Is there currently a project out there to port OSX (or something open source and remarkably, illegally similar to OSX) to x86?.... And no, I don't know what the hell I'm doing on slashdot either.
Your ability to understand, and take an interest in, such a project and the underlying issue demonstrates what you're doing here.
Your need to ask that question demonstrates that you haven't been here very long.
The only topic icons that really make sense for this story are Windows and Security.
Yes, but if you put both of those together on the same webpage without some kind of buffering in between them they would probably make your browser catch fire.
Why would anyone download music that he has already paid for?
Maybe because the mastering quality of the (RIAA-produced) CD was so poor that the customer's player(s) couldn't read the damn thing. Then they'd need a _good_ copy to burn onto a CD-R and play.
And don't tell me that it's my cheap player's fault, because it's legitimately licensed. It says "CD" right there on the top, which is more than the RIAA can say about every music disc they're pushing nowdays.
[blink] Oh, I seem to have somehow got attached to the subject line...
I probably had you confused with the guy who changed the title. You also made a remark before about a software developer refusing emailed bug reports.
Was this FREE/GPL software, or commercial software?
If the former, the developer is under little obligation to listen if he does not wish to.
If this was commercial software, we all know that customer "support" and bug fixing represent after-sale co$t$ that commercial developers prefer to avoid.
Yeah, even though it _is_ "unethical". The actual mechanism employed in the avoidance has little to do with it.
I *do* think it's broadly impractical, and only of use in specialised cases, such as people who don't use email except for a very limited set of contacts.
Whoa! This describes most induhvidual users of personal email. Most have a fairly short (under 100) list of family and friends with whom they exchange email. They want email only from people whom they already know, no spam please. Addresses are distributed via personal contact: "Oh, yeah, the first time you send anything to me you won't get through the spam barrier - you'll just get a reply from my whitelist manager. All you'll have to do to that is hit "Reply" and send it back."
Of course you'll hear: "What's a 'whitelist'?"
"Well, it's a spam elimination technique which...." And I think you'd have the interest of any email user.
Also, when you exchange email addresses with a contact, you _could_ go ahead and put the new address into your whitelist and save even the trouble of that initial reply. That's how I'd handle my Mum.
Whitelists are no problem on a personal scale. Yes, the level of expertise required is a barrier to many. A good (l)user application might be some easy-to-configure (and easy-to-share with yer friends) scripts to handle this automagically.
No, they're not for everybody (particularly your website), and I don't represent them to be, even if the parent thread was titled "Whitelists are the Answer".
Oh I read what you wrote, as well as your discussions with several others. I'm not accusing you personally of spamming, you appear completely ethical. You have my sympathy, for trying to use email to contact those too clueless to know how to use it. You have my sympathy for trying to _teach_ email to those too clueless to understand how to use it, for that matter.
Indeed, whitelisting is probably unworkable for your sales contact/response application. This IN NO WAY MAKES IT UNETHICAL.
I refuse to accept that, for the purposes of general email (NOT sales contact, where a higher level of convenience is required), the laiety is SO stupid that they cannot deal with a politely worded and conveniently responded-to whitelist reply request. "Regular" people deal with double-opt-in lists all the time. In general, if you're too stupid to use email I don't really want to correspond with you anyway. "You must be at least this tall to ride". I fully realize that as a businessman you don't have the option of refusing stupid people's money.
My point was that my real, personal email address has become a very private data item which I disclose as reluctantly as my SSN. If that's the only mechanism you have in place to attract contacts, well, you'll not be hearing from me that way.
Then that is Not For You, unless you can identify some distinctive characteristic in your mail (maybe its originating IP?) that the spammers don't match.
Detect and run from, sure, but not _defeat_. (for a value or "defeat" == "get yer spam through")
Excessively slow server detection will be a standard feature of all next generation spam software.
Oh it is now. Has been, for at least a year. My buddy, who runs his own mail server, teergrubes anything he can detect as spam. The spammers flee, then remove him from their lists. He cares not whether this is automatic or requires manual effort on the part of the spammer. They go away.
I'd make it even simpler: teergrube _everything_, for about fifteen seconds a line. Legit mail has to tolerate these kinds of delays (and much worse, in fact) in order to get through to servers which are stuffed with spam traffic. A spammer can't afford to fool around for even one minute to send a message - he has to send a million a day in order to make money. Of course this probably wouldn't work for Mr. Ramasubramanian, but it will for my friend, and for me if I ever put up a mail server. You'd probably be pleasantly surprised at how many of those 32767+ connections will be dropped _immediately_ at the first continuation reply, no matter how short its delay.
I still think you can never win the resource battle
Sure we can. A thousand spammers facing 1,000,000 tarpits haven't a chance.
Unfortunately even whitelisting can be ineffective if someone uses *your own* e-mail address to spam you.
Huh? I missed something there. How often do you send email to _yourself_?
Guys who forge my email address(es) go to a _special_ spam folder, the one that will get priority treatment when I figure out how to retaliate against these bastards. Any suggestions?
Then you can forget about my patronage, because I do not expose my email address in this manner. (My slashdot-published email is a blackhole, so don't bother.)
And you can also forget about asking me to use my email address as a userID. "Everybody who asks for my email address is a spammer until proven otherwise."
Yes, I have no problem isolating myself from the rest of the outside world, especially spammers, telelmarketers, and other advertizers of all types: "If you're one of my friends, relatives, or aquantiances, leave a message, preferably including your number, and I'll get back to you. If you're trying to _sell_me_something_, I either don't want it, can't afford it, or I've already got one."
It's MY email box, dammit. I'll accept or reject anything I please, from whomever _I_ choose!
Email, as it stands today, is useless as a business contact medium. A hundred spams a day forces one to dig a moat and lower the drawbridge only for known friends. Sorry if this interferes with your "business model". Tell it to the spammers who've ruined email.
Sure it does, but the customers' latitude in selecting those parts (or even which ones to simply omit, like the lose"modem") is piss poor. It certainly comes nowhere near the flexibility of the "build your own" method so many of us enjoy at the desktop system level.
In particular the choice of a high-end display and a big disk carries with it the need to pay _way_too_much_ for a bleeding-edge CPU with speed I don't need, and whose power consumption is inappropriate for battery-powered equipment. Other people, with other priorities, will be dissatisfied for other reasons. You can't please us _all_. Only a parts warehouse can.
You're hereby accused of blowing smoke up our collective asses, about this whole "build yer own laptop" thing. It just doesn't happen.
Well, seeing that you want a one-off, custom installation you should expect to pay the one-off, custom price and not the "high-volume pricing".
That's exactly the point of "build it yourself", and this doesn't happen with laptops.
I can go into Fry's (well, several _other_ guys in town as well)(and there are online vendors too), buy a basketfull of components at high-volume prices, take them home, and build a "one-off", full custom desktop computer that will suit me precisely (including and especially when it comes to choice of OS), at a price that's competitive with OEM-built systems. The closest I can come to this with a laptop system is the customization options allowed me by the manufacturer or occasionally a vendor. A one-off laptop costs an arm and a leg, leaving me with no way to pick up and carry the fscking thing around!
I guess the difference is that PTC doesn't generally assume its customers are moronic criminals from the start.
Precisely.
FLEXlm gives the vendor total control over his software in the field. I had a whole paragraph about its capabilities, but I'd prefer not to advertize them as I know astroturfers lurk here. Most ominous are the reporting capabilities, which cause the mind to reel. I mean they could bill you for hourly usage of "your" computer, or particular programs theron, with amazingly little effort. But we all trust the Emperor, don't we?
In the hands of a benign, responsive vendor (as the CAD/CAE vendors generally have to be, in their highly competitive market), this works smoothly and well. Can you honestly expect that from the Empire?
And GLOBEtrotter (the vendor of FLEXlm technology) was bought up this year by one of our favorite IPR protection companies: Macrovision!
Re:Changing the licenses and refunds..
on
Windows Refund Day II
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
SSSssshh!!
Do NOT tell the Empire about _that_.
I work full-time wrangling FLEXlm license keys & reports for/from CAD software license servers, and let me tell you you do NOT want the Empire to resort to such a licensing model.
#1 problem: You'll _never_ get the keys to the "software" you'll pay for. They'll be kept in Redmond, and you'll have to activate your software over the Internet, every time you use it. The Empire will then know _exactly_ when and how and to some extent where you use your computer. Local key servers run by the end-user will require proof that you _can't_ get the machine on the Internet, and could be very strictly controlled.
#2 problem: You won't crack the (2048 bit) keys, either. Your only chance will be to hack the.exe files. I know the gamerz are used to that, but just ask Cadence how impossible this can be made if a vendor _really_ puts his heart into it.
You do NOT want the Empire to go to a CAD/CAE-tool style, probably FLEXlm based, licensing model! PTC _may_ work with their customers. The monopolist has demonstrated that _they_ don't have to.
Sure I do, but a search for something like "build your own laptop" yields a few guys who will, within quite narrow limitations, let you pick from a few configuration options, which usually do NOT include no OS.
EmperorLinux.com looks like about the best. They resell Sony's big 16" PCG-GRX600, calling it a "Gazelle", and they give you your choice of distro, as long as your choice is RedHat, Mandrake, or Slackware. Beyond that they're hardly "build your own". Minimum CPU is still 1800MHz P4, and there's still that lose"modem". If you want a 60G disk you have to get the 2G CPU which pushes the total to $3000, and I don't even see an option to add extra RAM.
Again, that's not what/me (and I believe others here as well) describe as "build your own".
You can buy laptops without an OS as mentioned above
Not from any of the major OEMs, and not at anything resembling their high-volume pricing. Sure there are guys who will, basically, buy a laptop from an OEM (& pay the M$ tax on it), strip the WinBloze off, install some Linux distro I'm not interested in in a way that won't really suit me, put a Tux sticker on it, and sell it for about 50% over the OEMs price. That's not what I want.
and you can build you own laptop --
REALLY?!? That's be GREAT, that way I could leave out the useless lose"modem"! I could save a buncha money by using a 666MHz PIII too, and my battery would last a lot longer than with the 2GHz P4s that all the OEMs insist on putting in their pre-built laptops now.
I want a laptop with a 15" 1600x1200 display (or better yet the 16" 1600x1200 display Sony is now using).
Where do I go to find parts to build a laptop? PLEASE, enlighten us, before I accuse you of blowing smoke up our collective asses!
...the court decreed that the police have no duty to protect the public...
That's exactly right. The police are NOT charged with defending you from crime, only with writing up the report after the fact. Your first line of defense against crime is yourself - [flamebait] and your gun.[/flamebait]
I give up - how do you get it to render the less-than/greater-than arrows?
You compare 'crimes prevented by display of firearm' and 'criminal shootings'. However, often people get robbed by 'display of firearm', as they are afraid of 'criminal shootings'. Count also this, and I think your numbers would change considerably.
I don't. Add in anything you want, to come up with a number for "crimes committed with guns" and you might get a hundred thousand or two. The FBI should have numbers on this. It still pales next to "crimes prevented with guns".
"it's better to be judged by twelve than carried by six."
It's better yet to keep yer mouth shut, and avoid the trouble (arrest record, legal bills, etc) of being judged by twelve, even if this does mean forgoing your bragging rights in the matter.
As children, we learn how to drive a vehicle by watching our parents drive. Most US kids learn about firearms by watching television, not the best source of information and role modelling when it comes to gun safety. As when consuming alcohol, many of us, as kids, are magically expected to make the right judgements with firearms without the benefit of any real training or parental guidance. WRT Timmy accidently killing his sister: Guns don't kill people, ignorance kills people.
This is why the NRA unceasingly beats the gun education/training drum, and can point to a continually _declining_ rate of gun accidents as a result.
"Who is Eddie Eagle? And _WHY_ hasn't he visited _your_child's_school_?"
Slashdot Mirror
Is there currently a project out there to port OSX (or something open source and remarkably, illegally similar to OSX) to x86?....
And no, I don't know what the hell I'm doing on slashdot either.
Your ability to understand, and take an interest in, such a project and the underlying issue demonstrates what you're doing here.
Your need to ask that question demonstrates that you haven't been here very long.
Welcome.
Nothing more to see here, move along......
The only topic icons that really make sense for this story are Windows and Security.
Yes, but if you put both of those together on the same webpage without some kind of buffering in between them they would probably make your browser catch fire.
If I were a religious person, I would pray that Alan Ralsky's wife and children get cancer. Any religious Slashdotters are invited to do so.
Why would anyone wish such on relative innocents?
If Alan Ralsky _himself_ were to get cancer, that would be appropriate.
Why would anyone download music that he has already paid for?
Maybe because the mastering quality of the (RIAA-produced) CD was so poor that the customer's player(s) couldn't read the damn thing. Then they'd need a _good_ copy to burn onto a CD-R and play.
And don't tell me that it's my cheap player's fault, because it's legitimately licensed. It says "CD" right there on the top, which is more than the RIAA can say about every music disc they're pushing nowdays.
[blink] Oh, I seem to have somehow got attached to the subject line...
I probably had you confused with the guy who changed the title.
You also made a remark before about a software developer refusing emailed bug reports.
Was this FREE/GPL software, or commercial software?
If the former, the developer is under little obligation to listen if he does not wish to.
If this was commercial software, we all know that customer "support" and bug fixing represent after-sale co$t$ that commercial developers prefer to avoid.
Yeah, even though it _is_ "unethical".
The actual mechanism employed in the avoidance has little to do with it.
I *do* think it's broadly impractical, and only of use in specialised cases, such as people who don't use email except for a very limited set of contacts.
Whoa! This describes most induhvidual users of personal email. Most have a fairly short (under 100) list of family and friends with whom they exchange email. They want email only from people whom they already know, no spam please. Addresses are distributed via personal contact: "Oh, yeah, the first time you send anything to me you won't get through the spam barrier - you'll just get a reply from my whitelist manager. All you'll have to do to that is hit "Reply" and send it back."
Of course you'll hear: "What's a 'whitelist'?"
"Well, it's a spam elimination technique which...."
And I think you'd have the interest of any email user.
Also, when you exchange email addresses with a contact, you _could_ go ahead and put the new address into your whitelist and save even the trouble of that initial reply. That's how I'd handle my Mum.
Whitelists are no problem on a personal scale. Yes, the level of expertise required is a barrier to many. A good (l)user application might be some easy-to-configure (and easy-to-share with yer friends) scripts to handle this automagically.
No, they're not for everybody (particularly your website), and I don't represent them to be, even if the parent thread was titled "Whitelists are the Answer".
Oh I read what you wrote, as well as your discussions with several others. I'm not accusing you personally of spamming, you appear completely ethical. You have my sympathy, for trying to use email to contact those too clueless to know how to use it. You have my sympathy for trying to _teach_ email to those too clueless to understand how to use it, for that matter.
Indeed, whitelisting is probably unworkable for your sales contact/response application. This IN NO WAY MAKES IT UNETHICAL.
I refuse to accept that, for the purposes of general email (NOT sales contact, where a higher level of convenience is required), the laiety is SO stupid that they cannot deal with a politely worded and conveniently responded-to whitelist reply request. "Regular" people deal with double-opt-in lists all the time. In general, if you're too stupid to use email I don't really want to correspond with you anyway. "You must be at least this tall to ride". I fully realize that as a businessman you don't have the option of refusing stupid people's money.
My point was that my real, personal email address has become a very private data item which I disclose as reluctantly as my SSN. If that's the only mechanism you have in place to attract contacts, well, you'll not be hearing from me that way.
Good luck.
I can't block myself since I do mail myself.
Then that is Not For You, unless you can identify some distinctive characteristic in your mail (maybe its originating IP?) that the spammers don't match.
Not to nitpick, but IIRC Hans Brinker was NOT the kid who stuck his finger in the dike.
Hans' claim to fame was victory in the regional ice-skating race, just to set the record straight.
You know this is trivial to defeat right?
Detect and run from, sure, but not _defeat_. (for a value or "defeat" == "get yer spam through")
Excessively slow server detection will be a standard feature of all next generation spam software.
Oh it is now. Has been, for at least a year. My buddy, who runs his own mail server, teergrubes anything he can detect as spam. The spammers flee, then remove him from their lists. He cares not whether this is automatic or requires manual effort on the part of the spammer. They go away.
I'd make it even simpler: teergrube _everything_, for about fifteen seconds a line. Legit mail has to tolerate these kinds of delays (and much worse, in fact) in order to get through to servers which are stuffed with spam traffic. A spammer can't afford to fool around for even one minute to send a message - he has to send a million a day in order to make money. Of course this probably wouldn't work for Mr. Ramasubramanian, but it will for my friend, and for me if I ever put up a mail server. You'd probably be pleasantly surprised at how many of those 32767+ connections will be dropped _immediately_ at the first continuation reply, no matter how short its delay.
I still think you can never win the resource battle
Sure we can. A thousand spammers facing 1,000,000 tarpits haven't a chance.
Unfortunately even whitelisting can be ineffective if someone uses *your own* e-mail address to spam you.
Huh? I missed something there. How often do you send email to _yourself_?
Guys who forge my email address(es) go to a _special_ spam folder, the one that will get priority treatment when I figure out how to retaliate against these bastards. Any suggestions?
My business relies on average people emailing me.
Then you can forget about my patronage, because I do not expose my email address in this manner.
(My slashdot-published email is a blackhole, so don't bother.)
And you can also forget about asking me to use my email address as a userID.
"Everybody who asks for my email address is a spammer until proven otherwise."
Yes, I have no problem isolating myself from the rest of the outside world, especially spammers, telelmarketers, and other advertizers of all types: "If you're one of my friends, relatives, or aquantiances, leave a message, preferably including your number, and I'll get back to you. If you're trying to _sell_me_something_, I either don't want it, can't afford it, or I've already got one."
It's MY email box, dammit. I'll accept or reject anything I please, from whomever _I_ choose!
Email, as it stands today, is useless as a business contact medium. A hundred spams a day forces one to dig a moat and lower the drawbridge only for known friends. Sorry if this interferes with your "business model". Tell it to the spammers who've ruined email.
soooo many annoying flashing things, NONE
of which have any relation to you or your
material?
Are those supposed to be of some benefit?
Scientific studies have repeadedly shown
that Netizens (particularly SlashDotters)
either:
1. Block these things in the first place
2. Hit Esc or other such to MAKE THEM STOPP!!
3. Leave a website immediately when they see so many.
OK, but those are all desktop models, NONE of which I'd ever buy.
What about _laptops_?
So a configed laptop doesn't contain parts?
Sure it does, but the customers' latitude in selecting those parts (or even which ones to simply omit, like the lose"modem") is piss poor. It certainly comes nowhere near the flexibility of the "build your own" method so many of us enjoy at the desktop system level.
In particular the choice of a high-end display and a big disk carries with it the need to pay _way_too_much_ for a bleeding-edge CPU with speed I don't need, and whose power consumption is inappropriate for battery-powered equipment. Other people, with other priorities, will be dissatisfied for other reasons. You can't please us _all_. Only a parts warehouse can.
You're hereby accused of blowing smoke up our collective asses, about this whole "build yer own laptop" thing. It just doesn't happen.
Well, seeing that you want a one-off, custom installation you should expect to pay the one-off, custom price and not the "high-volume pricing".
That's exactly the point of "build it yourself", and this doesn't happen with laptops.
I can go into Fry's (well, several _other_ guys in town as well)(and there are online vendors too), buy a basketfull of components at high-volume prices, take them home, and build a "one-off", full custom desktop computer that will suit me precisely (including and especially when it comes to choice of OS), at a price that's competitive with OEM-built systems. The closest I can come to this with a laptop system is the customization options allowed me by the manufacturer or occasionally a vendor. A one-off laptop costs an arm and a leg, leaving me with no way to pick up and carry the fscking thing around!
I guess the difference is that PTC doesn't generally assume its customers are moronic criminals from the start.
Precisely.
FLEXlm gives the vendor total control over his software in the field. I had a whole paragraph about its capabilities, but I'd prefer not to advertize them as I know astroturfers lurk here. Most ominous are the reporting capabilities, which cause the mind to reel. I mean they could bill you for hourly usage of "your" computer, or particular programs theron, with amazingly little effort. But we all trust the Emperor, don't we?
In the hands of a benign, responsive vendor (as the CAD/CAE vendors generally have to be, in their highly competitive market), this works smoothly and well. Can you honestly expect that from the Empire?
And GLOBEtrotter (the vendor of FLEXlm technology) was bought up this year by one of our favorite IPR protection companies: Macrovision!
SSSssshh!!
.exe files. I know the gamerz are used to that, but just ask Cadence how impossible this can be made if a vendor _really_ puts his heart into it.
Do NOT tell the Empire about _that_.
I work full-time wrangling FLEXlm license keys & reports for/from CAD software license servers, and let me tell you you do NOT want the Empire to resort to such a licensing model.
#1 problem: You'll _never_ get the keys to the "software" you'll pay for. They'll be kept in Redmond, and you'll have to activate your software over the Internet, every time you use it. The Empire will then know _exactly_ when and how and to some extent where you use your computer. Local key servers run by the end-user will require proof that you _can't_ get the machine on the Internet, and could be very strictly controlled.
#2 problem: You won't crack the (2048 bit) keys, either. Your only chance will be to hack the
You do NOT want the Empire to go to a CAD/CAE-tool style, probably FLEXlm based, licensing model! PTC _may_ work with their customers. The monopolist has demonstrated that _they_ don't have to.
Doesn't anyone know how to use Google?
/me (and I believe others here as well) describe as "build your own".
Sure I do, but a search for something like "build your own laptop" yields a few guys who will, within quite narrow limitations, let you pick from a few configuration options, which usually do NOT include no OS.
EmperorLinux.com looks like about the best. They resell Sony's big 16" PCG-GRX600, calling it a "Gazelle", and they give you your choice of distro, as long as your choice is RedHat, Mandrake, or Slackware. Beyond that they're hardly "build your own". Minimum CPU is still 1800MHz P4, and there's still that lose"modem". If you want a 60G disk you have to get the 2G CPU which pushes the total to $3000, and I don't even see an option to add extra RAM.
Again, that's not what
You can buy laptops without an OS as mentioned above
Not from any of the major OEMs, and not at anything resembling their high-volume pricing. Sure there are guys who will, basically, buy a laptop from an OEM (& pay the M$ tax on it), strip the WinBloze off, install some Linux distro I'm not interested in in a way that won't really suit me, put a Tux sticker on it, and sell it for about 50% over the OEMs price. That's not what I want.
and you can build you own laptop --
REALLY?!? That's be GREAT, that way I could leave out the useless lose"modem"! I could save a buncha money by using a 666MHz PIII too, and my battery would last a lot longer than with the 2GHz P4s that all the OEMs insist on putting in their pre-built laptops now.
I want a laptop with a 15" 1600x1200 display (or better yet the 16" 1600x1200 display Sony is now using).
Where do I go to find parts to build a laptop? PLEASE, enlighten us, before I accuse you of blowing smoke up our collective asses!
...the court decreed that the police have no duty to protect the public...
That's exactly right. The police are NOT charged with defending you from crime, only with writing up the report after the fact. Your first line of defense against crime is yourself - [flamebait] and your gun.[/flamebait]
I give up - how do you get it to render the less-than/greater-than arrows?
Oh, my. Didn't realize I was giving that a +2!
That probably doesn't rate +2.
Please don't moderate me, that's the first time that's happened.....
You compare 'crimes prevented by display of firearm' and 'criminal shootings'.
However, often people get robbed by 'display of firearm', as they are afraid of 'criminal shootings'. Count also this, and I think your numbers would change considerably.
I don't. Add in anything you want, to come up with a number for "crimes committed with guns" and you might get a hundred thousand or two. The FBI should have numbers on this. It still pales next to "crimes prevented with guns".
"it's better to be judged by twelve than carried by six."
It's better yet to keep yer mouth shut, and avoid the trouble (arrest record, legal bills, etc) of being judged by twelve, even if this does mean forgoing your bragging rights in the matter.
As children, we learn how to drive a vehicle by watching our parents drive. Most US kids learn about firearms by watching television, not the best source of information and role modelling when it comes to gun safety. As when consuming alcohol, many of us, as kids, are magically expected to make the right judgements with firearms without the benefit of any real training or parental guidance. WRT Timmy accidently killing his sister: Guns don't kill people, ignorance kills people.
This is why the NRA unceasingly beats the gun education/training drum, and can point to a continually _declining_ rate of gun accidents as a result.
"Who is Eddie Eagle? And _WHY_ hasn't he visited _your_child's_school_?"