yeah, it's too bad that iran actually *HAD* a democratically elected government, and we saw fit to replace it with a theocracy.
oh, sorry, i forgot. iran, iraq, and afghanistan have always been the axis of evil. we would never have suported their governments with weapons or intelligence.... my bad.
am i the only person here who got the impression that this was a cleverly disguised (or not) "ask slashdot" on the part of the students of this class to the effect of "what can we do to not fail this class?"
since this is a higher level, non-required course, i would say we can safely assume that most of the people taking the course are not idiots. it is also very likely that not all of them are complete slackers. neither of these are guarantees, obviously, but as i said, in a class like this, they are both good bets.
now, IF you have a class that is mostly intelligent enough to comprehend the course matter being taught, AND less than 100% of the students are complete slackers, then it pretty much guarantees that one of the following is true: a) the teacher doesn't know how to teach what he was supposed to teach. b) the teacher set unrealistic expectations for the students. or c) the teacher is grading the students on a criteria that is completely divorced from what what they are expected to have learned.
based on comments by people who i presume are students in this class, it sounds like this case is a healthy dose of b and c, with a little bit of a mixed in (focusing on buffer overflow exploits? how 90's...)
or maybe not many people make those easy kind of mistakes anymore...
seriously, even in c, buffer overflow exploits aren't that hard to avoid if you've been programming itmore than a year or so, and you actually pay attention to what you are doing.
maybe he doesn't care, but if they go tohim and he acts like an ass, then they can move up to the department and if necessary to the administration.
the administration of a reputable university *WILL NOT* look kindly upon a professor failing an entire class, ESPECIALLY if it is a class that has never been taught before. these guys should try and settle their case with the professor first, but if he is unsympathetic, they have every right to take it up the chain to higher authorities.
of course, i suspect any deccent teacher would already know this. other posters have pointed out that it is very unlikely that he will fail an entire class, regardless of anything he may have said at the beginning of the semester. i had a lot of preofessors that talked tough like that, but in the end they usually gave out pretty fair grades.
of course there is one other thing to watch out for. the professor might fall back to a strict bell curve grading policy. if you're right in the middle of the curve, and half the class drops out because they're afraid of failing, congratulations, you are the new bottom of the curve....
openssh is grou of programs which includes an openssh client and an openssh server. the protocol implemented by both putty and openssh is secure shell, or secsh, i believe.
if you really want to be pedantic, maybe he could have been more clear by saying "i prefer putty over the openssh client", but what he said is correct, and i think most people were able to understand the post.
Um... if the activity was genuinely insensitive to security, you could run naked telnet.
not really. even if you don't do anything security sensitive, you want to protect your login information, which you can't do with naked telnet. i wouldn't care if somebody with a key logger found out i was checking my log files or updating my web page from a public computer, but i wouldn't want them to be able to grab my login name or password to use later.
actually they both send bitmaps. the difference is that X knows enough about what it is displaying that it can only send bitmaps of areas that need updating. so for something like an xterm, (unless you are doing an awful lot of scrolling) it doesn't have to send nearly as much information. also, X works at the window level, instead of the whole desktop, like VNC.
VNC does have other features that it uses to save bandwidth though, so i imagine there are cases where it could outperform X. for example, if you are running something like a web browser full screen, VNC could probably outperform X. but VNC will be just as slow with an xterm running emacs as it would with a full screen office suite. X would be orders of magnitude faster with a smaller more static window.
in the present day, why would anyone run an xterm remotely? i would guess that most of the time that anybody runs a remote application anymore, they're probably running a complex gui application. comparisons of running an xterm over a modem might have been reasonable when 2400 modems were in use. for most people now, i suspect such a comparison is meaningless.
they probably are not licensed to sell nonDRM'd versions. i don't really care either way- they deserve to lose their customers by advertising that they could provide something that they couldn't. at this point the only way they can provide what they advertised is to license fairplay or strip the DRM off the songs people have already downloaded. if they can't do either of those, then they owe their customers a refund.
real wasn't using fairplay. they were using their own proprietary drm. for all we know real was exploiting a buffer overflow in the ipod in order to get the routine that check's for a fairplay encoded file to return true.
of course, even if that is the case, it's quite possible they wouldn't have found the bug if they weren't looking for a way to break real's harmony drm.
either way, if apple has said all along that they only support drm'd music from itms and that they will disable real's hack as soon as possible, then i don't see why anyone is all upset about it now. where was the outrage back in july? and why would anyone buy songs from real if they knew they wouldn't be supported?
if real had successfully reverse engineered playfair, then this firmware update wouldn't be an issue. rather, they found some hack that allowed them to circumvent the issue.
as other posters have pointed out, for all we know, they were using a buffer overflow exploit to accomplish this. they might have been exploiting a serious bug in the ipod. imagine that really was the case. then how should apple respond? on one hand you have people ready to lynch them for breaking copmatibility that they never advertised if they fix it, and on the other you have people ready to lynch them for not fixing a flaw that could allow malicious mp3's to crash or disable their ipods.
did you download and install the firmware update? if so, then not only did you give them permission to change the software, you openly invited them to.
This basically is a lock-in tactic tieing you to the itms if you have an ipod.
really? i don't actually have an ipod to verify this, but i suspect it allows you to play mp3's or aac's that you ripped yourself, or purchased legally online from emusic.com or other places that allow you to download non-protected file formats.
or downloaded from kazaa/gnutella/etc. for those so inclined...
well, so far they haven't changed any supported features. it still plays mp3, aac, and playfair encrypted files from itms. no feature that they have ever advertised has been removed.
also, if they really wanted to provide drm'd files that were guaranteed to be compatible with the ipod, they could have licensed playfair from apple. if their "comprehensive plan" to deal with this is anything other than releasing a tool for free that will strip the harmony drm of the purchased files, than real deserves to lose every customer they have ever had.
or he could sell a thousand plots of land for $30. and given what i know of mmorpg players, there's at least a thousand of them out there. really this doesn't seem that dumb to me- he can sell of plots of land, and mine or otherwise extract resources from the ones he keeps, which he can exchange for real cash.
of course if he has $30K sitting around, he could most likely get a better return on it by learning a little bit about the stock market, but when you think about it, it's not really that much different, other than the target audience.
i have two sony stereo receivers, a sony es cd changer, and a ps2, and have never had a problem with any of them. i know, the ps/ps2's tend to be hit or miss, but other than that, i've only had good experiences with sony. i had a first generation sony dvd player as well, and recently retired it. it still works as well as it always has, but it whas a lot of problems typical of almost all early dvd players- mainly, that it wouldn't play cd-r's or dvd-r's, and it skipped way too easily. now that my dvd collection is old enough that it is starting to show signs of wear, it just wasn't cutting it anymore.
i know that with sony, you pay extra for the name, but i don't necessarily see a problem with that- to me, at least the sony name still means something... as long as you aren't buying the cheapest model they make.
So yes, your competitors get reap the rewards of your work, but because you released it under the GPL, you will get paid back by reaping the rewards of their additions, modifications, and bugfixes.
This is not necessarily true- if they never distribute the software, they are under no obligations to share any changes that they made to the software. You can modify and use GPL'd software to your hearts content without sharing a thing. The only time you are obligated to make any changes you have made to the code available to someone else is if you give them a copy of the software.
There's one problem with your idea: The USA is so large physically that the high price of petrol is NOT a good idea. You're forgetting that Europe has many excellent alternatives to driving a car, especially their high-speed rail networks built at mostly government expense.
do you think their governments built all of that public transportation because they thought it would be fun? no, the people wanted it. nobody in the us wants public transportation because driving is so cheap. americans believe that driving is their right. part of the problem is that the us, unlike anywhere else in the world, has succeeded in isolating its suburbs to the point where it is assumed that practically every american adult needs a car. (this, of course was driven in large part by our substantially lower gas prices)
of course even if we could turn around the damage we have already done to our suburbs (in a city/regional planning sense) meaningful public transportation is only possible in regions of sufficiently high population density. there are huge regions of rural america where driving will always be the only meaningful solution. i think that if we did increase the gas tax we would have to do it on a variable scale- in more rural areas it would stay more or less as it is, but as you get into suburban and urban regions it would go up. maybe than americans would be more supportive of public transportation proposals, rather than countering them with ridiculous proposals for ten lane freeways or double decker freeways (which many opponents of the recent light rail proposal in the denver metro area were suggesting)
ok, i grant that we aren't depressing the cost of gasoline. a better way of saying it might be that the us is artificially depressing the cost of driving, or at least the apparent cost.
in the us, unlike much of the rest of the world, most of the real costs associated with transportation- primarily highway maintenance and construction, but there are many others as well- is payed for out of income, property, or sales taxes, rather than gasoline taxes. the end result is that the actual cost of driving is much higher than most anericans percieve, or, if they do percieve it, they realize that they are already paying to drive whether they drive or not.
and as far as europeans whining, i mostly tend to hear/see them making fun of how much americans complain about their gas prices. my experience has been that americans tend to complain about gas prices far more than anyone else, even though they pay far less. the problem (in my opinion) is that too many americans have spent their whole life believeing that driving is the only way to get from place to place, and have never considered that there might be other alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, it's too bad that iran actually *HAD* a democratically elected government, and we saw fit to replace it with a theocracy.
oh, sorry, i forgot. iran, iraq, and afghanistan have always been the axis of evil. we would never have suported their governments with weapons or intelligence.... my bad.
am i the only person here who got the impression that this was a cleverly disguised (or not) "ask slashdot" on the part of the students of this class to the effect of "what can we do to not fail this class?"
since this is a higher level, non-required course, i would say we can safely assume that most of the people taking the course are not idiots. it is also very likely that not all of them are complete slackers. neither of these are guarantees, obviously, but as i said, in a class like this, they are both good bets.
now, IF you have a class that is mostly intelligent enough to comprehend the course matter being taught, AND less than 100% of the students are complete slackers, then it pretty much guarantees that one of the following is true:
a) the teacher doesn't know how to teach what he was supposed to teach.
b) the teacher set unrealistic expectations for the students.
or c) the teacher is grading the students on a criteria that is completely divorced from what what they are expected to have learned.
based on comments by people who i presume are students in this class, it sounds like this case is a healthy dose of b and c, with a little bit of a mixed in (focusing on buffer overflow exploits? how 90's...)
you will get a "permission denied" error doing it your way. unless they changed something significant between 4.9 and 4.10.
or maybe not many people make those easy kind of mistakes anymore...
seriously, even in c, buffer overflow exploits aren't that hard to avoid if you've been programming itmore than a year or so, and you actually pay attention to what you are doing.
maybe he doesn't care, but if they go tohim and he acts like an ass, then they can move up to the department and if necessary to the administration.
the administration of a reputable university *WILL NOT* look kindly upon a professor failing an entire class, ESPECIALLY if it is a class that has never been taught before. these guys should try and settle their case with the professor first, but if he is unsympathetic, they have every right to take it up the chain to higher authorities.
of course, i suspect any deccent teacher would already know this. other posters have pointed out that it is very unlikely that he will fail an entire class, regardless of anything he may have said at the beginning of the semester. i had a lot of preofessors that talked tough like that, but in the end they usually gave out pretty fair grades.
of course there is one other thing to watch out for. the professor might fall back to a strict bell curve grading policy. if you're right in the middle of the curve, and half the class drops out because they're afraid of failing, congratulations, you are the new bottom of the curve....
openssh is grou of programs which includes an openssh client and an openssh server. the protocol implemented by both putty and openssh is secure shell, or secsh, i believe.
if you really want to be pedantic, maybe he could have been more clear by saying "i prefer putty over the openssh client", but what he said is correct, and i think most people were able to understand the post.
Um... if the activity was genuinely insensitive to security, you could run naked telnet.
not really. even if you don't do anything security sensitive, you want to protect your login information, which you can't do with naked telnet. i wouldn't care if somebody with a key logger found out i was checking my log files or updating my web page from a public computer, but i wouldn't want them to be able to grab my login name or password to use later.
actually they both send bitmaps. the difference is that X knows enough about what it is displaying that it can only send bitmaps of areas that need updating. so for something like an xterm, (unless you are doing an awful lot of scrolling) it doesn't have to send nearly as much information. also, X works at the window level, instead of the whole desktop, like VNC.
VNC does have other features that it uses to save bandwidth though, so i imagine there are cases where it could outperform X. for example, if you are running something like a web browser full screen, VNC could probably outperform X. but VNC will be just as slow with an xterm running emacs as it would with a full screen office suite. X would be orders of magnitude faster with a smaller more static window.
in the present day, why would anyone run an xterm remotely? i would guess that most of the time that anybody runs a remote application anymore, they're probably running a complex gui application. comparisons of running an xterm over a modem might have been reasonable when 2400 modems were in use. for most people now, i suspect such a comparison is meaningless.
they probably are not licensed to sell nonDRM'd versions. i don't really care either way- they deserve to lose their customers by advertising that they could provide something that they couldn't. at this point the only way they can provide what they advertised is to license fairplay or strip the DRM off the songs people have already downloaded. if they can't do either of those, then they owe their customers a refund.
real wasn't using fairplay. they were using their own proprietary drm. for all we know real was exploiting a buffer overflow in the ipod in order to get the routine that check's for a fairplay encoded file to return true.
of course, even if that is the case, it's quite possible they wouldn't have found the bug if they weren't looking for a way to break real's harmony drm.
either way, if apple has said all along that they only support drm'd music from itms and that they will disable real's hack as soon as possible, then i don't see why anyone is all upset about it now. where was the outrage back in july? and why would anyone buy songs from real if they knew they wouldn't be supported?
if real had successfully reverse engineered playfair, then this firmware update wouldn't be an issue. rather, they found some hack that allowed them to circumvent the issue.
as other posters have pointed out, for all we know, they were using a buffer overflow exploit to accomplish this. they might have been exploiting a serious bug in the ipod. imagine that really was the case. then how should apple respond? on one hand you have people ready to lynch them for breaking copmatibility that they never advertised if they fix it, and on the other you have people ready to lynch them for not fixing a flaw that could allow malicious mp3's to crash or disable their ipods.
did you download and install the firmware update? if so, then not only did you give them permission to change the software, you openly invited them to.
if not, then what are you bitching about?
This basically is a lock-in tactic tieing you to the itms if you have an ipod.
really? i don't actually have an ipod to verify this, but i suspect it allows you to play mp3's or aac's that you ripped yourself, or purchased legally online from emusic.com or other places that allow you to download non-protected file formats.
or downloaded from kazaa/gnutella/etc. for those so inclined...
well, so far they haven't changed any supported features. it still plays mp3, aac, and playfair encrypted files from itms. no feature that they have ever advertised has been removed.
also, if they really wanted to provide drm'd files that were guaranteed to be compatible with the ipod, they could have licensed playfair from apple. if their "comprehensive plan" to deal with this is anything other than releasing a tool for free that will strip the harmony drm of the purchased files, than real deserves to lose every customer they have ever had.
i tihnk the name came from the fact that they used to play them after the movie instead of before.
but i might be making that up....
or he could sell a thousand plots of land for $30. and given what i know of mmorpg players, there's at least a thousand of them out there. really this doesn't seem that dumb to me- he can sell of plots of land, and mine or otherwise extract resources from the ones he keeps, which he can exchange for real cash.
of course if he has $30K sitting around, he could most likely get a better return on it by learning a little bit about the stock market, but when you think about it, it's not really that much different, other than the target audience.
i have two sony stereo receivers, a sony es cd changer, and a ps2, and have never had a problem with any of them. i know, the ps/ps2's tend to be hit or miss, but other than that, i've only had good experiences with sony. i had a first generation sony dvd player as well, and recently retired it. it still works as well as it always has, but it whas a lot of problems typical of almost all early dvd players- mainly, that it wouldn't play cd-r's or dvd-r's, and it skipped way too easily. now that my dvd collection is old enough that it is starting to show signs of wear, it just wasn't cutting it anymore.
i know that with sony, you pay extra for the name, but i don't necessarily see a problem with that- to me, at least the sony name still means something... as long as you aren't buying the cheapest model they make.
Pfft. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny.
actually, they will most likely decide that their computer is old and out of date and buy a new one.
I think you are the first person i have ever seen to say something complimentary about hp-ux
So yes, your competitors get reap the rewards of your work, but because you released it under the GPL, you will get paid back by reaping the rewards of their additions, modifications, and bugfixes.
This is not necessarily true- if they never distribute the software, they are under no obligations to share any changes that they made to the software. You can modify and use GPL'd software to your hearts content without sharing a thing. The only time you are obligated to make any changes you have made to the code available to someone else is if you give them a copy of the software.
There's one problem with your idea: The USA is so large physically that the high price of petrol is NOT a good idea. You're forgetting that Europe has many excellent alternatives to driving a car, especially their high-speed rail networks built at mostly government expense.
do you think their governments built all of that public transportation because they thought it would be fun? no, the people wanted it. nobody in the us wants public transportation because driving is so cheap. americans believe that driving is their right. part of the problem is that the us, unlike anywhere else in the world, has succeeded in isolating its suburbs to the point where it is assumed that practically every american adult needs a car. (this, of course was driven in large part by our substantially lower gas prices)
of course even if we could turn around the damage we have already done to our suburbs (in a city/regional planning sense) meaningful public transportation is only possible in regions of sufficiently high population density. there are huge regions of rural america where driving will always be the only meaningful solution. i think that if we did increase the gas tax we would have to do it on a variable scale- in more rural areas it would stay more or less as it is, but as you get into suburban and urban regions it would go up. maybe than americans would be more supportive of public transportation proposals, rather than countering them with ridiculous proposals for ten lane freeways or double decker freeways (which many opponents of the recent light rail proposal in the denver metro area were suggesting)
ok, i grant that we aren't depressing the cost of gasoline. a better way of saying it might be that the us is artificially depressing the cost of driving, or at least the apparent cost.
in the us, unlike much of the rest of the world, most of the real costs associated with transportation- primarily highway maintenance and construction, but there are many others as well- is payed for out of income, property, or sales taxes, rather than gasoline taxes. the end result is that the actual cost of driving is much higher than most anericans percieve, or, if they do percieve it, they realize that they are already paying to drive whether they drive or not.
and as far as europeans whining, i mostly tend to hear/see them making fun of how much americans complain about their gas prices. my experience has been that americans tend to complain about gas prices far more than anyone else, even though they pay far less. the problem (in my opinion) is that too many americans have spent their whole life believeing that driving is the only way to get from place to place, and have never considered that there might be other alternatives.