The two Pentium 200 CPU's would be much slower than the PII-450 by a long shot. The P5 has very little onboard cache, and talks to external cache over a 66mhz CPU bus. The PII-450 would be taking to a 225mhz on card cache, and a PPro 200 would be talking to a 200mhz on chip cache.
If you really want to do SMP, consider dual Pentium Pro's. You can get the 166/512kb's 180/256kb's for about $120 and they overclock reliably to 200mhz. Even at the factory clock speed, a 166/512kb would be much faster than a P5-200, and two of them would perform as well or better than a single pII-400 for many tasks.
Pop two PPro's on an Intel pr440fx motherboard that you can get for $100 on eBay and you've got a kickass fast system with built in ultra-wide SCSI, 100baseTX ethernet, sound, and USB, all of which work flawlessly under Linux.
Executive Summary: P5 CPU's are obsolete and a waste of money. Even two 233mhz p5's would be significantly slower than a single PII-450. PPro CPU's are a good buy, and you can prolly get two of 'em and a motherboard with SCSI and other goodies for cheaper than a PII-450 chip and board with the same features.
The fact that the GPL doesn't accomodate other licenses is disturbing.
You're forgetting that many free software developers are open to relicensing their code under another comparable free software license to help out folks working on other free projects. This happens all the time with XFree86, where authors of GPL'd code relicense portions of their code under the BSD license so they can be used in the X server and X libraries.
First, try enabling the buffering in mpg123. A buffer of between 128kb - 4096kb will allow the player thread to continue working even when the decoder falls behind due to high system load.
Second, try using rtstools to give mpg123 realtime priority. This will result in mpg123 getting run before all other pending processes on your computer. I also have a patch for mpg123 that can do this -- mail me if rtstools helps but you get tired of doing it by hand.
Third, check for hardware issues. Make sure your video card or another device isn't hogging all the bus bandwidth. Make sure slow devices like parallel port zip drives and old IDE controllers aren't holding up the entire system.
Foo is most commonly used by programmers as a metasyntactic variable.
metasyntactic variable A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word {foo} is the {canonical} example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a {scratch} file that may be deleted at any time.
foo /foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything, especially programs and files (especially {scratch files}). First on the standard list of {metasyntactic variables} used in {syntax} examples. See also {bar}, {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {corge}, {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}.
The etymology of "foo" is obscure. When used in connection with "bar" it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym {FUBAR}, later bowdlerised to {foobar}.
However, the use of the word "foo" itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. "FOO" often appeared in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip by Bill Holman. This surrealist strip about a fireman appeared in various American comics including "Everybody's" between about 1930 and 1952. FOO was often included on licence plates of cars and in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke but foo men chew".
Allegedly, "FOO" and "BAR" also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!". Oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be related to the Chinese word "fu" (sometimes transliterated "foo"), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called "fu dogs").
Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's "oeuvre" have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language", compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.
For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}. Almost the entire staff of what became the {MIT} {AI LAB} was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.
Another correspondant cites the nautical construction "foo-foo" (or "poo-poo"), used to refer to something effeminate or some technical thing whose name has been forgotten, e.g. "foo-foo box", "foo-foo valve". This was common on ships by the early nineteenth century.
Very probably, hackish "foo" had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish "feh" and/or English "fooey".
Definitions from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (12Dec98) [foldoc]:
I have a 12 cassette DAT autoloader I bought for $300 from an auction site. It's DDSI, so I can use the cheapest possible tapes with it. Just pop in the magazine and come back the next morning...
You gotta use threads or separate processes and that requires a whole different approach than some applications use. You'd basically have to rewrite the code to use parallel algorithms.
Not true. There's an automatic speed increase when more than one job is running, since there's more CPU time to go around.
Note that netscape or quake are not threaded, therefore you wouldn't get get any performance gain with the exception that you could be using the other processor for other processes.
Netscape is threaded. Also, the X server runs in a separate process and can be scheduled on the other CPU, so that UI operations can be run asynchronously on another CPU. While Quake isn't multithreaded, the extra CPU keeps routine system operations (like email and web server) from slowing down your game. SMP makes for a massive improvement when you're playing quakeworld on the same machine that runs the server, since the server runs in a separate process and can be scheduled on the other CPU.
This might be good for something like ftp or http, where processes are forked off the main process (or inetd or whatever), but not for something like an SQL database.
It makes for a great improvement with HTTP servers, especially when lots of CGI scripts get running. SQL databases like PostgreSQL fork separate processes for each client connected, and I belive mySQL uses threads. Both SQL servers can easily be scheduled across multiple CPU's to decrease execution time when multiple queries are run.
All this talk about smp starts me drooling for an smp motherboard to learn more about all this stuff:)
Intel pr440fx, $100 on most discount hardware and auction sites. Has two PPro CPU sockets, 4 dimm sockets (up to 512mb), USB, 4 PCI slots, onboard UW SCSI, 2 IDE ports, onboard sound, onboard temperature, voltage, and fan speed monitoring, and 100baseTX ethernet.
A software emulator can be used to help in the creation and debugging of new games. With an emulator, it's easy to add a few lines of code to display internal machine state information that otherwise would require cost-prohibitive in-circuit debuggers to do on the actual hardware.
Emulators have many uses other than piracy. Why have a stack of 10 different console machines and 20 different controllers (SMS, Genesis, Nintendo, SNES, N64, NeoGeo, Game Boy, Game Gear, Jaguar, Colecovision) when you can play all your games on one computer and a single pair of controllers?
You'll need to apply a patch to Ext2fs in order to get 32-bit UID/GID's on Linux. With the patch, the extra UID/GID bits are stored in unused/reserved parts of the inode. A patch like I describe was posted recently on linux-kernel.
After applying the patch, you may need to recompile glibc in order for chown, chgrp, etc to work with the bigger UID's. Not sure. Contact the author for details. At any rate, 32-bit UID's will be "official" in 2.3 and 2.4 kernels.
This law would also outlaw network cards - which have unique MAC addresses hardcoded, SCSI Disks - which have a serial number, and many modern modems - which also include serial numbers. If Ethernet cards didn't come pre-programed from the factory with a unique number, maintaining uniqueness on a large LAN would be a major hassle. (worse than the current situation with IP's, since bootp and dhcp won't work for this sort of thing.) Software serial numbers on SCSI drives and Modems help ensure that the correct version of firmware upgrades are installed.
This law is even lamer than Intel's suggestion that an easily tampered with serial number could help secure e-commerce. If it becomes official, folks in Arizona would have to manually set MAC addresses on all their new network cards, as well as risk installing unmatched firmware upgrades on their new SCSI drives and Modems.
Sometimes, passing the UPS depot on the way to school I'll see UPS trucks moving with the rear door open. On more than one occasion I've seen boxes on the ground near the depot's driveway or dragging behind trucks. If this isn't bad enough, I'm sure you've all seen the episode of the 20/20 news show where Barbara Walters, the show's anchorperson, makes all kinds of funny faces while she watches UPS employees stomp open packages at christmas time in order to steal stuff.
To all those who argue Katz's computer was ill-assembled, remember that a trip off the back of a UPS truck at 35mph would destroy even the original IBM AT steel case. Who knows how many flights of stairs, loading docks or trucks the computer fell off before the delivery person dropped it off Katz's porch.
There's over 10,000 legitimate mp3's at http://www.mp3.com/. It's slanderous for the mainstream music industry representatives to state that mp3's are used primarily for the unauthorized duplication and redistribution of copyrighted music.
So if your vendor isn't responsive, you get a new vendor.
If you're unhappy with a problem in a closed software product, switching vendors isn't as easy as it sounds. Data files created by closed software products are often incompatible with software from other vendors. In order to change vendors, money would need to be spent to convert the data to the new format. Then more money would need to be spent to purchase the new software. Any money spent on the old software would be lost.
With Open Source software products, it's easy to move to a better vendor and continue using the same software and the same data files. No money must be spent to convert the old data files, and the money spent to aquire the old software is not wasted.
I have two machines on my desk at work. My favorite of the two is an old SPARCstation IPX. With a 40mhz CPU and 32mb of ram, it's still faster for most tasks than the p200mmx with 48mb of ram and NT that sits next to it.
The only problem with the old SPARC is its 8bpp framebuffer. It makes most websites hard to read, and despite degrading the content, Netscape still sucks up too many colormap entries. If I want to run Netscape, color xterms, and XEmacs at the same time, I have my choice between missing colors or colormap flashing. Yuck.
Consequently, I usually run Netscape on the PC with Windows NT, even though I do all my imporant stuff on the old SPARC. At one point, I used to run Netscape over the network from one of the faster sparcs, but NT's poor networking performance and the frequent crashing of my NT X server brought a stop to this. Now I just go get a cup of coffee when I see "Cache cleanup, removing 1342 files..."
My favorite machine of all is at home. It's a dual ppro-200 with 384mb of ram, two 18gb ultra-wide scsi disks, one 9gb ultra scsi disk, a fast cdrom, 48gb DAT autoloader, and a 2x cd writer. It has a great video card that can do 1280x1024x16bpp, which is just the right size for my 20" trinitron monitor. Netscape on my home machine makes for some comfortable slashdotting.
Legacy winhardware like winmodems and winprinters can make upgrading to a new operating system difficult. Their costs associated with their poor performance, low efficiency, and limited operating system comatibility rarely offset the small decrease in price versus standard devices. Futureproof your hardware investments by avoiding devices that lock you into the current operating system fad. There's no guarantee that you winmodem or winprinter will work with anything other than the current version of Windows. Some winhardware designed before the release of Windows 98 doesn't work with '98. Many windevices don't work with Windows NT due to changes in how it handles device drivers. For similar reasons, it's likely that these devices won't work with the upcoming Windows 2000 either.
A cheapie 56k modem can be had for $60, and an Ensonic PCI sound card in retail box is $50 at Circuit City. Shop these items carefully and you could replace all your legacy winhardware for well under a hundred bucks.
Don't panic. Ethernet Cards and SCSI disk drives already have embedded ID or serial numbers for a long time now with little impact on privacy.
Win32 Has More Bugs, Requires More Developers
on
Interview with JWZ
·
· Score: 1
Proprietary platforms such as Win32 often have more bugs than open platforms. Since it's usually very difficult or impossible to get the operating system code fixed, workarounds or replacement code must be created. More bugs to fix means more code to write. More code to write requires more developers to write it.
The Mozilla folks already have plans to package the layout engine as a XPCOM or CORBA object. This would allow it to be used as a widget without any of the linking / source combination issues you describe. Remember, the GPL doesn't apply to programs that are aggregated with GPL'd programs, only those that are linked or combined.
Object interfaces like CORBA and XPCOM would also provide an easy way to plug any layout engine into any program, so getting tied to an obsolete or buggy layout engine wouldn't become a problem.
Now, based on my understanding of contract law, as soon as one party violates the terms of the contract, the other party is immediately released from having to fulfill their obligations under said contract. So it seems to me that in Igor's case, as soon as the EULA was violated by Toshiba refusing to issue a refund, he was no longer bound by the EULA.
I don't know if what you describe is true or not, but it's very likely that he was never bound by the EULA in the first place, since shrinkwrap licenses are not valid in many jurisdictions.
If that is the case, why could a person not, once MS or their representatives had broken the contract, simply start burning copies of the Windows CD and handing them out on a street corner?
Unauthorized duplication is prohibited by copyright law, and has nothing to do with the license agreement. If the EULA was determined invalid on the grounds you specified above, he could do other things like reverse engineer or disassemble the software, but he probably already had those rights in the first place.
Spamtrack is by no means a finished product, and still needs some work before it's suitable for everyone. I encourage users to try test@spamtrack.978.org to make sure the results are appropriate for your situation before making heavy use of the service. As always, suggestions, comments, and bug-reports are welcome: you can email them to brianr-slashdot.org@osiris.978.org
In response to Mr. Anonymous Coward's Comments:
1.It will send the spam complaint to the contacts of every domain in every legitimate-looking Received: header.
Correct. This results in a contact to every site involved or fraudulently represented as involved with the tranmission of the unsolicited commercial message. ISP's that were involved want to hear about it so they can avoid having their resources wasted by the spammer. ISP's that were fraudulently represented as being involved by forged headers want to know so they can stop the spammer from misusing their name again in the future.
This is a bad thing because it will also send the spam complaint to your ISP...
Sending a copy of the complaint to the spammed user's ISP could be either good or bad depending on the circumstances and the ISP's policy, and should probably be turned off by default.
...It basically accuses them of allowing relaying. This is a nice kick in the nuts when you've been busting spammers all day...
This is not the case at all. Some ISP's like to know about abuse of their resources by spammers (even if they're not being used as a relay) and will actively pursue the matter.
2.It spams every internic contact for the domains it decides are involved. It's hard to tell from the tests I have tried, but it may send mail to every contact for each domain....
The Internic whois database is only used when the domain has not registered their preferred spam-complaint contact address with one of the major abuse contact lists. If no contact is on file and the whois lookup fails, then the message is sent to postmaster and abuse at the offending domain. Even if the same address appears as a contact more than one time, only a single complaint message will be sent.
3. It mangles the subject
Spamtrack merely prepends text to the subject. The subject is not mangled, and can still be matched by automated tracking systems.
...and inserts a little speech about why spam is bad... The best thing to send is a message with the original subject line, with only the message with full headers in the body and no other comments. Otherwise, you will mess up spam-report handling programs which try to match messages...
Any sane spam-report handling program will match the first RFC822 object it finds in the body of the message or its attachments. Including a complaint or "speech" in the body of the message should not interfere with this process.
The same complaint message and "speech" is also BCC'd to the spammer, just in case they don't understand the implications of what they've done. The envelope sender address on that message is written in a manner that makes it easy to keep track of which spammers actually send more spam to people who ask them not to send any spam at all.
A lot of people used to tell me that they didn't like to report spammers. When I asked them why, there were two major reasons they always cited: 1. I don't know who to report it to, and 2. If I report them, my mailbox will only fill up with dozens of "Yes, we got your spam complaint" messages. Spamtrack, a free service powered by all Free Software is my answer to the problem.
Using spamtrack is easy. Simply forward the spam message with full headers (preferably as an attachment) to report@spamtrack.978.org. A list of all the contact addresses for the offending domains will be compiled. You will be sent a report, and the domain contacts will be sent complaint messages. All complaint messages will have the return addresses rewriten so that responses will end up in the database instead of filling up your inbox.
Spamtrack uses a modified Ricochet and the PosgreSQL database to track complaints and their responses. An online interface where you can view responses and statistics on worst offenders, response times, and number of resolutions is in the works.
Please use the report@spamtrack.978.org address only to report actual unsolicited commercial messages. You can forward test messages to test@spamtrack.978.org.
Slashdot Mirror
The two Pentium 200 CPU's would be much slower than the PII-450 by a long shot. The P5 has very little onboard cache, and talks to external cache over a 66mhz CPU bus. The PII-450 would be taking to a 225mhz on card cache, and a PPro 200 would be talking to a 200mhz on chip cache.
If you really want to do SMP, consider dual Pentium Pro's. You can get the 166/512kb's 180/256kb's for about $120 and they overclock reliably to 200mhz. Even at the factory clock speed, a 166/512kb would be much faster than a P5-200, and two of them would perform as well or better than a single pII-400 for many tasks.
Pop two PPro's on an Intel pr440fx motherboard that you can get for $100 on eBay and you've got a kickass fast system with built in ultra-wide SCSI, 100baseTX ethernet, sound, and USB, all of which work flawlessly under Linux.
Executive Summary: P5 CPU's are obsolete and a waste of money. Even two 233mhz p5's would be significantly slower than a single PII-450. PPro CPU's are a good buy, and you can prolly get two of 'em and a motherboard with SCSI and other goodies for cheaper than a PII-450 chip and board with the same features.
The fact that the GPL doesn't accomodate other licenses is disturbing.
You're forgetting that many free software developers are open to relicensing their code under another comparable free software license to help out folks working on other free projects. This happens all the time with XFree86, where authors of GPL'd code relicense portions of their code under the BSD license so they can be used in the X server and X libraries.
First, try enabling the buffering in mpg123. A buffer of between 128kb - 4096kb will allow the player thread to continue working even when the decoder falls behind due to high system load.
Second, try using rtstools to give mpg123 realtime priority. This will result in mpg123 getting run before all other pending processes on your computer. I also have a patch for mpg123 that can do this -- mail me if rtstools helps but you get tired of doing it by hand.
Third, check for hardware issues. Make sure your video card or another device isn't hogging all the bus bandwidth. Make sure slow devices like parallel port zip drives and old IDE controllers aren't holding up the entire system.
metasyntactic variable
A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word {foo} is the {canonical} example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a {scratch} file that may be deleted at any time.
foo
/foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything, especially programs and files (especially {scratch files}). First on the standard list of {metasyntactic variables} used in {syntax} examples. See also {bar}, {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {corge}, {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}.
The etymology of "foo" is obscure. When used in connection with "bar" it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym {FUBAR}, later bowdlerised to {foobar}.
However, the use of the word "foo" itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons.
"FOO" often appeared in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip by Bill Holman. This surrealist strip about a fireman appeared in various American comics including "Everybody's" between about 1930 and 1952. FOO was often included on licence plates of cars and in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke but foo men chew".
Allegedly, "FOO" and "BAR" also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!". Oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be related to the Chinese word "fu" (sometimes transliterated "foo"), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called "fu dogs").
Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's "oeuvre" have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language", compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.
For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}. Almost the entire staff of what became the {MIT} {AI LAB} was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.
Another correspondant cites the nautical construction "foo-foo" (or "poo-poo"), used to refer to something effeminate or some technical thing whose name has been forgotten, e.g. "foo-foo box", "foo-foo valve". This was common on ships by the early nineteenth century.
Very probably, hackish "foo" had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish "feh" and/or English "fooey".
Definitions from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (12Dec98) [foldoc]:
I have a 12 cassette DAT autoloader I bought for $300 from an auction site. It's DDSI, so I can use the cheapest possible tapes with it. Just pop in the magazine and come back the next morning...
You gotta use threads or separate processes and that requires a whole different approach than some applications use. You'd basically have to rewrite the code to use parallel algorithms.
Not true. There's an automatic speed increase when more than one job is running, since there's more CPU time to go around.
Note that netscape or quake are not threaded, therefore you wouldn't get get any performance gain with the exception that you could be using the other processor for other processes.
Netscape is threaded. Also, the X server runs in a separate process and can be scheduled on the other CPU, so that UI operations can be run asynchronously on another CPU. While Quake isn't multithreaded, the extra CPU keeps routine system operations (like email and web server) from slowing down your game. SMP makes for a massive improvement when you're playing quakeworld on the same machine that runs the server, since the server runs in a separate process and can be scheduled on the other CPU.
This might be good for something like ftp or http, where processes are forked off the main process (or inetd or whatever), but not for something like an SQL database.
It makes for a great improvement with HTTP servers, especially when lots of CGI scripts get running. SQL databases like PostgreSQL fork separate processes for each client connected, and I belive mySQL uses threads. Both SQL servers can easily be scheduled across multiple CPU's to decrease execution time when multiple queries are run.
All this talk about smp starts me drooling for an smp motherboard to learn more about all this stuff :)
Intel pr440fx, $100 on most discount hardware and auction sites. Has two PPro CPU sockets, 4 dimm sockets (up to 512mb), USB, 4 PCI slots, onboard UW SCSI, 2 IDE ports, onboard sound, onboard temperature, voltage, and fan speed monitoring, and 100baseTX ethernet.
A software emulator can be used to help in the creation and debugging of new games. With an emulator, it's easy to add a few lines of code to display internal machine state information that otherwise would require cost-prohibitive in-circuit debuggers to do on the actual hardware.
Emulators have many uses other than piracy. Why have a stack of 10 different console machines and 20 different controllers (SMS, Genesis, Nintendo, SNES, N64, NeoGeo, Game Boy, Game Gear, Jaguar, Colecovision) when you can play all your games on one computer and a single pair of controllers?
You'll need to apply a patch to Ext2fs in order to get 32-bit UID/GID's on Linux. With the patch, the extra UID/GID bits are stored in unused/reserved parts of the inode. A patch like I describe was posted recently on linux-kernel.
After applying the patch, you may need to recompile glibc in order for chown, chgrp, etc to work with the bigger UID's. Not sure. Contact the author for details. At any rate, 32-bit UID's will be "official" in 2.3 and 2.4 kernels.
This law would also outlaw network cards - which have unique MAC addresses hardcoded, SCSI Disks - which have a serial number, and many modern modems - which also include serial numbers. If Ethernet cards didn't come pre-programed from the factory with a unique number, maintaining uniqueness on a large LAN would be a major hassle. (worse than the current situation with IP's, since bootp and dhcp won't work for this sort of thing.) Software serial numbers on SCSI drives and Modems help ensure that the correct version of firmware upgrades are installed.
This law is even lamer than Intel's suggestion that an easily tampered with serial number could help secure e-commerce. If it becomes official, folks in Arizona would have to manually set MAC addresses on all their new network cards, as well as risk installing unmatched firmware upgrades on their new SCSI drives and Modems.
Sometimes, passing the UPS depot on the way to school I'll see UPS trucks moving with the rear door open. On more than one occasion I've seen boxes on the ground near the depot's driveway or dragging behind trucks. If this isn't bad enough, I'm sure you've all seen the episode of the 20/20 news show where Barbara Walters, the show's anchorperson, makes all kinds of funny faces while she watches UPS employees stomp open packages at christmas time in order to steal stuff.
To all those who argue Katz's computer was ill-assembled, remember that a trip off the back of a UPS truck at 35mph would destroy even the original IBM AT steel case. Who knows how many flights of stairs, loading docks or trucks the computer fell off before the delivery person dropped it off Katz's porch.
There's over 10,000 legitimate mp3's at http://www.mp3.com/. It's slanderous for the mainstream music industry representatives to state that mp3's are used primarily for the unauthorized duplication and redistribution of copyrighted music.
So if your vendor isn't responsive, you get a new vendor.
If you're unhappy with a problem in a closed software product, switching vendors isn't as easy as it sounds. Data files created by closed software products are often incompatible with software from other vendors. In order to change vendors, money would need to be spent to convert the data to the new format. Then more money would need to be spent to purchase the new software. Any money spent on the old software would be lost.
With Open Source software products, it's easy to move to a better vendor and continue using the same software and the same data files. No money must be spent to convert the old data files, and the money spent to aquire the old software is not wasted.
I have two machines on my desk at work. My favorite of the two is an old SPARCstation IPX. With a 40mhz CPU and 32mb of ram, it's still faster for most tasks than the p200mmx with 48mb of ram and NT that sits next to it.
The only problem with the old SPARC is its 8bpp framebuffer. It makes most websites hard to read, and despite degrading the content, Netscape still sucks up too many colormap entries. If I want to run Netscape, color xterms, and XEmacs at the same time, I have my choice between missing colors or colormap flashing. Yuck.
Consequently, I usually run Netscape on the PC with Windows NT, even though I do all my imporant stuff on the old SPARC. At one point, I used to run Netscape over the network from one of the faster sparcs, but NT's poor networking performance and the frequent crashing of my NT X server brought a stop to this. Now I just go get a cup of coffee when I see "Cache cleanup, removing 1342 files..."
My favorite machine of all is at home. It's a dual ppro-200 with 384mb of ram, two 18gb ultra-wide scsi disks, one 9gb ultra scsi disk, a fast cdrom, 48gb DAT autoloader, and a 2x cd writer. It has a great video card that can do 1280x1024x16bpp, which is just the right size for my 20" trinitron monitor. Netscape on my home machine makes for some comfortable slashdotting.
Legacy winhardware like winmodems and winprinters can make upgrading to a new operating system difficult. Their costs associated with their poor performance, low efficiency, and limited operating system comatibility rarely offset the small decrease in price versus standard devices. Futureproof your hardware investments by avoiding devices that lock you into the current operating system fad. There's no guarantee that you winmodem or winprinter will work with anything other than the current version of Windows. Some winhardware designed before the release of Windows 98 doesn't work with '98. Many windevices don't work with Windows NT due to changes in how it handles device drivers. For similar reasons, it's likely that these devices won't work with the upcoming Windows 2000 either.
A cheapie 56k modem can be had for $60, and an Ensonic PCI sound card in retail box is $50 at Circuit City. Shop these items carefully and you could replace all your legacy winhardware for well under a hundred bucks.
The PIII is already supported. It may be a while before kernel support and compilers exist to produce applications that use KNI.
Don't panic. Ethernet Cards and SCSI disk drives already have embedded ID or serial numbers for a long time now with little impact on privacy.
Proprietary platforms such as Win32 often have more bugs than open platforms. Since it's usually very difficult or impossible to get the operating system code fixed, workarounds or replacement code must be created. More bugs to fix means more code to write. More code to write requires more developers to write it.
The Mozilla folks already have plans to package the layout engine as a XPCOM or CORBA object. This would allow it to be used as a widget without any of the linking / source combination issues you describe. Remember, the GPL doesn't apply to programs that are aggregated with GPL'd programs, only those that are linked or combined.
Object interfaces like CORBA and XPCOM would also provide an easy way to plug any layout engine into any program, so getting tied to an obsolete or buggy layout engine wouldn't become a problem.
Now, based on my understanding of contract law, as soon as one party violates the terms of the contract, the other party is immediately released from having to fulfill their obligations under said contract. So it seems to me that in Igor's case, as soon as the EULA was violated by Toshiba refusing to issue a refund, he was no longer bound by the EULA.
I don't know if what you describe is true or not, but it's very likely that he was never bound by the EULA in the first place, since shrinkwrap licenses are not valid in many jurisdictions.
If that is the case, why could a person not, once MS or their representatives had broken the contract, simply start burning copies of the Windows CD and handing them out on a street corner?
Unauthorized duplication is prohibited by copyright law, and has nothing to do with the license agreement. If the EULA was determined invalid on the grounds you specified above, he could do other things like reverse engineer or disassemble the software, but he probably already had those rights in the first place.
Shrinkwrap licenses are invalid in the US. See 17 USC 117 and D. J. Bernstein's commentary on the matter.
Spamtrack is by no means a finished product, and still needs some work before it's suitable for everyone. I encourage users to try test@spamtrack.978.org to make sure the results are appropriate for your situation before making heavy use of the service. As always, suggestions, comments, and bug-reports are welcome: you can email them to brianr-slashdot.org@osiris.978.org
In response to Mr. Anonymous Coward's Comments:
1.It will send the spam complaint to the contacts of every domain in every legitimate-looking Received: header.
Correct. This results in a contact to every site involved or fraudulently represented as involved with the tranmission of the unsolicited commercial message. ISP's that were involved want to hear about it so they can avoid having their resources wasted by the spammer. ISP's that were fraudulently represented as being involved by forged headers want to know so they can stop the spammer from misusing their name again in the future.
This is a bad thing because it will also send the spam complaint to your ISP...
Sending a copy of the complaint to the spammed user's ISP could be either good or bad depending on the circumstances and the ISP's policy, and should probably be turned off by default.
This is not the case at all. Some ISP's like to know about abuse of their resources by spammers (even if they're not being used as a relay) and will actively pursue the matter.
2.It spams every internic contact for the domains it decides are involved. It's hard to tell from the tests I have tried, but it may send mail to every contact for each domain....
The Internic whois database is only used when the domain has not registered their preferred spam-complaint contact address with one of the major abuse contact lists. If no contact is on file and the whois lookup fails, then the message is sent to postmaster and abuse at the offending domain. Even if the same address appears as a contact more than one time, only a single complaint message will be sent.
3. It mangles the subject
Spamtrack merely prepends text to the subject. The subject is not mangled, and can still be matched by automated tracking systems.
Any sane spam-report handling program will match the first RFC822 object it finds in the body of the message or its attachments. Including a complaint or "speech" in the body of the message should not interfere with this process.
The same complaint message and "speech" is also BCC'd to the spammer, just in case they don't understand the implications of what they've done. The envelope sender address on that message is written in a manner that makes it easy to keep track of which spammers actually send more spam to people who ask them not to send any spam at all.
A lot of people used to tell me that they didn't like to report spammers. When I asked them why, there were two major reasons they always cited: 1. I don't know who to report it to, and 2. If I report them, my mailbox will only fill up with dozens of "Yes, we got your spam complaint" messages. Spamtrack, a free service powered by all Free Software is my answer to the problem.
Using spamtrack is easy. Simply forward the spam message with full headers (preferably as an attachment) to report@spamtrack.978.org. A list of all the contact addresses for the offending domains will be compiled. You will be sent a report, and the domain contacts will be sent complaint messages. All complaint messages will have the return addresses rewriten so that responses will end up in the database instead of filling up your inbox.
Spamtrack uses a modified Ricochet and the PosgreSQL database to track complaints and their responses. An online interface where you can view responses and statistics on worst offenders, response times, and number of resolutions is in the works.
Please use the report@spamtrack.978.org address only to report actual unsolicited commercial messages. You can forward test messages to test@spamtrack.978.org.
Gimp includes all photoshop functionality except color management and CMYK.
Glad to see some people have finally come to their senses.
For those still trapped, there's always Internet Censorship Repair Tools.
GNU Ghostscript 4.03 (1998-5-1) works fine with this document. Be sure you're running the latest version before reporting bugs.