the court refused to let the jury consider the "prior art,"
I noticed that too. If that is the case, it explains a bit about how the jury ruled in the case.
Is this the common practice in this type of case? I mean, we're told often enough after a really moronic patent is awarded, that now we just have to wait for the courts to 'sort things out'. Well, if the court isn't considering testimony concerning prior art that would invalidate the patent, then we're even more screwed than I thought was the case.
Here's what one of the legislooters had to say about it: "He came up with a bill that sent a lot of people crying to my office, so he must have done a pretty good job."
The thought never occurs to him that the reason a bunch of people are 'crying' about it is because it's yet another lame attempt at legislation drafted by a bunch of government goons who are completely clueless about technology.
The bright side of any legislation like this, is it really helps to grease the funds coming into the campaign coffers. That's why certain regulatory legislation comes up before congress every couple of years, so the lobbies of one side, the other, or both(!) can 'contribute' to make sure the legislootion never sees the light of day.
I used to have the prefbar installed some time ago. I just went back and tried to install it as a normal user and it failed. (required file not found) There is a link on the page you referred to for Linux/*nix installation instructions that is 404. Additionally, there is a link for a mailing list on the page that does not exist.
It looks like development on this tool is dead. Does anyone know any different?
They still sell a version of the "Blue Box". Unfortunately, it contains less parts than the old Blue Box, and has more specialized pieces. I actually found an original 1200pc BB at Toys R Us less than a year ago. I bought it because it is the best value out there for Lego. It has nothing but basic blocks. The new BlueBox has 1000pc I think, and has some non-rectangular pieces. The old set is better if you are building big things because it was only #20, and when it was more common, I saw it for as low as $16.
Absolutely. The quality of Megablocks is really piss-poor when compared to Lego. They have some excellent looking models, but the things won't stay together unless you use glue!
I can see how parents with no experience with Lego might look at the Megablocks and Lego side by side, and question why the Lego were so much more expensive, but after buying one set of the Megablocks, I can definitely say that I'd never do that again.
I think the big mistake Lego made was with the Bionicle and sports sets. Lego is for building models, and expanding your imagination, not for playing mini-basketball and hockey. The basketball sets also brought in something previously unseen to the Lego universe - racial minifigs. From what I understand, prior to the basketball sets being introduced, all minifigs were yellow. They weren't white, black, asian, indian or whatever. They were just yellow. I liked that.
I really like some of th newer larger models, which are probably going to be cut back a bit if the article in question is correct. The Tie Interceptor is a really cool model, but it cost so much that it would be hard to buy the set and just integrate the pieces into the rest of your collection after building it and checking it out.
I guess I'd better shell out the $300 for the Star Destroyer before it is dropped.
Count me in on this. I'll not fly until the brainless morons in control of "security" recognise that pocket knives, sewing kits, scissors, and other similar tools that ordinary people carry with them on a daily basis are allowed on the plane. Screw them. I'll drive or not go at all rather than be subjected to the humiliation that is commonplace at airports.
Making you turn on a laptop (as ha been pointed out several times) is completely idiotic as well. If I were a determined terrorist, I could easily rig my laptop to allow the morons play TuxRacer while booted off a Knoppix CD so they'd overlook the bomb sitting where a harddrive normally would. Since any thinking person can easily demonstrate that their procedures actually provide zero increase in safety, why even bother? Because it fools Joe Sixpack into believing that it makes him safer is not an adequate reason to institute the regime they've set in place.
I happen to own a copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica that was published in 1903. The article in it about telecommunications is particularly interesting in relation to the referenced article. At the time of course, telecom was pretty primative. Each individual phone had its own wire. Thus, if you look at period photos of New York City, you'll see these huge bundles of wires that pretty much obliterate the lower stories of buildings. The bundles of wires were huge and one might say they detracted much from the scenery (such that it was).
In those days, and later years, the process of connecting a call was actually a process of building a single point-to-point wire that connected the two parties, which is where the patch-boards and operators came from.
Several years ago I read a contemporary description of exactly what it was like to make a long-distance call from New York to St. Louis in the mid-20s. The caller would pick up the phone and repeatedly press the cradle that broke the circuit off and on. This would alert the operator that someone wanted to make a call, by flashing a light on her switchboard. (When the reciever was on-hook the light was off, and when it was on-hook, the light would come on.) The caller would tell the operator where to connect to - something like "Saint Louis 6 4324". The first two letters being the abbreviation for the city. Then the caller would hang up, while the operator connected to other operators across the country until the circuit was completely built, and essentially a single wire stretched between the caller and callee, and she had the callee on the line. Then she'd ring back the caller, and they'd start the conversation.
This is basically from memory which has been somewhat corrupted with age, so take it for what it's worth. The description of the wires brought it to mind so I thought I'd share...
and an operator would answer. (You see people repeatedly mashing the cradle of the phone in old movies.
D-Squared used the Windows messenger service to pop-up ads as often as every 10 minutes. The ads promoted its product -- software to stop 'these unwanted and illegal pop-up messages forever with the click of a button'
That's the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
Perhaps I don't get out enough.
Sometimes it amazes me what windows users will put up with to stay on the microsoft plantation. Messenger pop-ups... Web popups... Spyware... Gator... Browsers that you can't trust to accurately represent a URL... Programs that crash at random (or even regular) intervals...
I'm sure there are lots of other everyday annoyances, since I don't have to deal with them anymore, they just don't come to mind.
I was speaking with a fellow at work today and he was complaing about having to reload his windows box yet again because of stability issues. Why do people continue to just suck it up and deal with this crap? I guess I just don't understand why even people who know about the alternatives and are completely capable of dealing with the change continue to be so willing to submit. My wife is one of those. I've told her flat out that google and her own wits are the only tech support she has anymore. Fortunately for her, she knows enough to be able to figure things out on her own and can navigate DOS better than most, but I just plain refuse to be an enabler with this annoying pile of warm cow patties that is windows.
Even if they operate under the premise that it will not be done today doesn't mean they won't change their minds in the future.
That is one reason I really don't trust those 'ezpass' systems. Those pushing this tech will swear on a stack of bibles that they aren't doing, and have no plans to do anything evil with the information they are capable f collecting. The easy way to find out exactly how truthful about this they are being is to try to buy one anonymously ith no identification with cash. You simply can't do it here in texas from what I understand. Sure, they can get your plates off the cameras they inevitably install, but simply tracking the comings and goings of a tag is much easier.
If there were no nefarious intentions on their part, I'd be able to stop by the local quickie mart, buy one of these things with cash, and simply use it until it ran out. Then I could either recharge it, or get another one. This isn't going to happen, because they want to be able to easily track you wherever you go, just in case you might do something naughty.
I can't believe we allow them to put up cameras all over the place on light poles, stoplights, and the like. I'm abaolutely amazed that there isn't an incredibly high mortality rate on them, because they deserve it.
The term 'slave' may not make a lot of sense in the IDE world, but for some reason your post brings to mind something I thought was pretty funny when I first saw it many years ago.
I was taking a class on Ultrix (DEC's Unix many, many moons ago), and happened across the manpage for NTP as I was trying to sync up a bunch of computers in the lab for my own nefarious purposes. Here's what I recall about the way it was described:
One server on the network should be designated as a Master timeserver. The slaves will get their time from the master. If, for some reason, the master is unavailable, (i.e., the master dies or is KILLed), the slaves will hold an election for a new master, who will become the timeserver for the slaves. When/if he designated master is resurrected, the elected master will return to slave status.
I really wish I still had a copy of that man page it was a pretty interesting read.
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.
The phrase "the people" is used exactly 9 times in the Constitution. In every other case, but the second amendment, the ACLU interprets the phrase to apply to each of us as individuals. Only in the case of the second amendment is this not the case. It seems to be be a rather selective interpretation to me.
In fact, the supreme court has ruled that the phrase "the people" means the same thing in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 9th and 10th amendments.
It is truely unfortunate that the subordinate clause "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state," preceded the actual, enumerated right "of the people to keep and bear arms", as this has led to much revisionism of it's intended meaning. Given that the militia act of 1792(+- 1 year or 2), declares every able-bodied male between 17-45 years of age are militia members, and that they were expected to muster with their own personal firearms, the thought that this amendment was something to protect some collective state right is almost laughable.
By way of further clarification on what was initially intended with the bill of rights, the following text was submitted to the states as a preamble to the 12 origional proposed amendments.
The Conventions of a number of the States having, at the time of adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added, and as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;
I'm still amazed that the things you describe in your post haven't come to pass already. People just have no idea how vastly much more destructive the last few windows could have easily been.
Essentially, all they did was propagate and maybe try a DOS on a MS website. That is nothing compared to what they could have done, like reformat drives, randomly corrupt system files, or insert random profanities into email and similar things.
Eventually, somone is going to propagate something really nasty and destructive. I'll be laughing my ass off, because there have been plenty of warnings!
The article states... The GSM Association admits the Israeli researchers are onto something but say the attack requires the use of complex technology, which few phone phreakers have access to, and would need to be targeted at a specific caller.
I see... in other words. They only people you have to fear is your government and large companies.
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that governments all across this planet of ours seem to think that the only kind of secrecy that is a good thing is goverment secrecy?
Yeah, 'cause Linux could never be compromised in such a way.
I just love the way apologists try to compare the subversion of a single server compromised by a malicious insider via a local exploit to hundreds of thousands of computers infected by a (still spreading) worm that requires no human intervention whatsoever to aid its spread.
What more do we want? Well for starters, all of the recent worms have been fairly benign in what they do. They attempt to spread, which causes network disruptions, and turn the infected computer into a zombie. The blaster worm also unneccesarily caused systems reboots that alerted the user to infection. If the worm needed the reboot to install some service, it should have just waited until one of the thrice daily reboots that are normal for windows computers.
If they'd really wanted to be nasty, the worms could have fdisk'ed the users harddrive after successfully infecting 5 other systems, with a 48 hour timer in case it wasn't able to spread itself.
Windows users have been extremely lucky in that these worms have been relatively benign compared to what they could have done. I hope their luck eventually runs out. I think a serious worm/virus that effectively kills the host is the only thing that will really wake people up to what kind of crap they are running, and the risks they are taking for running windows.
My father-in-law has an old Plymouth(I think that's what it is anyways) that has a pushbutton automatic transmission. It was a neat and innovative idea that utterly failed in the marketplace. Many people are driven by expecations. If things don't work at least somewhat as they think they should, or lke what they are used to, they simply won't change.
I've seen this far too many times over the past few years with many different types of computer users. People are very resistant to change, especially when it concerns something they don't understand. Linux is a much better, more stable, and more flexible OS today, yet there are many people who won't switch, even when they agree with you that it is better, because they don't like change.
It is called Assasination Politics and was initially put forth by a fellow named Jim Bell. Fedgov didn't much like Mr. Bell after he started talking about this idea for obvious reasons. John Young's excellent site, Cryptome, has a lot of information about AP and exactly what happened to Jim Bell.
Funny how Windows has the highest government security rating a commercial product can acquire (C2 EAL4) whereas Linux has no such certification at all.
I can't believe I'm responding to this troll, but here goes...
Do you have any idea whatsoever exactly what that certification means? Are you aware that the minute you hook the computer into a network, that certification is null and void? Or that it only applies to a non-networked base install of WinNT 4 (might be 3.5 I can't recall) on an old service pack? Are you aware that if you add Office (any version) or IIS (any version) the certification is no longer valid?
Microsoft spent a bunch of money (to me, not to them) to set up a box with very limited functionality just so people like you would spout off about it like it actually meant something.
I'll second you on TextPad. It rocks. I don't have windows anymore though, so I don't use it anymore. I really did like the "Brief" compatability mode. Until about a year ago, I kept a DOS partition available for hardcore Brief editing. Nothing like using a 10 year old copy of a program to do serious text editing. I've still not found anything to replace the ease with which it worked on columns of text as well as lines.
It is the first book of a fantasy series. I made it all the way through it, (6 books), and is a good story, but amazingly depressing. I know much more about leprosy than I ever wanted to know.
The parent post is right on target with his comments as most people will see historical allegory as a bit of cold, dead, history already confined in the dustbins of our collective memories. If more people thought about history and the implications of cause/effect and actions/reactions, we might be able to avoid some past horrors that have visited our little planet.
Historical fiction can be a useful tool in personalizing the past in a way that the traditional who-did-what-to-whom-and-when model is difficult to achieve.
Communism is an evil philosophy that will have no result but death and destruction anywhere it is tried except in limited, completely voluntary settings.
Our shortsightedness is to our ultimate detriment.
Now storing the meta data in a database, which is essentially what WinFS and such are doing, is not as clear a benfit. Personally I can imagine that it would be a very practiacal FS for keeping movies and MP3's on. I don't really see the benefits of running the OS files on that FS though. A lot of unneccesary overhead. (I don't search for files in my OS partition very often.)
Indeed. It seems like what they are claiming as an improvement, (i.e., faster searching for files), does not appear to help what people actually do most of the time. It is similar to claims of "boots much faster!" that you used to hear about new versions of windows. I would think the thing that would be important to people is data integrity and access efficiency. I know my primary concern is "how safe is my data".
I also question the need to include the overhead of a database frontend to the filesystem. Seems like a catastrophe just waiting to happen.
Also, since the DB is always active, what issues do you have with backups? I'd be concerned about backup and restoral issues with this type of filesystem. I haven't seen that addressed at all.
While the words 'file sharing' probably struck a bit of fear and loathing in the hearts of the weak-kneed, I think it was the term 'encryption' that caused the thing to be pulled. THere are still some major forces out there that would like to put the crypto genie back in the bottle. From the brief blurbs that I've read about 'waste', it would appear that this software would allow for small groups of people to securely and routinely communicate and distribute files amongst the group in a way not easily monitored by The Powers That Be.
Go ahread, call me a tin-foiler. The facts are, there are some pretty powerful folx who hate crypto used by the peasants. I'm not the one who is paranoid here.
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the court refused to let the jury consider the "prior art,"
I noticed that too. If that is the case, it explains a bit about how the jury ruled in the case.
Is this the common practice in this type of case? I mean, we're told often enough after a really moronic patent is awarded, that now we just have to wait for the courts to 'sort things out'. Well, if the court isn't considering testimony concerning prior art that would invalidate the patent, then we're even more screwed than I thought was the case.
Here's what one of the legislooters had to say about it: "He came up with a bill that sent a lot of people crying to my office, so he must have done a pretty good job."
The thought never occurs to him that the reason a bunch of people are 'crying' about it is because it's yet another lame attempt at legislation drafted by a bunch of government goons who are completely clueless about technology.
The bright side of any legislation like this, is it really helps to grease the funds coming into the campaign coffers. That's why certain regulatory legislation comes up before congress every couple of years, so the lobbies of one side, the other, or both(!) can 'contribute' to make sure the legislootion never sees the light of day.
I used to have the prefbar installed some time ago. I just went back and tried to install it as a normal user and it failed. (required file not found) There is a link on the page you referred to for Linux/*nix installation instructions that is 404. Additionally, there is a link for a mailing list on the page that does not exist.
It looks like development on this tool is dead. Does anyone know any different?
They still sell a version of the "Blue Box". Unfortunately, it contains less parts than the old Blue Box, and has more specialized pieces. I actually found an original 1200pc BB at Toys R Us less than a year ago. I bought it because it is the best value out there for Lego. It has nothing but basic blocks. The new BlueBox has 1000pc I think, and has some non-rectangular pieces. The old set is better if you are building big things because it was only #20, and when it was more common, I saw it for as low as $16.
Absolutely. The quality of Megablocks is really piss-poor when compared to Lego. They have some excellent looking models, but the things won't stay together unless you use glue!
I can see how parents with no experience with Lego might look at the Megablocks and Lego side by side, and question why the Lego were so much more expensive, but after buying one set of the Megablocks, I can definitely say that I'd never do that again.
I think the big mistake Lego made was with the Bionicle and sports sets. Lego is for building models, and expanding your imagination, not for playing mini-basketball and hockey. The basketball sets also brought in something previously unseen to the Lego universe - racial minifigs. From what I understand, prior to the basketball sets being introduced, all minifigs were yellow. They weren't white, black, asian, indian or whatever. They were just yellow. I liked that.
I really like some of th newer larger models, which are probably going to be cut back a bit if the article in question is correct. The Tie Interceptor is a really cool model, but it cost so much that it would be hard to buy the set and just integrate the pieces into the rest of your collection after building it and checking it out.
I guess I'd better shell out the $300 for the Star Destroyer before it is dropped.
Count me in on this. I'll not fly until the brainless morons in control of "security" recognise that pocket knives, sewing kits, scissors, and other similar tools that ordinary people carry with them on a daily basis are allowed on the plane. Screw them. I'll drive or not go at all rather than be subjected to the humiliation that is commonplace at airports.
Making you turn on a laptop (as ha been pointed out several times) is completely idiotic as well. If I were a determined terrorist, I could easily rig my laptop to allow the morons play TuxRacer while booted off a Knoppix CD so they'd overlook the bomb sitting where a harddrive normally would. Since any thinking person can easily demonstrate that their procedures actually provide zero increase in safety, why even bother? Because it fools Joe Sixpack into believing that it makes him safer is not an adequate reason to institute the regime they've set in place.
I happen to own a copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica that was published in 1903. The article in it about telecommunications is particularly interesting in relation to the referenced article. At the time of course, telecom was pretty primative. Each individual phone had its own wire. Thus, if you look at period photos of New York City, you'll see these huge bundles of wires that pretty much obliterate the lower stories of buildings. The bundles of wires were huge and one might say they detracted much from the scenery (such that it was).
In those days, and later years, the process of connecting a call was actually a process of building a single point-to-point wire that connected the two parties, which is where the patch-boards and operators came from.
Several years ago I read a contemporary description of exactly what it was like to make a long-distance call from New York to St. Louis in the mid-20s. The caller would pick up the phone and repeatedly press the cradle that broke the circuit off and on. This would alert the operator that someone wanted to make a call, by flashing a light on her switchboard. (When the reciever was on-hook the light was off, and when it was on-hook, the light would come on.) The caller would tell the operator where to connect to - something like "Saint Louis 6 4324". The first two letters being the abbreviation for the city. Then the caller would hang up, while the operator connected to other operators across the country until the circuit was completely built, and essentially a single wire stretched between the caller and callee, and she had the callee on the line. Then she'd ring back the caller, and they'd start the conversation.
This is basically from memory which has been somewhat corrupted with age, so take it for what it's worth. The description of the wires brought it to mind so I thought I'd share...
and an operator would answer. (You see people repeatedly mashing the cradle of the phone in old movies.D-Squared used the Windows messenger service to pop-up ads as often as every 10 minutes. The ads promoted its product -- software to stop 'these unwanted and illegal pop-up messages forever with the click of a button'
That's the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
Perhaps I don't get out enough.
Sometimes it amazes me what windows users will put up with to stay on the microsoft plantation. Messenger pop-ups ... Web popups ... Spyware ... Gator ... Browsers that you can't trust to accurately represent a URL ... Programs that crash at random (or even regular) intervals...
I'm sure there are lots of other everyday annoyances, since I don't have to deal with them anymore, they just don't come to mind.
I was speaking with a fellow at work today and he was complaing about having to reload his windows box yet again because of stability issues. Why do people continue to just suck it up and deal with this crap? I guess I just don't understand why even people who know about the alternatives and are completely capable of dealing with the change continue to be so willing to submit. My wife is one of those. I've told her flat out that google and her own wits are the only tech support she has anymore. Fortunately for her, she knows enough to be able to figure things out on her own and can navigate DOS better than most, but I just plain refuse to be an enabler with this annoying pile of warm cow patties that is windows.
Even if they operate under the premise that it will not be done today doesn't mean they won't change their minds in the future.
That is one reason I really don't trust those 'ezpass' systems. Those pushing this tech will swear on a stack of bibles that they aren't doing, and have no plans to do anything evil with the information they are capable f collecting. The easy way to find out exactly how truthful about this they are being is to try to buy one anonymously ith no identification with cash. You simply can't do it here in texas from what I understand. Sure, they can get your plates off the cameras they inevitably install, but simply tracking the comings and goings of a tag is much easier.
If there were no nefarious intentions on their part, I'd be able to stop by the local quickie mart, buy one of these things with cash, and simply use it until it ran out. Then I could either recharge it, or get another one. This isn't going to happen, because they want to be able to easily track you wherever you go, just in case you might do something naughty.
I can't believe we allow them to put up cameras all over the place on light poles, stoplights, and the like. I'm abaolutely amazed that there isn't an incredibly high mortality rate on them, because they deserve it.
The term 'slave' may not make a lot of sense in the IDE world, but for some reason your post brings to mind something I thought was pretty funny when I first saw it many years ago.
I was taking a class on Ultrix (DEC's Unix many, many moons ago), and happened across the manpage for NTP as I was trying to sync up a bunch of computers in the lab for my own nefarious purposes. Here's what I recall about the way it was described:
I really wish I still had a copy of that man page it was a pretty interesting read.
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.
The phrase "the people" is used exactly 9 times in the Constitution. In every other case, but the second amendment, the ACLU interprets the phrase to apply to each of us as individuals. Only in the case of the second amendment is this not the case. It seems to be be a rather selective interpretation to me.
In fact, the supreme court has ruled that the phrase "the people" means the same thing in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 9th and 10th amendments.
It is truely unfortunate that the subordinate clause "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state," preceded the actual, enumerated right "of the people to keep and bear arms", as this has led to much revisionism of it's intended meaning. Given that the militia act of 1792(+- 1 year or 2), declares every able-bodied male between 17-45 years of age are militia members, and that they were expected to muster with their own personal firearms, the thought that this amendment was something to protect some collective state right is almost laughable.
By way of further clarification on what was initially intended with the bill of rights, the following text was submitted to the states as a preamble to the 12 origional proposed amendments.
This has been studied, but deemed more expensive than actually trying to build one from scratch due to the massive retrofit it would need.
They need to do two things. 1) Design a new shuttle. 2) Quit trying to hobble private industry from trying to make their own launch vehicles.
I'm still amazed that the things you describe in your post haven't come to pass already. People just have no idea how vastly much more destructive the last few windows could have easily been.
Essentially, all they did was propagate and maybe try a DOS on a MS website. That is nothing compared to what they could have done, like reformat drives, randomly corrupt system files, or insert random profanities into email and similar things.
Eventually, somone is going to propagate something really nasty and destructive. I'll be laughing my ass off, because there have been plenty of warnings!
The article states... The GSM Association admits the Israeli researchers are onto something but say the attack requires the use of complex technology, which few phone phreakers have access to, and would need to be targeted at a specific caller.
I see ... in other words. They only people you have to fear is your government and large companies.
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that governments all across this planet of ours seem to think that the only kind of secrecy that is a good thing is goverment secrecy?
Yeah, 'cause Linux could never be compromised in such a way.
I just love the way apologists try to compare the subversion of a single server compromised by a malicious insider via a local exploit to hundreds of thousands of computers infected by a (still spreading) worm that requires no human intervention whatsoever to aid its spread.
Apple meet orange.
What more do we want? Well for starters, all of the recent worms have been fairly benign in what they do. They attempt to spread, which causes network disruptions, and turn the infected computer into a zombie. The blaster worm also unneccesarily caused systems reboots that alerted the user to infection. If the worm needed the reboot to install some service, it should have just waited until one of the thrice daily reboots that are normal for windows computers. If they'd really wanted to be nasty, the worms could have fdisk'ed the users harddrive after successfully infecting 5 other systems, with a 48 hour timer in case it wasn't able to spread itself.
Windows users have been extremely lucky in that these worms have been relatively benign compared to what they could have done. I hope their luck eventually runs out. I think a serious worm/virus that effectively kills the host is the only thing that will really wake people up to what kind of crap they are running, and the risks they are taking for running windows.
My father-in-law has an old Plymouth(I think that's what it is anyways) that has a pushbutton automatic transmission. It was a neat and innovative idea that utterly failed in the marketplace. Many people are driven by expecations. If things don't work at least somewhat as they think they should, or lke what they are used to, they simply won't change.
I've seen this far too many times over the past few years with many different types of computer users. People are very resistant to change, especially when it concerns something they don't understand. Linux is a much better, more stable, and more flexible OS today, yet there are many people who won't switch, even when they agree with you that it is better, because they don't like change.
I like the sound of that. I would probably use "untrusted" rather than "untrustable" though.
It is called Assasination Politics and was initially put forth by a fellow named Jim Bell. Fedgov didn't much like Mr. Bell after he started talking about this idea for obvious reasons. John Young's excellent site, Cryptome, has a lot of information about AP and exactly what happened to Jim Bell.
Read the above links for more info.
Funny how Windows has the highest government security rating a commercial product can acquire (C2 EAL4) whereas Linux has no such certification at all.
I can't believe I'm responding to this troll, but here goes...
Do you have any idea whatsoever exactly what that certification means? Are you aware that the minute you hook the computer into a network, that certification is null and void? Or that it only applies to a non-networked base install of WinNT 4 (might be 3.5 I can't recall) on an old service pack? Are you aware that if you add Office (any version) or IIS (any version) the certification is no longer valid?
Microsoft spent a bunch of money (to me, not to them) to set up a box with very limited functionality just so people like you would spout off about it like it actually meant something.
I'll second you on TextPad. It rocks. I don't have windows anymore though, so I don't use it anymore. I really did like the "Brief" compatability mode. Until about a year ago, I kept a DOS partition available for hardcore Brief editing. Nothing like using a 10 year old copy of a program to do serious text editing. I've still not found anything to replace the ease with which it worked on columns of text as well as lines.
It is the first book of a fantasy series. I made it all the way through it, (6 books), and is a good story, but amazingly depressing. I know much more about leprosy than I ever wanted to know.
Damn. I never have modpoints when I need them.
The parent post is right on target with his comments as most people will see historical allegory as a bit of cold, dead, history already confined in the dustbins of our collective memories. If more people thought about history and the implications of cause/effect and actions/reactions, we might be able to avoid some past horrors that have visited our little planet.
Historical fiction can be a useful tool in personalizing the past in a way that the traditional who-did-what-to-whom-and-when model is difficult to achieve.
Communism is an evil philosophy that will have no result but death and destruction anywhere it is tried except in limited, completely voluntary settings.
Our shortsightedness is to our ultimate detriment.
Now storing the meta data in a database, which is essentially what WinFS and such are doing, is not as clear a benfit. Personally I can imagine that it would be a very practiacal FS for keeping movies and MP3's on. I don't really see the benefits of running the OS files on that FS though. A lot of unneccesary overhead. (I don't search for files in my OS partition very often.)
Indeed. It seems like what they are claiming as an improvement, (i.e., faster searching for files), does not appear to help what people actually do most of the time. It is similar to claims of "boots much faster!" that you used to hear about new versions of windows. I would think the thing that would be important to people is data integrity and access efficiency. I know my primary concern is "how safe is my data".
I also question the need to include the overhead of a database frontend to the filesystem. Seems like a catastrophe just waiting to happen.
Also, since the DB is always active, what issues do you have with backups? I'd be concerned about backup and restoral issues with this type of filesystem. I haven't seen that addressed at all.
While the words 'file sharing' probably struck a bit of fear and loathing in the hearts of the weak-kneed, I think it was the term 'encryption' that caused the thing to be pulled. THere are still some major forces out there that would like to put the crypto genie back in the bottle. From the brief blurbs that I've read about 'waste', it would appear that this software would allow for small groups of people to securely and routinely communicate and distribute files amongst the group in a way not easily monitored by The Powers That Be.
Go ahread, call me a tin-foiler. The facts are, there are some pretty powerful folx who hate crypto used by the peasants. I'm not the one who is paranoid here.