That's only partially true. What you're talking about are pre-release versions of the firmware. Sveasoft has said that release versions will be available to the public completely for free. Also, the redistribution clause you're talking about is a little vague. No one "instantly loses access to future versions" as you so carelessly put it. This link helps clarify: Sveasoft Faq I suspect they don't want people redistributing the source, but pointing to Sveasoft for support issues. It's not an uncommon thing in free software...check out some of the DVD Shrink and VCD Easy support horror stories. Both of these products were included in software packages without the developers' consent, and any support issues were forwarded to the developers.
With regards to the "restrictive development model," I believe that it became a pain in the ass supporting their pre-release versions for free. People bitched about features not being available, demanded the source code to prereleases (rightly so, according to the GPL, but to hear Sveasoft talk about it, they were rude about it), and in general, were assholes about the software (it's getting pretty typical for people to be jerks about free software, while paying an arm-and-a-leg for Microsoft's software and being complacent..boggles the mind). Anyway, requiring people to pay for the binaries seems to have greatly reduced the amount of crap that goes through the forums. There's now a subscriber-only forum that has fewer demands and accusations in it. The source code is freely available to anyone who pays for the binaries, as is completely allowed by the GPL (you only have to provide the source to people you give the binaries to).
I don't think this is particularly innovative--in fact, it's the first thing my friends and I thought of when we started playing FF:CC. The main issue is the TVs, though finding the extra Gamecubes/Gameboy Players is problematic, too. If you've got them, cool. I still think that Gameboys are easier, though.
They don't need to kill Linux the hobby, they need to kill Linux the enterprise. They don't want companies choosing Linux over their product. If Windows was mandated for corporations (to use an extreme example) Microsoft would have no need to target Linux.
Pai Gow is even money, even odds, though. You can play the house rules and get those odds, or you can play your own and hope for luck. The main problem is that on wins, the house takes a cut, giving them a bit of an advantage. Sure, you can play for a long time with multiple pushes, but eventually, the house still comes out on top.
My point certainly wasn't that business majors are dumb. The point is that they TEND not to focus on the techier side of things (not that screenshots are particularly techie, but that's another argument entirely). Most of the BANA people I knew in college used computers as little as possible. They pretty much got done what they needed to get done. Office, e-mail when it was absolutely necessary (never for anything other than assignments), and web browsing for doing research. They didn't sit at a computer unless they had to, and certainly never took the time to learn the little tricks that make even Windows a decent operating environment. I could tell them how to do something, and two weeks later, they'd be calling again because they'd forgotten how to do it. Most of them were quite bright, in fact. They just chose to spend their time on something other than the computer, and thus didn't learn or remember how to do many simple tasks, such as taking a screenshot.
And at the risk of coming off as inflamatory, you seem to indicate that the techie-suit is rare, too. So while I understand your frustration at being lumped in with a bunch of non-techies, you surely must understand where the stereotype comes from.
What are you talking about? This situation is much less snake-oil than the original poster. It's not a stretch at all to think that they store the text on their server and then send an email including scripting to get that text from their server. That's really the only way I can see that you could make these claims, particularly for "every major mail reader on the market" and "including handhelds". It's actually somewhat more secure this way, too, in that if you are using a mail reader that can't execute scripts, you just can't see the email. Of course, as you point out, saving a screenshot clearly would work, even if the scripting managed to prevent highlighting the text in order to copy it. Of course, so would opening a text editor and retyping the entire message while you're looking at it. It's silly to claim that you can prevent someone from copying anything these days, but this is enough probably stop your average user from making a copy (how many business majors know that you can make a screenshot in windows?)
Yeah, but it doesn't seem like you could ever guarantee that up-front. All you could "guarantee" is that a certain percentage of the addresses are legitimate, and let's face it, if you're spamming, you probably wouldn't mind fudging on some of the other deals you're making.
About the only reason it makes sense to need confirmed e-mail addresses is if you are a) fishing by putting together common names and numbers or b) needing to reduce your bandwidth costs. With bandwidth costs decreasing as much as they have and the use of zombie machines, what's the point in testing e-mails anymore? Plus, if you use an alias that doesn't have common names, most of the spam you get is probably your own doing--signing up to sites that sell your address, posting publicly where spammers can harvest, etc. In other words, these addresses are probably fairly well confirmed anyway. "Unsubscribe-harvesting" doesn't add anything to those unscrupulous spammers (thus shouldn't add to your spam) and thus can only decrease it when legitimate spammers allow you to opt-out.
But since the OP asked for anecdotal evidence, my mom began clicking on every unsubscribe link she came across. She called me to tell me this (and I knee-jerked about what a horrible idea it was). Then she told me that her spam had decreased significantly since she'd begun unsubscribing, and.. well, I was surprised:) But there ya go.
At our local Best Buy, the people at the door pretty much only stop you if they think you're carrying something out and they didn't see you at the checkout lane. I notice this all the time.. if I'm exchanging something, frequently I'll be stopped and they look at the receipt. But if I stop at the register first because I'm also buying something else at the same time, they never stop me. I imagine it would be simple to just walk out with a hard drive or two if I bought something else, first, telling the cashier that I had made an exchange earlier (explaining the extra package that he/she isn't scanning.
Disclaimer: It's not something I'd EVER do, but it's the pattern I noticed because I do, in fact, buy a lot of shit from Best Buy (and conversely, have to exchange a lot of malfunctioning electronics)
The EULA in the envelope is not so good, but I've always wanted to try writing on a contract that they're going to have fees deducted, just to see what would happen:) If the grunt taking the order doesn't notice or thinks it's unenforceable, boy howdy won't they be surprised?
I have a friend who simply refuses to take the jump to 3-D versions of his favorite NES games, such as Zelda, Metroid, etc. Unreasonable, IMO, but some people are just not really welcome to change.
Yeah, but they could tell where the backspace was by the fact that it's held down longer than the others (if there's a click for keyup and keydown) or by the pause between the clicks. Then they could just consider clicks after the backspace. Even if you type a few characters of your real password, it won't help. abcdefg[backspace3]dcba they know where the backspace is, so they know that the last four letters are correct and 0-7 of the keys preceding the backspace are correct. Leaves exactly 8 choices.
You are a lawyer? Interesting. How'd you miss the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, then?
I believe that this is the law that most virus writers are prosecuted under. I don't see anything explicitly saying that you have to notify anyone that they can't use the computer--in fact, that it says "accessed a computer without authorization" indicates that authorization is required, and that lack of authorization is not implied consent. Now obviously you could say that accessing any webpage is usually without authorization. I do believe there to be implied authorization when someone intentionally opens up port 80, for example. However once you begin requiring a login and password, attempting to circumvent that also violates this law due to "exceeding authorized access". Most people didn't open up the port that this worm uses. Most of them didn't know it was open. Most of them probably couldn't have closed it to save their lives. And precedent goes a long way towards establishing that virus writers who abuse such holes are, indeed, liable.
It's quite likely that there are other laws covering similar material.
Actually, in many states, it's still considered burglary if you are there for the purpose of theft/murder/whatever. I believe in Texas, you can be charged and convicted with breaking and entering for such an act, even if the door is unlocked.
Exactly. What we really need is a switch on the card itself, akin to the rw/ro switch on floppy disks. That way we could turn the cards off for most activities, but turn it on just long enough for the RFID reader to scan the card. It could even probably be a small button that must be depressed to activate the card, though how that would work when the car is stuck next to my ass in my back pocket, I'm not sure. My ass seems to be good at pushing buttons, at times.
But in all seriousness, the ability to "turn off" the card would be great protection from malicious readers.
Of course, there's a lot of ATM fraud going on right now that's based on phony equipment next to legitimate equipment (sometimes housed within the same unit). Probably won't be long before there are RFID readers that hijack onto legitimate ones.
And that isn't even the end of the game! Nethack can go down lower than 50 levels, though from 30-the lowest level are extremely boring. Then you get to traverse back up:)
I thought dual-layer was around from the beginning. I would assume that the reason DVDs came out without extras originally was because the movie studios were still feeling things out. They had no idea if this crazy DVD thing was really going to take off, and they didn't want to spend a whole lot of time preparing discs that were just going to sit around in a warehouse like an old Atari ET cartridge. I mean, if you look at some of the original releases (even flippers), the quality is typically pretty poor. They didn't put a lot of effort into color correcting the films, restoring the high quality of the content. Nowadays, lousy video quality tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
Since it's BOUND to be edited for the racist remark.... Hey, I don't agree with the racism, but I like archival, too. What a quandry.
Star Trek TOS DVD Box Sets Forthcoming
Posted by simoniker on Thursday May 06, @06:36AM from the shatner's-bassoon dept. bluethundr writes "According to Trek Today: the diabolical Trek 'powers that be' have come up with yet another way to separate the hapless trekkie from his hard earned cash. The Original Series is being re-released as a Box Set. Reportedly, the sets should feature enough extras to make (they hope) the die-hard pony-up against their better judgement. They have an image of the box set on the R2 Project. One interesting aspect of this release is that the Region 2 release will package all original season eps in order of original air-date! One also has to wonder why in the world they are still refusing to offer the The Animated Series on DVD, forcing one to buy the bootlegs if you want to get your hands on a copy. Solly cholly. VHS only, as far as official release goes. TAS featured most of the original cast, many of the original writers. What's more, is that one episode was penned by another author you may have heard of in which he mingled concepts of his own distinct mythology with that of trek-lore."
The battery life on those seems to vary widely by the particular unit. It's entirely possible that the one I played with was a little lower, or that yours is a little higher. Also, constant use seems to be more of a drain... when I read on it, it was continuous. Don't know if that's how you used it. Maybe it was just a bum unit.:)
I read ebooks on a Palm IIIxe some time ago, and it worked beautifully. I recently had the chance to play with a Tungsten E, and while the screen itself was much, much nicer, the batter will be something of a problem. If it's possible to underclock, that may help somewhat, but even with the brightness turned all the way down and only using the reading software, the battery dropped to about half charge after only a couple of hours of reading. Charging up is quick, but still this is an issue for someone who really wants a portable solution. The OP needs to realize that high resolution screens are a huge drain on the batter, as is a continuous backlight. The Zire may be a better option for reading books, since I suspect you'll get more hours out of it (though I haven't seen any real numbers on the Zire yet.)
The first changes I noticed: 1) Tapping my touchpad no longer registers a mouse-click. AFAIK, this requires a change in my XF86Config file. Not sure how hard this will be to do automatically. 2) Icons in the bar at the bottom of the screen disappeared when I load my configuration from a USB drive. The configuration was created in Knoppix 3.3. 3) Hitting the Windows key pulls up the Knoppix menu. Nifty addition, is this a part of the new version of KDE? 4) Mouse sensitivity is cranked up, and took some getting used to. 5) Still no TinyFugue:(
I'll need to make sure all this is the same under 2.4, as I only tried 2.6 so far. I'm overally still satisfied, but would like my missing features back if 2.4 doesn't address it. They lost tons of space from KOffice and
Slashdot Mirror
That's only partially true. What you're talking about are pre-release versions of the firmware. Sveasoft has said that release versions will be available to the public completely for free.
Also, the redistribution clause you're talking about is a little vague. No one "instantly loses access to future versions" as you so carelessly put it. This link helps clarify:
Sveasoft Faq
I suspect they don't want people redistributing the source, but pointing to Sveasoft for support issues. It's not an uncommon thing in free software...check out some of the DVD Shrink and VCD Easy support horror stories. Both of these products were included in software packages without the developers' consent, and any support issues were forwarded to the developers.
With regards to the "restrictive development model," I believe that it became a pain in the ass supporting their pre-release versions for free. People bitched about features not being available, demanded the source code to prereleases (rightly so, according to the GPL, but to hear Sveasoft talk about it, they were rude about it), and in general, were assholes about the software (it's getting pretty typical for people to be jerks about free software, while paying an arm-and-a-leg for Microsoft's software and being complacent..boggles the mind). Anyway, requiring people to pay for the binaries seems to have greatly reduced the amount of crap that goes through the forums. There's now a subscriber-only forum that has fewer demands and accusations in it. The source code is freely available to anyone who pays for the binaries, as is completely allowed by the GPL (you only have to provide the source to people you give the binaries to).
I don't think this is particularly innovative--in fact, it's the first thing my friends and I thought of when we started playing FF:CC. The main issue is the TVs, though finding the extra Gamecubes/Gameboy Players is problematic, too. If you've got them, cool. I still think that Gameboys are easier, though.
They don't need to kill Linux the hobby, they need to kill Linux the enterprise. They don't want companies choosing Linux over their product. If Windows was mandated for corporations (to use an extreme example) Microsoft would have no need to target Linux.
Pai Gow is even money, even odds, though. You can play the house rules and get those odds, or you can play your own and hope for luck. The main problem is that on wins, the house takes a cut, giving them a bit of an advantage. Sure, you can play for a long time with multiple pushes, but eventually, the house still comes out on top.
My point certainly wasn't that business majors are dumb. The point is that they TEND not to focus on the techier side of things (not that screenshots are particularly techie, but that's another argument entirely). Most of the BANA people I knew in college used computers as little as possible. They pretty much got done what they needed to get done. Office, e-mail when it was absolutely necessary (never for anything other than assignments), and web browsing for doing research. They didn't sit at a computer unless they had to, and certainly never took the time to learn the little tricks that make even Windows a decent operating environment. I could tell them how to do something, and two weeks later, they'd be calling again because they'd forgotten how to do it. Most of them were quite bright, in fact. They just chose to spend their time on something other than the computer, and thus didn't learn or remember how to do many simple tasks, such as taking a screenshot.
And at the risk of coming off as inflamatory, you seem to indicate that the techie-suit is rare, too. So while I understand your frustration at being lumped in with a bunch of non-techies, you surely must understand where the stereotype comes from.
What are you talking about? This situation is much less snake-oil than the original poster.
It's not a stretch at all to think that they store the text on their server and then send an email including scripting to get that text from their server. That's really the only way I can see that you could make these claims, particularly for "every major mail reader on the market" and "including handhelds". It's actually somewhat more secure this way, too, in that if you are using a mail reader that can't execute scripts, you just can't see the email.
Of course, as you point out, saving a screenshot clearly would work, even if the scripting managed to prevent highlighting the text in order to copy it. Of course, so would opening a text editor and retyping the entire message while you're looking at it. It's silly to claim that you can prevent someone from copying anything these days, but this is enough probably stop your average user from making a copy (how many business majors know that you can make a screenshot in windows?)
Yeah, but it doesn't seem like you could ever guarantee that up-front. All you could "guarantee" is that a certain percentage of the addresses are legitimate, and let's face it, if you're spamming, you probably wouldn't mind fudging on some of the other deals you're making.
About the only reason it makes sense to need confirmed e-mail addresses is if you are a) fishing by putting together common names and numbers or b) needing to reduce your bandwidth costs. With bandwidth costs decreasing as much as they have and the use of zombie machines, what's the point in testing e-mails anymore? Plus, if you use an alias that doesn't have common names, most of the spam you get is probably your own doing--signing up to sites that sell your address, posting publicly where spammers can harvest, etc. In other words, these addresses are probably fairly well confirmed anyway. "Unsubscribe-harvesting" doesn't add anything to those unscrupulous spammers (thus shouldn't add to your spam) and thus can only decrease it when legitimate spammers allow you to opt-out.
.. well, I was surprised :) But there ya go.
But since the OP asked for anecdotal evidence, my mom began clicking on every unsubscribe link she came across. She called me to tell me this (and I knee-jerked about what a horrible idea it was). Then she told me that her spam had decreased significantly since she'd begun unsubscribing, and
At our local Best Buy, the people at the door pretty much only stop you if they think you're carrying something out and they didn't see you at the checkout lane. I notice this all the time.. if I'm exchanging something, frequently I'll be stopped and they look at the receipt. But if I stop at the register first because I'm also buying something else at the same time, they never stop me. I imagine it would be simple to just walk out with a hard drive or two if I bought something else, first, telling the cashier that I had made an exchange earlier (explaining the extra package that he/she isn't scanning.
Disclaimer: It's not something I'd EVER do, but it's the pattern I noticed because I do, in fact, buy a lot of shit from Best Buy (and conversely, have to exchange a lot of malfunctioning electronics)
The EULA in the envelope is not so good, but I've always wanted to try writing on a contract that they're going to have fees deducted, just to see what would happen :) If the grunt taking the order doesn't notice or thinks it's unenforceable, boy howdy won't they be surprised?
I have a friend who simply refuses to take the jump to 3-D versions of his favorite NES games, such as Zelda, Metroid, etc. Unreasonable, IMO, but some people are just not really welcome to change.
Yeah, but they could tell where the backspace was by the fact that it's held down longer than the others (if there's a click for keyup and keydown) or by the pause between the clicks. Then they could just consider clicks after the backspace.
Even if you type a few characters of your real password, it won't help.
abcdefg[backspace3]dcba
they know where the backspace is, so they know that the last four letters are correct and 0-7 of the keys preceding the backspace are correct. Leaves exactly 8 choices.
Lots of places in industry want to avoid people taking pictures of the innovation that's going on there in order to prevent espionage.
You are a lawyer? Interesting. How'd you miss the
Computer Fraud and Abuse act, then?
I believe that this is the law that most virus writers are prosecuted under. I don't see anything explicitly saying that you have to notify anyone that they can't use the computer--in fact, that it says "accessed a computer without authorization" indicates that authorization is required, and that lack of authorization is not implied consent.
Now obviously you could say that accessing any webpage is usually without authorization. I do believe there to be implied authorization when someone intentionally opens up port 80, for example. However once you begin requiring a login and password, attempting to circumvent that also violates this law due to "exceeding authorized access".
Most people didn't open up the port that this worm uses. Most of them didn't know it was open. Most of them probably couldn't have closed it to save their lives. And precedent goes a long way towards establishing that virus writers who abuse such holes are, indeed, liable.
It's quite likely that there are other laws covering similar material.
Actually, in many states, it's still considered burglary if you are there for the purpose of theft/murder/whatever. I believe in Texas, you can be charged and convicted with breaking and entering for such an act, even if the door is unlocked.
Exactly.
What we really need is a switch on the card itself, akin to the rw/ro switch on floppy disks. That way we could turn the cards off for most activities, but turn it on just long enough for the RFID reader to scan the card. It could even probably be a small button that must be depressed to activate the card, though how that would work when the car is stuck next to my ass in my back pocket, I'm not sure. My ass seems to be good at pushing buttons, at times.
But in all seriousness, the ability to "turn off" the card would be great protection from malicious readers.
Of course, there's a lot of ATM fraud going on right now that's based on phony equipment next to legitimate equipment (sometimes housed within the same unit). Probably won't be long before there are RFID readers that hijack onto legitimate ones.
Good idea!
:P)
ifconfig | mail -s YOUR LAPTOP WAS STOLEN email@isp.com
mutt
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr DE:AD:BE:AF:00:00
inet addr:192.168.0.1 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:14883222 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:6501247 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3309542786 (3.0 GiB) TX bytes:385138942 (367.2 MiB)
Base address:0xbc00 Memory:fc9e0000-fca00000
Whoo, now I can get my laptop back!
(of course, you could trace the email, but that's too easy
And that isn't even the end of the game! :)
Nethack can go down lower than 50 levels, though from 30-the lowest level are extremely boring. Then you get to traverse back up
Did you understand what "uncompressed" means?
Hopefully they will edit and post an apology, but I've seen such things flat out removed before...simply as though they hadn't happened at all.
I thought dual-layer was around from the beginning. I would assume that the reason DVDs came out without extras originally was because the movie studios were still feeling things out. They had no idea if this crazy DVD thing was really going to take off, and they didn't want to spend a whole lot of time preparing discs that were just going to sit around in a warehouse like an old Atari ET cartridge.
I mean, if you look at some of the original releases (even flippers), the quality is typically pretty poor. They didn't put a lot of effort into color correcting the films, restoring the high quality of the content. Nowadays, lousy video quality tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
Since it's BOUND to be edited for the racist remark....
Hey, I don't agree with the racism, but I like archival, too. What a quandry.
Star Trek TOS DVD Box Sets Forthcoming
Posted by simoniker on Thursday May 06, @06:36AM
from the shatner's-bassoon dept.
bluethundr writes "According to Trek Today: the diabolical Trek 'powers that be' have come up with yet another way to separate the hapless trekkie from his hard earned cash. The Original Series is being re-released as a Box Set. Reportedly, the sets should feature enough extras to make (they hope) the die-hard pony-up against their better judgement. They have an image of the box set on the R2 Project. One interesting aspect of this release is that the Region 2 release will package all original season eps in order of original air-date! One also has to wonder why in the world they are still refusing to offer the The Animated Series on DVD, forcing one to buy the bootlegs if you want to get your hands on a copy. Solly cholly. VHS only, as far as official release goes. TAS featured most of the original cast, many of the original writers. What's more, is that one episode was penned by another author you may have heard of in which he mingled concepts of his own distinct mythology with that of trek-lore."
The battery life on those seems to vary widely by the particular unit. It's entirely possible that the one I played with was a little lower, or that yours is a little higher. Also, constant use seems to be more of a drain... when I read on it, it was continuous. Don't know if that's how you used it. Maybe it was just a bum unit. :)
I read ebooks on a Palm IIIxe some time ago, and it worked beautifully. I recently had the chance to play with a Tungsten E, and while the screen itself was much, much nicer, the batter will be something of a problem. If it's possible to underclock, that may help somewhat, but even with the brightness turned all the way down and only using the reading software, the battery dropped to about half charge after only a couple of hours of reading. Charging up is quick, but still this is an issue for someone who really wants a portable solution.
The OP needs to realize that high resolution screens are a huge drain on the batter, as is a continuous backlight. The Zire may be a better option for reading books, since I suspect you'll get more hours out of it (though I haven't seen any real numbers on the Zire yet.)
The first changes I noticed: :(
1) Tapping my touchpad no longer registers a mouse-click. AFAIK, this requires a change in my XF86Config file. Not sure how hard this will be to do automatically.
2) Icons in the bar at the bottom of the screen disappeared when I load my configuration from a USB drive. The configuration was created in Knoppix 3.3.
3) Hitting the Windows key pulls up the Knoppix menu. Nifty addition, is this a part of the new version of KDE?
4) Mouse sensitivity is cranked up, and took some getting used to.
5) Still no TinyFugue
I'll need to make sure all this is the same under 2.4, as I only tried 2.6 so far. I'm overally still satisfied, but would like my missing features back if 2.4 doesn't address it.
They lost tons of space from KOffice and