The security field is very time-dependant. One hour could mean having the police called thinking someone is trying to break in or having your premise completely unsecured.
As I happen to have written the time zone handling code for the most widely used central station automation software; and as it's already written to handle international cases smoothly (many countries don't decide which date they'll switch to DST until a couple weeks beforehand), changing the date that the big 4 U.S. time zones enter and exit DST is as easy as changing a database field from "THE FIRST SUNDAY IN APRIL (0200)" to "THE LAST SUNDAY IN APRIL (0200)"; and just like magic, we'll still generate all your Late To Close signals and Opened Out Of Schedule signals just fine.
They did not include a firewire cable. There is still a firewire connector. This was a cost savings move and nothing more. And it makes the front page of/. Why do I come here anymore?
Hey, at least it's not another Broadcast Flag article.
I observe and reverse-engineer an over-the-wire file transfer protocol between two computers owned by my friends. Now, tell me: How is any EULA violated? I never agreed to it in the first place, so I can't be violating it.
Probably for the exact same reason you can't legally use a DirecTV decoder; even though you may have never agreed to their terms of service, and even though their signal is being broadcast onto your property.
No, the fact that you'll get yourself in a heapload of trouble by observing something that was presented to you may not seem to be "common sense", but those are the breaks of living in this society. If you don't like it, don't post about it on Slashdot; go buy some Senators and Congressmen.
Question: has google been approached with DMCA takedown notices before and complied?
Yes. Google removed xenu.net from their search results for certain keywords after a DMCA takedown notice filed by the Church of Scientology. Google, however, also put a prominent notice on those search results that they'd been modified due to a DMCA action, and provided links to the legal documents, which just so happened to list all the sites that Scientology wanted removed from the results.
So while it was a pyrrhic victory for Scientology, Google did comply fully with the letter of the law.
Can't they just "lock down IE to their heart's content" via Group Policy? Or perhaps an outbound proxy that only allows access to the specified pages when the user agent is IE's?
Citrix seems like a little overkill for this problem.
Re:Cool FF trick - roll your own search engine
on
Firefox News Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's quite easy for companies to roll their own Firefox interface to existing search engines for use by employees and customers. Can your Internet Explorer do that?
And you can push it out via Group Policy too, so it's even easier to roll it out across a company than it is to do so for Firefox, which doesn't integrate with any enterprise-level network configuration tools.
That's not to piss on Firefox, but it goes to show that some of their "innovative features" have been in IE for quite some time.
This is what annoys me. CONCEDING DOES NOT MAKE BUSH THE WINNER. He can concede and the election can still go the other way. It doesn't remove him from the race.
But it does remove the possibility of contentions over results, lawsuits, recounts and hanging chads. So, yes, Kerry conceding is important; even if by some miracle Ohio comes out as a Kerry win and Kerry ends up in the White House.
Yes, everything's dandy, until you happen to be using two programs that don't export and import data in compatible formats.
In which case, you'd probably use one of their generic tools to remap attributes, or you could always whip up a quick.NET class and insert it into the pipeline to do more advanced translation.
Certainly in some cases a plain text pipe is more convenient, but being able to pass structured objects around in a pipeline has the capability to deliver even more; and, especially with regard to media like images, audio, etc., with a more efficient reference-passing mechanism that bypasses excessive copying around in memory, and excessive parse/deparse cycles.
I don't know, i get a little jumpy when i see companies (that i like, if that's possible) diversifying too much instead of focusing on what they do best. Usually it's a sign of bad things coming.
I jumped when they removed the browser share chart from the Zeitgeist. If that's not a clear sign they're planning on doing something in that area, I don't know what is.
That's what I've been saying for months. I even got chided by some big-name Mozilla devs here on Slashdot for saying that the reason Microsoft's XAML will trounce all over XUL is because you can bet your ass XAML and all supporting infrastructure will be fully documented, because if you've ever seen MSDN, you know its staggeringly comprehensive. "Go to XULPlanet," I was told, "everything is documented there."
Truth be told, XULPlanet only really documents maybe half the API. Sure, the interface definitions are there for the rest, but there's no description for most of it beyond the method names; the sample code coverage is virtually nil; and if you flip a coin and it comes up tails, XULPlanet.com will be down when you try to visit it and you need to hope that the incomplete mirror at mozdev has the page you want.
After they ship Firefox 1.0, the best thing the Mozilla team could possibly do is to shift their resources to documenting. After documenting, finish up the XRE (come on, how many years is it overdue now?), then switch to evangelizing the platform a little more -- but not until the developer support doc is in place, and not until it can be deployed standalone.
Anyway Perl 6's VM, Parrot, is a more important accomplishment than Perl 6, the language.
I used to follow Parrot's development closely, with great interest. Then I found Mono. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they designed a kickass VM; and there's a fully functional 1.0-level open source version of it available today. And as the author of IronPython adequately demonstrated, it works just fine for dynamic scripting languages.
In my opinion as a one-time Perl6/Parrot devotee, it's taken too long. By the time it ships, it'll be irrelevant. And, like it or not, Parrot's ultimate fate will likely be tied to Perl6, even though they're seperate projects; and Perl as a language is on a decline. The places where it used to be the only choice are rapidly being eroded by other, arguably better choices. Python for system administration tasks, and PHP (yeech, I know, but most of the time you only need the Tonka truck of languages) for web applications. Perl still reigns supreme for reporting, but honestly --- how often do you do that?
That's not even getting into the fact that Parrot seems to be being built around academic ivory-tower design concepts, like continuations, that seem spiffy-keen at first glance, but probably won't see that much usage in reality. (Perl6 suffers the same problem with the extreme focus on neato features with limited practical usefulness, like superpositions.)
Why should I use Parrot instead of Mono? Why should I use Perl6 instead of Python/PHP?
Am I missing something or is the "commercial free" line complete BS?
XM is only commercial free on its music channels. All of the other channels have varying levels of commercials, depending on their source. Their comedy channels, which are mostly pre-recorded bits, have relatively few commercials; while the stations where they rebroadcast talk radio have about the average number of commercials (which makes sense, since they are just rebroadcasting a standard radio stream, and the hosts still need to take regular breathers regardless of the carrier).
The thing that's most annoying about the spot sets on XM's non-music channels is the fact that advertisers seem to be overlooking XM, so you get the same six commercials and XM promos, every break.
Just please don't let them change it to Firemoth or Thundercat!
Well, after mozilla.org spent all that time and money investigating potential names for their project... since they decided that Firefox was the most freely available name; why wouldn't OpenOffice.org rename itself to Firefox too?
After all, if it was good enough for them...
Soon, all Open Source projects will be called Firefox.
RealPlayer 10 on Windows too, has transformed into something I no longer need to banish from my system.
Real is trying their hardest to reinvent themselves, and unlike some other posters here who'll obviously never give them a second chance, I applaud them for it. We're all better off with a well-behaved company than one that relies on underhanded tricks, and we should encourage the former to keep it up, and encourage the latter to become to former.
Re:X in Windows?
on
The Power of X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What I'd really like to see is some support for X type connections in the next version of windows. I don't mean basing all of windows on X11 but perhaps allow remote windows sessions that are native. Not based on screen redraws like VNC.
RDP is much closer in implementation and functionality to X than it is to VNC; in that it doesn't send updates to the screen as bitmaps -- it sends font information, strings, window information, and bitmap information for actual UI bitmap objects (i.e., not everything). In fact, it's so tied in with the Windows UI at the lowest levels that for Microsoft to switch to X11 would probably be a step backwards.
it should be a criminal offense to threaten someone over violation of or otherwise claiming to have a copyright or patent that you don't actually have rights to.
You could probably make a strong barratry case over it.
It's not the first time I've seen that rebuttal, either. And it's still missing the point. The CLR is the most interesting part of the platform from an intellectual property perspective. The rest of the framework just provides well known, well understood, and well IP-vetted concepts.
And it's still completely missing the point that Microsoft can't break Mono without breaking applications built on top of.NET, which you can put money on as something they're not going to do.
Her PC was in such bad shape, it required 10 1/2 hours of surgery to restore it to working condition
I think the problem here is that the took the computer into surgery, rather than having a technician look at it. Come on now, just because a doctor can fix a broken femur, doesn't mean they can fix a broken registry! I don't even want to think about having to use a speculum to look inside a data file.
Imagine 3000 people all trying to download this 250mb patch (hell, it will proably be around 300mb when it is released) at once... Networking will give a snail a run for it's money.
You have 3000 workstations and you're not running SUS? When's the last time your administrator came into work?
Slashdot Mirror
The security field is very time-dependant. One hour could mean having the police called thinking someone is trying to break in or having your premise completely unsecured.
As I happen to have written the time zone handling code for the most widely used central station automation software; and as it's already written to handle international cases smoothly (many countries don't decide which date they'll switch to DST until a couple weeks beforehand), changing the date that the big 4 U.S. time zones enter and exit DST is as easy as changing a database field from "THE FIRST SUNDAY IN APRIL (0200)" to "THE LAST SUNDAY IN APRIL (0200)"; and just like magic, we'll still generate all your Late To Close signals and Opened Out Of Schedule signals just fine.
They did not include a firewire cable. There is still a firewire connector. This was a cost savings move and nothing more. And it makes the front page of /. Why do I come here anymore?
Hey, at least it's not another Broadcast Flag article.
I observe and reverse-engineer an over-the-wire file transfer protocol between two computers owned by my friends. Now, tell me: How is any EULA violated? I never agreed to it in the first place, so I can't be violating it.
Probably for the exact same reason you can't legally use a DirecTV decoder; even though you may have never agreed to their terms of service, and even though their signal is being broadcast onto your property.
No, the fact that you'll get yourself in a heapload of trouble by observing something that was presented to you may not seem to be "common sense", but those are the breaks of living in this society. If you don't like it, don't post about it on Slashdot; go buy some Senators and Congressmen.
Question: has google been approached with DMCA takedown notices before and complied?
Yes. Google removed xenu.net from their search results for certain keywords after a DMCA takedown notice filed by the Church of Scientology. Google, however, also put a prominent notice on those search results that they'd been modified due to a DMCA action, and provided links to the legal documents, which just so happened to list all the sites that Scientology wanted removed from the results.
So while it was a pyrrhic victory for Scientology, Google did comply fully with the letter of the law.
Can't they just "lock down IE to their heart's content" via Group Policy? Or perhaps an outbound proxy that only allows access to the specified pages when the user agent is IE's?
Citrix seems like a little overkill for this problem.
It's quite easy for companies to roll their own Firefox interface to existing search engines for use by employees and customers. Can your Internet Explorer do that?
As a matter of fact, it can. IE's Search bar is completely overridable. Google's got a version for it even.
And you can push it out via Group Policy too, so it's even easier to roll it out across a company than it is to do so for Firefox, which doesn't integrate with any enterprise-level network configuration tools.
That's not to piss on Firefox, but it goes to show that some of their "innovative features" have been in IE for quite some time.
This is what annoys me. CONCEDING DOES NOT MAKE BUSH THE WINNER. He can concede and the election can still go the other way. It doesn't remove him from the race.
But it does remove the possibility of contentions over results, lawsuits, recounts and hanging chads. So, yes, Kerry conceding is important; even if by some miracle Ohio comes out as a Kerry win and Kerry ends up in the White House.
I don't believe Bush or Cheney were under oath when they went before the 9/11 commission.
Yeah, the Star Wars franchise is really suffering due to piracy.
Everybody knows its because GREEDO DIDN'T SHOOT FIRST .
Yes, everything's dandy, until you happen to be using two programs that don't export and import data in compatible formats.
.NET class and insert it into the pipeline to do more advanced translation.
In which case, you'd probably use one of their generic tools to remap attributes, or you could always whip up a quick
Certainly in some cases a plain text pipe is more convenient, but being able to pass structured objects around in a pipeline has the capability to deliver even more; and, especially with regard to media like images, audio, etc., with a more efficient reference-passing mechanism that bypasses excessive copying around in memory, and excessive parse/deparse cycles.
I don't know, i get a little jumpy when i see companies (that i like, if that's possible) diversifying too much instead of focusing on what they do best. Usually it's a sign of bad things coming.
I jumped when they removed the browser share chart from the Zeitgeist. If that's not a clear sign they're planning on doing something in that area, I don't know what is.
There's no documentation.
That's what I've been saying for months. I even got chided by some big-name Mozilla devs here on Slashdot for saying that the reason Microsoft's XAML will trounce all over XUL is because you can bet your ass XAML and all supporting infrastructure will be fully documented, because if you've ever seen MSDN, you know its staggeringly comprehensive. "Go to XULPlanet," I was told, "everything is documented there."
Truth be told, XULPlanet only really documents maybe half the API. Sure, the interface definitions are there for the rest, but there's no description for most of it beyond the method names; the sample code coverage is virtually nil; and if you flip a coin and it comes up tails, XULPlanet.com will be down when you try to visit it and you need to hope that the incomplete mirror at mozdev has the page you want.
After they ship Firefox 1.0, the best thing the Mozilla team could possibly do is to shift their resources to documenting. After documenting, finish up the XRE (come on, how many years is it overdue now?), then switch to evangelizing the platform a little more -- but not until the developer support doc is in place, and not until it can be deployed standalone.
Anyway Perl 6's VM, Parrot, is a more important accomplishment than Perl 6, the language.
I used to follow Parrot's development closely, with great interest. Then I found Mono. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they designed a kickass VM; and there's a fully functional 1.0-level open source version of it available today. And as the author of IronPython adequately demonstrated, it works just fine for dynamic scripting languages.
In my opinion as a one-time Perl6/Parrot devotee, it's taken too long. By the time it ships, it'll be irrelevant. And, like it or not, Parrot's ultimate fate will likely be tied to Perl6, even though they're seperate projects; and Perl as a language is on a decline. The places where it used to be the only choice are rapidly being eroded by other, arguably better choices. Python for system administration tasks, and PHP (yeech, I know, but most of the time you only need the Tonka truck of languages) for web applications. Perl still reigns supreme for reporting, but honestly --- how often do you do that?
That's not even getting into the fact that Parrot seems to be being built around academic ivory-tower design concepts, like continuations, that seem spiffy-keen at first glance, but probably won't see that much usage in reality. (Perl6 suffers the same problem with the extreme focus on neato features with limited practical usefulness, like superpositions.)
Why should I use Parrot instead of Mono? Why should I use Perl6 instead of Python/PHP?
Am I missing something or is the "commercial free" line complete BS?
XM is only commercial free on its music channels. All of the other channels have varying levels of commercials, depending on their source. Their comedy channels, which are mostly pre-recorded bits, have relatively few commercials; while the stations where they rebroadcast talk radio have about the average number of commercials (which makes sense, since they are just rebroadcasting a standard radio stream, and the hosts still need to take regular breathers regardless of the carrier).
The thing that's most annoying about the spot sets on XM's non-music channels is the fact that advertisers seem to be overlooking XM, so you get the same six commercials and XM promos, every break.
Just please don't let them change it to Firemoth or Thundercat!
Well, after mozilla.org spent all that time and money investigating potential names for their project... since they decided that Firefox was the most freely available name; why wouldn't OpenOffice.org rename itself to Firefox too?
After all, if it was good enough for them...
Soon, all Open Source projects will be called Firefox.
Just goes to show you - all you need to do to defeat Microsoft is to release something better. And release it for free.
And when Microsoft did the same thing to Netscape, everyone complained.
(Yes yes, I know.. monopoly schonopoly. Doesn't change the fact that IE 4 was an infinitely better browser compared to NS 4.)
RealPlayer 10 on Windows too, has transformed into something I no longer need to banish from my system.
Real is trying their hardest to reinvent themselves, and unlike some other posters here who'll obviously never give them a second chance, I applaud them for it. We're all better off with a well-behaved company than one that relies on underhanded tricks, and we should encourage the former to keep it up, and encourage the latter to become to former.
You can block IE using Group Policy.
What I'd really like to see is some support for X type connections in the next version of windows. I don't mean basing all of windows on X11 but perhaps allow remote windows sessions that are native. Not based on screen redraws like VNC.
RDP is much closer in implementation and functionality to X than it is to VNC; in that it doesn't send updates to the screen as bitmaps -- it sends font information, strings, window information, and bitmap information for actual UI bitmap objects (i.e., not everything). In fact, it's so tied in with the Windows UI at the lowest levels that for Microsoft to switch to X11 would probably be a step backwards.
it should be a criminal offense to threaten someone over violation of or otherwise claiming to have a copyright or patent that you don't actually have rights to.
You could probably make a strong barratry case over it.
Though I would pay attention if they open sourced .net.
Really? Because they did.
It's not the first time I've seen that rebuttal, either. And it's still missing the point. The CLR is the most interesting part of the platform from an intellectual property perspective. The rest of the framework just provides well known, well understood, and well IP-vetted concepts.
.NET, which you can put money on as something they're not going to do.
And it's still completely missing the point that Microsoft can't break Mono without breaking applications built on top of
Her PC was in such bad shape, it required 10 1/2 hours of surgery to restore it to working condition
I think the problem here is that the took the computer into surgery, rather than having a technician look at it. Come on now, just because a doctor can fix a broken femur, doesn't mean they can fix a broken registry! I don't even want to think about having to use a speculum to look inside a data file.
Why must the US stick to imperial units? The proper terminology is a metric fuckton.
Actually it's kiloshag.
Imagine 3000 people all trying to download this 250mb patch (hell, it will proably be around 300mb when it is released) at once... Networking will give a snail a run for it's money.
You have 3000 workstations and you're not running SUS? When's the last time your administrator came into work?