> Just a quick point -- a lot of times it's not > that a windows admin doesn't want to learn > about the problem, it's that the damned server > IS DOWN and windows can be reinstalled and the > server can be up and running in 2 hours, as > opposed to dicking around with it for a day > trying to figure out what went wrong.
Sorry, that's a stupid attitude. If a server is a MUST STAY UP machine you would have tapes to restore. Reinstalling is for the clueless because nobody will remember every tweak/patch/etc they did the first time they built the server. And of course my Linux boxes they don't go down unless the hardware does so reinstalling would be kinda useless as a repair method anyway. And I like the fact that should a critical server croak I can yank (from the tapes if needed) the software over to a different box without worrying overly much if the hardware is identical because kudzu will work it all out instead of accuse me of being a pirate.
And again, apt !=.deb. Apt works just as well with rpm and rpm dates back to RedHat 3x (RH2 for very liberal interpretations of what RPM is) so don't start an age war.
If InstallShield is the answer it was a dumb question. It doesn't really solve DLL Hell, can't run non interactive and generally sucks. And it is a PITA to build packages with.
I'm not defending the status quo, I think having something like apt become standard issue for rpm based distros would be a good thing.
My idea of a GOOD installer would be a simple Tcl/Tk (or for the Python Bigots out there, Python/Tk would be just as nice, save your napalm) script that threw up a welcome splash, checked for an existing install, etc but basically did an apt command to do the actual install would be just hoopy. Vendors should include the RPMs they depend on, from several popular distros, if there is a chance of a problem, just to avoid the user having to swap in a handful of distro CDs looking for packages. But there is NO need for a graphical package manager like Install Shield and DON'T allow the user to pick where to install to! And if you aren't packing the CD full of bundleware/spyware you usually don't even need to allow a choice of what to install. (But there are legit exceptions to that statement.)
For 95% of cases install should be a matter of "Do you want to install Foo?" Ok, wait a minute..... done. Enjoy Foo!
Here's my demented ravings, take em for whatever use you find them. When pondering why I'd want a modded X-Box here is one idea I keep having.
Grab an X-Box, screw that puny 8G drive and stick in something more manly. Then get that neato USB Tuner+MPEG encoder box from Hauppauge and twiddle the connectors to get em together. Add PVR software already floating around on the net after modding it a bit to talk to the USB dohickie instead of a BT-9xx device. Can you say fully open Convergence appliance? And for under $750 you get a nice professionally designed case, a Big Ass(tm) HD and all the trimmings.
And unlike the PS2 we will hopefully be able to get at the DVD drive so we can play DVD/DIVX/VCD/SVCD/MP3/etc. Word is no CD-R but CD-RW is OK. At current blank media prices that probably isn't a deal breaker. It has a 10/100 port so it can hook up to an inhouse LAN, mutant USB for easy hookup of external storage, and if you check to make sure the PVR doesn't plan to record anything for the next couple of hours you can probably still find a way to get it to play Halo. (Leave the first 8GB of the drive as an image of the original and lock the new drive with the same password?)
I can see somebody making a nice chunk of change selling a prefab PVR conversion kit.
up2date makes perfect sense when viewed in light of RedHat's business model. Whether allowing important standards to be defined to support a single company's business model is a good thing is a question for another day.
After instantly removing up2date and all it's associated cruft after an install/upgrade for a couple of years I finally left it on my new laptop and signed up for RHN just to give it a chance. It does work slicker than owl snot. Never a worry about finding a mirror, no dependencies, etc. Not sure if the time savings justifies the fee, guess I'll know next year when resub time comes if I actually give up the CC # again.;)
In the end, apt-get is a fine thing for the Debian folks because they are few in number. I just don't think there is enough free bandwidth to host package repositories for the rpm using hordes. I especially have those sorts of thoughts when a Debian user starts talking about installing or doing a major upgrade directly from the mirrors. Can you imagine the meltdown that would happen if, when RH8 drops if every RH user tried to upgrade directly off of the mirrors? The slashdot effect would be as nothing compared!
Yes it is a seperate process on OSX, but don't expect replacements anytime soon if Apple has any say in it.
On the whole, OSX does kinda toss old views of the Mac into the trash. I have been playing around with some iMacs running OSX recently and it's almost but not quite familiar territory. Neither fish nor foul if you take my meaning. But gimme three buttons on a TiBook and I'm there when my Thinkpad's warranty runs out.
RPM is just fine for a packaging standard. It does EVERYTHING a packaging system needs to do and none of the bogus crap that consumer friendly monsters like InstallShield do. Deb may very well have a equal featureset but nobody in the commercial world uses it because it is only used on Debian, a non-commercial distro. Since the big need for the LSB is for commercial software packagers.... see the problem? As for the BSD Ports system, it has ZERO to offer in this situation despite being a wonderful system. The BSD ports setup pretty much requires source distribution and the target audience for LSB isn't interested in that.
The apt groupies can't get it into their pointed heads that apt can work just fine with rpms. Apt and.deb are entirely seperate issues. Yes rpm needs something like apt to come into popular usage. (ya know, maybe apt would be just the ticket! Now if all of the apt groupies would promote it's use with rpm instead of constantly saying ya gotta go to Debian to get the wonders of apt. Ya, I'm talking about you Taco.)
Not that I would ever be insane enough to put apt in a cron job like the typical Debian user, but it does do wonders to solve rpm dependency hell situations.
I don't see seven layers of API. That's just FUD you are spouting from either the Windows or Berlin camp.
A typical GNOME app makes calls into the GNOME libraries, which are linked at the hip to GTK. GTK directly talks the lowest wirelevel X protocol which gets stuff on the framebuffer.
A KDE app talks to the KDE libraries which are built on Qt. Qt talks Xlib (QT experts feel free to call me an idiot and correct me) which, like GTK, talks directly to the X server.
And if you want to argue that X imposes too much overhead, that is why we have things like the shared memory extension and Xrender.
But NO, window managers must remain ordinary applications, otherwise X turns into something brain damaged like Windows or a Mac.
Nah, because higher education gets dumbed down to match what is coming out of the high schools. Your younger brother will do just fine in college. Won't actually LEARN as much as you did, but who cares about that?
The whole point of modern education these days seems to be keeping people out of the labor force for as many years as possible and brainwashing them with political correctness.
Read the story before engaging in your knee jerk anti-americanism. They do remind the reader of the US's ill advised attempt to bag us a Russian programmer.
All told, you still have better odds of speaking your mind without ending up in jail here in the US than in most of the so called enlightened european countries. Not sure how much longer that will remain true with W and the Dems in lockstep agreement that the Constituition needs to be destroyed in order to preserve it....
Not anymore. They tossed those rules and replaced them with rules that say they can decide to sell the IP rights to a private company who CAN patent/copyright.
I know I shouldn't kick cripples, but here is some free investment advice re: msft.
It is currently trading at $51.11 a share with a PE ratio of 44.8, which is insanely high, indicating downward pressure. That $51.11 price is only $3.61 off of it's 52 week low of $47.50 and it has flopped around in the 50-70 range for the last two years. It started the year in the 70's so it has DROPPED YTD, not risen 18% as you stated. It has fallen from a high of about $120 in late '99 so many longer term investors probably aren't exactly happy and employees with options certainly aren't happy campers. The only good news is that it IS up from where it started on the 5yr chart so in this bear market that is at least something. I certainly know I'd rather have had MSFT instead of the shares of WorldCom I bought in '00.;)
No. This is way off topic, but just so nobody else reads this and gets their hopes up.
The Amateur Vanity fee you see listed is for a Anateur Radio operator to trade in the random generated callsign for a callsign of their choice.
Since all music is verboten in the Amateur Radio Service it has no bearing on this thread. A Ham can't even sing a public domain song into the microphone by a strict reading of the regs. Plus there are almost no conditions (exception for emergencies involving risk to life or property) where an Amateur station can retransmit the signals of any other service, not can an Amateur knowingly transmit a signal with the intent that it be retransmitted by another service. (There are a couple of exceptions, if you are a Ham you should know them but they don't matter in this context.)
Don't fall for the fallacy that EULAs mean a damn thing. They don't unless you live in a state that signed onto UCITA. They can print any silly text they want to but that does not make it a binding contract.
A contract needs several conditions. It needs to be SIGNED. It must offer a tangible benefit to BOTH parties. If I buy an X-Box at WalMart or a game, I have BOUGHT a physical product. Both contain copyrighted material, my use of which is governed by U.S. Copyright law (since I live in the US) but in no way am I bound by any sort of EULA.
The only computer product which I have owned which might have been governed by a EULA was my first Tandy. Before purchasing it I was required to read and sign a contract on five part carbon paper. That would have been a legally binding contract had I not been sixteen years old at the time.:)
Think it through people. Independent game devs are reported to be paying $10 per shipped game in royalties for games developed with the the official XDK. There is plenty of settled case law saying you CAN release a title without paying up and that you can break any obstacles the console vendor throws up, including adding the trademarked Nintindo logo if it is required to get the machine to execute your code. Since it IS settled case law I can think of a few game shops who might be tempted to add that $10 to their bottom line instead of Microsoft. A $200K inventment goes into the black when unit #20,000 of the first title goes out the door, which will be in the initial production run.
Wanna bet BioWare had a secret reason for doing a Linux port of Neverwinter Nights? Or if not them there are a dozen or so equally good suspects. It probably isn't a huge shop that does a lot of console biz though. Screwing M$ out of their royalties would scare Sony & Nintendo that they might be next so there is enough risk that I'd doubt it is somebody on the scale of EA and such. The big shops need the good relationship with the hardware vendors as new hardware comes down the pipe.
Don't fall for the BS. When you buy an X-Box you have BOUGHT one. When you buy HALO you also BOUGHT a copy of Halo, you did NOT license it. If there isn't a signed contract it is a SALE.
This of course does not mean you can do anything you please with that copy of Halo. Your use is governed by the copyright laws in your location. But the publisher cannot impose any additional terms and conditions on your use of the copy so long as you don't expect them to PROVIDE anything above and beyond supplying you with a working copy. I.E. support, upgrades, etc.
A shrinkwrap/clickwrap EULA is all but worthless, regardless of what one judge on the loony coast of the USA said. If I buy it in WalMart it is a SALE. Back when Tandy made you sign a five part form to purchase anything in the computer dept, that was a LICENSE.
When you buy a game at Best Buy you are the owner of a copy of an item that is SOLD, not LICENSED therefore you are regulated by the copyright laws of your country and nothing else.
Ok, why not give them a listen and see if they play good stuff. Both claim they will stream their channels. However both of them are unavailable without Windows so screw em.
> It is curious that he refers to the UN as an > "infamously corrupt and self-serving collection > of dictatorships"; the last time I checked, the > United States and the rest of the Western > democracies were members of the UN as well.
Yes, the US is a member, along with the other semi free countries. And hopelessly outnumbered by barbarian children from the third world who have equal voting rights. If you think Somolia == Canada you are part of the problem demonstrated by the UN. And no I don't have a ready suggestion for a more realistic distribution of votes for the UN. Basically it is just a silly, but very dangerous, idea that needs to be eliminated.
Maybe in another 50-100 years the various regions will have equalized enough to consider the idea afresh. Until then regional organization will serve as international forums to hammer out needful treaties and such. NATO and OAS being the ones of interest for the US. Europe is rapidly collapsing into a single nationstate and will have completed that transition by the end of the 50-100 years I proposed. China will be in the same league or bigger by then. Assuming merger mania continues in the other parts of the world we would be left with at most a dozen mega states of roughly equal stature to form a new world over government that would have a better chance of success. Especially if republican notions happened to be in vogue at the time. Power divided and limited hozontally and vertically over so many layers and cultures would be kept in check for a bit while it absorbed all power to the top.
By then, with luck, we would have spread to the nearby bodies and those peoples would be ready to seceed and start their own governments free from the baggage from here on Earth. The cycle would begin again. Small nation states would form, eventually band together/be conquered, etc.
Because there really are two sorts of people. Those who can make it on their own and want only to be left alone to do it, and those sheep who crave a shepherd. The promise of unexplored territory is that it gives the first sort a place to go where there aren't yet any sheep needing to be protected from themselves.
I'm the sysadmin for a library deep in the buckle of the bible belt. We will be returning to the rules in effect prior to CIPA.
Kids can't access the net without showing their library card. With that we lookup what their PARENTS selected when they authorized them to have net access. Our records will show one of the following choices:
1. No Access
2. Only with a parent present
3. Filtered Access
4. Unfiltered access
Then it depends where they access. ANYONE, child or adult, who accesses from an exposed monitor will have web access filtered. We have 14 workstations with recessed displays in our main branch and one at each rural branch.
Filtered users also have IRC & telnet restricted, unfiltered users have access to text services even on the exposed stations.
We have used variations of this policy of parental control since 1995 and even in this VERY conservative community have had zero complaints. Some parents might want to impose their rules on others, but seem to know they wouldn't get very far with it.
> "Ready to run in Type II or III PCMCIA > CardBus-equipped notebook PCs running Windows 98, > Millennium, 2000, and XP..."
No, the PDF spec sheet and the PDF users manual clearly state that 98SE (Note that 98 & 98SE are different) ME and XP are supported. 2000 is also mentioned in some places, but NT and 98 are not. I did RTFM before lighting up my flamethrower.
You should be nice when dealing with reputable people. That "Virtually All" line wasn't marketing spin, it was an outright lie. Only when we have the self confidence as consumers and citizens to start calling companies and politicians out when they 'pull a Clinton' like that do we have a chance to deal with them as equals in a free market/society.
They showed zero respect for our intelligence so why should we respect them? Respect is NOT a right.
Maybe you like holding the ankles and swallowing aything a company puts on glossy paper but I sure don't. Linux has only marginal relevance in this case. When I read "Virtually All" I expect to see more than three entries on the list. Obvious omissions are PowerMac (Powerbooks have Cardbus slots you know, and OS X certainly qualifies as a Network Operating System) Netware, Linux, *BSD and SCO.
And yes, there ARE times when running any/all of those in a wireless environment is useful. Think portable training lab for a second. Think portable data gathering.
Ok, I just looked at the products in the subject line and have a question. Since when did "Compatible with Virtually All Major Network Operating Systems" get redefined to mean "Currently shipping versions of Windows?" You don't even support Win95, Win98 or WinNT. 98 & NT are officially still supported by Microsoft and certainly qualify as Network Operating Systems so your marketing department is officially full of BS. Trust is a valuable commodity to piss away on such an obvious and senseless lie.
I'm a current owner of a BEFW11S4 so I was sorta interested, but the only card the new access point talks to has no Linux drivers or tech specs posted to allow the creation of a driver. That kinda makes it useless to me. Come to think of it, there wasn't much in the way of technical details period. No details on what the actual native speed (data compression is cheating since most of my traffic is encrypted, etc.) of the card is, what ranges are usable at each datarate, etc.
Modern law in the Western World is based on the notion that The Law, The Truth and Justice are seperate and unrelated concepts, with Truth and Justice being outside the scope of the courts. And if you believe that anything sensible can come from such an insane view you are part of the problem.
To quote Don Henley quoting the bard, "Old Billy was right. Let's kill all the lawyers, let's kill 'em tonight."
Really, at this point it is the only way out. Until we are ready to kill every lawyer, judge and congressman, raze the law schools, burn all of the lawbooks and just start the hell over, reformulating a new code of laws from scratch, we are going to remain screwed. Every lawyer now practicing is hopelessly tainted by notions incompatible with civilization.
If we are too enlightened to kill em all we can at least brand a big L on their forehead which would prohibit them from holding office, voting or working within 100 yards of a law office, courthouse, bar where people in the new legal profession hang out, educational institution or anywhere else their perverted ideas might resurface or try to infect the next generation.
And before you mod this as flamebait, lets hear YOUR ideas to fix the current mess we are in with out 'legal system.'
Doesn't matter a damn how 'good' a Windows based firewall is. By the nature of the beast they depend on Windows to allow them to see all network traffic. They can do that by essentially running as 'root'. Of course since almost ALL windows software runs with the same elevated privledges all they need to do is attack the firewall.
See the current measures/countermeasures going on with AdAware for a preview of where things will go when there is actual $MONEY$ to be made writing malware as opposed to what pimply 15 year old script kiddies have been doing the last twenty years. The spyware authors have the exact same system level access as your firewall and equal knowledge of how the system works so how the hell can you trust it unless you also trust ALL other software running in ring0?
And remember that M$ itself will eventually be 'leveraging the platform' for revenue gains as sales continue to decline in a saturating market. Do you trust your firewall to be able to protect you against the underlying OS (or their 'select' partners) spying on you?
I define an effective firewall as a trusted system running only a well known set of trusted software under the administration of trusted personel. No program running on an untrusted computer with an insecure and untrusted OS, running an unknown and almost unknowable quantity of suspect programs with elevated privledges can possibly be called a 'firewall'. Any company marketing such a product without some extreme disclaimers is engaged in the sale of "Snake Oil" and is inherently untrustworthy. Period, end of story.
Slashdot Mirror
> Just a quick point -- a lot of times it's not
> that a windows admin doesn't want to learn
> about the problem, it's that the damned server
> IS DOWN and windows can be reinstalled and the
> server can be up and running in 2 hours, as
> opposed to dicking around with it for a day
> trying to figure out what went wrong.
Sorry, that's a stupid attitude. If a server is a MUST STAY UP machine you would have tapes to restore. Reinstalling is for the clueless because nobody will remember every tweak/patch/etc they did the first time they built the server. And of course my Linux boxes they don't go down unless the hardware does so reinstalling would be kinda useless as a repair method anyway. And I like the fact that should a critical server croak I can yank (from the tapes if needed) the software over to a different box without worrying overly much if the hardware is identical because kudzu will work it all out instead of accuse me of being a pirate.
And again, apt != .deb. Apt works just as well with rpm and rpm dates back to RedHat 3x (RH2 for very liberal interpretations of what RPM is) so don't start an age war.
If InstallShield is the answer it was a dumb question. It doesn't really solve DLL Hell, can't run non interactive and generally sucks. And it is a PITA to build packages with.
I'm not defending the status quo, I think having something like apt become standard issue for rpm based distros would be a good thing.
My idea of a GOOD installer would be a simple Tcl/Tk (or for the Python Bigots out there, Python/Tk would be just as nice, save your napalm) script that threw up a welcome splash, checked for an existing install, etc but basically did an apt command to do the actual install would be just hoopy. Vendors should include the RPMs they depend on, from several popular distros, if there is a chance of a problem, just to avoid the user having to swap in a handful of distro CDs looking for packages. But there is NO need for a graphical package manager like Install Shield and DON'T allow the user to pick where to install to! And if you aren't packing the CD full of bundleware/spyware you usually don't even need to allow a choice of what to install. (But there are legit exceptions to that statement.)
For 95% of cases install should be a matter of "Do you want to install Foo?" Ok, wait a minute..... done. Enjoy Foo!
Here's my demented ravings, take em for whatever use you find them. When pondering why I'd want a modded X-Box here is one idea I keep having.
Grab an X-Box, screw that puny 8G drive and stick in something more manly. Then get that neato USB Tuner+MPEG encoder box from Hauppauge and twiddle the connectors to get em together. Add PVR software already floating around on the net after modding it a bit to talk to the USB dohickie instead of a BT-9xx device. Can you say fully open Convergence appliance? And for under $750 you get a nice professionally designed case, a Big Ass(tm) HD and all the trimmings.
And unlike the PS2 we will hopefully be able to get at the DVD drive so we can play DVD/DIVX/VCD/SVCD/MP3/etc. Word is no CD-R but CD-RW is OK. At current blank media prices that probably isn't a deal breaker. It has a 10/100 port so it can hook up to an inhouse LAN, mutant USB for easy hookup of external storage, and if you check to make sure the PVR doesn't plan to record anything for the next couple of hours you can probably still find a way to get it to play Halo. (Leave the first 8GB of the drive as an image of the original and lock the new drive with the same password?)
I can see somebody making a nice chunk of change selling a prefab PVR conversion kit.
up2date makes perfect sense when viewed in light of RedHat's business model. Whether allowing important standards to be defined to support a single company's business model is a good thing is a question for another day.
;)
After instantly removing up2date and all it's associated cruft after an install/upgrade for a couple of years I finally left it on my new laptop and signed up for RHN just to give it a chance. It does work slicker than owl snot. Never a worry about finding a mirror, no dependencies, etc. Not sure if the time savings justifies the fee, guess I'll know next year when resub time comes if I actually give up the CC # again.
In the end, apt-get is a fine thing for the Debian folks because they are few in number. I just don't think there is enough free bandwidth to host package repositories for the rpm using hordes. I especially have those sorts of thoughts when a Debian user starts talking about installing or doing a major upgrade directly from the mirrors. Can you imagine the meltdown that would happen if, when RH8 drops if every RH user tried to upgrade directly off of the mirrors? The slashdot effect would be as nothing compared!
Yes it is a seperate process on OSX, but don't expect replacements anytime soon if Apple has any say in it.
On the whole, OSX does kinda toss old views of the Mac into the trash. I have been playing around with some iMacs running OSX recently and it's almost but not quite familiar territory. Neither fish nor foul if you take my meaning. But gimme three buttons on a TiBook and I'm there when my Thinkpad's warranty runs out.
RPM is just fine for a packaging standard. It does EVERYTHING a packaging system needs to do and none of the bogus crap that consumer friendly monsters like InstallShield do. Deb may very well have a equal featureset but nobody in the commercial world uses it because it is only used on Debian, a non-commercial distro. Since the big need for the LSB is for commercial software packagers.... see the problem? As for the BSD Ports system, it has ZERO to offer in this situation despite being a wonderful system. The BSD ports setup pretty much requires source distribution and the target audience for LSB isn't interested in that.
.deb are entirely seperate issues. Yes rpm needs something like apt to come into popular usage. (ya know, maybe apt would be just the ticket! Now if all of the apt groupies would promote it's use with rpm instead of constantly saying ya gotta go to Debian to get the wonders of apt. Ya, I'm talking about you Taco.)
The apt groupies can't get it into their pointed heads that apt can work just fine with rpms. Apt and
Not that I would ever be insane enough to put apt in a cron job like the typical Debian user, but it does do wonders to solve rpm dependency hell situations.
I don't see seven layers of API. That's just FUD you are spouting from either the Windows or Berlin camp.
A typical GNOME app makes calls into the GNOME libraries, which are linked at the hip to GTK. GTK directly talks the lowest wirelevel X protocol which gets stuff on the framebuffer.
A KDE app talks to the KDE libraries which are built on Qt. Qt talks Xlib (QT experts feel free to call me an idiot and correct me) which, like GTK, talks directly to the X server.
And if you want to argue that X imposes too much overhead, that is why we have things like the shared memory extension and Xrender.
But NO, window managers must remain ordinary applications, otherwise X turns into something brain damaged like Windows or a Mac.
Nah, because higher education gets dumbed down to match what is coming out of the high schools. Your younger brother will do just fine in college. Won't actually LEARN as much as you did, but who cares about that?
The whole point of modern education these days seems to be keeping people out of the labor force for as many years as possible and brainwashing them with political correctness.
Read the story before engaging in your knee jerk anti-americanism. They do remind the reader of the US's ill advised attempt to bag us a Russian programmer.
All told, you still have better odds of speaking your mind without ending up in jail here in the US than in most of the so called enlightened european countries. Not sure how much longer that will remain true with W and the Dems in lockstep agreement that the Constituition needs to be destroyed in order to preserve it....
Not anymore. They tossed those rules and replaced them with rules that say they can decide to sell the IP rights to a private company who CAN patent/copyright.
I know I shouldn't kick cripples, but here is some free investment advice re: msft.
;)
It is currently trading at $51.11 a share with a PE ratio of 44.8, which is insanely high, indicating downward pressure. That $51.11 price is only $3.61 off of it's 52 week low of $47.50 and it has flopped around in the 50-70 range for the last two years. It started the year in the 70's so it has DROPPED YTD, not risen 18% as you stated. It has fallen from a high of about $120 in late '99 so many longer term investors probably aren't exactly happy and employees with options certainly aren't happy campers. The only good news is that it IS up from where it started on the 5yr chart so in this bear market that is at least something. I certainly know I'd rather have had MSFT instead of the shares of WorldCom I bought in '00.
No. This is way off topic, but just so nobody else reads this and gets their hopes up.
The Amateur Vanity fee you see listed is for a Anateur Radio operator to trade in the random generated callsign for a callsign of their choice.
Since all music is verboten in the Amateur Radio Service it has no bearing on this thread. A Ham can't even sing a public domain song into the microphone by a strict reading of the regs. Plus there are almost no conditions (exception for emergencies involving risk to life or property) where an Amateur station can retransmit the signals of any other service, not can an Amateur knowingly transmit a signal with the intent that it be retransmitted by another service. (There are a couple of exceptions, if you are a Ham you should know them but they don't matter in this context.)
Don't fall for the fallacy that EULAs mean a damn thing. They don't unless you live in a state that signed onto UCITA. They can print any silly text they want to but that does not make it a binding contract.
:)
A contract needs several conditions. It needs to be SIGNED. It must offer a tangible benefit to BOTH parties. If I buy an X-Box at WalMart or a game, I have BOUGHT a physical product. Both contain copyrighted material, my use of which is governed by U.S. Copyright law (since I live in the US) but in no way am I bound by any sort of EULA.
The only computer product which I have owned which might have been governed by a EULA was my first Tandy. Before purchasing it I was required to read and sign a contract on five part carbon paper. That would have been a legally binding contract had I not been sixteen years old at the time.
Think it through people. Independent game devs are reported to be paying $10 per shipped game in royalties for games developed with the the official XDK. There is plenty of settled case law saying you CAN release a title without paying up and that you can break any obstacles the console vendor throws up, including adding the trademarked Nintindo logo if it is required to get the machine to execute your code. Since it IS settled case law I can think of a few game shops who might be tempted to add that $10 to their bottom line instead of Microsoft. A $200K inventment goes into the black when unit #20,000 of the first title goes out the door, which will be in the initial production run.
Wanna bet BioWare had a secret reason for doing a Linux port of Neverwinter Nights? Or if not them there are a dozen or so equally good suspects. It probably isn't a huge shop that does a lot of console biz though. Screwing M$ out of their royalties would scare Sony & Nintendo that they might be next so there is enough risk that I'd doubt it is somebody on the scale of EA and such.
The big shops need the good relationship with the hardware vendors as new hardware comes down the pipe.
Don't fall for the BS. When you buy an X-Box you have BOUGHT one. When you buy HALO you also BOUGHT a copy of Halo, you did NOT license it. If there isn't a signed contract it is a SALE.
This of course does not mean you can do anything you please with that copy of Halo. Your use is governed by the copyright laws in your location. But the publisher cannot impose any additional terms and conditions on your use of the copy so long as you don't expect them to PROVIDE anything above and beyond supplying you with a working copy. I.E. support, upgrades, etc.
A shrinkwrap/clickwrap EULA is all but worthless, regardless of what one judge on the loony coast of the USA said. If I buy it in WalMart it is a SALE. Back when Tandy made you sign a five part form to purchase anything in the computer dept, that was a LICENSE.
When you buy a game at Best Buy you are the owner of a copy of an item that is SOLD, not LICENSED therefore you are regulated by the copyright laws of your country and nothing else.
Ok, why not give them a listen and see if they play good stuff. Both claim they will stream their channels. However both of them are unavailable without Windows so screw em.
> It is curious that he refers to the UN as an
> "infamously corrupt and self-serving collection
> of dictatorships"; the last time I checked, the
> United States and the rest of the Western
> democracies were members of the UN as well.
Yes, the US is a member, along with the other semi free countries. And hopelessly outnumbered by barbarian children from the third world who have equal voting rights. If you think Somolia == Canada you are part of the problem demonstrated by the UN. And no I don't have a ready suggestion for a more realistic distribution of votes for the UN. Basically it is just a silly, but very dangerous, idea that needs to be eliminated.
Maybe in another 50-100 years the various regions will have equalized enough to consider the idea afresh. Until then regional organization will serve as international forums to hammer out needful treaties and such. NATO and OAS being the ones of interest for the US. Europe is rapidly collapsing into a single nationstate and will have completed that transition by the end of the 50-100 years I proposed. China will be in the same league or bigger by then. Assuming merger mania continues in the other parts of the world we would be left with at most a dozen mega states of roughly equal stature to form a new world over government that would have a better chance of success. Especially if republican notions happened to be in vogue at the time. Power divided and limited hozontally and vertically over so many layers and cultures would be kept in check for a bit while it absorbed all power to the top.
By then, with luck, we would have spread to the nearby bodies and those peoples would be ready to seceed and start their own governments free from the baggage from here on Earth. The cycle would begin again. Small nation states would form, eventually band together/be conquered, etc.
Because there really are two sorts of people. Those who can make it on their own and want only to be left alone to do it, and those sheep who crave a shepherd. The promise of unexplored territory is that it gives the first sort a place to go where there aren't yet any sheep needing to be protected from themselves.
I'm the sysadmin for a library deep in the buckle of the bible belt. We will be returning to the rules in effect prior to CIPA.
Kids can't access the net without showing their library card. With that we lookup what their PARENTS selected when they authorized them to have net access. Our records will show one of the following choices:
1. No Access
2. Only with a parent present
3. Filtered Access
4. Unfiltered access
Then it depends where they access. ANYONE, child or adult, who accesses from an exposed monitor will have web access filtered. We have 14 workstations with recessed displays in our main branch and one at each rural branch.
Filtered users also have IRC & telnet restricted, unfiltered users have access to text services even on the exposed stations.
We have used variations of this policy of parental control since 1995 and even in this VERY conservative community have had zero complaints. Some parents might want to impose their rules on others, but seem to know they wouldn't get very far with it.
> "Ready to run in Type II or III PCMCIA
> CardBus-equipped notebook PCs running Windows 98,
> Millennium, 2000, and XP..."
No, the PDF spec sheet and the PDF users manual clearly state that 98SE (Note that 98 & 98SE are different) ME and XP are supported. 2000 is also mentioned in some places, but NT and 98 are not. I did RTFM before lighting up my flamethrower.
You should be nice when dealing with reputable people. That "Virtually All" line wasn't marketing spin, it was an outright lie. Only when we have the self confidence as consumers and citizens to start calling companies and politicians out when they 'pull a Clinton' like that do we have a chance to deal with them as equals in a free market/society.
They showed zero respect for our intelligence so why should we respect them? Respect is NOT a right.
Maybe you like holding the ankles and swallowing aything a company puts on glossy paper but I sure don't. Linux has only marginal relevance in this case. When I read "Virtually All" I expect to see more than three entries on the list. Obvious omissions are PowerMac (Powerbooks have Cardbus slots you know, and OS X certainly qualifies as a Network Operating System) Netware, Linux, *BSD and SCO.
And yes, there ARE times when running any/all of those in a wireless environment is useful. Think portable training lab for a second. Think portable data gathering.
To : sales@linksys.com
Subject : WAP54A & WPC54A
Ok, I just looked at the products in the subject line and have a question. Since when did "Compatible with Virtually All Major Network Operating Systems" get redefined to mean "Currently shipping versions of Windows?" You don't even support Win95, Win98 or WinNT. 98 & NT are officially still supported by Microsoft and certainly qualify as Network Operating Systems so your marketing department is officially full of BS. Trust is a valuable commodity to piss away on such an obvious and senseless lie.
I'm a current owner of a BEFW11S4 so I was sorta interested, but the only card the new access point talks to has no Linux drivers or tech specs posted to allow the creation of a driver. That kinda makes it useless to me. Come to think of it, there wasn't much in the way of technical details period. No details on what the actual native speed (data compression is cheating since most of my traffic is encrypted, etc.) of the card is, what ranges are usable at each datarate, etc.
Modern law in the Western World is based on the notion that The Law, The Truth and Justice are seperate and unrelated concepts, with Truth and Justice being outside the scope of the courts. And if you believe that anything sensible can come from such an insane view you are part of the problem.
To quote Don Henley quoting the bard, "Old Billy was right. Let's kill all the lawyers, let's kill 'em tonight."
Really, at this point it is the only way out. Until we are ready to kill every lawyer, judge and congressman, raze the law schools, burn all of the lawbooks and just start the hell over, reformulating a new code of laws from scratch, we are going to remain screwed. Every lawyer now practicing is hopelessly tainted by notions incompatible with civilization.
If we are too enlightened to kill em all we can at least brand a big L on their forehead which would prohibit them from holding office, voting or working within 100 yards of a law office, courthouse, bar where people in the new legal profession hang out, educational institution or anywhere else their perverted ideas might resurface or try to infect the next generation.
And before you mod this as flamebait, lets hear YOUR ideas to fix the current mess we are in with out 'legal system.'
Doesn't matter a damn how 'good' a Windows based firewall is. By the nature of the beast they depend on Windows to allow them to see all network traffic. They can do that by essentially running as 'root'. Of course since almost ALL windows software runs with the same elevated privledges all they need to do is attack the firewall.
See the current measures/countermeasures going on with AdAware for a preview of where things will go when there is actual $MONEY$ to be made writing malware as opposed to what pimply 15 year old script kiddies have been doing the last twenty years. The spyware authors have the exact same system level access as your firewall and equal knowledge of how the system works so how the hell can you trust it unless you also trust ALL other software running in ring0?
And remember that M$ itself will eventually be 'leveraging the platform' for revenue gains as sales continue to decline in a saturating market. Do you trust your firewall to be able to protect you against the underlying OS (or their 'select' partners) spying on you?
I define an effective firewall as a trusted system running only a well known set of trusted software under the administration of trusted personel. No program running on an untrusted computer with an insecure and untrusted OS, running an unknown and almost unknowable quantity of suspect programs with elevated privledges can possibly be called a 'firewall'. Any company marketing such a product without some extreme disclaimers is engaged in the sale of "Snake Oil" and is inherently untrustworthy. Period, end of story.