I see a lot of posts complaining about how eBooks aren't so great. I've put close to $400 into eBooks in the past couple years which is a lot more than I've put into dead trees. Perhaps I can explain why.
You see, I read a lot and I go different places. 50 books is a lot to haul around if I'm not sure what I want to read next. A laptop is a lot less so. An Internet-enabled computer at the other location where I can get back to the secured section of my home page is even less cumbersome.
"Ah ha!" some of you are now saying. "Most eBooks are locked down so you can't just pick them up from the password-protected part of your web page!" Well, that was true of Barnes and Noble's offerings. That's why I spent very little money there.
I spent quite a bit of money at places like Fictionwise and Baen's webscription service. All of Baen's stuff comes wrapped in a pleasant HTML format that's easy to use. Some of Fictionwise's stuff is still locked down, but you know what? Most of that is available in the Microsoft Reader format, and the cracking program discussed on Slashdot a while ago is easy and quick to use and it does a reasonably competent job of converting to HTML.
So, while I am sorry to see Barnes and Noble drop out, I want the folks at Baen and Fictionwise to know that they can expect more cash from me. A lot more.
You don't say "no" to the customer. You simply tell the customer how much the request will cost them. In your situation, you tell them how much their department will have to contribute to your budget.
In the rare cases where the task is not just difficult but in actual fact impossible, you simply alter the description until its merely hard and then tell them how much that will cost.
The percentage is high because a lot of domain speculators park the domains on cheap out-of-the-box red hat systems. When the box is breached, so are all hundred of the domains on it. NT boxes are much more likely to be corporate web servers with only one domain on them.
This also tends to weight linux higher in the overall web server percentages.
Do you remember science class where they told you a measurement wasn't correct unless it included a +/- error estimate?
Every CD burner (like every real-world device) has a certain amount of error. The device decides to turn the laser on or off, and there is a delay before the laser turns on or off. This small delay varies with heat and other factors within the device and varies with the component tolerances from device to device.
This error rate is over time, not distance. So, if the CD is rotating slower, it doesn't move as far during the error period. This results in a burn which is closer to perfect, that is it has less error distance than a higher speed burn.
Then there is the completeness of the burn; with a brand new good quality drive it shouldn't matter, but how many of you have a brand new plextor?
And of course there's also the CD media. If you bought the 10 cent bulk discs and expected them to last, shame on you. I record at slow speed to the old dark-blue verbatims whenever I can, and after 7 years I havn't lost data yet.
I have seen this behavior on several of my systems on interfaces where I *know* the customer is not intentionally sending bad packets. I resolved the problem by disabling fair-queueing on the interfaces where this tended to happen.
a judge *could* decide linux was infringing, and that it would be illegal to use it without paying Sco royalties.
No, he couldn't. He *could* decide the Linux kernel version whatever to version whatever are infringing and that folks are enjoined from using or distributing *those versions* since the breach of SCO's IP would force the cancellation of the GPL contract on them.
After that, it becomes a cat and mouse game, with SCO trying to collect from alleged infringers, Linux authors trying to collect from SCO for infringement, etc. Meanwhile, the infriging code having necessarily been identified, its removed from Linux, a non-infringing version is released and Linux as a whole motors on.
It would, however, be wise to make sure that none of your daemons explicitly identify the Linux version you're running.
I suspect you're right, but I'm interested in whether multi-threading makes debugging enough more difficult to result in a higher defect count in the basic bugs as well.
We can't gritch about them using Apache 2.1-dev unless we have reason to believe they didn't compare againt dev versions.
Sure we can. The number of bugs in a dev version isn't an interesting metric here. The bug count in a release version is. Also, their press release not only implied that they were testing release versions, but generalized the claim to say that open source web servers had as many bugs as closed source web servers.
First, as many posters have noted, Reasoning DID NOT TEST APACHE 2.1. They tested Apache 2.1-dev. That's dev, as in development branch. As in: I have new untested code, so don't use me on a production server until I'm released in the STABLE series.
For a valid comparison versus commercial software, the testers should have used Apache 2.0.46, the most current STABLE series release.
Second, I'd be interested to see a comparison of 2.0.46 versus 1.3.27. I have a pet theory that multithreaded C code has more bugs than single-threaded C code, and I'd like to see whether there is evidence to support it.
What an astonishingly dumb idea. I can see the news story now: Software bug flies airplane to sea; 200 people die.
And what if you have an emergency and have to fly directly to the nearest airport or else die? This is a really stupid idea.
Folks, the pilot has enough trouble flying without giving the plane the power to disagree with him.
The only even vaguely sensible automation idea I've heard is a pilot panic-button which turns the autopilot on and locks the controls until a ground controller provides an override. Even that's risky.
Hormel has been remarkably tolerant of the use of their product name to refer to junk email. I think it behooves those of us fighting junk email to avoid abusing their good will.
I hope Hormel doesn't pay for their tolerance by losing their trademark they way Aspirin did.
I hate to say it (and I'll probably be called a bigot for it), but starting in Mexico and moving South the answer is: Bribe the right official. Those regulations you're talking about exist in the first place because a competitor already did.
Put together a nice sales-speak contract with a made-up flat fee. Pay the fee to the government, and pay it again to the official who has to stamp it OK. Presto, you're in business.
Not sure what all the fuss is about. eBay has never promised any sort of anonymity for sellers. Quite the contrary, they've made it clear all along that as a party to a transacion, you have a right to any contact information they possess. You need only ask for it. Extending this to law enforcement as well is not exactly big news.
Frankly, if I were in eBay's shoes, I'd do the same thing. If someone else wants to create an anonymous marketplace, let them. I'd want to cater to the folks who are above-board... If for no other reason than sellers who aren't scamming someone else are less likely to try to scam me.
Netfilter technologies (www.netfilter.net) has been doing transparent web proxying with Squid since port redirection was first introduced into Linux (was it version 2.0 in 1996 or version 1.2 in 1995? I don't remember). They modified squid to do it. The first customer it was deployed for was the Department of Veterans Affairs.
DoSed? Raspberry packets! There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry. Linus Torvalds!
That joke only made sense when it was radar JAMming. Jam. Raspberry. Get it?
You want to update it for being DoS'd you'd have to say something like "dir packets" or "C: packets."
Firewall Operator: Sir! We're being DoSed! [Screen shows directory listings] Black Hat: Dir packets! There's only one man who would dare send me Dirs! Linus Torvalds!
Redesigning Linux for use by demanding business customers "is not technologically feasible or even possible at the enterprise level without (a) a high degree of design coordination, (b) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (c) access to Unix code and development methods; (d) Unix architectural experience; and (e) a very significant financial investment," the amended suit says.
SCO: They built a better OS using so-called open source methods? Inconceivable!
IBM: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Well, I'm not in good position to judge the accuracy of the unemployment calculation. If you have details on the previous and current methodologies, perhaps you can enlighten the rest of us.
I am, however, in one of the hardest hit areas for job loss in the IT sector (Northern Virginia) and I have had friends lose their jobs here and find other work.
Just happened a couple months ago -- the company a friend was working for folded. He was a Solaris system administrator. "System Administrator" is one of the tough ones to find a job for.
My friend had a comperable job at similar pay three weeks later. He told me: the trick is don't sit around feeling sorry for yourself. Put your resume on Monster, put it on the Washington Post's job site and get your butt out of bed every morning before the recruiters get to work and change a comma or something in your entry so that it comes up fresh.
I also know a couple of hard cases who still havn't found work. They want the same $75k jobs they had, but their qualifications barely justify $50k and their work ethics are poor. They won't find another $75k job, and they'll lose it quickly if they do. And when they finally accept a $50k job, they won't be underemployed.
In the US, you own the copyright as a consequence of creating the work in the first place and can seek real damages for any infringement. However, you can only seek PUNITIVE damages if your copyright was registered at the time the infringement occurred.
Given that linux is free (as in beer) when the license is obeyed, its very unlikely that any real damages could exceed SCO's actual revenues for distributing Linux. Indeed, its unlikely they'd amount to even a small fraction of that. Punitive damages, on the other hand, can go quite high.
In practice, your only certain defense against an allegation of copying is that you havn't seen the other guy's code.
This is simply not true.
Oh no? Please offer some examples of strong defenses in the situation where it has been established that your code looks like the other guy's code, his code predated yours, and you had access to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a lot of posts complaining about how eBooks aren't so great. I've put close to $400 into eBooks in the past couple years which is a lot more than I've put into dead trees. Perhaps I can explain why.
You see, I read a lot and I go different places. 50 books is a lot to haul around if I'm not sure what I want to read next. A laptop is a lot less so. An Internet-enabled computer at the other location where I can get back to the secured section of my home page is even less cumbersome.
"Ah ha!" some of you are now saying. "Most eBooks are locked down so you can't just pick them up from the password-protected part of your web page!" Well, that was true of Barnes and Noble's offerings. That's why I spent very little money there.
I spent quite a bit of money at places like Fictionwise and Baen's webscription service. All of Baen's stuff comes wrapped in a pleasant HTML format that's easy to use. Some of Fictionwise's stuff is still locked down, but you know what? Most of that is available in the Microsoft Reader format, and the cracking program discussed on Slashdot a while ago is easy and quick to use and it does a reasonably competent job of converting to HTML.
So, while I am sorry to see Barnes and Noble drop out, I want the folks at Baen and Fictionwise to know that they can expect more cash from me. A lot more.
You don't say "no" to the customer. You simply tell the customer how much the request will cost them. In your situation, you tell them how much their department will have to contribute to your budget.
In the rare cases where the task is not just difficult but in actual fact impossible, you simply alter the description until its merely hard and then tell them how much that will cost.
The percentage is high because a lot of domain speculators park the domains on cheap out-of-the-box red hat systems. When the box is breached, so are all hundred of the domains on it. NT boxes are much more likely to be corporate web servers with only one domain on them.
This also tends to weight linux higher in the overall web server percentages.
Do you remember science class where they told you a measurement wasn't correct unless it included a +/- error estimate?
Every CD burner (like every real-world device) has a certain amount of error. The device decides to turn the laser on or off, and there is a delay before the laser turns on or off. This small delay varies with heat and other factors within the device and varies with the component tolerances from device to device.
This error rate is over time, not distance. So, if the CD is rotating slower, it doesn't move as far during the error period. This results in a burn which is closer to perfect, that is it has less error distance than a higher speed burn.
Then there is the completeness of the burn; with a brand new good quality drive it shouldn't matter, but how many of you have a brand new plextor?
And of course there's also the CD media. If you bought the 10 cent bulk discs and expected them to last, shame on you. I record at slow speed to the old dark-blue verbatims whenever I can, and after 7 years I havn't lost data yet.
The question most folks who havn't used a computer before will have is: What can I do with it an why is that better?
For the Internet part, cover things like:
Read the local newspaper
Check the weather report
Use Google to find the complaint address for the company that made your shoes
and so on
The definiton of libel is: [...] 1a. A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation.
Documents filed with the court qualify as public presentation, do they not?
BTW, libel is not a crime. Its a violation of civil law. You can be sued for libel, but you can't be fined/arrested/jailed for libel.
I have seen this behavior on several of my systems on interfaces where I *know* the customer is not intentionally sending bad packets. I resolved the problem by disabling fair-queueing on the interfaces where this tended to happen.
a judge *could* decide linux was infringing, and that it would be illegal to use it without paying Sco royalties.
No, he couldn't. He *could* decide the Linux kernel version whatever to version whatever are infringing and that folks are enjoined from using or distributing *those versions* since the breach of SCO's IP would force the cancellation of the GPL contract on them.
After that, it becomes a cat and mouse game, with SCO trying to collect from alleged infringers, Linux authors trying to collect from SCO for infringement, etc. Meanwhile, the infriging code having necessarily been identified, its removed from Linux, a non-infringing version is released and Linux as a whole motors on.
It would, however, be wise to make sure that none of your daemons explicitly identify the Linux version you're running.
I suspect you're right, but I'm interested in whether multi-threading makes debugging enough more difficult to result in a higher defect count in the basic bugs as well.
We can't gritch about them using Apache 2.1-dev unless we have reason to believe they didn't compare againt dev versions.
Sure we can. The number of bugs in a dev version isn't an interesting metric here. The bug count in a release version is. Also, their press release not only implied that they were testing release versions, but generalized the claim to say that open source web servers had as many bugs as closed source web servers.
First, as many posters have noted, Reasoning DID NOT TEST APACHE 2.1. They tested Apache 2.1-dev. That's dev, as in development branch. As in: I have new untested code, so don't use me on a production server until I'm released in the STABLE series.
For a valid comparison versus commercial software, the testers should have used Apache 2.0.46, the most current STABLE series release.
Second, I'd be interested to see a comparison of 2.0.46 versus 1.3.27. I have a pet theory that multithreaded C code has more bugs than single-threaded C code, and I'd like to see whether there is evidence to support it.
What an astonishingly dumb idea. I can see the news story now: Software bug flies airplane to sea; 200 people die.
And what if you have an emergency and have to fly directly to the nearest airport or else die? This is a really stupid idea.
Folks, the pilot has enough trouble flying without giving the plane the power to disagree with him.
The only even vaguely sensible automation idea I've heard is a pilot panic-button which turns the autopilot on and locks the controls until a ground controller provides an override. Even that's risky.
Hormel has been remarkably tolerant of the use of their product name to refer to junk email. I think it behooves those of us fighting junk email to avoid abusing their good will.
I hope Hormel doesn't pay for their tolerance by losing their trademark they way Aspirin did.
I hate to say it (and I'll probably be called a bigot for it), but starting in Mexico and moving South the answer is: Bribe the right official. Those regulations you're talking about exist in the first place because a competitor already did.
Put together a nice sales-speak contract with a made-up flat fee. Pay the fee to the government, and pay it again to the official who has to stamp it OK. Presto, you're in business.
Not sure what all the fuss is about. eBay has never promised any sort of anonymity for sellers. Quite the contrary, they've made it clear all along that as a party to a transacion, you have a right to any contact information they possess. You need only ask for it. Extending this to law enforcement as well is not exactly big news.
Frankly, if I were in eBay's shoes, I'd do the same thing. If someone else wants to create an anonymous marketplace, let them. I'd want to cater to the folks who are above-board... If for no other reason than sellers who aren't scamming someone else are less likely to try to scam me.
Netfilter technologies (www.netfilter.net) has been doing transparent web proxying with Squid since port redirection was first introduced into Linux (was it version 2.0 in 1996 or version 1.2 in 1995? I don't remember). They modified squid to do it. The first customer it was deployed for was the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Needless to say, the notion is _obvious_.
So let me see if I have the major companies' spam fighting techniques down:
Earthlink -- fighting spam with challenge/response
AOL -- fighting spam with lawsuits
MSN -- fighting spam with position papers (marketing materials)
Well, my ASUS P4C800 seems OK. Its USB 2.0 states "480 mbps" in the manual. I don't actually have USB 2.0 devices so I can't test that...
Man though, what a slimey thing to do. Why do I think some class-action lawyers are going to get rich over this?
The irony in that statement is that IE is still spoofing Mozilla:
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSN 2.5; Windows 98)"
DoSed? Raspberry packets! There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry. Linus Torvalds!
That joke only made sense when it was radar JAMming. Jam. Raspberry. Get it?
You want to update it for being DoS'd you'd have to say something like "dir packets" or "C: packets."
Firewall Operator: Sir! We're being DoSed!
[Screen shows directory listings]
Black Hat: Dir packets! There's only one man who would dare send me Dirs! Linus Torvalds!
where exactly does ICANN derive its' authority from
n n- memorandum.htm
The United States Department of Commerce
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/ica
Redesigning Linux for use by demanding business customers "is not technologically feasible or even possible at the enterprise level without (a) a high degree of design coordination, (b) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (c) access to Unix code and development methods; (d) Unix architectural experience; and (e) a very significant financial investment," the amended suit says.
SCO: They built a better OS using so-called open source methods? Inconceivable!
IBM: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
the unemployment figures are inaccurate
Well, I'm not in good position to judge the accuracy of the unemployment calculation. If you have details on the previous and current methodologies, perhaps you can enlighten the rest of us.
I am, however, in one of the hardest hit areas for job loss in the IT sector (Northern Virginia) and I have had friends lose their jobs here and find other work.
Just happened a couple months ago -- the company a friend was working for folded. He was a Solaris system administrator. "System Administrator" is one of the tough ones to find a job for.
My friend had a comperable job at similar pay three weeks later. He told me: the trick is don't sit around feeling sorry for yourself. Put your resume on Monster, put it on the Washington Post's job site and get your butt out of bed every morning before the recruiters get to work and change a comma or something in your entry so that it comes up fresh.
I also know a couple of hard cases who still havn't found work. They want the same $75k jobs they had, but their qualifications barely justify $50k and their work ethics are poor. They won't find another $75k job, and they'll lose it quickly if they do. And when they finally accept a $50k job, they won't be underemployed.
Why would they need to register it?
In the US, you own the copyright as a consequence of creating the work in the first place and can seek real damages for any infringement. However, you can only seek PUNITIVE damages if your copyright was registered at the time the infringement occurred.
Given that linux is free (as in beer) when the license is obeyed, its very unlikely that any real damages could exceed SCO's actual revenues for distributing Linux. Indeed, its unlikely they'd amount to even a small fraction of that. Punitive damages, on the other hand, can go quite high.
In practice, your only certain defense against an allegation of copying is that you havn't seen the other guy's code.
This is simply not true.
Oh no? Please offer some examples of strong defenses in the situation where it has been established that your code looks like the other guy's code, his code predated yours, and you had access to it.