Good luck with that. I installed the driver under Mandrake 7.1 and it doesn't do shit. (Always gives a "setup failed" response.) Since it's closed source I can't do anything to debug it. And since my adapter came private-labeled with my camera and has "Olympus" instead of "SmartDisk" printed on it, I can't get tech support. Not that I could anyway, since it's more than 90 days old.
Yet another product that I have to fucking load Windows to use.
IAMYOU virus sends 100,000 new bills to legislature.
Yesterday an unknown hacker used a flaw in a popular email software program to trick personal computers throughout the state into digitally signing petitions for 100,000 randomly generated laws.
The legislature has no way to determine which of the signatures were forged, but estimates that up to 95% of them may be bogus. Since there is no way to realistically debate each of the new measures, a proportional 5,000 of the bills will be randomly selected and summarily passed into law.
Although the outcome will not be known until next week, some of the new laws may include giving matching funds to bowls of hot grits running in open primaries, converting elementary school curricula to an all-haiku format, and reorganizing the the Boy Scouts of America into a beowulf cluster.
A spokesman for Microsoft denied the existence of the flaw and said a hotfix would be available sometime after the next election.
My main question is: what is the reason for filling the file with random data before creating the filesystem?
And the reason I ask is that I've just installed the international patch and started to mess around with the loopback filesystem, and I've noticed that even after the random initialization the encrypted data isn't completely random-looking.
As a simple test, I made a 1MB encrypted filesystem using the serpent cipher, and inside that I created a 900K file full of a repeating 8-byte sequence. Then I unmounted the filesystem.
The 1MB container file is compressible down to 320K by gzip. This doesn't seem right to me - shouldn't there be almost no redundancy in the encrypted file? Further investigation shows that about 930 of the 1024 1K blocks in the container occur in repeated groups of four blocks. The data inside each block are certainly scrambled beyond human recognition, but isn't this exposure of the cleartext's redundancy a sign of something wrong?
Is it my fault? I followed the encrypted loopback HOWTO to the letter. Anyone know what's up?
Who says anyone has a right to use another person's creation?
Well, the writers of the Constitution of the United States of America, that's who. "Limited times" means just what it says.
If Walt makes up a mouse, it's his to do what he wishes, including prevent others from drawing it.
Yes indeed, Walt Disney can do whatever he wishes with his mouse. Oh wait, isn't he dead? How long does he have to be in the ground before he loses control of his creation?
Walt Disney was a creator of art. The Disney Corporation is not. The Disney Corporation is a tax entity that employs creators of art. It is not a legal instrument whereby Walt Disney can reach out from the grave and control the American media in perpetuity.
Except I guess congress is trying to make it that way. Thanks, guys.
I have a Kapok laptop that's about a year and a half old, and had to get it to work with a Sony projector. Random fiddling with the modelines did not really help. What did the trick was going to Sony's web site and looking up the horizontal and vertical frequency ranges of the projector, then plugging them into the HorizSync and VertRefresh ranges in XF86Config. This doesn't seem to affect how the laptop's display looks at all, and it got the projector working. I still have to do a little magic dance by starting X in 1280x1024 mode and then kicking down to 1024*768, but it works every time.
Yeah, in January the pre-order sites were saying it would ship in February. In February they said it'd ship in March. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It's encouraging that there are people trusting enough to give their cash now in exchange for a vague promise of future delivery of a product that no one's ever actually used or even seen yet.
After shopping for over a year I just bought one of these two days ago. I'm quite happy with it so far. It uses the DiamondTron tube, which is a Trinitron with a flat face. This eliminates a lot of distortion and glare. It claims to be a 22" tube but the viewable area is 20".
I'm currently running it at 1600x1200 at 80Hz, and the text in an xterm with the "tiny" font is easily readable at normal viewing distance. The monitor could refresh even faster (100Hz at this resolution), but my Matrox Millennium can't. Likewise, 1800x1440 is readable but a little flickery at 68Hz. A newer video card would probably be awesome.
Two things made me nervous about buying. (1) The price on these larger monitors hasn't plummeted the way the 17" and 19" have, so if you want that extra couple of inches you're going to pay dearly. (2) I did a lot of reading and the general impression I got was that Iiyamas are great if you get a good one, but your chances of getting a lemon are about 1 in 10. So make sure the place you buy it from has a good return/exchange policy. If you go retail, ask them to hook it up in the store so you can check it out. (At these prices, you don't have to feel bad about making them work a little for a sale.) After the sale, Iiyama is reputed to have excellent service during the 3-year warranty period.
I don't think there's a contradiction here. We just want to preserve the right to use our eyes and brains. Our desire to be able to take a bought-and-paid-for product and look at it in any way we want to isn't so different from our desire to have our open-sourced software remain free for others to look at in any way they want.
The big sticking point about the whole DeCSS scenario is that the copyright laws are supposed to control distribution, and the MPAA wants to kill DeCSS on the grounds that it is a distribution tool. But as we see it, DeCSS is a tool for personal use of copyrighted data, not distribution. When this very same issue came up in the Universal vs. Sony case, it was ruled that VCRs were not illegal because they enabled substantial legal uses of copyrighted material that had nothing to do with distribution. Hopefully some court will rule this way again soon.
And incidentally, the whole GPL is about distribution, not use. You can do whatever you want in the privacy of your own mind - the law only kicks in when you try to pass the stuff around.
Insert the usual disclaimers about how much I love Linux and Free Software and life and liberty and blah blah blah, because I'm about to play devil's advocate...
Are you so sure that the GPL will protect us like a shiny gold shield? Suppose some giant evil corporation (sorry I can't think of an example right now) decides to take Linux, slightly mutate it, and use every mass distribution channel it controls to force it down the throats of consumers without opening the source. And when someone cries "hey you're violating the GPL!" the company says "go screw yourself."
Then it ends up in court, where the open source community's 10-million-dollar hired-gun lawyer has to go up against EvilCorp's team of a dozen 100-million-dollar lawyers. Do you think just saying "GPL" is going to mean anything? Much smaller companies have managed to lobby the U.S. Congress into turning Article 1 Sec. 8 of the Constitution on its head. A license dispute would be peanuts in comparison.
Not that any of that would kill Linux, because the freedom-loving user base is still there. But it might take the wind out of all the big-corporate hardware and software support we've recently begun enjoying. They can't bomb us back to the stone age, but they might put us back where we were four years ago.
Whatever happens in mediation, the parties still have deadlines to meet in the trial very soon. It makes sense for DOJ to be exploring all their options now, just in case mediation falls through. So I wouldn't take this as any indication of how the talks are going.
Well, this can't actually happen. MS can only terminate the license if you violate the terms of the agreement. It can't just shut you down on a whim (although if UCITA pushes through, they might get this kind of power).
So if MS shuts down overnight, we're left in a situation where millions of people are running software for which they have no vendor support. Oh wait, that's pretty much the way it is now, isn't it?
The biggest problem would be that no one else could provide the hotfixes to plug the endless stream of security holes in MS products that come to light every week. But assuming Melissa III didn't take down the nation's infrastructure, I don't think the fallout from MS's disappearance would be all that dramatic right away.
And in the long term, everyone would just migrate elsewhere. They all did it when 3.1 turned into 95, and most people are "expected" to do it again 95 turns into 2000. So without the iron fist threatening you with forced incompatibility if you go non-MS, I don't think the transition away from MS would be any more costly than the current parade of upgrades is.
The real trouble might be that if everyone switched over to [your favorite real OS], there would be so little immediate need for faster hardware that Moore's law would take a vacation for a couple of years.
If we had the wherewithal to communicate rationally with a completely alien species, wouldn't we have done it already here on earth? There are loads and loads of lifeforms around, and yet the extent of our communication with them has been domestication (with the exception of a couple of signing primates). Would aliens become our pets or our food? Would we become theirs?
Or suppose the life on planet X is intelligent but huge and slow - like million-year lifespans and taking a year just to get a word out. Would we have any incentive to talk to them? Would we even know to try?
Or will it really turn out that all intelligent life in the galaxy is just English-speaking humanoids with wrinkled noses?
The article is a little vague. Did this craft come down on water or dry land? They mention parachutes and retro-rockets and resemblance to Apollo. But the landing was within China, where I wouldn't think there'd be a large enough body of water to be safe. Anyone know?
In that case, let's abolish the government and just let Microsoft call the shots.
Your argument seems to be that Microsoft is so large, we dare not touch them with those pesky "laws" because who knows what might happen. And if their dominance subsides someday, then we should hand the reins of government over to AT&T, or Time-Warner, or Disney, because they also are so big that messing with them might destroy the economy.
I think it's a really bad idea to establish that companies over a certain size should be exempt from prosecution. With merger-mania still in full swing, particularly in telecom, there will be more of these above-the-law megacorps around. And they have more than just economic power - who do you think paid for the Telecommunications Reform Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
If the law can't be exercised for fear of upsetting the status quo, we're doomed.
By the way, Microsoft almost certainly did break the law, and not the one most people are talking about. While there is a lot of hand-wringing over whether MS abused monopoly power in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act, this article points out that meeting with Netscape to try to carve up the browser market is an extremely clear violation of section 1 of the act. Oops.
I think this is the patent in question. Graphon "acquired" it from Exodus.
From what I can see, this system turns an individual Windows app into an actual X client, as opposed to VNC which simply gives you a virtual display of the whole Windows desktop in an X-window.
Not sure about "prior art" considerations as they apply to VNC, though. The filing date on the patent is 1995.
Oh yes, Microsoft employees, although these are not political decisions, the White House will deifnitely be involved. Don't worry. Vote Democrat.
This is meaningless tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear bullshit. Gore won't want to be anywhere near the settlement talks (if there are any settlement talks), because there's no way to gain political advantage from it. He can't very well back his own administration's prosecution of Microsoft AND go to bat for them in settlement talks without the press shredding him for it. Gore's not so hard up for money that he needs Microsoft's support. He just wanted to be seen hanging out with high tech types to show how in tune he is with the new millennium.
Of course, all he said was that the White House would be involved. He didn't say which way. Nice, bland, noncommittal, non-responsive response. Perfect candidate.
I'm so intrigued by this, it's driving me insane. What could this thing do??!?! It can't be as simple as a super-fast CPU, or there'd be no need to target it specifically for mobile apps. (Except to avoid the iron fist of Intel.) Could it be mobile speech recognition? Mobile high-bandwidth satellite wireless? Mobile telekinesis? WHAT WHAT WHAT!
So what you mean is that you can't claim ownership to ideas that you present in public, only to the specific expression of those ideas.
This sounds quite similar to the argument that you can patent a particular piece of software, but not the idea of what the software does. And since I agree with this, I have to agree with you. Touche!
And now you've made me question my whole philosophy, because where speech is concerned I'd have thought there was more value worth protecting in the idea than in the words. But now, saying it to myself, that sounds spooky and totalitarian. Is the idea only valuable if it's shared?
If I speak in a public forum I give away my words to those who hear, I can't claim that I own the words...
And yet your sig says, "If you want to quote me in an article, contact me for permission". Why? How can you claim ownership of words you posted in a public forum?
I am getting more and more desensitized to companies trumpeting that the future is the Internet. I mean, DUH!
But what do such statements really mean? For Sega to concentrate on content is one thing, but what has the internet got to do with it? Two things: delivery of software, and networked gameplay.
Delivery is nothing to shout about. Packaged CD's will always be an effective distribution method for large amounts of data, and by the time the net is fast enough to make CD's seem small we'll all have those cool fluorescent multilayer disks with even more orders of magnitude of capacity. Sneakernet rules.
So that leaves networked gameplay. Will the bandwidth requirements always be reasonable? Maybe, if the net stays free. But you-know-who is buying their way into control of residential broadband access. It's already controlled by a very few cable and phone companies, and they're straining at the bit to start selling you their broadband content bundled with net access. What's to stop them from screwing up traffic on Dreamcast ports (oh, purely accidentally) and trying to sell you their games that for some reason have much better network performance? The game console manufacturers and developers have an enormous market, and there's no way that the big network powers are going to just let them keep it for themselves.
Call me paranoid, but I see all these mergers and cross-investments as steps toward turning the net into a big vending machine that will be controlled with the electro-economic equivalent of the muscle that the mobs use to use to control jukeboxes.
Intel is getting some attention from the federal antitrust people, but so far they've managed to avoid big consequences a la Microsoft. The FTC had a case against them, but they settled with a consent decree in March. Just in time not to catch heat for trying to muscle Athlon motherboards off the market, although supposedly the FTC continues to keep an eye on them. They recently won an appeal of an injunction against them in Intergraph's antitrust suit. But the actual suit hasn't come to trial yet.
Bottom line is they'll probably wriggle out of any serious consequences unless they do something really boneheaded, like falsify evidence at the trial.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another product that I have to fucking load Windows to use.
Yesterday an unknown hacker used a flaw in a popular email software program to trick personal computers throughout the state into digitally signing petitions for 100,000 randomly generated laws.
The legislature has no way to determine which of the signatures were forged, but estimates that up to 95% of them may be bogus. Since there is no way to realistically debate each of the new measures, a proportional 5,000 of the bills will be randomly selected and summarily passed into law.
Although the outcome will not be known until next week, some of the new laws may include giving matching funds to bowls of hot grits running in open primaries, converting elementary school curricula to an all-haiku format, and reorganizing the the Boy Scouts of America into a beowulf cluster.
A spokesman for Microsoft denied the existence of the flaw and said a hotfix would be available sometime after the next election.
And the reason I ask is that I've just installed the international patch and started to mess around with the loopback filesystem, and I've noticed that even after the random initialization the encrypted data isn't completely random-looking.
As a simple test, I made a 1MB encrypted filesystem using the serpent cipher, and inside that I created a 900K file full of a repeating 8-byte sequence. Then I unmounted the filesystem.
The 1MB container file is compressible down to 320K by gzip. This doesn't seem right to me - shouldn't there be almost no redundancy in the encrypted file? Further investigation shows that about 930 of the 1024 1K blocks in the container occur in repeated groups of four blocks. The data inside each block are certainly scrambled beyond human recognition, but isn't this exposure of the cleartext's redundancy a sign of something wrong?
Is it my fault? I followed the encrypted loopback HOWTO to the letter. Anyone know what's up?
Walt Disney was a creator of art. The Disney Corporation is not. The Disney Corporation is a tax entity that employs creators of art. It is not a legal instrument whereby Walt Disney can reach out from the grave and control the American media in perpetuity.
Except I guess congress is trying to make it that way. Thanks, guys.
I have a Kapok laptop that's about a year and a half old, and had to get it to work with a Sony projector. Random fiddling with the modelines did not really help. What did the trick was going to Sony's web site and looking up the horizontal and vertical frequency ranges of the projector, then plugging them into the HorizSync and VertRefresh ranges in XF86Config. This doesn't seem to affect how the laptop's display looks at all, and it got the projector working. I still have to do a little magic dance by starting X in 1280x1024 mode and then kicking down to 1024*768, but it works every time.
It's encouraging that there are people trusting enough to give their cash now in exchange for a vague promise of future delivery of a product that no one's ever actually used or even seen yet.
"Murderer's Row", 1966
I'm currently running it at 1600x1200 at 80Hz, and the text in an xterm with the "tiny" font is easily readable at normal viewing distance. The monitor could refresh even faster (100Hz at this resolution), but my Matrox Millennium can't. Likewise, 1800x1440 is readable but a little flickery at 68Hz. A newer video card would probably be awesome.
Two things made me nervous about buying. (1) The price on these larger monitors hasn't plummeted the way the 17" and 19" have, so if you want that extra couple of inches you're going to pay dearly. (2) I did a lot of reading and the general impression I got was that Iiyamas are great if you get a good one, but your chances of getting a lemon are about 1 in 10. So make sure the place you buy it from has a good return/exchange policy. If you go retail, ask them to hook it up in the store so you can check it out. (At these prices, you don't have to feel bad about making them work a little for a sale.) After the sale, Iiyama is reputed to have excellent service during the 3-year warranty period.
The big sticking point about the whole DeCSS scenario is that the copyright laws are supposed to control distribution, and the MPAA wants to kill DeCSS on the grounds that it is a distribution tool. But as we see it, DeCSS is a tool for personal use of copyrighted data, not distribution. When this very same issue came up in the Universal vs. Sony case, it was ruled that VCRs were not illegal because they enabled substantial legal uses of copyrighted material that had nothing to do with distribution. Hopefully some court will rule this way again soon.
And incidentally, the whole GPL is about distribution, not use. You can do whatever you want in the privacy of your own mind - the law only kicks in when you try to pass the stuff around.
Are you so sure that the GPL will protect us like a shiny gold shield? Suppose some giant evil corporation (sorry I can't think of an example right now) decides to take Linux, slightly mutate it, and use every mass distribution channel it controls to force it down the throats of consumers without opening the source. And when someone cries "hey you're violating the GPL!" the company says "go screw yourself."
Then it ends up in court, where the open source community's 10-million-dollar hired-gun lawyer has to go up against EvilCorp's team of a dozen 100-million-dollar lawyers. Do you think just saying "GPL" is going to mean anything? Much smaller companies have managed to lobby the U.S. Congress into turning Article 1 Sec. 8 of the Constitution on its head. A license dispute would be peanuts in comparison.
Not that any of that would kill Linux, because the freedom-loving user base is still there. But it might take the wind out of all the big-corporate hardware and software support we've recently begun enjoying. They can't bomb us back to the stone age, but they might put us back where we were four years ago.
Whatever happens in mediation, the parties still have deadlines to meet in the trial very soon. It makes sense for DOJ to be exploring all their options now, just in case mediation falls through. So I wouldn't take this as any indication of how the talks are going.
So if MS shuts down overnight, we're left in a situation where millions of people are running software for which they have no vendor support. Oh wait, that's pretty much the way it is now, isn't it?
The biggest problem would be that no one else could provide the hotfixes to plug the endless stream of security holes in MS products that come to light every week. But assuming Melissa III didn't take down the nation's infrastructure, I don't think the fallout from MS's disappearance would be all that dramatic right away.
And in the long term, everyone would just migrate elsewhere. They all did it when 3.1 turned into 95, and most people are "expected" to do it again 95 turns into 2000. So without the iron fist threatening you with forced incompatibility if you go non-MS, I don't think the transition away from MS would be any more costly than the current parade of upgrades is.
The real trouble might be that if everyone switched over to [your favorite real OS], there would be so little immediate need for faster hardware that Moore's law would take a vacation for a couple of years.
Or suppose the life on planet X is intelligent but huge and slow - like million-year lifespans and taking a year just to get a word out. Would we have any incentive to talk to them? Would we even know to try?
Or will it really turn out that all intelligent life in the galaxy is just English-speaking humanoids with wrinkled noses?
The article is a little vague. Did this craft come down on water or dry land? They mention parachutes and retro-rockets and resemblance to Apollo. But the landing was within China, where I wouldn't think there'd be a large enough body of water to be safe. Anyone know?
Not much incentive here to obey the law, is there?
Check out this article on why MS almost certainly did break the law, and not the one everyone's arguing about.
Your argument seems to be that Microsoft is so large, we dare not touch them with those pesky "laws" because who knows what might happen. And if their dominance subsides someday, then we should hand the reins of government over to AT&T, or Time-Warner, or Disney, because they also are so big that messing with them might destroy the economy.
I think it's a really bad idea to establish that companies over a certain size should be exempt from prosecution. With merger-mania still in full swing, particularly in telecom, there will be more of these above-the-law megacorps around. And they have more than just economic power - who do you think paid for the Telecommunications Reform Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
If the law can't be exercised for fear of upsetting the status quo, we're doomed.
By the way, Microsoft almost certainly did break the law, and not the one most people are talking about. While there is a lot of hand-wringing over whether MS abused monopoly power in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act, this article points out that meeting with Netscape to try to carve up the browser market is an extremely clear violation of section 1 of the act. Oops.
Shades of Fahrenheit 451 :)
From what I can see, this system turns an individual Windows app into an actual X client, as opposed to VNC which simply gives you a virtual display of the whole Windows desktop in an X-window.
Not sure about "prior art" considerations as they apply to VNC, though. The filing date on the patent is 1995.
This is meaningless tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear bullshit. Gore won't want to be anywhere near the settlement talks (if there are any settlement talks), because there's no way to gain political advantage from it. He can't very well back his own administration's prosecution of Microsoft AND go to bat for them in settlement talks without the press shredding him for it. Gore's not so hard up for money that he needs Microsoft's support. He just wanted to be seen hanging out with high tech types to show how in tune he is with the new millennium.
Of course, all he said was that the White House would be involved. He didn't say which way. Nice, bland, noncommittal, non-responsive response. Perfect candidate.
I'm so intrigued by this, it's driving me insane. What could this thing do??!?! It can't be as simple as a super-fast CPU, or there'd be no need to target it specifically for mobile apps. (Except to avoid the iron fist of Intel.) Could it be mobile speech recognition? Mobile high-bandwidth satellite wireless? Mobile telekinesis? WHAT WHAT WHAT!
This sounds quite similar to the argument that you can patent a particular piece of software, but not the idea of what the software does. And since I agree with this, I have to agree with you. Touche!
And now you've made me question my whole philosophy, because where speech is concerned I'd have thought there was more value worth protecting in the idea than in the words. But now, saying it to myself, that sounds spooky and totalitarian. Is the idea only valuable if it's shared?
Curse you for turning my mind into goo!
And yet your sig says, "If you want to quote me in an article, contact me for permission". Why? How can you claim ownership of words you posted in a public forum?
New, hip, generic term for intentional misinformation.
But what do such statements really mean? For Sega to concentrate on content is one thing, but what has the internet got to do with it? Two things: delivery of software, and networked gameplay.
Delivery is nothing to shout about. Packaged CD's will always be an effective distribution method for large amounts of data, and by the time the net is fast enough to make CD's seem small we'll all have those cool fluorescent multilayer disks with even more orders of magnitude of capacity. Sneakernet rules.
So that leaves networked gameplay. Will the bandwidth requirements always be reasonable? Maybe, if the net stays free. But you-know-who is buying their way into control of residential broadband access. It's already controlled by a very few cable and phone companies, and they're straining at the bit to start selling you their broadband content bundled with net access. What's to stop them from screwing up traffic on Dreamcast ports (oh, purely accidentally) and trying to sell you their games that for some reason have much better network performance? The game console manufacturers and developers have an enormous market, and there's no way that the big network powers are going to just let them keep it for themselves.
Call me paranoid, but I see all these mergers and cross-investments as steps toward turning the net into a big vending machine that will be controlled with the electro-economic equivalent of the muscle that the mobs use to use to control jukeboxes.
We're gonna need another revolution.
Bottom line is they'll probably wriggle out of any serious consequences unless they do something really boneheaded, like falsify evidence at the trial. :)