Interesting. I've stuck with cheap hardware (with a few important exceptions) for the last 7 or 8 years, and have had few problems. Realtek network cards seem to work fine for me, I've never had a failure. Cheap memory I've had one or two failures, although that's in an office with 5 machines running 24/7, plus my 2 home machines. The only motherboard failure I've had was when I put the wrong processor type into it and the higher than expected voltage caused the processor to explode, melting part of the motherboard with it.
If everyone remembers the service pack release times from the Windows 95 and NT4.0 days, they came out every few months, with very occasional fixes otherwise, just to take care of emergencies.
Windows 95, I believe, had no network-enabled services other than file & printer sharing, both of which were almost certainly ported from Windows 3.11 and therefore were already fairly well debugged. NT4 was similar, although not quite as good. Neither of them had RPC, DCOM, UPNP, SNMP, a web or ftp server installed by default, or a version of Internet Explorer that enabled scripting of ActiveX objects. There simply weren't many security problems in out-of-the-box 95/NT4 installs because an out-of-the-box install of these systems did next to nothing of any interest with the Internet.
Ravicher found that about a third of the 283 issued patents are owned by large corporations that are friendly to Linux - ones with some current financial interest in broad Linux adoption, including: Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Sony, and others However, to date, no Linux vendor has [...] entered into an explicit agreement promising never to use its own patents against Linux users.
Each time you redistribute the Program [...]. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
I think threatening patent infringement action against any user of a Linux distribution that you had provided them with would be placing a further restriction on usage, hence a violation of this term that a Linux distributor must have agreed to in order to distribute Linux.
From: dhein#NoSpam.onramp.net An Engineer, a Physicist, and a Mathematician all go the same Conference. University budgets being what they are, they all stay in the same cheap hotel. Each room has the same floor plan, has the same cheap TV, the same cheap bed, and a small bathroom. Instead of a sprinkler system, the hotel has opted for Fire Buckets.
The Engineer, Physicist, and Mathematician are all asleep in bed. At about 2AM, the Engineer wakes up because he smells smoke. He looks in the corner of the room and sees that the TV set is on fire! He dashes into the bathroom, fills the Fire Bucket to overflowing with water, and drenches the TV set. The fire goes out, and the Engineer goes back to sleep.
A little while later, the Physicist wakes because he smells smoke. He looks in the corner and sees that the TV set is on fire. He grabs a handy envelope, estimates the BTU output of the fire, scribbles a quick calculation, then dashes into the bathroom and fills the Fire Bucket with just enough water to douse the flames. He puts the fire out and goes back to sleep.
In a little while, the Mathematician wakes up to the smell of smoke. He looks in the corner and sees the TV on fire. He looks into the bathroom and sees the Fire Bucket. Having determined that a solution exists, he goes back to sleep.
As someone who watched an open source game project get caught up in stage 1 years ago, I can say that it is a risk.
At the time, 3D graphics hardware was just starting to become common -- so, initially a rendering engine was written that used allegro's triangle drawing and the painter's algorithm to draw 3D objects. Then the authors decided that OpenGL was the way to go instead (I think Quake had been released a little while beforehand, and everyone thought it was cool back then). While they messed around for 6 months I gave up interest in contributing to the AI section I'd been considering working on. I understand later still they moved to Direct3D, I'm not sure why. I don't think the game was ever finished.
almost every computer user violates the double click patent of Microsoft.
Actually, if you read the patent, you'd find that most people don't. IIRC, what MS had patented there was a system where you clicked once to launch an application, but if you double clicked it the application launched and loaded the last document it was working with. I've never actually used a computer system that uses this approach.
That's not to say that it isn't a trivial invention that would be obvious to any competent user interface designer who was asked to solve the problem of how to provide those two functions efficiently (which would render the patent invalid, I believe), but it isn't a system that's currently in common usage.
How on earth must one believe that a worm works (or think that one's readers believe that a worm works) in order for them make such a statement?
I suspect a lot of people think they all get sent directly by the person who wrote them, and that they are somehow under his control.
But to be honest, I don't think most pepole actually think about how computer programs work at all. They just do.
It's like when I wrote a chess playing program as an exercise. I showed it off to a friend, and then said I wasn't entirely happy with the way it played. The response: "How can you not be happy? Isn't it playing like you do?"
Err... no... I didn't just copy my brain directly into the computer, actually.
Meanwhile, 5,000 shoppers simultaneously file compensation claims for 'unlawful arrest', because they've been prevented from leaving the store when they've done nothing wrong.
Of course, but umm, what prevents me now relabeling the bar codes in a store? And it's not that high tech either..
It's a tricky process to do surreptitiously. You have to align a label correctly over the barcode of the product and flatten it down so that it can be scanned properly.
Reprogramming an RFID tag could be done using hidden equipment while merely holding the item in front of you. You could do it right in front of a security camera and not be noticed.
Many supermarkets in the UK (at least Tesco and Safeway, probably others also) currently use a system where reduced products have a new barcode stuck to them which encodes both the original product ID and the reduced price. I would expect that they will want to move on to a similar system if they ever switch to RFID-based item scanning.
I once did this using Shift-Delete and couldn't believe it was taking so long.
Don't do that. Deleting large numbers of files via explorer is ridiculously wasteful -- it makes two passes over the directory structure, one to build a list of the files it needs to delete and one to delete them. This means it takes roughly twice as long to delete a large directory structure as, for instance, DEL/S.
Although, I believe a greater problem with NTFS is its tendency to get corrupted. I think most people have sees a BSOD because the filesystem couldn't be mounted.
No, I don't think most people have. I've been running an office here on NT4 and Win2K machines for the last 5 years, and have only seen 1 instance of FS corruption -- the file system checker came up on bootup, said it was fixing it, rebooted and it mounted fine. Entire process took about 20 minutes. I've seen one or two machines fail to boot because the _file_ NTOSKRNL.EXE has become corrupted, but that's usually down to hardware failure.
Huh? I didn't realize Creative had suddenly gained a monopoly on producing soundcards.
Looking at my local supplier's list, I see you're actually talking bollocks. They also stock cards manufactured by e-mu, m-audio and terratec. There's also a 'generic PCI' card, but I suspect that has a creative chipset.
I don't know if the Soundblaster Audigy ZS Platinum Pro cards they stock have any nifty features the others don't, but the Terratec card is a little cheaper, offers a close match on the listed features (24 bit, 96KHz, 8 stereo connections by the look of the picture of the product; don't know how many are in/out, though) for a lower price. If I had a use for an advanced piece of kit like that, I'd certainly be considering this solution rather than the soundblaster.
Someone in the UK found that lower earners bought more of them than higher earners, who would settle for a shops own brand.
The reason? People on low income can't afford to by Mercedes or BMWs, but at least they can reach the pinnacle in cola or corn flakes.
That's jumping to conclusions. I suspect the real reason is that people on lower incomes probably watch more commercial TV (remember this is a UK study, so non-commercial BBC is available) and therefore watch more adverts for brand name products and are more affected by them.
Sony have always had trouble with service. Many years ago, my family had one of their VCRs (the C5). Every ~9 months of use it needed repairs, due to a design flaw that meant the read heads were worn down by catching on something or other. The repairs came with a 12 month warranty, so it was always within warranty when it came time to get it fixed (!), but it would usually take something like 2 months for it to happen.
Eventually we just got sick of it and got a new one. But VCRs were expensive back then...
A 700mb CD is actually an 800mb disc; the other 100mb is lost to error correction bits when you write data tracks rather than audio/video tracks. To the other poster here -- yes, an 800mb disc holds roughly 80 minutes of standard spec VideoCD data, the same as it does CD audio data, as both formats were designed to be read by single speed CD players.
It _would_ help persuade management to switch. "Can we still use Word?" "Yes."
Of course, this ignores (a) the existence of Crossover Office, which I understand is capable of running Word virtually flawlessly, and (b) the fact that MS wouldn't do it because they know that they'd lose -- the number of people switching to Linux because of the availability of office would cut directly into their Windows revenues, and probably into some of their other application-based revenues also.
Of course, by the time we have the capability to do this, we'll probably have nice&clean self-sustaining fusion reactors anyway, and they're probably a much better source of power.
There's a bug in the idea of doing patent searches.
To reproduce this bug, go through the following steps: 1. Look for patents in the area where you're working. 2. Find a patent which is related but not identical to what you're doing. 3. Continue what you're doing. 4. Get sued for infringement by the patent owner.
Expected: Someone gives you credit for due diligence. Actual: Owner of related but not identical patent asks for triple damages for "willful infringement" using your knowledge of their patent as evidence. The threat of paying out three times as much forces you to settle unfavorably.
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX Comments: User error. Stage 3 of the process described above is considered an illegal operation, and as such we don't make any guarantees about the results of performing it.
Actually, MAD seems like a good metaphor. It points out that the patent war might be avertable -- if the OSS community can acquire allies with enough patents to dissuade an attack, then the attack will probably never come. The question is: how far will IBM et al go to support OSS? Would they openly fight Microsoft?
Second you are allowed to do research using others patents, you are just not allowed to sell a product based on the patent. So there is at least one instance where you are allowed to distribute under the GPL, so your release is a valid GPL release.
The GPL states that you're not allowed to distribute if you have any other legal requirements on you that would prevent you from fulfilling all of the terms of the GPL when you distribute. One of those terms is that you must give the recipient the right to redistribute under any of the acceptable terms of the GPL, one of which is redistribution in binary form (with an offer to provide the source code). A patent judgment against you would make it illegal for you to give such permission to distribute in binary form to anyone, so no, I don't believe it is legally possible to distribute a "source code only, experimental use only" patent encumbered program under the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. I've stuck with cheap hardware (with a few important exceptions) for the last 7 or 8 years, and have had few problems. Realtek network cards seem to work fine for me, I've never had a failure. Cheap memory I've had one or two failures, although that's in an office with 5 machines running 24/7, plus my 2 home machines. The only motherboard failure I've had was when I put the wrong processor type into it and the higher than expected voltage caused the processor to explode, melting part of the motherboard with it.
If everyone remembers the service pack release times from the Windows 95 and NT4.0 days, they came out every few months, with very occasional fixes otherwise, just to take care of emergencies.
Windows 95, I believe, had no network-enabled services other than file & printer sharing, both of which were almost certainly ported from Windows 3.11 and therefore were already fairly well debugged. NT4 was similar, although not quite as good. Neither of them had RPC, DCOM, UPNP, SNMP, a web or ftp server installed by default, or a version of Internet Explorer that enabled scripting of ActiveX objects. There simply weren't many security problems in out-of-the-box 95/NT4 installs because an out-of-the-box install of these systems did next to nothing of any interest with the Internet.
Ravicher found that about a third of the 283 issued patents are owned by large
corporations that are friendly to Linux - ones with some current financial interest in broad Linux
adoption, including: Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Sony, and others However, to date,
no Linux vendor has [...] entered into an explicit agreement promising never to use its own patents against Linux users.
How about this one?
Each time you redistribute the Program [...]. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
I think threatening patent infringement action against any user of a Linux distribution that you had provided them with would be placing a further restriction on usage, hence a violation of this term that a Linux distributor must have agreed to in order to distribute Linux.
Reminds me of a joke:
From: dhein#NoSpam.onramp.net
An Engineer, a Physicist, and a Mathematician all go the same
Conference. University budgets being what they are, they all stay in
the same cheap hotel. Each room has the same floor plan, has the same
cheap TV, the same cheap bed, and a small bathroom. Instead of
a sprinkler system, the hotel has opted for Fire Buckets.
The Engineer, Physicist, and Mathematician are all asleep in bed. At
about 2AM, the Engineer wakes up because he smells smoke. He looks in
the corner of the room and sees that the TV set is on fire! He dashes
into the bathroom, fills the Fire Bucket to overflowing with water, and
drenches the TV set. The fire goes out, and the Engineer goes back to
sleep.
A little while later, the Physicist wakes because he smells smoke. He
looks in the corner and sees that the TV set is on fire. He grabs a
handy envelope, estimates the BTU output of the fire, scribbles a quick
calculation, then dashes into the bathroom and fills the Fire Bucket
with just enough water to douse the flames. He puts the fire out and
goes back to sleep.
In a little while, the Mathematician wakes up to the smell of smoke.
He looks in the corner and sees the TV on fire. He looks into the
bathroom and sees the Fire Bucket. Having determined that a solution
exists, he goes back to sleep.
As someone who watched an open source game project get caught up in stage 1 years ago, I can say that it is a risk.
At the time, 3D graphics hardware was just starting to become common -- so, initially a rendering engine was written that used allegro's triangle drawing and the painter's algorithm to draw 3D objects. Then the authors decided that OpenGL was the way to go instead (I think Quake had been released a little while beforehand, and everyone thought it was cool back then). While they messed around for 6 months I gave up interest in contributing to the AI section I'd been considering working on. I understand later still they moved to Direct3D, I'm not sure why. I don't think the game was ever finished.
almost every computer user violates the double click patent of Microsoft.
Actually, if you read the patent, you'd find that most people don't. IIRC, what MS had patented there was a system where you clicked once to launch an application, but if you double clicked it the application launched and loaded the last document it was working with. I've never actually used a computer system that uses this approach.
That's not to say that it isn't a trivial invention that would be obvious to any competent user interface designer who was asked to solve the problem of how to provide those two functions efficiently (which would render the patent invalid, I believe), but it isn't a system that's currently in common usage.
Same here, also mozilla. I've also had internal server errors while metamoderating.
Maybe I'm just showing my ignorance here... but WTF is a blanket party?
How on earth must one believe that a worm works (or think that one's readers believe that a worm works) in order for them make such a statement?
I suspect a lot of people think they all get sent directly by the person who wrote them, and that they are somehow under his control.
But to be honest, I don't think most pepole actually think about how computer programs work at all. They just do.
It's like when I wrote a chess playing program as an exercise. I showed it off to a friend, and then said I wasn't entirely happy with the way it played. The response: "How can you not be happy? Isn't it playing like you do?"
Err... no... I didn't just copy my brain directly into the computer, actually.
What exactly would you call this?
http://www.usdoj.gov/foia/privstat.htm
For purposes of this section--
[...]
(2) the term "individual" means a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence;
A law that doesn't apply in the situation being discussed.
Meanwhile, 5,000 shoppers simultaneously file compensation claims for 'unlawful arrest', because they've been prevented from leaving the store when they've done nothing wrong.
Of course, but umm, what prevents me now relabeling the bar codes in a store? And it's not that high tech either..
It's a tricky process to do surreptitiously. You have to align a label correctly over the barcode of the product and flatten it down so that it can be scanned properly.
Reprogramming an RFID tag could be done using hidden equipment while merely holding the item in front of you. You could do it right in front of a security camera and not be noticed.
Many supermarkets in the UK (at least Tesco and Safeway, probably others also) currently use a system where reduced products have a new barcode stuck to them which encodes both the original product ID and the reduced price. I would expect that they will want to move on to a similar system if they ever switch to RFID-based item scanning.
I once did this using Shift-Delete and couldn't believe it was taking so long.
/S.
Don't do that. Deleting large numbers of files via explorer is ridiculously wasteful -- it makes two passes over the directory structure, one to build a list of the files it needs to delete and one to delete them. This means it takes roughly twice as long to delete a large directory structure as, for instance, DEL
Although, I believe a greater problem with NTFS is its tendency to get corrupted. I think most people have sees a BSOD because the filesystem couldn't be mounted.
No, I don't think most people have. I've been running an office here on NT4 and Win2K machines for the last 5 years, and have only seen 1 instance of FS corruption -- the file system checker came up on bootup, said it was fixing it, rebooted and it mounted fine. Entire process took about 20 minutes. I've seen one or two machines fail to boot because the _file_ NTOSKRNL.EXE has become corrupted, but that's usually down to hardware failure.
haha, there's no other brand.
Huh? I didn't realize Creative had suddenly gained a monopoly on producing soundcards.
Looking at my local supplier's list, I see you're actually talking bollocks. They also stock cards manufactured by e-mu, m-audio and terratec. There's also a 'generic PCI' card, but I suspect that has a creative chipset.
I don't know if the Soundblaster Audigy ZS Platinum Pro cards they stock have any nifty features the others don't, but the Terratec card is a little cheaper, offers a close match on the listed features (24 bit, 96KHz, 8 stereo connections by the look of the picture of the product; don't know how many are in/out, though) for a lower price. If I had a use for an advanced piece of kit like that, I'd certainly be considering this solution rather than the soundblaster.
Someone in the UK found that lower earners bought more of them than higher earners, who would settle for a shops own brand.
The reason? People on low income can't afford to by Mercedes or BMWs, but at least they can reach the pinnacle in cola or corn flakes.
That's jumping to conclusions. I suspect the real reason is that people on lower incomes probably watch more commercial TV (remember this is a UK study, so non-commercial BBC is available) and therefore watch more adverts for brand name products and are more affected by them.
Yes I have owned a Jaguar, they are horribly unreliable and extremely overrated for what they are
My experience has been the opposite. Which model did you have? I hear they had a lot of trouble with the series 4 XJ6/Sovereigns.
Sony have always had trouble with service. Many years ago, my family had one of their VCRs (the C5). Every ~9 months of use it needed repairs, due to a design flaw that meant the read heads were worn down by catching on something or other. The repairs came with a 12 month warranty, so it was always within warranty when it came time to get it fixed (!), but it would usually take something like 2 months for it to happen.
Eventually we just got sick of it and got a new one. But VCRs were expensive back then...
There are various definitions of room temperature. The one most often used is 20 degrees C (Err... about 75 degrees F, I think).
A 700mb CD is actually an 800mb disc; the other 100mb is lost to error correction bits when you write data tracks rather than audio/video tracks. To the other poster here -- yes, an 800mb disc holds roughly 80 minutes of standard spec VideoCD data, the same as it does CD audio data, as both formats were designed to be read by single speed CD players.
It _would_ help persuade management to switch. "Can we still use Word?" "Yes."
Of course, this ignores (a) the existence of Crossover Office, which I understand is capable of running Word virtually flawlessly, and (b) the fact that MS wouldn't do it because they know that they'd lose -- the number of people switching to Linux because of the availability of office would cut directly into their Windows revenues, and probably into some of their other application-based revenues also.
Of course, by the time we have the capability to do this, we'll probably have nice&clean self-sustaining fusion reactors anyway, and they're probably a much better source of power.
There's a bug in the idea of doing patent searches.
To reproduce this bug, go through the following steps:
1. Look for patents in the area where you're working.
2. Find a patent which is related but not identical to what you're doing.
3. Continue what you're doing.
4. Get sued for infringement by the patent owner.
Expected:
Someone gives you credit for due diligence.
Actual:
Owner of related but not identical patent asks for triple damages for "willful infringement" using your knowledge of their patent as evidence. The threat of paying out three times as much forces you to settle unfavorably.
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Comments: User error. Stage 3 of the process described above is considered an illegal operation, and as such we don't make any guarantees about the results of performing it.
Actually, MAD seems like a good metaphor. It points out that the patent war might be avertable -- if the OSS community can acquire allies with enough patents to dissuade an attack, then the attack will probably never come. The question is: how far will IBM et al go to support OSS? Would they openly fight Microsoft?
Second you are allowed to do research using others patents, you are just not allowed to sell a product based on the patent. So there is at least one instance where you are allowed to distribute under the GPL, so your release is a valid GPL release.
The GPL states that you're not allowed to distribute if you have any other legal requirements on you that would prevent you from fulfilling all of the terms of the GPL when you distribute. One of those terms is that you must give the recipient the right to redistribute under any of the acceptable terms of the GPL, one of which is redistribution in binary form (with an offer to provide the source code). A patent judgment against you would make it illegal for you to give such permission to distribute in binary form to anyone, so no, I don't believe it is legally possible to distribute a "source code only, experimental use only" patent encumbered program under the GPL.
You'll need a less restrictive license for that.
No. Why should we?