Think about it, how many of us linux users are regularly downloading a virus cleaning program?
Y'know, in 8 years of owning a PC running Windows, I have contracted only one virus, and that was through my own stupidity - I downloaded and ran software as an administrative user from untrusted sources without having any anti-virus software installed.
Apart from that, nothing.
Windows can be just as secure as Linux; third party developers who stupidly rely on the user having admin privs make it difficult, but it *is* possible. The biggest single security issue facing users of modern PC operating systems (Windows 2k+, a recent Linux, OS X, etc) are the users themselves.
Don't think for one minute that if Linux became the most used desktop OS that the crapware authors wouldn't follow, and don't think for one minute that we wouldn't see hordes of clueless users running as root or entering their root password when prompted and screwing their systems over. True, there will be fewer automated attacks, but that's cold comfort to the user who loses all their data because that last cute little KDE applet was even more malicious than the previous half dozen they installed.
Give it time, and you too will be running AV software, or else, a different OS. No OS can protect against a rogue user with the admin password.
For that matter, we do have rights and a constitution, enshrined not only in statute but in case law, and the Human Rights Act.
Gotta love those Americans who think that just because we have a figurehead monarchy and no single piece of paper in a museum to point at, we don't have a constitution.
Every little bit of cruft is a bugfix that you'll have to make again.
Not true - some will be fixes for fixes that were poorly implemented (perhaps in a rush to hit a deadline, then forgotten about), some of the cruft will be for features that are no longer used (or perhaps even available, if other parts of the app no longer use the code at all), and so on.
Reminds me of a game of Quake 3 I was playing a few years back; one of the other players killed someone and said "That frag was brought to you by Kellog's Frosties! They're grrrrrreeeeaaaatttt!!!"
You probably had to be there, but it was hilarious at the time...
There's nothing stopping me shitting in the reservoir. Does this mean that tapwater is dead?
If you do that sort of thing enough, you will be tracked down and (if caught) prosecuted.
The same apparently cannot be said of spammers - or at least, not the ones that pick on individuals. I imagine that the story would be different if they chose to forge addresses from amazon, google, microsoft, etc.
I know the flip side of the spam problem is bandwidth wastage, but anyone who's still getting spam in their inbox should install some nice filtering software.
I have a catch-all email address set up on my domain - so $anything@$mydomain gets to me.
For years, I used to get a very small amount of spam to addresses like info@, sales@, etc, and a throwaway account I used on a website that I never used for any real mails.
Then, a few months ago, some scum-sucking shit-brained low-life motherfucker* decided to use my domain name in forged From: addresses.
(* But I'm not bitter)
I now receive on the order of a thousand spams, bounces and assorted related crap per day. Now, of these, only a tiny handful make it to my inbox, and they're all easy to spot. I've not done the stats, but I'd image that Thunderbird's filtering is 99% accurate or better.
It's still a pain in the arse though, and it's still utterly unacceptable behaviour on the part of the morons responsible.
I don't necessarily think that vigilantism is the answer, but something has to be done.
(Yes, I could switch off the catch-all addressing, but I actually find it useful, inconsiderate wankers trying to ruin the entire net for everyone not withstanding)
If they submitted the patent before Apple started using the disputed aspects of it, then how is it a submarine patent? A submarine patent is one that's submitted, granted, and then quietly sat on by the holder until the covered tech has gained widespread adoption - then and only then do they start enforcing it, knowing that
a) there are lots of targets b) it'll be much more painful to remove/do without the patented tech than just pay-up
Just a minor nit-pick - the population of London is a touch under 7.5 million. Assuming 4 people per household, that's about 1.8 million households, or 3 routers.
But surely the binary only component and the shim are linked at runtime, and so the person doing the linking that arguably violates the GPL is the person running the code, not the person who compiles it?
As I understand it, the binary-only driver doesn't contain any GPLed code - it can't, or distribution by NVidia without the source being available would be illegal and this entire conversation is moot. Given that, I am confused as to how Kororaa can be in violation, as long as they ship the source of the shim.
Then I misunderstood you - you said "GCC has an explicit note in its license that says that C source files that GCC (and perhaps only GCC- say using GCCisms) can compile are not automatically under the GPL." I took that to mean that it said that source that GCC can compile is not automatically under the GPL, not that source that has been compiled is GPLed...
I say if you buy a piece of hardware , you have the right: one-way or another- to make it work and do whatever you want to make it work and do.
But you do have that right. ATi and NVidia are just exercising their right not to make it easy for you - they provide drivers, if you don't want to use them and prefer to write your own, fine, knock yourself out. They can't and won't stop you, they just won't help you. Sounds fair enough to me.
Sure, it'd be nice if they did help out, and I appreciate how difficult the problem is without at least some help (eg some documentation), but I don't see that they're morally obliged to provide it.
I've purchased hardware- and then the company goes out of business and I can't use it anymore.
Should've kept a backup of the drivers or stuck with the last supported OS then...
I've not used an NVidia card under Linux in a good few years, but I seem to recall that the driver comes in two parts - an open source shim that is the kernel module, and a closed-source driver that does all the grunt work, and which communicates with the shim.
Given that architecture, I don't see that there is any closed source code incorporated into the kernel at all (or vice versa), or am I missing something?
GCC has an explicit note in its license that says that C source files that GCC (and perhaps only GCC- say using GCCisms) can compile are not automatically under the GPL.
Ignoring the question of GCC-specific code, think about it for a second. If all source that GCC can compile were automatically to fall under the GPL, then all standards-compliant C code would automatically be GPLed. In other words, the mere existence of GCC would force all code written in C to be GPLed.
The note isn't there to grant people any rights, it's there to clear up any possible misunderstanding - just because you use GCC to compile your code doesn't automatically make it GPLed.
For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page.
I don't know about Linux, but under Windows Acrobat Reader stays memory resident even after you navigate away from the PDF that originally launched the plugin; look for the acrord32.exe process in Task Manager. It dies if you close the last "real" Reader window (which also kills all PDFs open in browser windows!), but not if you close a PDF open in the plugin.
MS releases its patches on a given day because that's what corporate IT departments have demanded.
See? They listen to their customers, and their biggest customers (by far) are corporate IT departments.
Don't blame MS for bowing to customer pressure, blame the customers for bringing that pressure to bear in the first place.
(Astute readers will have noticed that I've ignored the huge difference in effort required to test patches against a small list of tightly-controlled hardware platforms, vs any old pieces of PC crap that can be coerced into working together. That is on purpose, as it should be immediately obvious to anyone with any experience of development or IT work.)
Pretty much every Brit who dismisses American surprise about the London camera system.
Well duh - those of us who dislike the cameras are hardly going to be making the argument that our government would never misuse the information!
Similarly, those of your fellow countrymen who argue that there's nothing wrong with the PATRIOT Act, or the wiretapping that's going on at the moment, etc generally make exactly the same arguments - that the government needs the powers to combat terrorism and/or crime, they'd never misuse them, if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, etc.
He can't run again, he'll be out of office in 2.5 years regardless.
Will he? Oh, I know that that's what the rules say, but rules can be changed or ignored... Even failing that, there's no guarantee that his replacement won't simply carry on in exactly the same way. Over the last few years for example, we've had a succession of Labour Home Secretaries, each a little worse (= more fascist) than the previous. The names and faces have changed, but the path they take is the same. True, it was Blair at the helm the whole time, but even when Bush goes, the party will remain.
Sure, the quality of HTML produced by previous versions of Word has been awful. Most (all?) WYSIWYG HTML editors went through that phase, but Word certainly took a damn sight longer to grow out of it than most.
However, MS tools generating decent HTML isn't new. VS.NET and ASP.NET generate acceptable HTML, and it all works cross-browser too. (Some of the controls degrade gracefully in non-IE browsers, but the basic functionality is still there - treeview controls still work, just less dynamically, for example).
It's nice to see the Office group finally taking a leaf out of the dev tool group's book.
Not to mention the fact that it is basically impossible to leave your house without being filmed.
Bullshit. I'm one of the first to rail against some of the crap that our New Labour masters are shoving down our throats*, but that's just crap.
Yes, most cities have CCTV cameras all over the place, especially Central London. However, it's disingenuous to suggest that "it is basically impossible to leave your house without being filmed" - I most certainly can do so, and I live in London.
Even if you count speed cameras, they only film transgressors; stick to the limit and they won't get you either.
That's not to say that there aren't far too many cameras around the place, just that it's nowhere near as bad as you paint it.
The company should be disbanded, all its assets forfeited and sold at auction.
So the tens of thousands of employees and their families should be punished because of the disregard of the law of a few people at the top of the company? Nice.
If a company flagrantly violates the law like this, those responsible should be brought to trial. The whole concept of incorporation protecting the individuals involved from responsibility for their actions is bullshit. However, destroying the entire company and thus punishing all of their employees, from those responsible right down to the canteen workers, janitorial staff, secretaries, etc is bullshit too.
Windows users who download the "High-Priority Update" called Windows Genuine Advantage Notification are required to agree to a new contract.
Yes; we agree to a contract covering the WGAN tool, not Windows. The EULA for Windows XP is not affected.
it won't allow you to uninstall the software
The licence actually says "you will not be able to uninstall the software". That is not the same as you aren't allowed to uninstall it; MS are not denying you permission, they're saying that it isn't possible. In other words, they have not provided an uninstallation tool. I see nothing in the licence that forbids you from ripping it out yourself, if you are so able.
If you buy, agree to the terms of use, and install Windows for your company and train your staff to use it and applications you buy for it, your total cost is far greater than the cost of Windows.
As it is for any OS or application; I'm not sure I see the relevance. If you give everyone Linux (whether freely downloaded or bought and paid for), you still have training costs and quite possibly costs for commercial apps. The total cost may be lower (especially if you don't buy the distro or a support contract), but it's still higher than just the cost of the OS.
If you go to your kitchen and find a Microsoft employee eating your ice cream, check your EULA; maybe Microsoft has decided that Microsoft employees can raid your refrigerator.
That sort of crap would be struck down by a court in seconds. Just because something is in a contract (even an honest to goodness, negogiatable, signed on the dotted line contract) doesn't necessarily mean that it's enforceable. For a clearly absurd example, if my employment contract stated that upon leaving the company, I had to give them my first born child as a replacement, that would not be enforcable. For a more realistic example, some/most anti-compete clauses are not enforcable as they contravene restriction of trade laws.
Yes, it's a crap licence, but it's not quite as bad as either you or Ed Foster make out.
Now I freely admit that things may have changed in the 7 or so years since I quit my Phd in plasma physics, but back then that simply wasn't true. One of the major byrpoducts of a fusion reaction is (was) a pretty steady flux of neutrons. Being neutral, the only way to contain it is to absorb it. This shielding will become radioactive, and will need to be replaced periodically. It is inevitable that eventually, the entire reactor will have been damaged to the point of having to be replaced; it will all also be radioactive.
Now it's true that the half-life of the irradiated components is much, much shorter than that of the waste products of fission, and (imnho) fusion is absolutely the way to go long-term for nuclear power. However, I really don't think it's true to say "reactor irradiation is minimal".
Like I said though, it's been some time since I last really looked at this, so it's possible that progress has been made. It's also not impossible that I'm mis-remembering things (or simply misinterpreting your meaning), of course.
As has been pointed out time and time again, the editors do not check the stories they post. They prefer to get a breaking story up on the site fast, rather than "waste" time checking them. The chances are excellent that by the time CowboyNeal had posted this, he'd not even skimmed the article, let alone read it.
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Think about it, how many of us linux users are regularly downloading a virus cleaning program?
Y'know, in 8 years of owning a PC running Windows, I have contracted only one virus, and that was through my own stupidity - I downloaded and ran software as an administrative user from untrusted sources without having any anti-virus software installed.
Apart from that, nothing.
Windows can be just as secure as Linux; third party developers who stupidly rely on the user having admin privs make it difficult, but it *is* possible. The biggest single security issue facing users of modern PC operating systems (Windows 2k+, a recent Linux, OS X, etc) are the users themselves.
Don't think for one minute that if Linux became the most used desktop OS that the crapware authors wouldn't follow, and don't think for one minute that we wouldn't see hordes of clueless users running as root or entering their root password when prompted and screwing their systems over. True, there will be fewer automated attacks, but that's cold comfort to the user who loses all their data because that last cute little KDE applet was even more malicious than the previous half dozen they installed.
Give it time, and you too will be running AV software, or else, a different OS. No OS can protect against a rogue user with the admin password.
For that matter, we do have rights and a constitution, enshrined not only in statute but in case law, and the Human Rights Act.
Gotta love those Americans who think that just because we have a figurehead monarchy and no single piece of paper in a museum to point at, we don't have a constitution.
For that matter, why the hell isn't this in YRO?
Every little bit of cruft is a bugfix that you'll have to make again.
Not true - some will be fixes for fixes that were poorly implemented (perhaps in a rush to hit a deadline, then forgotten about), some of the cruft will be for features that are no longer used (or perhaps even available, if other parts of the app no longer use the code at all), and so on.
Reminds me of a game of Quake 3 I was playing a few years back; one of the other players killed someone and said "That frag was brought to you by Kellog's Frosties! They're grrrrrreeeeaaaatttt!!!"
You probably had to be there, but it was hilarious at the time...
(He was kidding, of course)
There's nothing stopping me shitting in the reservoir. Does this mean that tapwater is dead?
If you do that sort of thing enough, you will be tracked down and (if caught) prosecuted.
The same apparently cannot be said of spammers - or at least, not the ones that pick on individuals. I imagine that the story would be different if they chose to forge addresses from amazon, google, microsoft, etc.
I know the flip side of the spam problem is bandwidth wastage, but anyone who's still getting spam in their inbox should install some nice filtering software.
I have a catch-all email address set up on my domain - so $anything@$mydomain gets to me.
For years, I used to get a very small amount of spam to addresses like info@, sales@, etc, and a throwaway account I used on a website that I never used for any real mails.
Then, a few months ago, some scum-sucking shit-brained low-life motherfucker* decided to use my domain name in forged From: addresses.
(* But I'm not bitter)
I now receive on the order of a thousand spams, bounces and assorted related crap per day. Now, of these, only a tiny handful make it to my inbox, and they're all easy to spot. I've not done the stats, but I'd image that Thunderbird's filtering is 99% accurate or better.
It's still a pain in the arse though, and it's still utterly unacceptable behaviour on the part of the morons responsible.
I don't necessarily think that vigilantism is the answer, but something has to be done.
(Yes, I could switch off the catch-all addressing, but I actually find it useful, inconsiderate wankers trying to ruin the entire net for everyone not withstanding)
If they submitted the patent before Apple started using the disputed aspects of it, then how is it a submarine patent? A submarine patent is one that's submitted, granted, and then quietly sat on by the holder until the covered tech has gained widespread adoption - then and only then do they start enforcing it, knowing that
.gif patent.
a) there are lots of targets
b) it'll be much more painful to remove/do without the patented tech than just pay-up
See for example the
Just a minor nit-pick - the population of London is a touch under 7.5 million. Assuming 4 people per household, that's about 1.8 million households, or 3 routers.
But surely the binary only component and the shim are linked at runtime, and so the person doing the linking that arguably violates the GPL is the person running the code, not the person who compiles it?
As I understand it, the binary-only driver doesn't contain any GPLed code - it can't, or distribution by NVidia without the source being available would be illegal and this entire conversation is moot. Given that, I am confused as to how Kororaa can be in violation, as long as they ship the source of the shim.
Then I misunderstood you - you said "GCC has an explicit note in its license that says that C source files that GCC (and perhaps only GCC- say using GCCisms) can compile are not automatically under the GPL." I took that to mean that it said that source that GCC can compile is not automatically under the GPL, not that source that has been compiled is GPLed...
I say if you buy a piece of hardware , you have the right: one-way or another- to make it work and do whatever you want to make it work and do.
But you do have that right. ATi and NVidia are just exercising their right not to make it easy for you - they provide drivers, if you don't want to use them and prefer to write your own, fine, knock yourself out. They can't and won't stop you, they just won't help you. Sounds fair enough to me.
Sure, it'd be nice if they did help out, and I appreciate how difficult the problem is without at least some help (eg some documentation), but I don't see that they're morally obliged to provide it.
I've purchased hardware- and then the company goes out of business and I can't use it anymore.
Should've kept a backup of the drivers or stuck with the last supported OS then...
I've not used an NVidia card under Linux in a good few years, but I seem to recall that the driver comes in two parts - an open source shim that is the kernel module, and a closed-source driver that does all the grunt work, and which communicates with the shim.
Given that architecture, I don't see that there is any closed source code incorporated into the kernel at all (or vice versa), or am I missing something?
GCC has an explicit note in its license that says that C source files that GCC (and perhaps only GCC- say using GCCisms) can compile are not automatically under the GPL.
Ignoring the question of GCC-specific code, think about it for a second. If all source that GCC can compile were automatically to fall under the GPL, then all standards-compliant C code would automatically be GPLed. In other words, the mere existence of GCC would force all code written in C to be GPLed.
The note isn't there to grant people any rights, it's there to clear up any possible misunderstanding - just because you use GCC to compile your code doesn't automatically make it GPLed.
it gets dog slow if the list gets long
In my experience, it gets pretty damn slow after the list hits a couple of dozen items; not what I would call long by any means.
For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page.
I don't know about Linux, but under Windows Acrobat Reader stays memory resident even after you navigate away from the PDF that originally launched the plugin; look for the acrord32.exe process in Task Manager. It dies if you close the last "real" Reader window (which also kills all PDFs open in browser windows!), but not if you close a PDF open in the plugin.
CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime; they displace it to camera-free areas, where it obviously isn't anyone's problem.
The solution to which is obvious - cameras everywhere, then everyone will be safe!
I'm only surprised it's not been used as an excuse to increase the coverage yet...
Ah yes, this argument again.
MS releases its patches on a given day because that's what corporate IT departments have demanded.
See? They listen to their customers, and their biggest customers (by far) are corporate IT departments.
Don't blame MS for bowing to customer pressure, blame the customers for bringing that pressure to bear in the first place.
(Astute readers will have noticed that I've ignored the huge difference in effort required to test patches against a small list of tightly-controlled hardware platforms, vs any old pieces of PC crap that can be coerced into working together. That is on purpose, as it should be immediately obvious to anyone with any experience of development or IT work.)
Pretty much every Brit who dismisses American surprise about the London camera system.
Well duh - those of us who dislike the cameras are hardly going to be making the argument that our government would never misuse the information!
Similarly, those of your fellow countrymen who argue that there's nothing wrong with the PATRIOT Act, or the wiretapping that's going on at the moment, etc generally make exactly the same arguments - that the government needs the powers to combat terrorism and/or crime, they'd never misuse them, if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, etc.
He can't run again, he'll be out of office in 2.5 years regardless.
Will he? Oh, I know that that's what the rules say, but rules can be changed or ignored... Even failing that, there's no guarantee that his replacement won't simply carry on in exactly the same way. Over the last few years for example, we've had a succession of Labour Home Secretaries, each a little worse (= more fascist) than the previous. The names and faces have changed, but the path they take is the same. True, it was Blair at the helm the whole time, but even when Bush goes, the party will remain.
Sure, the quality of HTML produced by previous versions of Word has been awful. Most (all?) WYSIWYG HTML editors went through that phase, but Word certainly took a damn sight longer to grow out of it than most.
However, MS tools generating decent HTML isn't new. VS.NET and ASP.NET generate acceptable HTML, and it all works cross-browser too. (Some of the controls degrade gracefully in non-IE browsers, but the basic functionality is still there - treeview controls still work, just less dynamically, for example).
It's nice to see the Office group finally taking a leaf out of the dev tool group's book.
Not to mention the fact that it is basically impossible to leave your house without being filmed.
Bullshit. I'm one of the first to rail against some of the crap that our New Labour masters are shoving down our throats*, but that's just crap.
Yes, most cities have CCTV cameras all over the place, especially Central London. However, it's disingenuous to suggest that "it is basically impossible to leave your house without being filmed" - I most certainly can do so, and I live in London.
Even if you count speed cameras, they only film transgressors; stick to the limit and they won't get you either.
That's not to say that there aren't far too many cameras around the place, just that it's nowhere near as bad as you paint it.
The company should be disbanded, all its assets forfeited and sold at auction.
So the tens of thousands of employees and their families should be punished because of the disregard of the law of a few people at the top of the company? Nice.
If a company flagrantly violates the law like this, those responsible should be brought to trial. The whole concept of incorporation protecting the individuals involved from responsibility for their actions is bullshit. However, destroying the entire company and thus punishing all of their employees, from those responsible right down to the canteen workers, janitorial staff, secretaries, etc is bullshit too.
Windows users who download the "High-Priority Update" called Windows Genuine Advantage Notification are required to agree to a new contract.
Yes; we agree to a contract covering the WGAN tool, not Windows. The EULA for Windows XP is not affected.
it won't allow you to uninstall the software
The licence actually says "you will not be able to uninstall the software". That is not the same as you aren't allowed to uninstall it; MS are not denying you permission, they're saying that it isn't possible. In other words, they have not provided an uninstallation tool. I see nothing in the licence that forbids you from ripping it out yourself, if you are so able.
If you buy, agree to the terms of use, and install Windows for your company and train your staff to use it and applications you buy for it, your total cost is far greater than the cost of Windows.
As it is for any OS or application; I'm not sure I see the relevance. If you give everyone Linux (whether freely downloaded or bought and paid for), you still have training costs and quite possibly costs for commercial apps. The total cost may be lower (especially if you don't buy the distro or a support contract), but it's still higher than just the cost of the OS.
If you go to your kitchen and find a Microsoft employee eating your ice cream, check your EULA; maybe Microsoft has decided that Microsoft employees can raid your refrigerator.
That sort of crap would be struck down by a court in seconds. Just because something is in a contract (even an honest to goodness, negogiatable, signed on the dotted line contract) doesn't necessarily mean that it's enforceable. For a clearly absurd example, if my employment contract stated that upon leaving the company, I had to give them my first born child as a replacement, that would not be enforcable. For a more realistic example, some/most anti-compete clauses are not enforcable as they contravene restriction of trade laws.
Yes, it's a crap licence, but it's not quite as bad as either you or Ed Foster make out.
reactor irradiation is minimal
Now I freely admit that things may have changed in the 7 or so years since I quit my Phd in plasma physics, but back then that simply wasn't true. One of the major byrpoducts of a fusion reaction is (was) a pretty steady flux of neutrons. Being neutral, the only way to contain it is to absorb it. This shielding will become radioactive, and will need to be replaced periodically. It is inevitable that eventually, the entire reactor will have been damaged to the point of having to be replaced; it will all also be radioactive.
Now it's true that the half-life of the irradiated components is much, much shorter than that of the waste products of fission, and (imnho) fusion is absolutely the way to go long-term for nuclear power. However, I really don't think it's true to say "reactor irradiation is minimal".
Like I said though, it's been some time since I last really looked at this, so it's possible that progress has been made. It's also not impossible that I'm mis-remembering things (or simply misinterpreting your meaning), of course.
As has been pointed out time and time again, the editors do not check the stories they post. They prefer to get a breaking story up on the site fast, rather than "waste" time checking them. The chances are excellent that by the time CowboyNeal had posted this, he'd not even skimmed the article, let alone read it.