It would be pretty ironic if outside apps had better support for MS's old formats than Word does.
A few years ago I had several corrupted Word '97 docs. When I opened them in Word on Win95,
Word would immediately freeze or crash with an "illegal instruction" dump, or even corrupt the
OS leading to the inevitable BSOD. But in the pre-Sun StarOffice the.doc's would open perfectly,
with helpful red error messages showing exactly where the corruption was, and the rest
of the content was easily salvaged.
One thing that really PO'ed me at the time was
that when Word '97 docs were opened with older Word
versions (I forget which, but certainly the previous Mac version), there wasn't even an error message saying you
had to upgrade or something. Either you'd see garbage on the
screen or Word would freeze/crash. The shoddiness of such a design was just appalling.
It was a painful transition until everyone was
up to '97.
One thing I never understood is why exploits to
take advantage of such behavior never caught on
with the script kiddies. I guess macro viruses were just too easy, so why bother.
But if you only have 1 Box, XP+Cygwin seems a better option for now.
For simple things Cygwin is great. But not for serious work, at least on XP.
1. If you try to work with a directory with 5000 files under Cygwin
forget it. We're talking coffee-break time if you do ls -l with a wildcard.
A heavy-duty script that might run in a couple of
minutes on Linux can take hours.
2. Sometimes Windows XP will "lock" a file or directory randomly for no
apparent reason, such that if an attempt to delete/rename the file or
is made from the Windows Explorer, the error message "Cannot rename/delete
xxx - access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected."
This has been discussed endlessly in newsgroups with no apparent solution
except to reboot. And Cygwin is not immune - just today for no reason at all I got
"./subproc3.sh: cannot create 7.tmp: permission denied", causing the rest
of the script to screw up. After rebooting and spending an
hour cleaning up the damage, the identical script ran perfectly.
3. updatedb (as well as the related "find" on large directory trees) seems to occasionally
skip directories, usually at the end or the last directory. It is not repeatable.
So you can't trust it.
It seems to be yet another weird XP file system flakiness.
In short: XP (and/or Cygwin, but I suspect the former) is not
reliable for typical heavy-duty Linux-type tasks. And there's something
seriously wrong with the disk-scheduling/file system of XP when, randomly,
the disk thrashes for 2-3 minutes when all you do is click on a folder in
Windows Explorer to see its contents, before displaying said contents.
I haven't seen XP crash with a BSOD but now and
then it just becomes completely
unresponsive and/or apps start acting bizarre,
requiring a reboot. And even if it doesn't crash
it just seems to just get slower and slower and s-l-o-w-e-r
after several days of very heavy Cygwin script use until finally I reboot
in frustration.
Does this mean the Wright brothers' patent may have been invalid? Their
aggressive efforts to enforce their patent is
said to have seriously delayed development
of aviation by others up to WWI. As I understand it the government had
to step in to force them to license the patent at reasonable royalties
in WWI, and this marked the true beginning of modern aviation.
Re:Open Source is NOT the issue - it's the IMAGE
on
Largo Loving Linux
·
· Score: 2
2) The Penguin logo MUST go ASAP.
You forgot to mention the RedHat logo. Now there's a sinister, shady
character if I ever saw one. How would you like to have him poking around
inside your
network at 3am?
TMDC4 "Super Killer" is a super annoying XP killer
on
TMDC5
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I tried the TMDC4 "Super Killer" on a Windows XP (Pro) machine. I
pressed alt+enter as instructed, and the thing took over in full-screen
mode. Well, not exactly my taste. Fine. So, I assumed the following
rule (according to the contest site) was implemented: "User must be
able to quit the demo at any moment by pressing ESC". I pressed ESC.
Nothing, it just kept running. I pressed ALT+F4. Nothing, it just keep
running. I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL and nothing! It just keep running,
taking over the entire computer. Finally I just got p.o.'ed and killed
it with the power switch. After rebooting, thankfully, it was no longer running. (BTW the CTRL+ALT+DEL problem seems to be
common on this XP with other runaway apps too. It seems if an app uses
100% CPU time, the lame multitasking model never lets the Task Manager
start, or maybe it will if you wait an hour.)
If I'm an architect and design a house for you, you get to live in the
house. But if an architecture magazine publishes an article on it, I
get the royalties, not you. And it's my reputation as an architect that
is improved.
While such arrangements probably exist, I've never heard of one in my
immediate experience. I certainly have no such contract with the
architect who designed my home - he was paid for his services and I own
whatever he produced in exchange, period. Why would I decrease the
market value of my home by having to encumber a potential buyer with
legal liability if the buyer sells a photograph of the house? Or have
to worry about pictures I take of it? That's nuts.
Records, cassettes, CD's, and other music recordings come under a
general category called Sound Recordings or Phonorecords. Before 1978,
sound recordings were not protected by copyright law, but by a
hodge-podge tangle of state laws. This problem was fixed with the 1978
copyright act and extended by the 1998 twenty year copyright extension.
Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated
explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are
under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one
sentence you need to remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb:
There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain.
"If we took that
responsibility, say for a big contract at Airbus, I would have to take
out a giant insurance policy from Lloyds or another insurance broker,
and pay a giant invoice," said Mundie. "The product would then cost not
50 euros, but 50 million."
I don't know what product he's talking about, but 50 euros sounds like
it might be volume discounted Windows XP. Being conservative and
assuming the insurance company wants a 50% profit margin for taking the
risk, it seems Mundie is telling us that using Windows XP causes the
average user 25,000,000 euros of damage. Well, Microsoft would want its
50% cut too, so make that 12,500,000 euros of average damage. It still
sounds like a lot. I know several people who use Windows XP and I don't
think they've suffered that much damage yet, but I'll have to ask them.
Perhaps it's time to
Quit Slashdot.org Today! Excerpt:
I have friends who were once tremendously productive programmers, until they started reading Slashdot. Then, the endless stream of links, updated a dozen times a day no less (so you don't go once a day to get your fix; instead, you keep a window open and hit reload every twenty minutes or so), steadily seduced them, until they eventually became babbling idiots, dribbling saliva from the corners of their mouths, ranting on the forums about the relative merits of Karma Whores and Anonymous Cowards.
Thanks for this tip; yes it definitely works with this particular pdf.
Slashdot is useful after all:) But I'm almost positive I tried to
read another one with gsview and some other tools without success - unfortunately now I can't
locate that pdf, and my memory of this hurried effort has faded - but at one point in my efforts I saw a comment, in a ps
file I believe, stating exactly "Removing the following eight lines is
illegal, subject to the Digital Copyright Act of 1998" (I saved the
comment but not the file). Has anyone else ever seen this? Anyway I
gave up on all of them at that point. Are there different
versions/kinds of encryption used in pdf's?
Now I just have to convince the company's lawyers to let me install this
gsview "hacker" software on company property; perhaps they'll let me throw
in DeCSS at the same time. Barring that I can secretly use gsview at
home and claim that I manually retyped the content so as not to get the
company in trouble. Oh, I see you're from.nl so you don't have to
worry about this crap. Yet.
You try to copy a snippet from a webpage by simply moving a mouse
pointer from your desktop to your laptop, but you don't have permission
to copy the snippet from the webpage, and the copy action fails due to
DRM.
This has already happening with the State of Massachusetts
government procurements. All of their RFPs are now RC4-encrypted PDF
files that can only be viewed and printed. Random example: ftp://ftp.comm-pass.com/Data/0139400002.pdf. Try to copy a snippet
to say, comment on in an email for discussion. Or put the summary
paragraph or even the title in a spreadsheet of proposals you're
reviewing for you company. You can't. You have to manually re-type
whatever you want to extract. Perhaps they expect you to use scissors
and glue to literally cut-and-paste from a printout to your physical
wallchart of proposals under consideration? I had the unfortunate
privilege of having to review some of these and it LITERALLY DROVE ME
NUTS. And forget trying to decrypt it unless you want to incur the
wrath of the DMCA (Skylarov etc.)
Yes, friends, the office of the future is already here.
SourceSafe - Once was a reliable CLI program that ran under Unix and
allowed you to check in and out dozens of files with a simple command
line. Was bought by MS, ported to NT, lost its Unix support, and became
a bloated GUI that required literally hours (on a 33MHz machine) of
point, click, wait...wait... (and cross your fingers not to crash) to
check in 100 files one by one vs. 5 sec from the old CLI. We discovered that rebooting after checking in every dozen or so files greatly improved reliability, and I recall that our record
was checking in about 50 files in a single session without a crash.
At least that
was the case shortly after MS bought it; we scrapped it after numerous
crashes corrupted its db, and I haven't used it in years.
Many of these companies are obviously violating the GPL, but exactly
who is going to prosecute them?
Well, the copyright holder I
suppose. Heck, it actually would be kinda fun to have some multi-billion corp
(I'll mention no names...)
steal my GPL'ed stuff. Then I'd gleefully find a greedy lawyer to sue them
for megabucks and hopefully (after the contingency fee) get rich also.
Let's look at the numbers provided by the article.
There are 10000 businesses which lost $1.7M in 3.5 years, or $57 per business
per year.
The proposed systems will cost "between $2 and $40 a month to operate", or
$12 to $480 per business per year. These numbers from the proponents
are probably well on the low side - will it really cost only $12 per year
to collect customer's fingerprints? Give me a break.
$57 lost per business per year is barely a nuisance amount
and for most businesses it's covered by insurance anyway.
Around 1999 when I was first learning Samba, I made a silly newbie error
in smb.conf causing a misleading error message that lead me down a
tortuous wrong path. I was desperate to meet an internal deadline which
if missed would result in management choosing NT for our file server.
With no luck on newsgroups, I wrote the Samba team and within hours got
a personal response from "Tridge", who put it in the official FAQ that
very same day. I was amazed. And of course the error message was fixed
in the next version.
The goal: when a key is held down, auto-repeat at say 5 chars/sec.
The "correct" solution: start a 200 msec timer that triggers an
interrupt, allowing the CPU to do other things in the meantime.
The MSDOS solution: stay in an infinite loop until 200 msec is up.
I don't know about current Windows versions, but under W95 when I did a
lot of fast typing in a DOS window (under which, in pre-Cygwin days, I
had a bunch of crippled unix commands to make my use of that OS at least
semi-tolerable) it caused my laptop to get so hot the fan would turn on,
not to mention the increased battery drain. In the performance monitor
I could see the CPU usage peg at 100% when a key was held down or during
fast typing at the command line. It used like 50 million CPU clock
ticks to process one key stroke.
Oh, and about the circuit: it's not surprising a "receiver"
solution was picked. It's trivial to serially connect 3 or 4 transistor
stages to get a 10^6 gain amp that picks up any noise, whereas designing
a stable oscillator involves more sophistication.
After a table comparing the calories, carbs, and sugars to 2 decimal places,
the article goes on:
"It's also important to note where the caffiene is located in the
ingredients list. Ingredients lists are ordered from greatest content
to least content. In Vanilla Coke, caffiene is the sixth ingredient out
of eight, higher than any other soda in this roundup. For Pepsi Blue,
caffiene is seventh out of ten. Mr. Green's caffiene placement is also
seventh out of ten; it's important to note that ginseng is listed in a
lower placement than caffiene, meaning it's possibly simply an
insubstantial amount. Caffiene is the seventh ingredient out of nine in
Red Fusion."
So, the amount of caffiene is just a guessing game. But the bottom line, really,
is the amount of caffiene. This is what keeps you awake (and, some will say,
hooks you on the drink:). Is there anywhere to find out the caffeine mg per
serving, or do
we each have to pay for our own chemical assays? Why are the drink manufacturers
so reluctant or afraid to place this vital information on the label?
(On a tangential note, I once heard the Renaissance coincided with the
introduction of coffee in Europe. Can anyone confirm this?)
From the "DishPVR 721 Source Code" page:
"Do not replace or add any software to the DishPVR 721 with items
compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and
cause the unit to fail."
Well, if replacing a piece of software recompiled from the source tree causes
the unit to fail, that means the binary must not correspond to the source.
Thus the GPL'ed source must have had further, secret modifications that are not being
released. Isn't that a violation of the GPL?
Why are you putting a * in Oracle? It's supposed to be a C.
Because he would get his pants sued off if he
compared Oracle to another product, in violation of
the EULA.
Re:On a slightly related subject..
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 2
...cartoons of Tux & the BSD Daemon kicking Bill Gates ass don't really
make people believe that Linux reliable business product that it
actually is.
OTOH MS has no qualms about such depictions. According to this./ comment,
"[Microsoft] had a video intro type thing for Windows 2000 Professional
in which they had a female actress kicking the crap out of a guy in a
penguin suit with her saying, 'Still using Linux, sissy?', plus other
little gems of class and character that show Microsoft for who they
really are."
Someone founds a company called OrangeFedora whose sole purpose is to
take the RedHat distribution, s/RedHat/OrangeFedora/ and give away/sell
the binaries at a reduced cost.
Someone has already done this. Go to cheapbytes.com and look for "Pink Tie".
To summarize: Copyright infringement is not theft. Some instances of
copyright infringement cause some economic harm to rightsholders. Some
do not.
And some instances of copyright infringement cause some economic benefit
to rightsholders, by exposing the material to a wider audience who may
decide to purchase it (e.g. myself when I purchased many more obscure
CDs during the brief heyday of Napster than before or after).
Well, perhaps it's actually the entire Windows kernel core, a version of the
34-byte Universal Machine
(bloated to 48 bytes of course, in typical MS style...)
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago I had several corrupted Word '97 docs. When I opened them in Word on Win95, Word would immediately freeze or crash with an "illegal instruction" dump, or even corrupt the OS leading to the inevitable BSOD. But in the pre-Sun StarOffice the .doc's would open perfectly,
with helpful red error messages showing exactly where the corruption was, and the rest
of the content was easily salvaged.
One thing that really PO'ed me at the time was that when Word '97 docs were opened with older Word versions (I forget which, but certainly the previous Mac version), there wasn't even an error message saying you had to upgrade or something. Either you'd see garbage on the screen or Word would freeze/crash. The shoddiness of such a design was just appalling. It was a painful transition until everyone was up to '97.
One thing I never understood is why exploits to take advantage of such behavior never caught on with the script kiddies. I guess macro viruses were just too easy, so why bother.
For simple things Cygwin is great. But not for serious work, at least on XP.
1. If you try to work with a directory with 5000 files under Cygwin forget it. We're talking coffee-break time if you do ls -l with a wildcard. A heavy-duty script that might run in a couple of minutes on Linux can take hours.
2. Sometimes Windows XP will "lock" a file or directory randomly for no apparent reason, such that if an attempt to delete/rename the file or is made from the Windows Explorer, the error message "Cannot rename/delete xxx - access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected." This has been discussed endlessly in newsgroups with no apparent solution except to reboot. And Cygwin is not immune - just today for no reason at all I got "./subproc3.sh: cannot create 7.tmp: permission denied", causing the rest of the script to screw up. After rebooting and spending an hour cleaning up the damage, the identical script ran perfectly.
3. updatedb (as well as the related "find" on large directory trees) seems to occasionally skip directories, usually at the end or the last directory. It is not repeatable. So you can't trust it. It seems to be yet another weird XP file system flakiness.
In short: XP (and/or Cygwin, but I suspect the former) is not reliable for typical heavy-duty Linux-type tasks. And there's something seriously wrong with the disk-scheduling/file system of XP when, randomly, the disk thrashes for 2-3 minutes when all you do is click on a folder in Windows Explorer to see its contents, before displaying said contents. I haven't seen XP crash with a BSOD but now and then it just becomes completely unresponsive and/or apps start acting bizarre, requiring a reboot. And even if it doesn't crash it just seems to just get slower and slower and s-l-o-w-e-r after several days of very heavy Cygwin script use until finally I reboot in frustration.
Does this mean the Wright brothers' patent may have been invalid? Their aggressive efforts to enforce their patent is said to have seriously delayed development of aviation by others up to WWI. As I understand it the government had to step in to force them to license the patent at reasonable royalties in WWI, and this marked the true beginning of modern aviation.
You forgot to mention the RedHat logo. Now there's a sinister, shady character if I ever saw one. How would you like to have him poking around inside your network at 3am?
I tried the TMDC4 "Super Killer" on a Windows XP (Pro) machine. I pressed alt+enter as instructed, and the thing took over in full-screen mode. Well, not exactly my taste. Fine. So, I assumed the following rule (according to the contest site) was implemented: "User must be able to quit the demo at any moment by pressing ESC". I pressed ESC. Nothing, it just kept running. I pressed ALT+F4. Nothing, it just keep running. I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL and nothing! It just keep running, taking over the entire computer. Finally I just got p.o.'ed and killed it with the power switch. After rebooting, thankfully, it was no longer running. (BTW the CTRL+ALT+DEL problem seems to be common on this XP with other runaway apps too. It seems if an app uses 100% CPU time, the lame multitasking model never lets the Task Manager start, or maybe it will if you wait an hour.)
While such arrangements probably exist, I've never heard of one in my immediate experience. I certainly have no such contract with the architect who designed my home - he was paid for his services and I own whatever he produced in exchange, period. Why would I decrease the market value of my home by having to encumber a potential buyer with legal liability if the buyer sells a photograph of the house? Or have to worry about pictures I take of it? That's nuts.
Unfortunately you are wrong. From Music Recordings and Public Domain Music:
Records, cassettes, CD's, and other music recordings come under a general category called Sound Recordings or Phonorecords. Before 1978, sound recordings were not protected by copyright law, but by a hodge-podge tangle of state laws. This problem was fixed with the 1978 copyright act and extended by the 1998 twenty year copyright extension. Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb: There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain.
I don't know what product he's talking about, but 50 euros sounds like it might be volume discounted Windows XP. Being conservative and assuming the insurance company wants a 50% profit margin for taking the risk, it seems Mundie is telling us that using Windows XP causes the average user 25,000,000 euros of damage. Well, Microsoft would want its 50% cut too, so make that 12,500,000 euros of average damage. It still sounds like a lot. I know several people who use Windows XP and I don't think they've suffered that much damage yet, but I'll have to ask them.
Perhaps it's time to Quit Slashdot.org Today! Excerpt: I have friends who were once tremendously productive programmers, until they started reading Slashdot. Then, the endless stream of links, updated a dozen times a day no less (so you don't go once a day to get your fix; instead, you keep a window open and hit reload every twenty minutes or so), steadily seduced them, until they eventually became babbling idiots, dribbling saliva from the corners of their mouths, ranting on the forums about the relative merits of Karma Whores and Anonymous Cowards.
Now I just have to convince the company's lawyers to let me install this gsview "hacker" software on company property; perhaps they'll let me throw in DeCSS at the same time. Barring that I can secretly use gsview at home and claim that I manually retyped the content so as not to get the company in trouble. Oh, I see you're from .nl so you don't have to
worry about this crap. Yet.
This has already happening with the State of Massachusetts government procurements. All of their RFPs are now RC4-encrypted PDF files that can only be viewed and printed. Random example: ftp://ftp.comm-pass.com/Data/0139400002.pdf. Try to copy a snippet to say, comment on in an email for discussion. Or put the summary paragraph or even the title in a spreadsheet of proposals you're reviewing for you company. You can't. You have to manually re-type whatever you want to extract. Perhaps they expect you to use scissors and glue to literally cut-and-paste from a printout to your physical wallchart of proposals under consideration? I had the unfortunate privilege of having to review some of these and it LITERALLY DROVE ME NUTS. And forget trying to decrypt it unless you want to incur the wrath of the DMCA (Skylarov etc.)
Yes, friends, the office of the future is already here.
SourceSafe - Once was a reliable CLI program that ran under Unix and allowed you to check in and out dozens of files with a simple command line. Was bought by MS, ported to NT, lost its Unix support, and became a bloated GUI that required literally hours (on a 33MHz machine) of point, click, wait...wait... (and cross your fingers not to crash) to check in 100 files one by one vs. 5 sec from the old CLI. We discovered that rebooting after checking in every dozen or so files greatly improved reliability, and I recall that our record was checking in about 50 files in a single session without a crash. At least that was the case shortly after MS bought it; we scrapped it after numerous crashes corrupted its db, and I haven't used it in years.
So, the next step is to manufacture CDs with copy prevent^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprotection using these tokens. (Sigh.)
Well, the copyright holder I suppose. Heck, it actually would be kinda fun to have some multi-billion corp (I'll mention no names...) steal my GPL'ed stuff. Then I'd gleefully find a greedy lawyer to sue them for megabucks and hopefully (after the contingency fee) get rich also.
There are 10000 businesses which lost $1.7M in 3.5 years, or $57 per business per year.
The proposed systems will cost "between $2 and $40 a month to operate", or $12 to $480 per business per year. These numbers from the proponents are probably well on the low side - will it really cost only $12 per year to collect customer's fingerprints? Give me a break.
$57 lost per business per year is barely a nuisance amount and for most businesses it's covered by insurance anyway.
Around 1999 when I was first learning Samba, I made a silly newbie error in smb.conf causing a misleading error message that lead me down a tortuous wrong path. I was desperate to meet an internal deadline which if missed would result in management choosing NT for our file server. With no luck on newsgroups, I wrote the Samba team and within hours got a personal response from "Tridge", who put it in the official FAQ that very same day. I was amazed. And of course the error message was fixed in the next version.
The "correct" solution: start a 200 msec timer that triggers an interrupt, allowing the CPU to do other things in the meantime.
The MSDOS solution: stay in an infinite loop until 200 msec is up. I don't know about current Windows versions, but under W95 when I did a lot of fast typing in a DOS window (under which, in pre-Cygwin days, I had a bunch of crippled unix commands to make my use of that OS at least semi-tolerable) it caused my laptop to get so hot the fan would turn on, not to mention the increased battery drain. In the performance monitor I could see the CPU usage peg at 100% when a key was held down or during fast typing at the command line. It used like 50 million CPU clock ticks to process one key stroke.
Oh, and about the circuit: it's not surprising a "receiver" solution was picked. It's trivial to serially connect 3 or 4 transistor stages to get a 10^6 gain amp that picks up any noise, whereas designing a stable oscillator involves more sophistication.
"It's also important to note where the caffiene is located in the ingredients list. Ingredients lists are ordered from greatest content to least content. In Vanilla Coke, caffiene is the sixth ingredient out of eight, higher than any other soda in this roundup. For Pepsi Blue, caffiene is seventh out of ten. Mr. Green's caffiene placement is also seventh out of ten; it's important to note that ginseng is listed in a lower placement than caffiene, meaning it's possibly simply an insubstantial amount. Caffiene is the seventh ingredient out of nine in Red Fusion."
So, the amount of caffiene is just a guessing game. But the bottom line, really, is the amount of caffiene. This is what keeps you awake (and, some will say, hooks you on the drink :). Is there anywhere to find out the caffeine mg per
serving, or do
we each have to pay for our own chemical assays? Why are the drink manufacturers
so reluctant or afraid to place this vital information on the label?
(On a tangential note, I once heard the Renaissance coincided with the introduction of coffee in Europe. Can anyone confirm this?)
Well, if replacing a piece of software recompiled from the source tree causes the unit to fail, that means the binary must not correspond to the source. Thus the GPL'ed source must have had further, secret modifications that are not being released. Isn't that a violation of the GPL?
Because he would get his pants sued off if he compared Oracle to another product, in violation of the EULA.
OTOH MS has no qualms about such depictions. According to this ./ comment,
Someone has already done this. Go to cheapbytes.com and look for "Pink Tie".
And some instances of copyright infringement cause some economic benefit to rightsholders, by exposing the material to a wider audience who may decide to purchase it (e.g. myself when I purchased many more obscure CDs during the brief heyday of Napster than before or after).
Do you think your office would have approved this patent (approved April 9, 2002)?
Well, perhaps it's actually the entire Windows kernel core, a version of the 34-byte Universal Machine (bloated to 48 bytes of course, in typical MS style...)