Why was that marked down as "Offtopic"? It's clearly the right answer!
Sometimes I think I'm surrounded by a bunch of kids who don't know anything about the culture of my generation. And then I realize why I think this -- it's because I am!:-(
Of course, the RIAA isn't solely to blame for this. The corporations that own the radio stations must share culpability as well. Why, for example, can I find no less than 6 of those bland Lite-Rock/Mix stations on my radio dial? And then, when they finally re-introduced an alternative rock station here last week after many years without one, they took away the unique R&B oldies station instead of one of the Lite-Rock clones.
If Rob Kaper and I don't hear your beloved jazz music on the radio, it's because the music industry has decided not to market it to us in an effective manner. Releasing music is not the same as marketing it.
At least she didn't mention Freenet. Let Gnutella face the fire while Freenet gets off the ground.
I wonder whether she actually knows about Freenet, and chose not to mention it by name. She said, "Collective projects that are free from any corporate ties are still flourishing, and small companies with nifty ideas lurk on the fringes." And from reading previous pieces by her, I know she's got more than half a clue when it comes to file-sharing.
I foresee a problem here. The song title may contain a slash or other "naughty" character that isn't whitespace. Now, on Unix file systems, the slash is the only show-stopper, but I've heard complaints from Windows users that the question mark causes tremendous grief.
Just like when you write a CGI that accepts user input from a URL, your CDDB lookup is relying on outside information. Rather than stripping out a subset of characters that you know to be undesirable (whitespace in your case), you need to take the more proactive approach -- only allow characters you know you want, and clobber all the rest.
Also for what it's worth: I prefer cdparanoia for ripping, and I'd put the encoder and its options up at the top of the script where they can be configured more easily.
I consider HP-UX to be middle-of-the-road myself. It's head and shoulders above SCO or MP-RAS, but that's not saying much. It's about on par with AIX. It can't touch Linux or *BSD in terms of features, although it's more stable on its native hardware, of course.
With HP-UX, you may pay a bit more, but almost everything you need is right there on the OS install disk.
Except for strace, and lsof, and/proc, and gzip, and ssh, and perl5, and/dev/urandom (need to install EGD), and GNU patch, and GNU diff, and GNU make, and the ANSI C compiler (costs extra, but at least you still bundle the K&R C compiler so we can build gcc), and the X11 header files and libraries, and Apache (no biggie, everyone compiles it anyway), and a web browser (c'mon, lynx would be good), and dig/host, and fmt (I had to install it from GNU textutils). I can't remember whether lex and yacc are included or whether they're part of the ANSI C compiler kit, but I'm pretty sure they're not standard either. Oh, and how about a version of whois that doesn't have nic.ddn.mil hard-coded in it?
I can understand not including things like an IRC client, a choice of window managers, etc. But by not including the X11 headers and libraries, HP makes it damned hard to compensate for that.
(All this is based on HP-UX 10.20 -- in fact, I'm typing this from an HP 9000 model 715/100 running 10.20. 9.0x is even worse. I haven't used 11.x yet.)
Now let's say I'm the author of document #12345 and want it to be available no matter what. If I'm willing to take the risk, couldn't I hack my local server such that a copy of document #12345 is always returned, no matter what?
If you request a file, and your local Freenet node can find it, it will be cached.
Files are only discarded from the cache when they fail to be requested for a long time. There's some sort of least-recently-used algorithm, I believe. (Freenet coders, correct me if I'm wrong.)
Therefore, the obvious way to make sure your local node never forgets your one-shot static files is to keep requesting them. A daily freenet_request crontab should suffice.
Of course, if you're publishing a Freesite with a DBR (date-based redirect), then you're going to be re-inserting your (potentially modified) index pages and verifying your data files every day anyway, so it'll always be fresh on your local node. See my previous comment in this story for more details.
Does this mean you would just start over any time you wanted to change your db schema?
Is the content of freenet read only?
Data are inserted into Freenet using CHK (content hash keys). The basic unit of data is a file (of any size); when you insert a file, its hash value is computed, and that is used as an index for retrieval, as well as for encryption. Other forms of Freenet keys redirect to the CHK.
If you insert file F1 into Freenet, with CHK K1, it's there to stay. You could have a human-readable KSK that points to it (e.g., freenet:KSK@/file/F1) so that it's easier to retrieve. But there's no way to delete it.
If you modify file F1 to create file F2, and then insert it into Freenet, you end up with a new CHK K2, which is the hash of F2. But if you try to insert F2 using your old KSK (freenet:KSK@/file/F1), it won't work -- you'll get a keyspace collision.
So in short, there's no simple way to update information that's been posted to Freenet. It will eventually die out if nobody ever reads it; but in accordance with Murphy's Law, if you made an error, it will haunt you forever.
(This is not to say that it's impossible to have updated content on Freenet! It's just that you have to go through some fairly involved convolutions to do so. The most common technique in use today, AFAIK, is a date-based redirect (DBR). Essentially, there's some black magic in the Freenet client that lets a key of the form freenet:MSK@SSK@... redirect to a different key every day, or every week, or every hour, or however often you choose. Then you set up a crontab job to publish a new index of your data periodically, just before the deadline.)
Location: Lorain, OH (USA)
Local telco: CenturyTel
DSL ISP: CenturyTel
Price: $40/month (USD) for residential service with 2-year commitment
Speed: 512/256 kbps
Reliability: fairly good
If that's too heavy, here's a simpler explanation: the MP3 header is 32 bits (bit 0 through bit 31). Bit 28 is the copyright bit, and bit 29 is the original bit. You can view them with mp3info -f '%O %o' foo.mp3. You can change them with a hex editor (set the second nybble of the fourth byte to 4, assuming the emphasis bits are 00).
If you needed to read this message to learn how to do this, I strongly suggest making a backup of the file before you edit it.
How? By forcing the original copy to self-destruct?
A song could be downloaded and copied onto a mp3 player. The song on the player cannot be copied.
It can be played, though! And if it can be played, it can be copied.
The song on the hard drive cannot be copied until [...]
A song on a hard drive is a sequence of 0s and 1s. It's just a data file! Any data file can be copied, as long as there's some available room on the destination medium.
What would mess up this beautiful equation [...]
... is a good dose of ugly facts. Welcome to the real world, hope you enjoyed your stay in RIAA Fantasy Land.
rsh isn't a shell either. there was no "style of
naming" since rsh was the only odd man out.
It doesn't matter whether it's a "shell" or not. In fact, it does follow the naming pattern of several other commands, collectively known as the "r commands" -- rlogin, rexec, rcp and rsh.
rlogin - remote login - "kinda like running login, but remotely"
rexec - remote exec - "kinda like running exec, but remotely"
rcp - remote cp - "kinda like running cp, but remotely"
rsh - remote sh - "kinda like running sh, but remotely"
So now we have ssh (secure remote sh) and scp (secure remote cp).
I know, I wish Slashdot had the same type of WYSIWYG editor that my weblog does.
That's silly. A web site should not have its own text editor! That's the client's job, with the client in this case being the web browser.
One of my longterm mozilla wishes is to be able to edit textarea text with an external editor -- just like in every sane Unix program. Just have the user press Alt-E (or whatever), then copy the text to a temp file, invoke the user's defined editor (rxvt -e vim for me, please), and when the user saves, read the text from the file and replace what's in the textarea. What could be simpler? Why in the name of the great lizard isn't this implemented yet? (Or if it's implemented, why didn't anybody tell me?;-) )
The Linux version of Opera is in beta, though. (And by normal definitions, it would still be a pre-beta, because it's not feature-complete.)
But I'm using it right now, and it's pretty good. The multiple window thing takes some getting used to, and there are still bugs in it (including crashing bugs), but it's far better than, say, Netscape 4.5 was.
In our ksh-happy shop, we have a lot of scripts that rely on "echo $string | read x y junk" to parse space-seperated lists, and of course these statements don't port well to Bash (you have to do a few backtick/sed operations).
Actually, you can still do it with shell builtins. Save off the current argument list ($*) if necessary, and then:
set -- $string x=$1; shift y=$1; shift junk="$*"
I have to agree, though, that the ksh implementation is better.
This isn't a fair use issue; the difference is the same as copying a book from a library (fair use) vs. stealing it from the bookstore (shoplifting).
That's ridiculous. If you steal a book from a bookstore, then you've denied access to that physical object to the bookstore. They can no longer sell it, because you've removed it. This is what theft is. Making a copy of something is not theft, and decrypting a transmission that you intercepted is not theft. To put it in slashdot-understandable terms: theft is like a denial of service attack for physical objects.
If I decrypt and display a videostream that is sent to me by a satellite, I haven't stolen anything. The people who pay to have this decrypted for them haven't lost their ability to use anything; the people who sent the signal haven't lose their ability to use anything; in fact, no physical objects have been affected in any way, except for those which I own.
but should Microsoft be able to self-destruct your PC if they discover you stole a copy of Windows?
Microsoft doesn't own your computer. They could destroy the CD you installed from since that is (supposedly) theirs but the situations are completely different.
The answer to this is still pending. UCITA was an attempt to provude companies like Microsoft with the legal right to remotely disable their software on other people's computers, in the event of lapsed contracts, unregistered copies and the like. At least one state has passed a UCITA-inspired law, but it prohibits the "self-help" (ECM) in the case of "mass-market" software. (You can only use the ECM option if you entered into a contract with the other party.)
So, to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft can't legally destroy your installed copy of Windows ME.
When you lessen the value of something you are likewise stealing.
When Ford Motor Company started to mass-produce cars, they lessened the value of horse-drawn carriages and accessories. This was not stealing.
We are a consumer based society, and while I will scream about corporate abuse as much as anyone, in this instance we have to protect the rights of the company [...]
This is one of the most depressing things I've read so far this millennium.
A company has no right to make a profit. They especially don't have the right to make a profit by requiring people to pay them money for things that they're giving away to those people.
I know it's fairly common for people to make money this way. In NYC, at least according to some TV shows I've seen, people on the street will wash your car's windshield while you're stopped at a red light, then expect you to tip them. Human nature is such that we will feel some obligation to give these people money (for various reasons which I won't go into here). But there is no legal obligation to pay for this service, because you did not ask for it ("enter into a contract").
Now, to the best of my knowledge, DirecTV hasn't done anything wrong. But neither did the H-card hackers. Nobody was stealing here, and nobody has broken any laws that I know of (apart from the DMCA, but that's not Constitutional... it's an abomination).
Slashdot Mirror
In this case it's a quote from Rush.
Why was that marked down as "Offtopic"? It's clearly the right answer!
Sometimes I think I'm surrounded by a bunch of kids who don't know anything about the culture of my generation. And then I realize why I think this -- it's because I am! :-(
I listen to jazz music you wouldn't have heard of
This is evidence of failed marketing, then.
Of course, the RIAA isn't solely to blame for this. The corporations that own the radio stations must share culpability as well. Why, for example, can I find no less than 6 of those bland Lite-Rock/Mix stations on my radio dial? And then, when they finally re-introduced an alternative rock station here last week after many years without one, they took away the unique R&B oldies station instead of one of the Lite-Rock clones.
If Rob Kaper and I don't hear your beloved jazz music on the radio, it's because the music industry has decided not to market it to us in an effective manner. Releasing music is not the same as marketing it.
Where is the business plan for paying the artists anything for their hard work
Right here: www.fairtunes.com
Jesus, what a depressing piece.
At least she didn't mention Freenet. Let Gnutella face the fire while Freenet gets off the ground.
I wonder whether she actually knows about Freenet, and chose not to mention it by name. She said, "Collective projects that are free from any corporate ties are still flourishing, and small companies with nifty ideas lurk on the fringes." And from reading previous pieces by her, I know she's got more than half a clue when it comes to file-sharing.
I foresee a problem here. The song title may contain a slash or other "naughty" character that isn't whitespace. Now, on Unix file systems, the slash is the only show-stopper, but I've heard complaints from Windows users that the question mark causes tremendous grief.
Just like when you write a CGI that accepts user input from a URL, your CDDB lookup is relying on outside information. Rather than stripping out a subset of characters that you know to be undesirable (whitespace in your case), you need to take the more proactive approach -- only allow characters you know you want, and clobber all the rest.
Also for what it's worth: I prefer cdparanoia for ripping, and I'd put the encoder and its options up at the top of the script where they can be configured more easily.
I prefer HP-UX hands down to any other Unix.
I consider HP-UX to be middle-of-the-road myself. It's head and shoulders above SCO or MP-RAS, but that's not saying much. It's about on par with AIX. It can't touch Linux or *BSD in terms of features, although it's more stable on its native hardware, of course.
With HP-UX, you may pay a bit more, but almost everything you need is right there on the OS install disk.
Except for strace, and lsof, and /proc, and gzip, and ssh, and perl5, and /dev/urandom (need to install EGD), and GNU patch, and GNU diff, and GNU make, and the ANSI C compiler (costs extra, but at least you still bundle the K&R C compiler so we can build gcc), and the X11 header files and libraries, and Apache (no biggie, everyone compiles it anyway), and a web browser (c'mon, lynx would be good), and dig/host, and fmt (I had to install it from GNU textutils). I can't remember whether lex and yacc are included or whether they're part of the ANSI C compiler kit, but I'm pretty sure they're not standard either. Oh, and how about a version of whois that doesn't have nic.ddn.mil hard-coded in it?
I can understand not including things like an IRC client, a choice of window managers, etc. But by not including the X11 headers and libraries, HP makes it damned hard to compensate for that.
(All this is based on HP-UX 10.20 -- in fact, I'm typing this from an HP 9000 model 715/100 running 10.20. 9.0x is even worse. I haven't used 11.x yet.)
You don't get it! There WILL be search engines man!
There already are.
But don't take my word for it. Install Freenet and see.
Now let's say I'm the author of document #12345 and want it to be available no matter what. If I'm willing to take the risk, couldn't I hack my local server such that a copy of document #12345 is always returned, no matter what?
If you request a file, and your local Freenet node can find it, it will be cached.
Files are only discarded from the cache when they fail to be requested for a long time. There's some sort of least-recently-used algorithm, I believe. (Freenet coders, correct me if I'm wrong.)
Therefore, the obvious way to make sure your local node never forgets your one-shot static files is to keep requesting them. A daily freenet_request crontab should suffice.
Of course, if you're publishing a Freesite with a DBR (date-based redirect), then you're going to be re-inserting your (potentially modified) index pages and verifying your data files every day anyway, so it'll always be fresh on your local node. See my previous comment in this story for more details.
Does this mean you would just start over any time you wanted to change your db schema?
Is the content of freenet read only?
Data are inserted into Freenet using CHK (content hash keys). The basic unit of data is a file (of any size); when you insert a file, its hash value is computed, and that is used as an index for retrieval, as well as for encryption. Other forms of Freenet keys redirect to the CHK.
If you insert file F1 into Freenet, with CHK K1, it's there to stay. You could have a human-readable KSK that points to it (e.g., freenet:KSK@/file/F1) so that it's easier to retrieve. But there's no way to delete it.
If you modify file F1 to create file F2, and then insert it into Freenet, you end up with a new CHK K2, which is the hash of F2. But if you try to insert F2 using your old KSK (freenet:KSK@/file/F1), it won't work -- you'll get a keyspace collision.
So in short, there's no simple way to update information that's been posted to Freenet. It will eventually die out if nobody ever reads it; but in accordance with Murphy's Law, if you made an error, it will haunt you forever.
(This is not to say that it's impossible to have updated content on Freenet! It's just that you have to go through some fairly involved convolutions to do so. The most common technique in use today, AFAIK, is a date-based redirect (DBR). Essentially, there's some black magic in the Freenet client that lets a key of the form freenet:MSK@SSK@... redirect to a different key every day, or every week, or every hour, or however often you choose. Then you set up a crontab job to publish a new index of your data periodically, just before the deadline.)
How this affects FreeSQL, I couldn't say.
Location: Lorain, OH (USA)
Local telco: CenturyTel
DSL ISP: CenturyTel
Price: $40/month (USD) for residential service with 2-year commitment
Speed: 512/256 kbps
Reliability: fairly good
Does anyone have a utility to change these bits on MP3s?
MPEG-Layer 3 Bitstream Syntax and Decoding. (It's a zipped MS Word document, so break out unzip and catdoc.
If that's too heavy, here's a simpler explanation: the MP3 header is 32 bits (bit 0 through bit 31). Bit 28 is the copyright bit, and bit 29 is the original bit. You can view them with mp3info -f '%O %o' foo.mp3. You can change them with a hex editor (set the second nybble of the fourth byte to 4, assuming the emphasis bits are 00).
If you needed to read this message to learn how to do this, I strongly suggest making a backup of the file before you edit it.
Allow each song to be copied once.
How? By forcing the original copy to self-destruct?
A song could be downloaded and copied onto a mp3 player. The song on the player cannot be copied.
It can be played, though! And if it can be played, it can be copied.
The song on the hard drive cannot be copied until [...]
A song on a hard drive is a sequence of 0s and 1s. It's just a data file! Any data file can be copied, as long as there's some available room on the destination medium.
What would mess up this beautiful equation [...]
... is a good dose of ugly facts. Welcome to the real world, hope you enjoyed your stay in RIAA Fantasy Land.
setenv MAIL "xterm -e mutt"
Nice thought, but $MAIL is already used to point to your mailbox -- /var/spool/mail/username or /home/username/Maildir/ or what have you.
How about using $MUA for text MUAs like mutt, or... hmm... maybe $X11_MUA for X11-based MUAs like "xterm -e mutt"?
Am I the only person who things SSL is the most screwed up thing about this program?
No, you're not. Take a look at bug #60912 and bug #31174, for starters.
the library Mozilla uses for animated gifs is in fact called 'libpr0n'
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*pr0n*' -print[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*pron*' -print
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*porn*' -print
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*p0rn*' -print
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$
Nice thought, but please verify rumors before spreading them.
But the DEB package depends on libqt2.2-gl. I don't have the library installed, but it turns out that everything works for me.
You've misread the dependency line. It is this (adding some white space):
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.2), libjpeg62, liblcms (>= 1.06-0), libmng (>= 0.9.3-0),libpng2, libqt2.2 (>= 2:2.2.3-0.potato4) | libqt2.2-gl (>= 2:2.2.3-0.potato4), libstdc++2.10,
libz1, xlib6g (>= 3.3.6-4)
So, it depends on either libqt2.2 or libqt2.2-gl. You apparently have libqt2.2 installed.
However, it keeps slowing down itself over time until I have to exit the browser and run it again.
This is a known bug, introduced in the switch from 4.0-betaX to 5.0-betaX. Check the Linux opera newsgroup for some reports of it.
So why not bite the bullet and call it Secure EXchange (sex)? ;-)
(Yes, I know, there's already a text editor called sex ("Simple Editor for X"). It's still a fun name.)
rsh isn't a shell either. there was no "style of naming" since rsh was the only odd man out.
It doesn't matter whether it's a "shell" or not. In fact, it does follow the naming pattern of several other commands, collectively known as the "r commands" -- rlogin, rexec, rcp and rsh.
So now we have ssh (secure remote sh) and scp (secure remote cp).
I know, I wish Slashdot had the same type of WYSIWYG editor that my weblog does.
That's silly. A web site should not have its own text editor! That's the client's job, with the client in this case being the web browser.
One of my longterm mozilla wishes is to be able to edit textarea text with an external editor -- just like in every sane Unix program. Just have the user press Alt-E (or whatever), then copy the text to a temp file, invoke the user's defined editor (rxvt -e vim for me, please), and when the user saves, read the text from the file and replace what's in the textarea. What could be simpler? Why in the name of the great lizard isn't this implemented yet? (Or if it's implemented, why didn't anybody tell me? ;-) )
The Linux version of Opera is in beta, though. (And by normal definitions, it would still be a pre-beta, because it's not feature-complete.)
But I'm using it right now, and it's pretty good. The multiple window thing takes some getting used to, and there are still bugs in it (including crashing bugs), but it's far better than, say, Netscape 4.5 was.
In our ksh-happy shop, we have a lot of scripts that rely on "echo $string | read x y junk" to parse space-seperated lists, and of course these statements don't port well to Bash (you have to do a few backtick/sed operations).
Actually, you can still do it with shell builtins. Save off the current argument list ($*) if necessary, and then:
set -- $stringx=$1; shift
y=$1; shift
junk="$*"
I have to agree, though, that the ksh implementation is better.
Is that like the uni-directional bonding strip? ("Mr. Lightyear wants more tape!")
This isn't a fair use issue; the difference is the same as copying a book from a library (fair use) vs. stealing it from the bookstore (shoplifting).
That's ridiculous. If you steal a book from a bookstore, then you've denied access to that physical object to the bookstore. They can no longer sell it, because you've removed it. This is what theft is. Making a copy of something is not theft, and decrypting a transmission that you intercepted is not theft. To put it in slashdot-understandable terms: theft is like a denial of service attack for physical objects.
If I decrypt and display a videostream that is sent to me by a satellite, I haven't stolen anything. The people who pay to have this decrypted for them haven't lost their ability to use anything; the people who sent the signal haven't lose their ability to use anything; in fact, no physical objects have been affected in any way, except for those which I own.
Microsoft doesn't own your computer. They could destroy the CD you installed from since that is (supposedly) theirs but the situations are completely different.
The answer to this is still pending. UCITA was an attempt to provude companies like Microsoft with the legal right to remotely disable their software on other people's computers, in the event of lapsed contracts, unregistered copies and the like. At least one state has passed a UCITA-inspired law, but it prohibits the "self-help" (ECM) in the case of "mass-market" software. (You can only use the ECM option if you entered into a contract with the other party.)
So, to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft can't legally destroy your installed copy of Windows ME.
Yet.
When you lessen the value of something you are likewise stealing.
When Ford Motor Company started to mass-produce cars, they lessened the value of horse-drawn carriages and accessories. This was not stealing.
We are a consumer based society, and while I will scream about corporate abuse as much as anyone, in this instance we have to protect the rights of the company [...]
This is one of the most depressing things I've read so far this millennium.
A company has no right to make a profit. They especially don't have the right to make a profit by requiring people to pay them money for things that they're giving away to those people.
I know it's fairly common for people to make money this way. In NYC, at least according to some TV shows I've seen, people on the street will wash your car's windshield while you're stopped at a red light, then expect you to tip them. Human nature is such that we will feel some obligation to give these people money (for various reasons which I won't go into here). But there is no legal obligation to pay for this service, because you did not ask for it ("enter into a contract").
Now, to the best of my knowledge, DirecTV hasn't done anything wrong. But neither did the H-card hackers. Nobody was stealing here, and nobody has broken any laws that I know of (apart from the DMCA, but that's not Constitutional... it's an abomination).