Working my way through the text of the proposed ammendments to the copyright act - it seems to me that the text related to clause 296ZA - 296ZD are the crux of the clauses which define a circumvention device.
There appears to be a clause (un-numbered) which relates to someone who believes his fair use rights have been infringed by such a circumvention device. The wording is really unclear, but it appears that if you complain to the Secretary of State he can direct the copyright holder to tell you how to circumvent the technological methods.
Even though there is this get out clause, it still seems biased towards a the copyright holder. I would like to make an informed comment to the government via the public consultation but I this it difficult without fully understanding the wording.
There seems to be 2 sides to this arguement. One side hates MS and the other loves it, both sides of course are guilty of being wrong. We need a ruler to measure MS. In this instance they are doing something that is simple in their minds. They are trying to make the user XPerience an easyness in using their computer, "one stop shopping" of the 21st century. Is that wrong? Sure they muscled different companies out of business. Sure they are arrogant jerks who just want to make money with a good product. Welcome to America!
Whilst that may be true, you forget one thing. This company has been convicted of being a monopoly. Using that monopoly to wipe out another competing business area and turn that into a monopoly is illegal. In the longer run, its also against the interests of the consumer because without competition there is not incentive for innovation.
Re:Previously predicted...
on
Byte Wars
·
· Score: 1
I had similar problems circa 1985. I was responsible for a division that was developing a new SCADA project and decided to follow Yourdon as the recommended company standard.
The project was not a success, and I spent some time afterwards trying to analyse why. Firstly, Yourdon followed properly shouldn't lead to this over reliance on process diagrams - but the tendency of those who were not experienced with it (in my case the whole team - despite considerable investment in training). I concluded that for "functionally oriented programmers" as opposed to OO specialists (which didn't really exist in 1985) this was the natural thought process even though it was wrong.
Secondly this over reliance on process flow leads to lack of attention to the data model (as in ERD) side of things. As those who've tried to do an OO development with none OO experience people - there seems to be a natual block to address this side of the problem.
The net result was a very messy and inefficient solution. Our product was full of bugs which took ages to fix.
In the end I became the chief engineer for our subsidiary and was able to change the policy. I arranged - and persuaded many of our senior managers to attend - a one day data modelling seminar.
Despite a committed kmail user at home, I have to use outlook at work. My job takes me around the world, so I am often having to connect using not very good communication links. The biggest problem I have is that the user interface locks up solid when its is trying to communicate with the server. I can see no reason why it has to, just bad design.
The other issue that this review misses is the difference between e-mail that is person to person (ie the sender knows who the readers are) and mailing lists (where generally the post gets sent to those people who happen to be subscribed). Most of the facilities being requested are for the first type of communication, whilst the second needs a completely different set of priorities. This suggests the integration of the NNTP protocol, the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically from lists and much stronger threading capability (and associated actions such as ignore or watch threads) are functions that are built in.
I might be me, but I found aptitude a LOT harder to use than dselect. Trouble was that it would often do things I didn't want, but it was not obvious how to do it differently.
Dselect is great for finding packages which you only have a vague idea what they are called. This is the main reason for me to use it rather than apt-get where you have to know the name of the package before you can install it.
I would subscribe the the view that dselect could be made more friendly - but I certainly don't find aptitude going in that direction.
Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes! (I realize that some PDF authoring software allows this kind of thing. The ones I have seen were masterpieces of overengineering and were correspondingly priced. What's wrong with a basic "notes in the margin" feature included at no cost?)
If this is a required facility for every application it should be embedded within the desktop OS, not the application.
Our company (Logica) licenced Xenix from Microsoft for distribution on the UK in the early '80s (and later sold out to SCO). I purchased a copy from our internal product department in about '83 in order to create a configuration management system (using SCCS) for my team for our own (SCADA) software which ran under RSX-11M. Except that my copy of Xenix ran on a PDP-11/34 not on an IBM PC.
This was perhaps one of the first client server implementations of Configuration Management, very similar to what CVS is today. The server was this Xenix based 11/34 and the clients were PDP 11's running RSX-11M and the networking was homegrown protocols over serial links.
After I had been running this software for at least 18 months I remember being given a demonstration of a new version that our internal Xenix group had just received running on an early IBM PC (don't know the model, probably an AT - it was pre PS/2). This was because we were trying to decide on a platform for the client end a new version of our SCADA software that was to become client server and we were comparing XENIX (multitasking but no GUI interface - but at the time we were only replacing a system which used block graphic character based colour terminals), GEM (anyone remember that!) and Windows 2.0. We chose Windows for reasons I can't remember - but were able to dominate UK Water Company SCADA systems for most of the '80s
I was just after this that I was able to justify the purchase of a MiniVAX and a version of Unix System V for our Configuration Management server on the savings in maintenance costs over the PDP-11 and Xenix was ditched.
The funny thing is: this article [monolinux.com] on the site you mention flames bitkeeper to hell.
I can't see how the article flames bitkeeper to hell. It selectively provides part of the linux kernel mailing list, with the original petition against the use of bitkeeper, followed by a number of the regular kernel hackers stating that a) bitkeeper is good, b) nobody is forced to use it and c) the orginal author is listing to comments about improving it.
That definately doesn't seem like flames to me
Re:Having trouble with 2.4.17, should I get this?
on
2.5.4 Kernel Out
·
· Score: 1
I have had a similar experience with my Athlon machine. I think it is down to my NVIDIA drivers because I've benchmarked from the command line and its fine.
I have an Athlon with NVIDIA graphics card on my workstation. I switch it on at about 7pm each evening work in the evening and leave it overnight to do backup and switch it off again 7:30am in the morning
Before using the "nopentium" command line switch about 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 days I would find it frozen in the morning - mouse and keyboard locked and the screen blank (energy saving).
Since using the "nopentium" switch it hasn't happened once.
The statement itself was informative - heck I may even check it out myself. What I was complaining about was the link at the end which pointed to something completely unrelated to the information, but placed in such a way that it appeared to be so. I wasted my time following the link - and was annoyed when I got there. Why not complain about it.?
I have subsequently discovered this link has been placed all over the place - and been modded as OT by most. So I feel justified in complaining.
1) The performance argument seems to be a non issue with
the entry level machines of today (I've even seem discussion
of Quake Linux blowing Quake XP into the dust)
2) The MASSIVE benefit that is possible (if required) of
running apps on a server and just having a thin client (server in x terms)
All you need to do is open a connection to port 25 on an existing SMTP server to send an email to an address it assumes is its own, and send off a bunch of commands: HELO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, DATA, and QUIT.
Why bother? - the domain you are sending your e-mail to has an SMTP server just happy to
take your e-mail. Just look up the MX record of the outgoing mail addresses domain and connect directly to port 25 at that address.
Don't worry too much - wireless is to come
on
Wiring A New House?
·
· Score: 1
My first thought when seeing this topic was to suggest putting in big conduit and then you can change what you want to do later.
But thinking some more, I realised thats what I did with my phone system - only when I did it 10 years ago it was about putting a phone socket in every room just in case. Now, however, I have a few key phone points around the house and I run many more (far more than I had ever envisaged) phones via digital radio.
Anyway, you normally can't get the conduit to a simple exposure point in a room - I always had to do something like leave it under the floor boards and then ended up covering it with a fitted carpet that I didn't want to take up.
Linus claims that Linux has no guided direction and developes purely through evolution and luck. First off, I would view this as highly insulting if I was a major player like IBM, or even someone who has only minimally contributed. He is basically saying that these people are as useful as a random code generator. Even more importantly, his statement is not true.
I don't think he was saying that at all. In IBMs case they have a direction they are pushing and develop code in that area, but at the same time there is a vast array of people taking it in different directions. The net result is unplanned (as opposed to random).
The analogy to selective breeding is wrong. Yes, we can speed up evolution through selective breeding, but we are only changing minor traits. Sure, you can breed a dog with long hair, a short snout, and good temperment, but what if you want to breed a dog with feathers, or a fifth leg? At the very best, that would take an incredible amount of time. The better solution is to research and apply genetics. Lets apply that to the kernel... we can either let the scsi mid layer slowly evolve into something useful, or we can sit down and give it a good design phase and have something that works in a much shorter period of time.
Firstly, the lifecycle time of the kernel is down to a few days instead of years - secondly things do evolve - just look at the progress of the VM (either one). First attempt didn't get it quite right, so then there are some patches and things get a bit better, but something else is bust (etc etc). This seems quite close to the breeding approach (but is only one of a number of parallel directions for the kernel).
Windows does not succeed because of evolution and a deep gene pool. Windows succeeds because of 1) marketing, 2) aggressive business tatics against competitors, and 3) it's not so buggy that it's totally unusable.
I don't think Windows succeeded because of evolution either - it was a major mutation which occurred at a certain lucky point in history and wiped out most of its competitors. [Sure marketing and business tactics helped - but the real winner was the GUI interface (against DOS) and the fact that apple didn't open up their hardware whereas IBM did]. Don't we have something like this in the natural world? [My brain is addled with the thought of the mutant in Asimov's Foundation series]. The big question though is - in the long term will it continue to evolve fast enough to keep up when pressed with alternative species (like linux and the speed with which it is evolving!)
Having read through a number of turgid interviews with journalists where Linus has basically offered no strong opinion on anything, I was struck by the passion that this thread on lkml brought out in him.
However, for the average Linux user, WINE shouldn't matter much. After all, what's the reason he uses Linux? Certainly not running Win32 apps, but trying to find free, open alternatives.
What you forget is that is an interim solution whilst you find an app that is sufficiently close. For instance, when I first switched more or less full time to linux I couldn't find a linux version of a mail/news program that had the ergonomic feature of single key read (hit spacebar to scroll down message then on to next and eventually on to the next folder). So I used agent (my windows program) under Wine until I had hacked kmail to include what I wanted. I now use kmail so wine is not needed until I get time to try and get one of my games working.
Earlier in the year I did manage to get Grand Prix Legends (acting in server mode) running under Wine - I just got side tracked into getting the full version running - I wasn't far away but never finally finished it off.
So I think it has great potential - as one of those interim things until you find an OSS native application that does the same job (which of course with games maybe never).
When I was a kid I had something called Meccano. Was that the same you were thinking of? This had loads of metal girders, and metal plates with holes in every half inch or so. Girders were green plates where red (that was in the mid fifties - I think later versions had yellow girders and black plates). Small nuts and bolts where used to join it all together.
I used to build cranes with it, and had an electric motor and loads of gears. Careful engineering of the gearbox would allow you to
a) Drive cabin rotation around the main mast
Had a special piece which was two wheels with a ball race in between. One of the pieces had a sproketed outside which would take a chain. This was bolted to the girder structure that made the crane tower, the other half to the cabin bottom. An axel throught the cabin bottom with a small sproketted wheel would then have a chain round the gear bolted to the crane tower and you could make the cabin rotate.
b) Lift the jib up and down, AND
c) Lift the hook up and down
I seem to remember making a gear box with a gear on a movable axel that you could make move back and forth with a lever. Dependent on which gear engaged you could either drive the jib or the hook. Worm gears where used to slow down the motor to a sensible speed.
Another lever allowed you to control the motor (forward, stop, reverse).
We bought all this stuff and it came in cardboard boxes. My father built a wooden cabinet with special dividers to keep it all in.
This file allows you have both stable and unstable lines in your sources.list but to only use unstable packages for those that you include in this file. With KDE its a bit messy, because you have to include all packages indiviually, but it can be done (because I have).
Slashdot Mirror
Working my way through the text of the proposed ammendments to the copyright act - it seems to me that the text related to clause 296ZA - 296ZD are the crux of the clauses which define a circumvention device.
There appears to be a clause (un-numbered) which relates to someone who believes his fair use rights have been infringed by such a circumvention device. The wording is really unclear, but it appears that if you complain to the Secretary of State he can direct the copyright holder to tell you how to circumvent the technological methods.
Even though there is this get out clause, it still seems biased towards a the copyright holder. I would like to make an informed comment to the government via the public consultation but I this it difficult without fully understanding the wording.
Whats the views out there?
Unfortunately, argument 1 falls down because all DVD player manufacturers have paid for a licence to build the decoder.
There seems to be 2 sides to this arguement. One side hates MS and the other loves it, both sides of course are guilty of being wrong. We need a ruler to measure MS. In this instance they are doing something that is simple in their minds. They are trying to make the user XPerience an easyness in using their computer, "one stop shopping" of the 21st century. Is that wrong? Sure they muscled different companies out of business. Sure they are arrogant jerks who just want to make money with a good product. Welcome to America!
Whilst that may be true, you forget one thing. This company has been convicted of being a monopoly. Using that monopoly to wipe out another competing business area and turn that into a monopoly is illegal. In the longer run, its also against the interests of the consumer because without competition there is not incentive for innovation.
I had similar problems circa 1985. I was responsible for a division that was developing a new SCADA project and decided to follow Yourdon as the recommended company standard.
The project was not a success, and I spent some time afterwards trying to analyse why. Firstly, Yourdon followed properly shouldn't lead to this over reliance on process diagrams - but the tendency of those who were not experienced with it (in my case the whole team - despite considerable investment in training). I concluded that for "functionally oriented programmers" as opposed to OO specialists (which didn't really exist in 1985) this was the natural thought process even though it was wrong.
Secondly this over reliance on process flow leads to lack of attention to the data model (as in ERD) side of things. As those who've tried to do an OO development with none OO experience people - there seems to be a natual block to address this side of the problem.
The net result was a very messy and inefficient solution. Our product was full of bugs which took ages to fix.
In the end I became the chief engineer for our subsidiary and was able to change the policy. I arranged - and persuaded many of our senior managers to attend - a one day data modelling seminar.
Despite a committed kmail user at home, I have to use outlook at work. My job takes me around the world, so I am often having to connect using not very good communication links. The biggest problem I have is that the user interface locks up solid when its is trying to communicate with the server. I can see no reason why it has to, just bad design.
The other issue that this review misses is the difference between e-mail that is person to person (ie the sender knows who the readers are) and mailing lists (where generally the post gets sent to those people who happen to be subscribed). Most of the facilities being requested are for the first type of communication, whilst the second needs a completely different set of priorities. This suggests the integration of the NNTP protocol, the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically from lists and much stronger threading capability (and associated actions such as ignore or watch threads) are functions that are built in.
I might be me, but I found aptitude a LOT harder to use than dselect. Trouble was that it would often do things I didn't want, but it was not obvious how to do it differently.
Dselect is great for finding packages which you only have a vague idea what they are called. This is the main reason for me to use it rather than apt-get where you have to know the name of the package before you can install it.
I would subscribe the the view that dselect could be made more friendly - but I certainly don't find aptitude going in that direction.
If this is a required facility for every application it should be embedded within the desktop OS, not the application.
Our company (Logica) licenced Xenix from Microsoft for distribution on the UK in the early '80s (and later sold out to SCO). I purchased a copy from our internal product department in about '83 in order to create a configuration management system (using SCCS) for my team for our own (SCADA) software which ran under RSX-11M. Except that my copy of Xenix ran on a PDP-11/34 not on an IBM PC.
This was perhaps one of the first client server implementations of Configuration Management, very similar to what CVS is today. The server was this Xenix based 11/34 and the clients were PDP 11's running RSX-11M and the networking was homegrown protocols over serial links.
After I had been running this software for at least 18 months I remember being given a demonstration of a new version that our internal Xenix group had just received running on an early IBM PC (don't know the model, probably an AT - it was pre PS/2). This was because we were trying to decide on a platform for the client end a new version of our SCADA software that was to become client server and we were comparing XENIX (multitasking but no GUI interface - but at the time we were only replacing a system which used block graphic character based colour terminals), GEM (anyone remember that!) and Windows 2.0. We chose Windows for reasons I can't remember - but were able to dominate UK Water Company SCADA systems for most of the '80s
I was just after this that I was able to justify the purchase of a MiniVAX and a version of Unix System V for our Configuration Management server on the savings in maintenance costs over the PDP-11 and Xenix was ditched.
I can't see how the article flames bitkeeper to hell. It selectively provides part of the linux kernel mailing list, with the original petition against the use of bitkeeper, followed by a number of the regular kernel hackers stating that a) bitkeeper is good, b) nobody is forced to use it and c) the orginal author is listing to comments about improving it.
That definately doesn't seem like flames to me
I have an Athlon with NVIDIA graphics card on my workstation. I switch it on at about 7pm each evening work in the evening and leave it overnight to do backup and switch it off again 7:30am in the morning
Before using the "nopentium" command line switch about 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 days I would find it frozen in the morning - mouse and keyboard locked and the screen blank (energy saving).
Since using the "nopentium" switch it hasn't happened once.
I'm definately waiting for a fix.
No I am NOT.
The statement itself was informative - heck I may even check it out myself. What I was complaining about was the link at the end which pointed to something completely unrelated to the information, but placed in such a way that it appeared to be so. I wasted my time following the link - and was annoyed when I got there. Why not complain about it.?
I have subsequently discovered this link has been placed all over the place - and been modded as OT by most. So I feel justified in complaining.
wtf
Modded as informative - but the link points to an investigatation
of first post trolls.
I am sure this is a troll - but no mod points to say so!
I don't think so. Why?
1) The performance argument seems to be a non issue with
the entry level machines of today (I've even seem discussion
of Quake Linux blowing Quake XP into the dust)
2) The MASSIVE benefit that is possible (if required) of
running apps on a server and just having a thin client (server in x terms)
Why bother? - the domain you are sending your e-mail to has an SMTP server just happy to take your e-mail. Just look up the MX record of the outgoing mail addresses domain and connect directly to port 25 at that address.
My first thought when seeing this topic was to suggest putting in big conduit and then you can change what you want to do later.
But thinking some more, I realised thats what I did with my phone system - only when I did it 10 years ago it was about putting a phone socket in every room just in case. Now, however, I have a few key phone points around the house and I run many more (far more than I had ever envisaged) phones via digital radio.
Anyway, you normally can't get the conduit to a simple exposure point in a room - I always had to do something like leave it under the floor boards and then ended up covering it with a fitted carpet that I didn't want to take up.
Linus claims that Linux has no guided direction and developes purely through evolution and luck. First off, I would view this as highly insulting if I was a major player like IBM, or even someone who has only minimally contributed. He is basically saying that these people are as useful as a random code generator. Even more importantly, his statement is not true.
I don't think he was saying that at all. In IBMs case they have a direction they are pushing and develop code in that area, but at the same time there is a vast array of people taking it in different directions. The net result is unplanned (as opposed to random).
The analogy to selective breeding is wrong. Yes, we can speed up evolution through selective breeding, but we are only changing minor traits. Sure, you can breed a dog with long hair, a short snout, and good temperment, but what if you want to breed a dog with feathers, or a fifth leg? At the very best, that would take an incredible amount of time. The better solution is to research and apply genetics. Lets apply that to the kernel... we can either let the scsi mid layer slowly evolve into something useful, or we can sit down and give it a good design phase and have something that works in a much shorter period of time.
Firstly, the lifecycle time of the kernel is down to a few days instead of years - secondly things do evolve - just look at the progress of the VM (either one). First attempt didn't get it quite right, so then there are some patches and things get a bit better, but something else is bust (etc etc). This seems quite close to the breeding approach (but is only one of a number of parallel directions for the kernel).
Windows does not succeed because of evolution and a deep gene pool. Windows succeeds because of 1) marketing, 2) aggressive business tatics against competitors, and 3) it's not so buggy that it's totally unusable.
I don't think Windows succeeded because of evolution either - it was a major mutation which occurred at a certain lucky point in history and wiped out most of its competitors. [Sure marketing and business tactics helped - but the real winner was the GUI interface (against DOS) and the fact that apple didn't open up their hardware whereas IBM did]. Don't we have something like this in the natural world? [My brain is addled with the thought of the mutant in Asimov's Foundation series]. The big question though is - in the long term will it continue to evolve fast enough to keep up when pressed with alternative species (like linux and the speed with which it is evolving!)
Having read through a number of turgid interviews with journalists where Linus has basically offered no strong opinion on anything, I was struck by the passion that this thread on lkml brought out in him.
I think he is right too.
Don't you get nine goes at this?
You need to loose the space after the "?"
What you forget is that is an interim solution whilst you find an app that is sufficiently close. For instance, when I first switched more or less full time to linux I couldn't find a linux version of a mail/news program that had the ergonomic feature of single key read (hit spacebar to scroll down message then on to next and eventually on to the next folder). So I used agent (my windows program) under Wine until I had hacked kmail to include what I wanted. I now use kmail so wine is not needed until I get time to try and get one of my games working.
Earlier in the year I did manage to get Grand Prix Legends (acting in server mode) running under Wine - I just got side tracked into getting the full version running - I wasn't far away but never finally finished it off.
So I think it has great potential - as one of those interim things until you find an OSS native application that does the same job (which of course with games maybe never).
http://www.toms.net/rb/home.html
RSX-11M for PDP 11s
Came with Source Code which you compiled to make it work on your machine.
You only need to read last weeks kernel mailing list to see how much has changed with the VM and why.
When I was a kid I had something called Meccano. Was that the same you were thinking of? This had loads of metal girders, and metal plates with holes in every half inch or so. Girders were green plates where red (that was in the mid fifties - I think later versions had yellow girders and black plates). Small nuts and bolts where used to join it all together.
I used to build cranes with it, and had an electric motor and loads of gears. Careful engineering of the gearbox would allow you to
a) Drive cabin rotation around the main mast
Had a special piece which was two wheels with a ball race in between. One of the pieces had a sproketed outside which would take a chain. This was bolted to the girder structure that made the crane tower, the other half to the cabin bottom. An axel throught the cabin bottom with a small sproketted wheel would then have a chain round the gear bolted to the crane tower and you could make the cabin rotate.
b) Lift the jib up and down, AND
c) Lift the hook up and down
I seem to remember making a gear box with a gear on a movable axel that you could make move back and forth with a lever. Dependent on which gear engaged you could either drive the jib or the hook. Worm gears where used to slow down the motor to a sensible speed.
Another lever allowed you to control the motor (forward, stop, reverse).
We bought all this stuff and it came in cardboard boxes. My father built a wooden cabinet with special dividers to keep it all in.
take a look at
man apt_preferences
This file allows you have both stable and unstable lines in your sources.list but to only use unstable packages for those that you include in this file. With KDE its a bit messy, because you have to include all packages indiviually, but it can be done (because I have).