I bet one of them is AutoZone. SCO is pissed that AutoZone switched from SCO Unix to Linux, and claims that couldn't have been done without violating their IP. The meat of their argument is on groklaw here (Supplemental #8), and if you scroll down you can see some AutoZone employees refute the argument. Search for the comment by 'jbgreer'.
Can Debian or any other distro do a chroot install like Gentoo? I don't really like compiling everything, but it was really nice to be able to drop the tarball in a chroot folder on a running system and do the complete install from there.
Why would I have to use my ISPs email address? My ISPs mailserver relays for me because I'm on their network (and/or use SMTP AUTH), so there's no reason why they can't verify that they did in fact relay my message. Why does this have to be tied to whether or not I use my own email domain?
From the article, I gathered that there IS no single source-code representation of the compiled binary which would be readable. The binary code modifies itself as it runs to produce the correct interpreted instructions. If you decompiled it, you would get the source code for a self-modifying program.
Of course there's still the original source code, so there IS a representation which will run in a straightforward manner. But just because that 'cleartext' version exists doesn't mean you can easily generate it from the obfuscated version. Effectively they've found an encryption technique which requires a compiler to decode, as it runs.
SpamAssassin does this. They use a genetic algorithm to calculate the best weights to give all of the tests they have, where 'best' = least false positives and most accurate positives (on their 'standard' spam/ham corpus).
These problems are not because of the browser identification string. They're HTML or JavaScript issues.
Opera makes it easier than any other browser to change the browser id. You can even do it with a hotkey. One thing I wish is that I could configure it to always identify on IE for certain sites, and otherwise as Opera. I can leave it set to identify as IE, but I don't like to think that webmasters will look at logs and think that everyone still uses IE.
You've got a solution, and a problem, so now you just have to find more than ten people who actually HAVE that problem on a regular enough basis to be worth developing it.
Shouldn't it be pretty easy to make your own live distro? Has anyone come up with a tool which takes a root filesystem (< 650MB) and creates a bootable ISO? My server root filesystem (excluding/home) would probably fit onto a CD with some tweaking. It would make an amazing backup and recovery CD.
Do any of these live distros use compression? It would seem to me that the CD could have the kernel and an initrd which decompressed (on-the-fly?) the remainder of the CD. This might not work for 'generic' live CDs, but in my case, it could be configured to use a spare partition on my HD.
You could almost build a meta-distribution around this: build an initial copy of the distro on your HD (with/home and maybe/var on another partition), then burn it to CD. From then on, you always boot off the CD, which overwrites the HD partition. If you make changes to the HD partition that you want to keep, you re-burn the CD.
It wouldn't necessarily have to decompress / copy the entire CD at bootup, either. If the HD partition were really just a large enough swap partition, then the CD data could be mmap'd and mounted to ramdisk partitions (cramfs?), and paged in/out from the swap partition as necessary.
How about the Pac-Man, Frogger, and Qbert watches? I remember borrowing a friend's in 1st grade and getting some really high score, and then not being believed...
I seriously doubt it. By all copyright laws, Zahn would own the copyright to every word that ever comes from his pen. He is not allowed to distribute a work which is derived from Star Wars without Lucas's approval, but unless Zahn specifically assigned copyright, he maintains it.
And in the analogy, Zahn would be granted a 'perpetual and irrevocable right' to distribute works based on the Star Wars universe.
This makes it clear that SCO is not talking about old code. They aren't claiming that IBM put ancient SysV code into Linux. They're claiming that they own code that IBM wrote and they never saw (and don't have a copy of).
If they were saying that AT&T gave IBM the Unix source, and SCO inherited the Unix source, and IBM put the Unix source into Linux, then SCO would have a copy of the source of the infringement. If SCO doesn't have a copy, then that's a damn good sign that they never owned it.
Clearly their interpretation is that anything IBM ever wrote related to UNIX is covered by their new UNIX copyright.
Does George Lucas own the copyright to every Star Wars book ever published--say, the Timothy Zahn trilogy?
How do I get a virtual host to automatically redirect to a different virtual host and path? I want 'http://mail.foo.bar' to redirect to 'http://www.foo.bar/horde/imp/login.php'. I couldn't figure out how to do this...
EULAs have never really been tested in court, and generally when confronted with violating them, people will back down. Until the stakes get high enough, the threat of a lawsuit is usually enough.
But when the stakes DO get high enough, there is a world of difference between a license which has been found valid by a judge, and one which has not. Because the potential payoff is high enough for SCO, they are willing to go up against the GPL.
Of course, even a judge's decision doesn't mean someone won't re-argue the same thing a decade later, and possibly even win...
On Windows, you can move the open file to another directory on the same filesystem and put the new file in the original location. When the file is closed, you can then delete it.
This isn't as good as Unix, I agree, but it's not terribly difficult either.
That slowdown has been causing me to pull out my hair for many months on my laptop. I use right-click all of the time, and for quite a while I had five-second delays before the popup menu would appear. Many thanks!
To anyone else: if you don't use IE, but do use right-click menus in Explorer, I would recommend disabling the crl option.
In a related note: does anyone know why deleting a single file sometimes takes thirty to sixty seconds? It's obviously not disk-io time. Does it have to do with the Recycle Bin, or is NTFS updating weird indexes?
I believe that Intel already has an agreement to use AMD's x86-64 instruction set, if they choose to. I don't know what the licensing terms were, and of course, Intel is free to develop their own extensions. But as another poster said, Microsoft would be very unhappy with that.
Are you free to benchmark the single existing complete implementation of the CLR?
Were you free to benchmark the initial complete implementation of the JVM?
Did you know that you are not allowed to use Visual Studio to develop a word processor? Nor are you allowed to use FrontPage or InterDev to create web pages which criticise Microsoft.
I'll take Sun's 'free' over Microsoft's 'free' in this case.
I agree. Their backpack bags are absolutely great for carrying heavy laptops (for me, Inspiron 8000). They're expensive, but I'm planning on keeping the bag a lot longer than my current laptop.
Remember, the point of anti-spam measures is not to stop all spam completely. The point is to make spam as expensive as other means of marketing such as direct-mail, telemarketing, and fax blasting. Lawsuits can go a long way towards this.
Microsoft is correct. If they don't release something completely revolutionary and successful, they're going to fade into irrelevance. Whether or not Longhorn will be what they need it to be is another question. At least they have the balls to put their eggs in the long-term basket, unlike for example Sun, who just wants to insist that their past superiority will carry them forever.
The DMCA applies to anything a lawyer says it applies to. If I say you're infringing my copyright rights, you pretty much have to stop until you can prove in court otherwise. Which means that whatever you're doing has to be worth proving in court otherwise, and I can make the cost of doing so extremely high if I'm willing to spend the money.
Clarke mentions that the term 'boot' came from 'kicking recalcitrant computers'. I'm pretty sure that it was more related to 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps', because in a sense starting a computer has to overcome some chicken-and-egg problems to get itself going.
Regardless, it was an interesting article. As a (slightly recovered) sci-fi fan, I've found that Clarke's books are still deeply engaging for me, when quite a few of the other authors I used to read have grown a bit tired. _Imperial Earth_ and _Rendezvous with Rama_ are probably my favorite hard sci-fi novels of all time, and his work on the movie version of _2001_ shouldn't be discounted.
He has such a great style to his writing; he makes predictions seem very natural. I think he's mastered the art, more than any other writer, of dropping slight predictions into science fiction. In one book, he mentions that a character watched "Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, much of the Disnet canon, Oliver's Hamlet, Ray's Pather Panchali, Kubrick's Napoleon Bonaparte, Zymanowski's Moby Dick, and many other old masterpieces..."
I love the progression of the sequence... (Kubrick never actually made Napoleon Bonaparte, but had planned on doing so.)
...if as he says, it's optional. I have no problem with an online music distributor requiring me to play its music files on a computer secured this way. I may choose to not do business with them, but at least it's my own choice. This is basically what DRM wants, and I don't see a problem with it.
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I bet one of them is AutoZone. SCO is pissed that AutoZone switched from SCO Unix to Linux, and claims that couldn't have been done without violating their IP. The meat of their argument is on groklaw here (Supplemental #8), and if you scroll down you can see some AutoZone employees refute the argument. Search for the comment by 'jbgreer'.
Can Debian or any other distro do a chroot install like Gentoo? I don't really like compiling everything, but it was really nice to be able to drop the tarball in a chroot folder on a running system and do the complete install from there.
Why would I have to use my ISPs email address? My ISPs mailserver relays for me because I'm on their network (and/or use SMTP AUTH), so there's no reason why they can't verify that they did in fact relay my message. Why does this have to be tied to whether or not I use my own email domain?
From the article, I gathered that there IS no single source-code representation of the compiled binary which would be readable. The binary code modifies itself as it runs to produce the correct interpreted instructions. If you decompiled it, you would get the source code for a self-modifying program.
Of course there's still the original source code, so there IS a representation which will run in a straightforward manner. But just because that 'cleartext' version exists doesn't mean you can easily generate it from the obfuscated version. Effectively they've found an encryption technique which requires a compiler to decode, as it runs.
SpamAssassin does this. They use a genetic algorithm to calculate the best weights to give all of the tests they have, where 'best' = least false positives and most accurate positives (on their 'standard' spam/ham corpus).
These problems are not because of the browser identification string. They're HTML or JavaScript issues.
Opera makes it easier than any other browser to change the browser id. You can even do it with a hotkey. One thing I wish is that I could configure it to always identify on IE for certain sites, and otherwise as Opera. I can leave it set to identify as IE, but I don't like to think that webmasters will look at logs and think that everyone still uses IE.
You've got a solution, and a problem, so now you just have to find more than ten people who actually HAVE that problem on a regular enough basis to be worth developing it.
Were the Ataris actually backwards compatible? I had a 5200 but I never thought I could play 2600 games.
Shouldn't it be pretty easy to make your own live distro? Has anyone come up with a tool which takes a root filesystem (< 650MB) and creates a bootable ISO? My server root filesystem (excluding /home) would probably fit onto a CD with some tweaking. It would make an amazing backup and recovery CD.
/home and maybe /var on another partition), then burn it to CD. From then on, you always boot off the CD, which overwrites the HD partition. If you make changes to the HD partition that you want to keep, you re-burn the CD.
Do any of these live distros use compression? It would seem to me that the CD could have the kernel and an initrd which decompressed (on-the-fly?) the remainder of the CD. This might not work for 'generic' live CDs, but in my case, it could be configured to use a spare partition on my HD.
You could almost build a meta-distribution around this: build an initial copy of the distro on your HD (with
It wouldn't necessarily have to decompress / copy the entire CD at bootup, either. If the HD partition were really just a large enough swap partition, then the CD data could be mmap'd and mounted to ramdisk partitions (cramfs?), and paged in/out from the swap partition as necessary.
How about the Pac-Man, Frogger, and Qbert watches? I remember borrowing a friend's in 1st grade and getting some really high score, and then not being believed...
I seriously doubt it. By all copyright laws, Zahn would own the copyright to every word that ever comes from his pen. He is not allowed to distribute a work which is derived from Star Wars without Lucas's approval, but unless Zahn specifically assigned copyright, he maintains it.
And in the analogy, Zahn would be granted a 'perpetual and irrevocable right' to distribute works based on the Star Wars universe.
This makes it clear that SCO is not talking about old code. They aren't claiming that IBM put ancient SysV code into Linux. They're claiming that they own code that IBM wrote and they never saw (and don't have a copy of).
If they were saying that AT&T gave IBM the Unix source, and SCO inherited the Unix source, and IBM put the Unix source into Linux, then SCO would have a copy of the source of the infringement. If SCO doesn't have a copy, then that's a damn good sign that they never owned it.
Clearly their interpretation is that anything IBM ever wrote related to UNIX is covered by their new UNIX copyright.
Does George Lucas own the copyright to every Star Wars book ever published--say, the Timothy Zahn trilogy?
How do I get a virtual host to automatically redirect to a different virtual host and path? I want 'http://mail.foo.bar' to redirect to 'http://www.foo.bar/horde/imp/login.php'. I couldn't figure out how to do this...
EULAs have never really been tested in court, and generally when confronted with violating them, people will back down. Until the stakes get high enough, the threat of a lawsuit is usually enough.
But when the stakes DO get high enough, there is a world of difference between a license which has been found valid by a judge, and one which has not. Because the potential payoff is high enough for SCO, they are willing to go up against the GPL.
Of course, even a judge's decision doesn't mean someone won't re-argue the same thing a decade later, and possibly even win...
On Windows, you can move the open file to another directory on the same filesystem and put the new file in the original location. When the file is closed, you can then delete it.
This isn't as good as Unix, I agree, but it's not terribly difficult either.
That slowdown has been causing me to pull out my hair for many months on my laptop. I use right-click all of the time, and for quite a while I had five-second delays before the popup menu would appear. Many thanks!
To anyone else: if you don't use IE, but do use right-click menus in Explorer, I would recommend disabling the crl option.
In a related note: does anyone know why deleting a single file sometimes takes thirty to sixty seconds? It's obviously not disk-io time. Does it have to do with the Recycle Bin, or is NTFS updating weird indexes?
That's good...for me personally (about average), that works out to about 26GB.
I believe that Intel already has an agreement to use AMD's x86-64 instruction set, if they choose to. I don't know what the licensing terms were, and of course, Intel is free to develop their own extensions. But as another poster said, Microsoft would be very unhappy with that.
Are you free to benchmark the single existing complete implementation of the CLR?
Were you free to benchmark the initial complete implementation of the JVM?
Did you know that you are not allowed to use Visual Studio to develop a word processor? Nor are you allowed to use FrontPage or InterDev to create web pages which criticise Microsoft.
I'll take Sun's 'free' over Microsoft's 'free' in this case.
I agree. Their backpack bags are absolutely great for carrying heavy laptops (for me, Inspiron 8000). They're expensive, but I'm planning on keeping the bag a lot longer than my current laptop.
Remember, the point of anti-spam measures is not to stop all spam completely. The point is to make spam as expensive as other means of marketing such as direct-mail, telemarketing, and fax blasting. Lawsuits can go a long way towards this.
Microsoft is correct. If they don't release something completely revolutionary and successful, they're going to fade into irrelevance. Whether or not Longhorn will be what they need it to be is another question. At least they have the balls to put their eggs in the long-term basket, unlike for example Sun, who just wants to insist that their past superiority will carry them forever.
The DMCA applies to anything a lawyer says it applies to. If I say you're infringing my copyright rights, you pretty much have to stop until you can prove in court otherwise. Which means that whatever you're doing has to be worth proving in court otherwise, and I can make the cost of doing so extremely high if I'm willing to spend the money.
Clarke mentions that the term 'boot' came from 'kicking recalcitrant computers'. I'm pretty sure that it was more related to 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps', because in a sense starting a computer has to overcome some chicken-and-egg problems to get itself going.
Regardless, it was an interesting article. As a (slightly recovered) sci-fi fan, I've found that Clarke's books are still deeply engaging for me, when quite a few of the other authors I used to read have grown a bit tired. _Imperial Earth_ and _Rendezvous with Rama_ are probably my favorite hard sci-fi novels of all time, and his work on the movie version of _2001_ shouldn't be discounted.
He has such a great style to his writing; he makes predictions seem very natural. I think he's mastered the art, more than any other writer, of dropping slight predictions into science fiction. In one book, he mentions that a character watched "Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, much of the Disnet canon, Oliver's Hamlet, Ray's Pather Panchali, Kubrick's Napoleon Bonaparte, Zymanowski's Moby Dick, and many other old masterpieces..."
I love the progression of the sequence... (Kubrick never actually made Napoleon Bonaparte, but had planned on doing so.)
...if as he says, it's optional. I have no problem with an online music distributor requiring me to play its music files on a computer secured this way. I may choose to not do business with them, but at least it's my own choice. This is basically what DRM wants, and I don't see a problem with it.