I hear there is a plan to seal London's roads this weekend, so come Monday we will no longer be driving around on mud tracks like everyone else outside the US does.
I used to think that a few trusted CAs were a more scalable solution than relying on your own web of contacts to verify the identity of someone on the other side of the world.
But browsers these days ship with over 100 CA certificates pre-installed and pre-trusted. Around 20% of the certificates have already expired before the latest version of the browsers were released, so it is obvious that the browser manufacturers are not checking the certificates they include with the close eye that one might expect.
A couple of years back, I tried clicking on the button IE provides for getting information about the issuing policies of the CAs. Out of the 100 CA certificates, 95 had the button grayed out; I was told by someone knowledgeable about such things that the official way of finding out the policy was to look at the VWXYZ (I don't remember the actual obscure name) field of the certificate, then decode its value using some secret algorithm to find out the URL to get the details from. So of the 5 CAs that consider their issuing policies to be relevant for us mere users, 3 of the links were 404. One other was a link to a file in Microsoft DOC format, with all its risks of virus carrying and non-portability. I have no idea what that document said, as I do not open DOC files I have obtained over the internet.
I now run my browser with no CA certificates installed. I get a lot of dialogues popping up, but it means I have complete control over who I trust.
Two years ago, on a worldwide basis, how many blank cassette tapes were sold for every CD sold? How many now? If blank cassette tapes, floppy disks and CDRs are combined, has the total ratio of sales of blank media to copyrighted media really changed over the years?
MS were shipping Mobile IE (as opposed to its big brother Pocket IE) over two years ago. It too handles HTML (with horiz scrolling on poorly designed pages though), although it often runs my little Sony CMD-Z5 out of RAM trying to display large GIFs.
When I worked in the access control field a few years ago, it was common knowledge that biometric devices are nowhere near good enough for identification purposes.
Used for authentication though, they are fine if calibrated properly. ie: I scan my machine readable passport that says I'm Jason Rumney, then I use the biometric device to prove I am who I say I am. The possibility of someone else looking more like me than me is not important in this case.
Let ME show you what a Windows install is REALLY like:
When I installed Windows XP home upgrade edition, here's what happened: I inserted the CD, set the BIOS to boot off CD. The installer offered me the option to first clean my system of Windows ME, which I did, since it was a new PC with nothing on there I wanted to keep, and prefered to use NTFS rather than FAT32. Following that, it refused to install, because I didn't have a Microsoft Operating System installed on the PC. So I got out the "System Recovery CD" that shipped with my PC. The installer did not recognize that as a valid Microsoft OS. Luckily I had a Mandrake DVD lying around, and haven't looked back after the flawless install. It detected every piece of hardware, including my aging but still healthy "Windows only" inkjet printer, for which only Windows 95 and 98 drivers are officially available. Try to get that sucker working under XP.
MS's own JVM works flawlessly on every web site I've ever visited which required Java. Joe Average Consumer doesn't care who wrote it or or even what it is, as long as it works.
Of course client side Java works flawlessly on the JVM that is installed on 80% of desktops, it is written to target that JVM. If you did any Java development you would realise what a pain in the arse it is having to support these old JVMs when the API has improved so drastically since then.
The option that is open to Microsoft is to ship Sun's, IBM's, or anyone else's JVM. The only things they are prevented from doing are further developing their own incompatible JVM, and continuing to ship their existing out of date one past some date (which must be getting close now).
Maybe your books just aren't interesting and therefore don't sell well. Just a theory.
It wasn't so funny when the same comment was made about your own books, was it? I feel rather flattered that you've been wasting your moderation points marking thirteen day old on topic comments as trolls though.
Re:Saw something similar about EULAs in general
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Although, if you decide you won't use any of the additional rights the GPL grants, are you still bound by it if you, say, bought a RedHat package full of GNU software? You're paying to use it, right?
The GPL doesn't restrict your use of the software. So you are free to use the software whether you agree with the GPL or not. It is only when you distribute GPLed code that you agree to be bound by its terms.
If your book was rated highly by readers, why are you so worried about second-hand copies undermining the sales of new ones? Surely if your readers like the book, they will keep it, more so if the book is of minority interest. I was not accusing you of writing bad books, just wondering why you see this as a threat.
Is it just a coincidence that this comes less than a week after MS starts trumpeting about how they've spent the last two and a half months doing security audits of their code?
Being an author myself, I can sympathize with the Author's Guild. I spent a great deal of time on my book and just barely made any money off of it to begin with. Had Amazon had this at the time my book came out, I may have never made a dime.
Why? Was your book so bad, that anyone who bought it wanted to sell it again straight away?
This would be great.I'm nowhere near the skills to implement SAMBA in Windoze, but if you have the expertise, why not set up a poroject in sourceforge to port SAMBA to Win32???
You don't have the skills, I don't have the time.
Besides, sourceforge is evil.
I'm sure a Cygwin port would be possible, perhaps even trivial. The difficult part would be disabling the built in Windows SMB support, but I think Samba can be made to run on non-standard ports if this proves impossible.
Many years ago I began an OS/2 port of Samba (since SMB support was not included in the base OS/2 2.1 installation and my employer was migrating everyone to Windows 95 and didn't want to spend money upgrading those of us who chose to stick with OS/2). It was not particularly difficult to port, although Samba has no doubt grown in size since then. AFAIK it is still being maintained by someone else, so could provide some useful tips to someone wanting to do a Windows port.
You missed the word OTHER in there. Even the GPL does not require that OTHER software distributed with the GPLed software be GPLed. If it weren't for the explicit inclusion of GPL and LGPL in there, that clause would not apply to them. I have seen free(beer)ware licenses in the past that forbade distribution on compilation CDROMs that also contained non-free(beer) software. But those sort of licenses are pretty rare these days.
I have to wonder how legal it is for a convicted monopoly to include anti-competitive clauses such as this in their licenses.
I think this belongs with the post RIAA can blame congress on this one...
CD sales are up in the UK because the UK music industry has not yet reached the depths of blandness that their US counterparts have. Not for lack of trying though.
The only major problem I've seen is that the same classloader gets reused for different applets. Besides being a major security flaw, sooner or later you hit an applet that uses the same class name as one you previously ran, and things get screwed. I think if this one got fixed, things would work a lot more smoothly.
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I hear there is a plan to seal London's roads this weekend, so come Monday we will no longer be driving around on mud tracks like everyone else outside the US does.
Was the Slapper worm developed by a disgruntled Microsoft employee, and unleashed from within Microsoft?
But browsers these days ship with over 100 CA certificates pre-installed and pre-trusted. Around 20% of the certificates have already expired before the latest version of the browsers were released, so it is obvious that the browser manufacturers are not checking the certificates they include with the close eye that one might expect.
A couple of years back, I tried clicking on the button IE provides for getting information about the issuing policies of the CAs. Out of the 100 CA certificates, 95 had the button grayed out; I was told by someone knowledgeable about such things that the official way of finding out the policy was to look at the VWXYZ (I don't remember the actual obscure name) field of the certificate, then decode its value using some secret algorithm to find out the URL to get the details from. So of the 5 CAs that consider their issuing policies to be relevant for us mere users, 3 of the links were 404. One other was a link to a file in Microsoft DOC format, with all its risks of virus carrying and non-portability. I have no idea what that document said, as I do not open DOC files I have obtained over the internet.
I now run my browser with no CA certificates installed. I get a lot of dialogues popping up, but it means I have complete control over who I trust.
The forth movie in the trilogy would be "Cowboy Neal".
In other words, prices per unit rose by 1.6%. Are we surprised that sales fall after a price increase?
Two years ago, on a worldwide basis, how many blank cassette tapes were sold for every CD sold? How many now? If blank cassette tapes, floppy disks and CDRs are combined, has the total ratio of sales of blank media to copyrighted media really changed over the years?
Is the letter available in MS Word format, so we can see who really wrote it?
MS were shipping Mobile IE (as opposed to its big brother Pocket IE) over two years ago. It too handles HTML (with horiz scrolling on poorly designed pages though), although it often runs my little Sony CMD-Z5 out of RAM trying to display large GIFs.
In fact, sometimes Windows NT even ran for 49.7 days!!!
When I worked in the access control field a few years ago, it was common knowledge that biometric devices are nowhere near good enough for identification purposes.
Used for authentication though, they are fine if calibrated properly. ie: I scan my machine readable passport that says I'm Jason Rumney, then I use the biometric device to prove I am who I say I am. The possibility of someone else looking more like me than me is not important in this case.
When I installed Windows XP home upgrade edition, here's what happened: I inserted the CD, set the BIOS to boot off CD. The installer offered me the option to first clean my system of Windows ME, which I did, since it was a new PC with nothing on there I wanted to keep, and prefered to use NTFS rather than FAT32. Following that, it refused to install, because I didn't have a Microsoft Operating System installed on the PC. So I got out the "System Recovery CD" that shipped with my PC. The installer did not recognize that as a valid Microsoft OS. Luckily I had a Mandrake DVD lying around, and haven't looked back after the flawless install. It detected every piece of hardware, including my aging but still healthy "Windows only" inkjet printer, for which only Windows 95 and 98 drivers are officially available. Try to get that sucker working under XP.
You shouldn't have to be a specialist to use a version control system.
The option that is open to Microsoft is to ship Sun's, IBM's, or anyone else's JVM. The only things they are prevented from doing are further developing their own incompatible JVM, and continuing to ship their existing out of date one past some date (which must be getting close now).
It wasn't so funny when the same comment was made about your own books, was it? I feel rather flattered that you've been wasting your moderation points marking thirteen day old on topic comments as trolls though.
The GPL doesn't restrict your use of the software. So you are free to use the software whether you agree with the GPL or not. It is only when you distribute GPLed code that you agree to be bound by its terms.
If your book was rated highly by readers, why are you so worried about second-hand copies undermining the sales of new ones? Surely if your readers like the book, they will keep it, more so if the book is of minority interest. I was not accusing you of writing bad books, just wondering why you see this as a threat.
Is it just a coincidence that this comes less than a week after MS starts trumpeting about how they've spent the last two and a half months doing security audits of their code?
I'm sure a Cygwin port would be possible, perhaps even trivial. The difficult part would be disabling the built in Windows SMB support, but I think Samba can be made to run on non-standard ports if this proves impossible.
Many years ago I began an OS/2 port of Samba (since SMB support was not included in the base OS/2 2.1 installation and my employer was migrating everyone to Windows 95 and didn't want to spend money upgrading those of us who chose to stick with OS/2). It was not particularly difficult to port, although Samba has no doubt grown in size since then. AFAIK it is still being maintained by someone else, so could provide some useful tips to someone wanting to do a Windows port.
You missed the word OTHER in there. Even the GPL does not require that OTHER software distributed with the GPLed software be GPLed. If it weren't for the explicit inclusion of GPL and LGPL in there, that clause would not apply to them. I have seen free(beer)ware licenses in the past that forbade distribution on compilation CDROMs that also contained non-free(beer) software. But those sort of licenses are pretty rare these days.
I have to wonder how legal it is for a convicted monopoly to include anti-competitive clauses such as this in their licenses.
CD sales are up in the UK because the UK music industry has not yet reached the depths of blandness that their US counterparts have. Not for lack of trying though.
The only major problem I've seen is that the same classloader gets reused for different applets. Besides being a major security flaw, sooner or later you hit an applet that uses the same class name as one you previously ran, and things get screwed. I think if this one got fixed, things would work a lot more smoothly.