all OS's due to use a 32 bit integer to store the sector address.
Microsoft undoubtedly has many similar implementation limits, even if the raw format of FAT32 and NTFS can handle more. If past history is any indication, PC bios code will also consistantly have problems with "next years" drives, simply due to bugs and short sighted coding, even though there's no "real reason" for it.
Small, Rack Mountable, under Warranty, but not nearly as cheap or as much fun as reverse engineering a "coming any day now" Microsoft X-Box, which supposedly costs $425 to manufacture, but Microsoft will sell for $299.
Ok, the xbox won't come in a tiny rack mount enclosure, but at with a 700-some Mhz Pentium3 other pretty cool stuff, you'll come a lot closer to the beowolf-on-a-budget. Of course, there is the issue of having to use USB-based network adaptors, but never mind that.
Plus there's the fun-factor of seeing Linux run on a piece of hardware made (and sold at a loss) by Microsoft!
1. To divide and parcel out in shares; apportion.
2. To participate in, use, enjoy, or experience jointly or in turns.
3. To relate (a secret or experience, for example) to another or others.
4. To accord a share in (something) to another or others:
shared her chocolate bar with a friend.
Coming soon to a dictionary near you...
5. To receive information that you may not use, modify, discuss with others,
or even attempt to learn from:
Microsoft Shared Source
The new transistor is capable of operating at 210GHz using just 1 milliamp of electrical current, or about 80 percent faster than current technology while using half as much power.
Before anyone (probably too late) starts dreaming of a 210 GHz Pentium-class microprocessor, take that 1mA and multiply by 20 million (or some plausible number of transistors for a microprocessor). Even at 1 volt, that'd be 20000 watts... quite a bit more than you can get even on the 240 volt mains of a residential service.... and it'd take one hell of a heatsink:)
Now if you wanted to build some nice little amplifiers and use 1 mA bias currents, that's make a lot more sense.
It's pretty impressive technology, but it helps to keep these things perspective and not equate the bandwidth of individual transistors with relatively large bias currents to the clock frequency of a Pentium-class microprocessor containing many millions of transistors.
One major things that Redhat and other distros do to add value is maintain a list of security updates, even for relatively old systems. Got a server that's been up for 2 years... it ain't running RedHat 7.x, or even 6.2 if it's been up that long!
This page is a prime example of the immense value they add. Sure, an admin out to keep on top of security mail lists and such, but how many of these programs even bother to keep security notices going back for 2.5 years? A list like (together with rpm -q) is extreemly valuable for doing a quick check to make sure you didn't miss obvious security holes.
Why do I bet these would only be useful with one company's cable service?
As surely as you can bet they'll code it to only with their services, folks like Ken "Codeman" Segler will get one and start reverse engineering (if the hardware is worthwhile and can run linux). He's the guy who reverse engineering the iOpener. Rumor has it he works full-time reverse engineering products, sometimes for fun and sometimes on contract basis for surplus shops.
Slashdot Mirror
It is such a stretch of imagination to believe that Microsoft could improve the APIs that are used to "access windows internals" so that it's simply not possible to "cause instability on XP"?
Meddling in ordinary business practives, while it might give some satisfaction to some poor folks who have to drink tap water, but it won't really solve anything, and it certainly sets a dangerous precedent. Personally, I don't see what they're complaining about. I buy premium bottled water, and I've seen nothing in the polution infested public water utility that'd make we want to stop. We've got lots of great clean bottled water brands at every store, so why's everyone so scared over a few chemicals?
The last time slashdot carried an article about this same Viking 'life on Mars' experient, it was suggested the Gilbert V. Levin (the guy who created this experient) wasn't a member of the NASA religion (cult). The accusation was that NASA scientists believe they are THE special and unique group to discover life, and Levin is an outsider to this community. Specifically, here's the quote that appeared in the Washington Post story:
This Washington Post story obviously takes a slant towards Levin, but there are some interesting comments from NASA... that other experiments onboard Viking failed to confirm life, problems with Levin's approach, etc.
It would be something like "symmetry" if the "public" that "stole" from artists were to pay the artists directly. So far, efforts to make that happen have failed miserably.
Ugly as spam is, it simply is not a contageuos disease.
Simply hosting a (non-spam related) site within the same netblock as some spammers does not somehow influence that site to start sending large volumes of unsolicited email.
A quarantine is also used only when the disease is fatal. Nobody can quarantine people to prevent the spread of a disease like the common cold or flu.
Spam isn't fatal. I get about 3-8 spams daily, and I just delete them. Sure, spam is annoying, but it's nowhere near serious enough (fatal) to declare a quarantine or other similarily drastic actions.
I'm glad to see people fighting spam... but when they start intentionally hurting innocent people who are mere bystanders, they've crossed over the line.
The key word is "if". If you actually went so far as to pay for a portion of a spammer's bill to their ISP, then your statement might make some sense. Nobody willingly pays someone else's ISP bills, just as nobody walks over to their undesirable neighbors house and offers them cash to help pay their rent.
The simple fact that this hypothetical crackhouse happens to be owned by the same landlord and you happen to send your monthy rent check to that same landlord does not somehow make you a drug dealer.
Luckily law enforcement (in the US) isn't free to harrass mere bystanders without "probable cause", and ultimately there is "due process" in the courts. It's not a perfect system, but it does generally tend to prevent rampant and unchecked abuse of power. The same can not be said of MAPS.
Your financial support of a spam-friendly ISP is what keeps them in business.
The bitter hatred of spam that many tech-types hold has an amazing power to justify as rightous harming innocent bystanders. Amazing.
The subject of this thread, "vigilantes" is particularily approapriate. This attitude, that (maybe) hindering some spammers justifies hampering many innocent people simply because they live in the wrong part of town, is truely the mindset of a vigilante who's lost touch with reality.
There have been numerous well known cases where MAPS created an entire netblock against "spam friendly" ISPs, in an attempt to put pressure on that ISP to change its policy and stop selling bandwidth or other services to spammers. This tactic has the effect of blocking all of that ISPs customers, spammers and legitimate businesses and users alike. Not long ago, slashdot ran a story about peacefire.org and others getting blocked by MAPS.
Your belief that everything listed by MAPS must be spammers is clearly false if examples can be shown where non-spammers have been blocked, and I believe that link above is just such an example.
Even without a hard example, it's a well known fact that MAPS uses large netblocks against entire ISPs who they consider "spam friendly", without any regard for the other innocent bystanders who just happen to be other (unsuspecting) customers of that ISP.
These services would not be worth squat if they did not work as advertised.
It is debatable how effective MAPS is. In this C/net article MAPS blocked very few spams and also blocked many non-spam messages. MAPS was the only spam blocking service among the ones tested that blocked non-spam messages. That C/net ran a test and found MAPS to block a significant number of non-spam messages further shows how naive it is to blindly trust MAPS.
I suspect that time will shortly prove that MAPS is in fact "not worth squat". Such questionable effectiveness coupled together with blocking legitimate emails isn't great from a free service, but when you're paying your expectations change.
Now that's a change from the typical slashdot "corporations are taking over everything" news.
I used photoshop for a few days back in '96, on someone else's computer (presumably legitimately licensed, since they had the box on the nearby shelf).
In the last couple years, I've been using the gimp on linux. It did take a bit more effort to get used to the gimp... version 1.2 (and betas leading up to it) fixed some of the strangeness in selecting stuff and made some many other minor improvements that I find it to be quite useful and all the bitmap graphic manipulation I need. Even if Adobe ported Photoshop to linux and offered me a complmentary license, I probably wouldn't even bother to install it. Photoshop probably is better, but as of 1.2, the gimp is pretty damn good and plenty good enough for me that I wouldn't bother relearning photoshop, even if I could get it for free (as in free beer, of course).
I suspect that in a year or two, many more gnome & kde apps will be "good enough" that people who've invested time learning them probably wouldn't bother relearning proprietary software even if it were offered to them at no cost.
Coupled together with recent trends to "crack down" on unlicensed proprietary software (forcing users to learn the free programs that are or will soon be "good enough"), I predict some troubled times for various proprietary software vendors who dominate their respective markets today.
I did buy the official linux quake3 from the shelf at Fry's, only days after it appeared. I spend "lots of time"... well, about two evenings, of installing various Mesa, libgart, kernels, Xfree versions, etc. In the end, I played it for a few hours at the lowest resolution and lowest quality and the 'bots kicked my ass. I was truely impressed by the visual quality of the high quality settings, but I never did manage to get more than a few frames per second on my matrox g400 (selected specifically because of matrox's good disclosure to the xfree team).
JohnZed does have a good point, that "we" suggests involvement as a developer in the project. As my own little (non-game) project has been building up a user base, I see a lot of users with strong opinions about development. It's easy to brush them off as "back seat drivers" or "armchair critics", but sometimes, some of them actually write a bit of code and get involved in the project... and it's hard to predict which ones those will be.
Now's your change to "get back" at them and cause them some pain. Quoting from the article:
So there you have it: the number to call. It might help to actually know there's some unlicensed software on a particular machine or two... but my guess is they'd be glad to have any tip, even a lie, as an excuse to conduct an audit (there will almost certainly be machines with unlicensed software, which means profit for the BSA)
Of course, it's Summer, so to maximize the pain for your school district, you'll probably want to wait until shortly before or right about the time school starts back up. In the end, doing this will only make the environment worse for everyone (except the BSA and maybe Microsoft), but it will put a lot of additional stress on teachers and administrators in the short term.
Most people do. They'll buy entire albums having only heard 1 song, and pay admission, rent or buy VHS/DVD movies, having only seen a brief trailer.
From their main page (today): "You can now subscribe to Kuro5hin, and browse the site ad-free."
I just went to K5 to see for myself, and sure enough, Junkbuster filtered the banner ad quite effectively, just like it does for nearly every other site on the web.
K5 is cool... maybe someday I'll kick the slashdot habbit and read K5 instead, and maybe even send 'em five dollars.
But it won't be due to banner ads. Junkbuster takes a bit of work, and you have to get a good blocklist built ( Stefan Waldherr's site is a good place to start). Maybe Junkbuster is too difficult for most mainsteam users, but I'd guess the average slashdot or K5 reader could set up Junkbuster about as easily as setting up a Paypal account... and it works for almost all websites for free (zero dollars, and GPL freedom to hack).
What about the company telephones? How about during the lunch hour? It is socially acceptable that employers would "monitor" voice phone calls, even personal calls to/from family members or friends, even during breaks and lunch hour?
Maybe email and voice phone calls are fundamentally different, but they're both simple human-to-human communication. Maybe it's "using someone elses resources" in your world, but at least in the US, local phone service and email are sold on a flat-fee basis. Aside from time lost from working, there is no additional cost to an employer for a brief phone call or a normal email message.
The only thing that is fundamentally different about email is that it can be easily copied, archived, searched and indexed. Today (except perhaps for the NSA), voice phone calls can't be automatically converted to text and monitored as cheaply and automatically as email can. That's today. Someday it will be possible. When that day is upon us, I certainly hope your anti-privacy opinion isn't the general public sentiment.
The one exception today, for voice phone calls, is monitoring of customer service calls to assure quality of service. It's generally accepted practice, and even required by law in some states, to disclose at the beginning of the call that it may be monitored. Saddly, email doesn't enjoy the same privacy protections as voice phone calls and postal (snail) mail.
Copyright infringment (duplicating copyrighted digital bits without authorization) is fundamentally different than stealing physical goods. It's unfortunate that people interchange the words.
I've heard several stories, some first hand accounts from people who've worked at a company that got busted. In every story, the BSA got a call from a former employee who told them there was pirated software.
The sworn statement of your former employee that you've got pirated software is the "gather evidence" stage.
Sure, you could turn them away at the door and insist they go get a warrant. If they do, you can be sure things will get ugly, even if you're 100% properly licensed. Once they have that warrant, they're under no obligation to minimize their disruption of your business... and since at that point you'll be a criminial in their minds.
If your business is anything like most small to mid-size ones, you've probably got at least a few computers running "what came with the computer"... but you don't have the original invoice or that original invoice doesn't specifically indicate the computer came with that software. The original manuals/holograms got shuffled into a desk somewhere, lost or filed away where nobody will find them, or perhaps fell on the floor and were cleaned up by a janitor.
If your business doesn't have a regular policy of auditing the machines, it's entirely possible that an employee installed some "harmless" program, or someone made a simple mistake. Often times, in the rush to meet a deadline or solve a problem for a customer, an employee might need to quickly load a copy of some program (say the customer emails a powerpoint file with purchase requirements and needs a quote within hours, and it's a big opportunity, but first your machine can't read his PPT file, you really want to bid for an opportunity at this sale and don't want to get off on the wrong foot and also precious time asking for a different format because your computer can not read the same attachment he sent to you and your competitors, and the clock is ticking)... the disc was sitting right there, and "we'll take care of it later", etc. These sorts of things really do happen all the time in "normal" companies.
BSA: Where I work, we have a excellent network consultant who audits all our computers every several months and orders anything that isn't proven to be licensed properly (once I lost the papers for a legally purchased win98 and months later when I couldn't find them he put it on the "need to buy" list, Doh!)... in case anyone from the BSA is reading this post.
Sure, you're innocent until proven guilty... at least in fifth-grade civics class. There are two realities about going to court: 1) it is expensive and rarely can you recover all costs even when you win, and 2) the outcome is uncertain, even when there is considerable evidence in your favor. If there's not absolutely certainty your "100% legal", the BSA will probably demand a fee to drop the whole matter instead of going to court. Maybe they won't sue if you pay... if you're smart you'll evaluate your options and choose the least expensive one, and paying will probably be the answer.
Ok it's official: I've gotten tired of comments like the above where someone thinks there's something profound and revelatory about the notion that skepticism is a common practice amongst slashdot readers
I'm sorry that is was my post that broke the camel's back, so to speak.
It is well known that slashdot readers (at least the tiny subset that post) are generally skeptics. There's nothing prefound about that.
My post was directed at Michael's skepticism, the slashdot editor, not any particular slashdot readers.
I expect many slashdot readers to take skeptical and negative viewpoints, though there's often a good number of well reasoned posts, some skeptical, others optimistic. When I read user comments, I expect to see complaints that AOL chose some of its largest competitors for open access (aka whining). I even expect to see even more senseless reasoning, first posts, etc.
But, I expect slashdot editors, who post to a news site with very wide readership, to adhere to the same sort of editorial standards as major newspapers and magazines regularily do. The big difference between slashdot and conventional print media is that when they print sub-standard editorials, I can feel like I got what I paid for!
I suppose there also isn't anything profound about slashdot editors commonly being skeptical.
I'm sorry it was my post that annoyed you so much.
No matter what three they pick, they're going to get slammed here on slashdot. It's a no-win situation (for a postive or even neutral editorial on slashdot). The only way they could make a slashdot editor happy would be to decide, purely out of good-will to allow more than the required three competitors... and since they're a publically held company, they'd have one hell of a time explaining that to their shareholders (who would rightly sue if AOL doesn't do what's in the shareholder's best interests profit-wise, that is).
Frankly, the fact that two of the largest ISPs are on the list is relatively good news. Had it been three tiny players without much presence, think of what this slashdot editorial would have said.... AOL picks non-starter competitors that they're just going to buy up as soon as the FTC isn't looking!
Sure, the FTC could have required more than three, but they didn't and that fact is old news. If you don't like these three, then I ask, what three could have made you happier?
The example that gets thrown around most often is "Coca-Cola" and "Coke". If it weren't for trademark protection, all sorts of folks would try to make cheap knock-offs of Coke and sell them in red cans designed to look the same on the shelf. Fortunately, as a consumer, when you see the can that looks like Coca-Cola, you can be sure you're going to get what you expect. It's quite legal to make a similar cola, and many companies do, but if you make the can the same red/white color and use similar fonts, you've stepped over the line.
As far as Adobe is concerned, it's easy to see their concern that their customers (or perspective customers) may be looking at various linux (gnu/linux) distributions and say to themselves "Wow, Linux now has KIllustrator, and Illustrator is the thing that's been holding me back from giving Linux a try", or even "Illustrator is expensive, but it I buy this cheap Linux CD, it comes with the 'K' version of Illustrator; what a bargain!" It's easy to see how someone could mistake it for a "lite" version of the "real thing".
What does seem strange is Adobe's demand for a relatively small sum of money. I would have expected them to demand an immediate name change.
The SCSI LVD (80 Mbyte/sec) signals can be run for at least 25 meters (approx 75 feet), and you can go much farther if it's just a point-to-point (only the PC and one drive). 25 feet was plenty to get the drive into a closet. Together with a bit of foam in the walls and door in the closet, that nasty 10000 rpm noise is almost completely gone.
But this won't be the end of "storage barriers". As a quick example, Linux 2.4.0 had a maximum size for any volume (even LVM & RAID) of only 1 TB last time I checked. Maxtor's white paper mentioned 2 TB limits in nearly all OS's due to use a 32 bit integer to store the sector address.
Microsoft undoubtedly has many similar implementation limits, even if the raw format of FAT32 and NTFS can handle more. If past history is any indication, PC bios code will also consistantly have problems with "next years" drives, simply due to bugs and short sighted coding, even though there's no "real reason" for it.
Ok, the xbox won't come in a tiny rack mount enclosure, but at with a 700-some Mhz Pentium3 other pretty cool stuff, you'll come a lot closer to the beowolf-on-a-budget. Of course, there is the issue of having to use USB-based network adaptors, but never mind that.
Plus there's the fun-factor of seeing Linux run on a piece of hardware made (and sold at a loss) by Microsoft!
If this sounds like a fun way to void the warranty on a $299 piece of brand new hardware, take a peek at this thread over at linux-hacker.net.
v. tr. Coming soon to a dictionary near you...
Before anyone (probably too late) starts dreaming of a 210 GHz Pentium-class microprocessor, take that 1mA and multiply by 20 million (or some plausible number of transistors for a microprocessor). Even at 1 volt, that'd be 20000 watts... quite a bit more than you can get even on the 240 volt mains of a residential service. ... and it'd take one hell of a heatsink :)
Now if you wanted to build some nice little amplifiers and use 1 mA bias currents, that's make a lot more sense.
It's pretty impressive technology, but it helps to keep these things perspective and not equate the bandwidth of individual transistors with relatively large bias currents to the clock frequency of a Pentium-class microprocessor containing many millions of transistors.
This page is a prime example of the immense value they add. Sure, an admin out to keep on top of security mail lists and such, but how many of these programs even bother to keep security notices going back for 2.5 years? A list like (together with rpm -q) is extreemly valuable for doing a quick check to make sure you didn't miss obvious security holes.
As surely as you can bet they'll code it to only with their services, folks like Ken "Codeman" Segler will get one and start reverse engineering (if the hardware is worthwhile and can run linux). He's the guy who reverse engineering the iOpener. Rumor has it he works full-time reverse engineering products, sometimes for fun and sometimes on contract basis for surplus shops.