PHYSICS Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [REFERENCE: "Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth," Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]
What do they mean "cannot not or should not be reproduced"?!!!!!! I'll run this experiment every chance I (URP!) get...
In the same vein, I'm tempted to do something like this...
Dear PetsWarehouseSupplier Inc.:
Hello. I would like to tell you that one of your dealers, namely PetsWarehouse.com, is costing you business.
Mr. Novak, the proprieter of said business, is in my humble opinion more about litigation against paying customers than about providing a proper venue for distributing your fine products to the public. Customers who complained publicly to others when they received poor customer service from his web based business, are being sued for $15,000,000.
Unfortunately for you, your product is prominetely displayed on the homepage of PetsWarehouse.com. As such, I conclude that you are sympathetic to Mr. Novaks lawsuits, which in my opinion are frivilous and only intended to stifle free speech and the exchange of opinions. I refuse to support any business which holds this view, so I will, in the future, refrain from purchasing any product from you, your subsidiaries or any other company affiliated with your products.
Thank you for your time,
Signed
A Former Potential Customer.
About the same as you suggest, just approaching the problem from the other end.
Mutually Assured Destruction, détente, whatever you want to cal it - the whole idea is to fight fire with fire, until everyone gets too tired or too scared to fight that way, and agrees to drop the flame throwers and talk reasonably about the issue.
``If this bill were to pass, it would render ineffective, worthless and useless any protection measure we would have in place to protect a $100 million movie,'' Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said of the Lofgren bill. ``You could download a million movies a day, and no penalty for it.''
*Wipes tears of laughter form eyes*
Hehe, that was worth it. Jack getting bashed with the clue stick right across the forehead.
THAT was entertainment at it's finest, and is definately worth paying for. Do I make my cheque out to Rep. Boucher now? (I hope he doesn't mind $CDN...)
My local radio station got a hold of the "new" Nirvana song on the 'net and were playing it on air. They were served a "cease and desist" letter from Universal Music, which they read on the air to explain why they wouldn't play it any more until Universal said it would be OK to do so. Seems to me that radio and the RIAA have a love/hate relationship.
Actually, the station is rather cool with the sharing thing as can be seen by this page.
I know it was November 1998 when I created my account - so you were definately before then. I signed up right after the Halloween documents were released by ESR. IIRC, it was a story about those documents on one of the IDC websites that provided the link to/. I've been around here ever since.
At the time, those documents shook me - made me doubt that Microsoft was less about technology and more about business. To be honest, at first I was all fire and brimstone about how "You Linux guys have such a superiority complex!". However, the seeds of doubt were still germinated by the discussions I read on/. I learned that there were definite reasons why one would use a system not controlled by a single entity, and came to realise the truth that any business interest, left to it's own devices, is devoid of some of the best human qualities - charity, altruism and community. Then Microsoft pulled WinNT support for my beloved Alphas, and I was a convert. (Linux on Alphas still rocks, BTW.) Since then, I have learned that business is not necessarily about better technology, it is all about the bottom line. I am not a socialist, but it still makes me weep to see people look up to a company, rather than an individual, as thier chosen hero and role model.
Anyways, thanks all of you low UIDers for hanging around, and to Rob for providing a site to do so.
Soko
P.S. - Anyone hear from Signal11 lately?;-)
Re:Journalism has never been a hard science.
on
Servers with a Smile
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Batter up...
Lack of offical support,
Right. RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and others will be happy to take your money for them to supply 24X7 support for thier distro. Oh, and support from newsgroups and Linux specific message boards are usually just as fast and thourough as any tech support dept. I've ever called.
Swing and a miss - Strike 1.
culpability,
Ha! Have you read any EULA included with "expensive software built by huge companies staffed by thousands of tech support folks"? EULAs exist to make sure you don't sue that same company if the software you buy from them blows your business to smithereens. "Sorry, Mr. Customer. Guess you shouldn't of bought the line from the Marketing Dept. Or (heh) our software package..."
Swung at a ball in the dirt, Strike 2!!
insuring[sic] that the software company will be there to lean on when things go wrong.
No, not lean on. Call and give more $$$ to so they can fix the problem with thier software, or tell you how to use thier crappy UI. They sold you a defective product, and you have to pay more for a correct product. IMHO, they're leaning on you, as in "Vinnie, I needs youse to lean on dis stooge 'til he gives us da dough..."
Strike 3!!! Batter out!
Software Libre _is_ good - read the article.
"It's a sea change," says Bridget O'Connor, a top technology executive at Lehman Brothers. "Now I can play all the vendors off against each other to get the price I want. I never had that negotiating power when all my machines came from Sun."
Power in the customers hands, not the vendors. Competition based on technical merit and value. That's what Free means, bud - freedom to choose. Spin that to the execs next time they ask.
CowManNeal's (DADATADADA!!!) Special Power will be:
( ) Able to eat an entire 16" pizza in a single bite ( ) Able to crack any DRM protection scheme with a Comodore64 ( ) Ability to vapourise any small server on the internet with a single URL ( ) Control the minds of a band of geeks with a single Poll ( ) Finally make little CowBoyNeals, since he's now a man..;-)
Actually, your father and colleagues were correct - Palladium would enable such a thing as stopping people from forwarding and copying e-mail. Possibly good - possibly.
You really should remind these people that there is no free lunch - they will get, they'll also give. Palladium all on it's own will not discriminate who can use the technology to protect whatever digital things they want. Criminals would have thier e-mails protected just like any upstanding citizen, (Hope Dad's not a Soprano type;-]) as would other un-savoury factions of society. It would make it harder to obtain and gather evidence against purveyours of child-porn, for instance, since they could protect thier communications as well as thier illicit files. Want to forward the hate-mail you got from the KKK member in the office to your boss or the cops? Nope, sorry, too bad, it's Pd protected. Nope, can't print it either! Now what?
If they then counter "Well the government/FBI/SomeAuthority will have the keys...", you can explain that Pd isn't much good to begin with then. This isn't FUD, it's truth. It's also a way to show that Pd isn't "good", it's just technology which can only be alligned to the purpose of it's user - which is where the good or evil truly lies.
Sometimes file copying is good. Where and when this is true takes good, running wetware to figure out properly.
That's helpdesk work, not system administration. If your job consists mostly of that, then I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're not a sysadmin.
Hunh? You sure about that?
You'd likely be correct if you're speaking of a big company, but your blanket statemnet is way off base. Smaller shops usually have an IT person or two, who do everything from architect systems to answer any and all tech support/help desk calls. If the servers, WAN, LAN and Internet pipe are all humming along - IOW, he's done the job of sysadmin well - the only thing left to screw up his day would be the users. ("Nawww!" sighs the audience, sarcasticly) Since small shops don't make a habit of getting new stuff in on a regular basis, there's not much else to do but tech support. To boot, once a company exec (owner, partner, CEO, whatever) knows you're good at fixing his screw ups, no matter the size of the company, they'll call you, no matter your job title. I've been there, and I know how he feels.
I'd ditch the elistist attitude, bud - anyone who keeps a companies IT infrastructure running is a Sysadmin. If you think about it, diversifying your knowledge, as well as you expectations, are the best way to keep yourself employed when there's people who are writing systems that want to make your job redundant.
Their technology section is showing some Slashdot stories too (sweet!).
What if Google links to this story? Then you get the Slashdot slashdotting Google, who will slashdot Slashdot, who will bounce it to Google, who will bounce it back to Slashdot, who will retur*Runtime error: Endless recursive loop encountered, stack overflow. Brain dump follows.*
Heh. Bandwidth firefights - this oughta be cool. Nifty setup indeed!
Anyway, seeing as this little guy can effectively extract all data coming from a copy protected device, I guess Palladium type systems are already in-effective. Contraband code? So what - it's already out there.
I would guess that this is a method for creating what is effectively a wrapper for the DVD driver, perhaps more correctly a shim. This means that it appears to be a DVD drive to the OS, and a DVD player program to the drive. This method can be employed to any hardware device - even embedded DRM methods. It may take a while, but it can be done. If hardware needs software to run, that hardware can be emulated with software, period.
The proponents of DRM might eventually come to realise this - if it's an idea, it's hard to keep it in a can. Good ideas are impossible to keep under wraps. To them I say:
The Genie is out of the bottle boys, but it grants wishes to anyone, not just you. Deal with it.
Now I can keep my pesky roommates out of my palms oh-so-full social calendar.
You mean right now you let *your* palm *date* your friends? Ewww....
Re:Were is my pointy-horned cap?
on
UT2003 LiveCD
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree that Windows users won't actively seek out this - especially if they're happy with thier current OS.
However, this can be the coup-de-grace for the people who are merely curious about Linux, even more so to those who are considering a switch. Observe:
WindowsUser: Y'know, I'd like to try that Linux thing but I don't want to hose my Windows machine.
LinuxAdvocate: No problem. Here's a Gentoo Linux 1.4 CD. You boot from it and it creates a temporary but fully working Linux system. You have an NVIDIA card, so you're good to go.
WindowsUser: It won't hose my system?
LinuxAdvocate: Not at all. It won't even look at your disk unless you tell it to.
WindowsUser: Hmmmmmm - OK, lemme plug it in and re-boot.
(Many minutes of playing with Linux)
WindowsUser: Seems stable and fast. It's alot like Windows, too. Not bad. What about games?
LinuxAdvocate: *ShitEatingGrin* Have I got a treat for you....
It's a marketing tool. UT2003 is just a way to draw the bees to the honey. Besides, it'd be cool to carry around your UT2003 environment wherever you go...
i didn't realize we were overdue for yet another "speed of like broken" article submission.
Ah, like, doooood, like, it's physics we're like talkin' about here, like y'know, not like your trip to the like bar where you were like refused by like 20 wimminz. Get it like right, doooood - that's the speed of dis-like anyways.:-p
and all I have to say is: AAGGHHHHHH my eyes, they burn!!!
I can't wait for a day when I can walk down the street, and have every business within 1 mile try and push advertising onto my devices.
Then stop using IE and switch to Mozilla, silly!:-)
Really - there has never been a better case made for Embedded Linux than this - we can keep out spam by auditing and checking for ourselves that "The SPAM Channel" has been turned off, or that you only recieve stuff from sources you trust (how hard can an access list be?), not those embeded by a Palladium type system. Think about that before you buy that Palm or Casio PDA.
Right. The quote I'm thinking of goes something like this....
"When you make something idiot-proof, the world just makes a better idiot".
Newbies will _find_ a way to hose thier machine, even with UML. You can bet on it. Me, I'm hoping I, er, they still can - there's no better way to learn how stuff _really_ works than by fixing it after you've "Blowed it up rreeaaaalll goooood!"
The article gives the cost of one of these (material costs) at about $80. So, retail would they go for about $150?
A 100% markup on material costs is not uncommon. But, don't forget labour, management, facilities, profit, etc., etc. have to be covered by the price as well. $150 would be optimistic, IMHO. Try $250
Ummmm...that was the point of my post. WEP is more or less just a padlock - it only really keeps out the curious. Someone looking for access won't have much trouble getting past that. In order to dead-bolt the access, the wireless access points should be on the untrusted side of a firewall, with VPN access for authorised machines.
I wish I _could_ find out if it's still wide open - I'm a ways away in Hamilton right now. And one does not just "go to Toronto" on a whim - the gridlock is viscious, so I'll rely on others to find out and post what they saw.:)
Queens Park (look on north portion of the map) is the seat of the Ontario Provincial Legislature, not an open, green space. This means that there are (or were) 2 open, non WEP (like that mattered) access points within the government offices. I really, really hope these are isolated from the internal network via firewalls - I don't want all of the info that the Ontario Government has on it's citizens (like me and my family) being broadcast for anyone to see/save/use.
Actually, the interaction of the ocean and land generates wind quite frequently.
The land tends to be warmer than the ocean during the day, so an on-shore breeze is generated (air warmed by the land rises, air from the ocean rushes in to replace it). The opposite effect is seen when the land cools off in the evening - an off shore breeze is generated.
Since Denmark is surrounded by ocean on 3 sides, one could assume that they have an abundance of breeze to make this work. I wish them success.
Slashdot Mirror
PHYSICS
Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [REFERENCE: "Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth," Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]
What do they mean "cannot not or should not be reproduced"?!!!!!! I'll run this experiment every chance I (URP!) get...
Soko
In the same vein, I'm tempted to do something like this...
Dear PetsWarehouseSupplier Inc.:
Hello. I would like to tell you that one of your dealers, namely PetsWarehouse.com, is costing you business.
Mr. Novak, the proprieter of said business, is in my humble opinion more about litigation against paying customers than about providing a proper venue for distributing your fine products to the public. Customers who complained publicly to others when they received poor customer service from his web based business, are being sued for $15,000,000.
Unfortunately for you, your product is prominetely displayed on the homepage of PetsWarehouse.com. As such, I conclude that you are sympathetic to Mr. Novaks lawsuits, which in my opinion are frivilous and only intended to stifle free speech and the exchange of opinions. I refuse to support any business which holds this view, so I will, in the future, refrain from purchasing any product from you, your subsidiaries or any other company affiliated with your products.
Thank you for your time,
Signed
A Former Potential Customer.
About the same as you suggest, just approaching the problem from the other end.
Soko
Mutually Assured Destruction, détente, whatever you want to cal it - the whole idea is to fight fire with fire, until everyone gets too tired or too scared to fight that way, and agrees to drop the flame throwers and talk reasonably about the issue.
It does make sense to me.
Soko
``If this bill were to pass, it would render ineffective, worthless and useless any protection measure we would have in place to protect a $100 million movie,'' Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said of the Lofgren bill. ``You could download a million movies a day, and no penalty for it.''
*Wipes tears of laughter form eyes*
Hehe, that was worth it. Jack getting bashed with the clue stick right across the forehead.
THAT was entertainment at it's finest, and is definately worth paying for. Do I make my cheque out to Rep. Boucher now? (I hope he doesn't mind $CDN...)
Soko
Hey, don't laugh.
My local radio station got a hold of the "new" Nirvana song on the 'net and were playing it on air. They were served a "cease and desist" letter from Universal Music, which they read on the air to explain why they wouldn't play it any more until Universal said it would be OK to do so. Seems to me that radio and the RIAA have a love/hate relationship.
Actually, the station is rather cool with the sharing thing as can be seen by this page.
Soko
What did you say??? I can't hear you with all my disks spun up.
What about damned limes???? Death of information on no ice? Hunh??
Please repeat, and this time SPEAK LOUDER, PLEASE!!!
Soko
I know it was November 1998 when I created my account - so you were definately before then. I signed up right after the Halloween documents were released by ESR. IIRC, it was a story about those documents on one of the IDC websites that provided the link to /. I've been around here ever since.
/. I learned that there were definite reasons why one would use a system not controlled by a single entity, and came to realise the truth that any business interest, left to it's own devices, is devoid of some of the best human qualities - charity, altruism and community. Then Microsoft pulled WinNT support for my beloved Alphas, and I was a convert. (Linux on Alphas still rocks, BTW.) Since then, I have learned that business is not necessarily about better technology, it is all about the bottom line. I am not a socialist, but it still makes me weep to see people look up to a company, rather than an individual, as thier chosen hero and role model.
;-)
At the time, those documents shook me - made me doubt that Microsoft was less about technology and more about business. To be honest, at first I was all fire and brimstone about how "You Linux guys have such a superiority complex!". However, the seeds of doubt were still germinated by the discussions I read on
Anyways, thanks all of you low UIDers for hanging around, and to Rob for providing a site to do so.
Soko
P.S. - Anyone hear from Signal11 lately?
Batter up...
Lack of offical support,
Right. RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and others will be happy to take your money for them to supply 24X7 support for thier distro. Oh, and support from newsgroups and Linux specific message boards are usually just as fast and thourough as any tech support dept. I've ever called.
Swing and a miss - Strike 1.
culpability,
Ha! Have you read any EULA included with "expensive software built by huge companies staffed by thousands of tech support folks"? EULAs exist to make sure you don't sue that same company if the software you buy from them blows your business to smithereens. "Sorry, Mr. Customer. Guess you shouldn't of bought the line from the Marketing Dept. Or (heh) our software package..."
Swung at a ball in the dirt, Strike 2!!
insuring[sic] that the software company will be there to lean on when things go wrong.
No, not lean on. Call and give more $$$ to so they can fix the problem with thier software, or tell you how to use thier crappy UI. They sold you a defective product, and you have to pay more for a correct product. IMHO, they're leaning on you, as in "Vinnie, I needs youse to lean on dis stooge 'til he gives us da dough..."
Strike 3!!! Batter out!
Software Libre _is_ good - read the article.
"It's a sea change," says Bridget O'Connor, a top technology executive at Lehman Brothers. "Now I can play all the vendors off against each other to get the price I want. I never had that negotiating power when all my machines came from Sun."
Power in the customers hands, not the vendors. Competition based on technical merit and value. That's what Free means, bud - freedom to choose. Spin that to the execs next time they ask.
Soko
New poll:
;-)
CowManNeal's (DADATADADA!!!) Special Power will be:
( ) Able to eat an entire 16" pizza in a single bite
( ) Able to crack any DRM protection scheme with a Comodore64
( ) Ability to vapourise any small server on the internet with a single URL
( ) Control the minds of a band of geeks with a single Poll
( ) Finally make little CowBoyNeals, since he's now a man..
Soko
Kroupware is a catchy name, but I wonder if the KDE team is aware of the English word croup.
;-)
Hmmmmm.....
A viral disease, often caused by..
Well, it _is_ supposed to be an Outlook replacement, isn't it?
Soko
Actually, your father and colleagues were correct - Palladium would enable such a thing as stopping people from forwarding and copying e-mail. Possibly good - possibly.
;-]) as would other un-savoury factions of society. It would make it harder to obtain and gather evidence against purveyours of child-porn, for instance, since they could protect thier communications as well as thier illicit files. Want to forward the hate-mail you got from the KKK member in the office to your boss or the cops? Nope, sorry, too bad, it's Pd protected. Nope, can't print it either! Now what?
You really should remind these people that there is no free lunch - they will get, they'll also give. Palladium all on it's own will not discriminate who can use the technology to protect whatever digital things they want. Criminals would have thier e-mails protected just like any upstanding citizen, (Hope Dad's not a Soprano type
If they then counter "Well the government/FBI/SomeAuthority will have the keys...", you can explain that Pd isn't much good to begin with then. This isn't FUD, it's truth. It's also a way to show that Pd isn't "good", it's just technology which can only be alligned to the purpose of it's user - which is where the good or evil truly lies.
Sometimes file copying is good. Where and when this is true takes good, running wetware to figure out properly.
Soko
That's helpdesk work, not system administration. If your job consists mostly of that, then I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're not a sysadmin.
Hunh? You sure about that?
You'd likely be correct if you're speaking of a big company, but your blanket statemnet is way off base. Smaller shops usually have an IT person or two, who do everything from architect systems to answer any and all tech support/help desk calls. If the servers, WAN, LAN and Internet pipe are all humming along - IOW, he's done the job of sysadmin well - the only thing left to screw up his day would be the users. ("Nawww!" sighs the audience, sarcasticly) Since small shops don't make a habit of getting new stuff in on a regular basis, there's not much else to do but tech support. To boot, once a company exec (owner, partner, CEO, whatever) knows you're good at fixing his screw ups, no matter the size of the company, they'll call you, no matter your job title. I've been there, and I know how he feels.
I'd ditch the elistist attitude, bud - anyone who keeps a companies IT infrastructure running is a Sysadmin. If you think about it, diversifying your knowledge, as well as you expectations, are the best way to keep yourself employed when there's people who are writing systems that want to make your job redundant.
Soko
Here's the low latency patch for that, by the way. Might bring down the ping times. ;-)
Soko
Their technology section is showing some Slashdot stories too (sweet!).
What if Google links to this story? Then you get the Slashdot slashdotting Google, who will slashdot Slashdot, who will bounce it to Google, who will bounce it back to Slashdot, who will retur*Runtime error: Endless recursive loop encountered, stack overflow. Brain dump follows.*
Heh. Bandwidth firefights - this oughta be cool. Nifty setup indeed!
Soko
Google Cache here. Poor little server.
Anyway, seeing as this little guy can effectively extract all data coming from a copy protected device, I guess Palladium type systems are already in-effective. Contraband code? So what - it's already out there.
I would guess that this is a method for creating what is effectively a wrapper for the DVD driver, perhaps more correctly a shim. This means that it appears to be a DVD drive to the OS, and a DVD player program to the drive. This method can be employed to any hardware device - even embedded DRM methods. It may take a while, but it can be done. If hardware needs software to run, that hardware can be emulated with software, period.
The proponents of DRM might eventually come to realise this - if it's an idea, it's hard to keep it in a can. Good ideas are impossible to keep under wraps. To them I say:
The Genie is out of the bottle boys, but it grants wishes to anyone, not just you. Deal with it.
Soko
Now I can keep my pesky roommates out of my palms oh-so-full social calendar.
You mean right now you let *your* palm *date* your friends? Ewww....
However, this can be the coup-de-grace for the people who are merely curious about Linux, even more so to those who are considering a switch. Observe:
It's a marketing tool. UT2003 is just a way to draw the bees to the honey. Besides, it'd be cool to carry around your UT2003 environment wherever you go...
Soko
i didn't realize we were overdue for yet another "speed of like broken" article submission.
:-p
Ah, like, doooood, like, it's physics we're like talkin' about here, like y'know, not like your trip to the like bar where you were like refused by like 20 wimminz. Get it like right, doooood - that's the speed of dis-like anyways.
Soko
and all I have to say is:
:-)
AAGGHHHHHH my eyes, they burn!!!
I can't wait for a day when I can walk down the street, and have every business within 1 mile try and push advertising onto my devices.
Then stop using IE and switch to Mozilla, silly!
Really - there has never been a better case made for Embedded Linux than this - we can keep out spam by auditing and checking for ourselves that "The SPAM Channel" has been turned off, or that you only recieve stuff from sources you trust (how hard can an access list be?), not those embeded by a Palladium type system. Think about that before you buy that Palm or Casio PDA.
Soko
Right. The quote I'm thinking of goes something like this....
"When you make something idiot-proof, the world just makes a better idiot".
Newbies will _find_ a way to hose thier machine, even with UML. You can bet on it. Me, I'm hoping I, er, they still can - there's no better way to learn how stuff _really_ works than by fixing it after you've "Blowed it up rreeaaaalll goooood!"
Soko
The article gives the cost of one of these (material costs) at about $80. So, retail would they go for about $150?
A 100% markup on material costs is not uncommon. But, don't forget labour, management, facilities, profit, etc., etc. have to be covered by the price as well. $150 would be optimistic, IMHO. Try $250
Soko
Ummmm...that was the point of my post. WEP is more or less just a padlock - it only really keeps out the curious. Someone looking for access won't have much trouble getting past that. In order to dead-bolt the access, the wireless access points should be on the untrusted side of a firewall, with VPN access for authorised machines.
:)
I wish I _could_ find out if it's still wide open - I'm a ways away in Hamilton right now. And one does not just "go to Toronto" on a whim - the gridlock is viscious, so I'll rely on others to find out and post what they saw.
Soko
Queens Park (look on north portion of the map) is the seat of the Ontario Provincial Legislature, not an open, green space. This means that there are (or were) 2 open, non WEP (like that mattered) access points within the government offices. I really, really hope these are isolated from the internal network via firewalls - I don't want all of the info that the Ontario Government has on it's citizens (like me and my family) being broadcast for anyone to see/save/use.
Soko
It will be great for the desktop to compete with Windows whom has always been naked. (Maybe that's Red Hats secret Plan).
Well, the latest RedHat beta is now called "null", so you never know...
Soko
Actually, the interaction of the ocean and land generates wind quite frequently.
The land tends to be warmer than the ocean during the day, so an on-shore breeze is generated (air warmed by the land rises, air from the ocean rushes in to replace it). The opposite effect is seen when the land cools off in the evening - an off shore breeze is generated.
Since Denmark is surrounded by ocean on 3 sides, one could assume that they have an abundance of breeze to make this work. I wish them success.
Soko