But, by and large, people don't do business (or homework) on Saturdays and Sundays.
For the most part, that's true. However, there are quite a few professions (e.g. Real Estate Agencies, Salesmen, Computer Programmers(!)) where weekend work is common. And don't forget businessmen who travel. They'll often fly in on a Sunday. Many hotels now have Wifi, but it is kind of nice to be able to relax at a cafe with a cup of coffee and/or lunch.
In an experiment, the cafe started shutting down its Wi-Fi network on Saturdays and Sundays after watching their culture erode: the shop became full (and was turning away customers) with six-to-eight hour Wi-Fi squatters, many of whom didn't even purchase anything.
Considering that most people have Internet at home, on campus, or at work, this is just a rude thing to do. Coffee shops provide Wifi so you can relax with a cup of coffee in a comfortable atmosphere while still being able to get that little extra bit of work done. There's no way that's accomplished by squatting in the coffee shop for 8 hours on end. If that's you, get some manners, and get a life.
And do you remember sweet times before OS X? Freezing Macs.. Oh, joy.
Old Macs sucked. I was an avid Mac hater. But we're not talking about those.
As I said - find a better vendor.
Well, the guy in the article had both Sony and Dell. If you have a better vendor, maybe you should let him know. I'm quite happy with my vendor. (Apple)
People often bring up Windows experience from the times of Win98 (definition of crap) and compare it to a modern OS. Bollocks.
Except that I'm not, I haven't, and I will not. But you keep saying that I do. The only issue is that tech support kept asking the guy to reinstall XP for a hardware problem. He's heard it, I've heard it, and I'm sure that many other people have heard it. It has nothing to do with whether Windows needs to be reinstalled or not, and everything to do with the SOP of tech support. (i.e. Hardware guys blame the software, software guys blame the software.)
If you imply that actual hardware support for Mac is somehow better, I would claim that you are wrong. Mac are on par with top PC platform vendors for support quality.
I've taken my Mac in for support a few times. Each time, the issue was hardware in nature, including one rather puzzling issue with the charger that *could* have been software. (What can I say? I'm hard on my computers.) Would you like to know how many times I was asked if I had reinstalled Mac OS X? (Hint: It's a real number that's less than one.)
Now compare that to PCs where the first suggestion is often "you need to reinstall Windows". Reinstalling the OS should be the LAST thing you should try, even when it does work! OS reinstallation is a great way to permanently lose files, waste hundreds of hours rebuilding your system configuration (apps, bookmarks, email, etc.), and potentially create new problems that didn't exist before.
In other words, my point is not that Mac support is "better". My point is that Mac support is forced to treat the entire system rather than play the "point a finger at someone else and make it not my problem" game.
Just use a single hardware vendor. Dells are what we use and they are quite nice.
Tech Support: Hello?
Customer: Hello, I'm having a problem with my laptop. It currently does not turn on, nor does the fan power up. I think the power supply is blown.
Tech Support: Ok, I think we can fix this. Have you tried reinstalling Windows XP?
Customer: WTF?
If you read the guy's blog, that's almost exactly what's been frustrating him. It's the age old issue of the Software vendor saying it's hardware and the hardware vendor saying it's software. In the case of Apple, no such dicotomy exists because they are one and the same. Take you iBook to the Genius Bar, get it back in a week with all your hardware issues fixed. No runaround involved.
The primary reason is that Macs Just Work(TM), which is exactly what this guy is after. He doesn't want to bother with packaging, experimental drivers, non-ability to sleep, and other issues that come with Linux (especially on laptops). Plus, Macs can run a lot of Officially Supported Microsoft software that the industry feels it needs in order to be compatible.
Which brings up an interesting point. Does anyone remember back when Microsoft's bread and butter was BASIC? IMHO, it will be impossible to kill Microsoft even if Windows is supplanted. Microsoft will instead move to being a premier software provider for another platform, and continue to hang around as IBM did after they lost the market.
No worries. He's fully surpassed by the assholes in the mirror around here.
I mean honestly, the OSS community has not treated him with any respect, despite the fact that he's a good friend of Linus. If Linus sees something in him, then perhaps there's more to the guy than the "money grubbing asshole" everyone here makes him out to be? Maybe, just maybe, he's an innovator who is looking to make a living off of innovating? You know, put food on the table for his kids?
A fan-produced Star Trek movie is definitely not legal.
Have you been to their site? They have explicit permission to create these episodes. In general, Paramount has stated that they don't mind too much as long as no one is making money off of their trademarks. Same thing with the Star Wars film. George Lucas has given quite a bit of leeway to fans in creating works based on his universe.
I'm 99.5% certain of the legality of all the torrents I've linked to. Even in the (extremely slim) chance that one of them is contested by a trademark or copyright holder, that's for the otherwise upstanding distribution sites to sort out.
But the bittorrent searches will fail the test. They are shutting down the search engine servers not people who use the client.
No, illegal BitTorrent indexes are being shut down. I have yet to see an actual torrent crawler along the lines of Google. Such a crawler would be legal under the carrier status of the DMCA. As long as the search engine keeps up with requests to remove links to torrents of illegal material, they can stay in business. Any sort of FBI purge prior to attempting communications would likely result in tremendous liability for the FBI and/or reporters of the infringement.
(P.S. The DMCA isn't all that bad a law if you read it. It's just that certain parts of it are not well thought through and have been heavily exploited by the MPAA.)
If I'm looking for a legal file, why wouldn't I just go to the official Web site?
Take another look at the torrents I posted. Most of them are from the official websites. Legal content distributers like BitTorrent because it offloads the cost of data transfer to the users, potentially saving the distributer thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs.
In other words, BitTorrent is a really advanced download system, not a P2P pirating network as many people seem to think. The catch is that it happens to be useful for piracy due to the fact that many illegal files are very large and pirates have limited bandwidth.
I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.
The judge in the Napster case defined the litmus test that has been used by successive generations of P2P software. His decision is also what got Kazza off the hook.
As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.
Similarly, this search engine should be legal as long as it stays within the bounds of a generic service. If it starts favoring particular sites, then the owners are going to be in trouble. Also note that the owners of the search engine will need to promptly remove any links requested by someone claiming a copyright, in order to sustain carrier status under the DMCA.
It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case?
Definitely not. Distributing copyrighted material is not illegal. Illegally distributing copyrighted material is illegal. I realize most people around here don't catch the distinction, so I'll attempt to explain.
You see, when the Mozilla Foundation produces a release of FireFox they have an automatic copyright on their work. That copyright gives them the sole control over its redistribution. In MF's case, they decide to freely allow for BitTorrent distribution and redistribution. That is their right as a copyright holder. However, when George Lucas produced Star Wars III he chose to only allow for distribution to theaters under a royalty agreement. Redistribution is not permitted (except for perhaps companies who create film copies on behalf of Lucas) and thus is illegal if found on a P2P network.
When Napster was sued they actually had content in their possession. Not the case here.
It doesn't matter. If it was found that the only purpose of the search engine was to assist in illegal activities, it would be just as illegal as if it carried the content itself.
That being said, my understanding is that this is supposed to be a generic search engine. As long as the owner keeps his nose clean, a judge is likely to find in his favor due to an "overwhelming degree of legal uses".
BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast.
So fast that the browser times out on a search for "mozilla". Hopefully they'll get those kinks worked out soon.:-/
Bandwidth generously provided by Hot or Not
That explains everything.;-)
Will he get sued?
I still think that anyone trying to sue Bittorrent or a generic search engine would have a hard time of it. Bittorrent has so many legal uses that it just isn't funny. Here's some example of legal torrents:
I had a usb mouse that chained through my keyboard a while back. I found that the extra length of mouse cord dangled from my desk to where my feet rested, and I'd often tug on my mouse cable which had gotten tangled in my feet... or I'd get up and pull the mouse *and* keyboard off the tray into the floor, nearly falling flat on my face in the process.
Bad design. I bought an optical mouse about a year ago that had a reasonably short cord. The problem you described doesn't happen with my mouse. Of course, it won't reach the back of a computer that way, so it also came with a USB extension cable. The extension cable was about 2.5x the length of the built in cable.
In the case of Sun machines, the mouse was required to be plugged into the keyboard, so the cord was sufficiently short to prevent such issues.
Phone companies usually have everything on redudant and battery backed power supplies. Much of this practice comes from the phone being the primary method of communicating in emergencies. If the phone system goes down, people may die. As far as I know, DSL subsystems tend to be integrated into the same emergency systems. (This may have to do with the rise in packet-switched networking popularity for POTS.)
Last night I lost power for about 3 hours. My laptop worked. My cable modem stayed connected on battery backup. My router is plugged in and died.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but you could have plugged your modem directly into your laptop. No other computers would have worked, but you would have had internet connectivity.
If you had any servers running, though... well... time to get a UPS.:-)
As I understand it, the Unix Style of keyboard predated the PC keyboard design and was considered the "correct" keyboard layout. For some reason though, IBM decided to move a few keys around when they developed the IBM PC. IIRC, it had to do with IBM recycling their old terminal keyboard layouts, thus the reason for such odd keys as Scroll Lock.
Anyone who's had access to both a PS/2 computer and a old-style sun keyboard can tell you that even though it looks like a PS/2 connector, it isn't a PS/2 connector.
I do have both, but I've never tried connecting one to the other. The pinouts appear the same, so I've always considered it a PS/2 port. I never had a reason to connect a Sun keyboard to a PC.:-)
Did you even try the content on that page?
Hmm... old link. The software page still works, but I hadn't realized that all the other links have gone dark. It looks like even the sunhelp links have gone dead. Apparently, Belkin's still got 'em, though.
But what the hell were "Compose" and "Alt Graph"??
They're left over from a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. (Cue thunderous orchestra.)
As I understand it, "Alt Graph" used to be used for swapping what keys did. e.g. The "delete" vs. "backspace" keys could be swapped. I'm none too sure about "compose", but I think it might have been for modal editors like VI. I do know that many advanced Sun GUI programs (i.e. Engineering and 3D programs) used these keys for special functions.
Does anyone around here remember using these keys? Care to share some experience?
Re:Calculator key?
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The Sun keyboards are PS/2 (old) and USB (new), but are a bit odd. The PS/2 mouse is actually chained through the PS/2 keyboard, resulting in only on PS/2 port on Sun Machines. This method means that you never need to tug on your mouse cord, because it never gets caught on anything. There's always plenty of slack, and the wire is facing the direction of the mouse. Supporting this sort of design on a PC can be a bit problematic, though. Fortunately, methods do exist for attaching a Sun keyboard to a PC. Does that answer your question?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Just wow. Only on Slashdot is it now "rude" to decline to offer a free service.
:-)
You need to reread. I didn't say that the coffee shop is rude. I said that the squatters who sit all day without buying anything are rude.
Trust me, I'm about as anti-GroupThink(TM) as you can get around here.
But, by and large, people don't do business (or homework) on Saturdays and Sundays.
For the most part, that's true. However, there are quite a few professions (e.g. Real Estate Agencies, Salesmen, Computer Programmers(!)) where weekend work is common. And don't forget businessmen who travel. They'll often fly in on a Sunday. Many hotels now have Wifi, but it is kind of nice to be able to relax at a cafe with a cup of coffee and/or lunch.
self-respect?
Doesn't stop them from squatting inside for 8 hours...
In an experiment, the cafe started shutting down its Wi-Fi network on Saturdays and Sundays after watching their culture erode: the shop became full (and was turning away customers) with six-to-eight hour Wi-Fi squatters, many of whom didn't even purchase anything.
Considering that most people have Internet at home, on campus, or at work, this is just a rude thing to do. Coffee shops provide Wifi so you can relax with a cup of coffee in a comfortable atmosphere while still being able to get that little extra bit of work done. There's no way that's accomplished by squatting in the coffee shop for 8 hours on end. If that's you, get some manners, and get a life.
Argh! Too quick on the submit:
s/software guys blame the software/software guys blame the hardware/g
And do you remember sweet times before OS X? Freezing Macs.. Oh, joy.
Old Macs sucked. I was an avid Mac hater. But we're not talking about those.
As I said - find a better vendor.
Well, the guy in the article had both Sony and Dell. If you have a better vendor, maybe you should let him know. I'm quite happy with my vendor. (Apple)
People often bring up Windows experience from the times of Win98 (definition of crap) and compare it to a modern OS. Bollocks.
Except that I'm not, I haven't, and I will not. But you keep saying that I do. The only issue is that tech support kept asking the guy to reinstall XP for a hardware problem. He's heard it, I've heard it, and I'm sure that many other people have heard it. It has nothing to do with whether Windows needs to be reinstalled or not, and everything to do with the SOP of tech support. (i.e. Hardware guys blame the software, software guys blame the software.)
If you imply that actual hardware support for Mac is somehow better, I would claim that you are wrong. Mac are on par with top PC platform vendors for support quality.
I've taken my Mac in for support a few times. Each time, the issue was hardware in nature, including one rather puzzling issue with the charger that *could* have been software. (What can I say? I'm hard on my computers.) Would you like to know how many times I was asked if I had reinstalled Mac OS X? (Hint: It's a real number that's less than one.)
Now compare that to PCs where the first suggestion is often "you need to reinstall Windows". Reinstalling the OS should be the LAST thing you should try, even when it does work! OS reinstallation is a great way to permanently lose files, waste hundreds of hours rebuilding your system configuration (apps, bookmarks, email, etc.), and potentially create new problems that didn't exist before.
In other words, my point is not that Mac support is "better". My point is that Mac support is forced to treat the entire system rather than play the "point a finger at someone else and make it not my problem" game.
Just use a single hardware vendor. Dells are what we use and they are quite nice.
Tech Support: Hello?
Customer: Hello, I'm having a problem with my laptop. It currently does not turn on, nor does the fan power up. I think the power supply is blown.
Tech Support: Ok, I think we can fix this. Have you tried reinstalling Windows XP?
Customer: WTF?
If you read the guy's blog, that's almost exactly what's been frustrating him. It's the age old issue of the Software vendor saying it's hardware and the hardware vendor saying it's software. In the case of Apple, no such dicotomy exists because they are one and the same. Take you iBook to the Genius Bar, get it back in a week with all your hardware issues fixed. No runaround involved.
The primary reason is that Macs Just Work(TM), which is exactly what this guy is after. He doesn't want to bother with packaging, experimental drivers, non-ability to sleep, and other issues that come with Linux (especially on laptops). Plus, Macs can run a lot of Officially Supported Microsoft software that the industry feels it needs in order to be compatible.
Which brings up an interesting point. Does anyone remember back when Microsoft's bread and butter was BASIC? IMHO, it will be impossible to kill Microsoft even if Windows is supplanted. Microsoft will instead move to being a premier software provider for another platform, and continue to hang around as IBM did after they lost the market.
When they said that McVoy really is an asshole.
No worries. He's fully surpassed by the assholes in the mirror around here.
I mean honestly, the OSS community has not treated him with any respect, despite the fact that he's a good friend of Linus. If Linus sees something in him, then perhaps there's more to the guy than the "money grubbing asshole" everyone here makes him out to be? Maybe, just maybe, he's an innovator who is looking to make a living off of innovating? You know, put food on the table for his kids?
A fan-produced Star Trek movie is definitely not legal.
Have you been to their site? They have explicit permission to create these episodes. In general, Paramount has stated that they don't mind too much as long as no one is making money off of their trademarks. Same thing with the Star Wars film. George Lucas has given quite a bit of leeway to fans in creating works based on his universe.
I'm 99.5% certain of the legality of all the torrents I've linked to. Even in the (extremely slim) chance that one of them is contested by a trademark or copyright holder, that's for the otherwise upstanding distribution sites to sort out.
But the bittorrent searches will fail the test. They are shutting down the search engine servers not people who use the client.
No, illegal BitTorrent indexes are being shut down. I have yet to see an actual torrent crawler along the lines of Google. Such a crawler would be legal under the carrier status of the DMCA. As long as the search engine keeps up with requests to remove links to torrents of illegal material, they can stay in business. Any sort of FBI purge prior to attempting communications would likely result in tremendous liability for the FBI and/or reporters of the infringement.
(P.S. The DMCA isn't all that bad a law if you read it. It's just that certain parts of it are not well thought through and have been heavily exploited by the MPAA.)
My apologies. Her decision established the litmus test for P2P software. ;-)
If I'm looking for a legal file, why wouldn't I just go to the official Web site?
Take another look at the torrents I posted. Most of them are from the official websites. Legal content distributers like BitTorrent because it offloads the cost of data transfer to the users, potentially saving the distributer thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs.
In other words, BitTorrent is a really advanced download system, not a P2P pirating network as many people seem to think. The catch is that it happens to be useful for piracy due to the fact that many illegal files are very large and pirates have limited bandwidth.
I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.
The judge in the Napster case defined the litmus test that has been used by successive generations of P2P software. His decision is also what got Kazza off the hook.
As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.
Similarly, this search engine should be legal as long as it stays within the bounds of a generic service. If it starts favoring particular sites, then the owners are going to be in trouble. Also note that the owners of the search engine will need to promptly remove any links requested by someone claiming a copyright, in order to sustain carrier status under the DMCA.
It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case?
Definitely not. Distributing copyrighted material is not illegal. Illegally distributing copyrighted material is illegal. I realize most people around here don't catch the distinction, so I'll attempt to explain.
You see, when the Mozilla Foundation produces a release of FireFox they have an automatic copyright on their work. That copyright gives them the sole control over its redistribution. In MF's case, they decide to freely allow for BitTorrent distribution and redistribution. That is their right as a copyright holder. However, when George Lucas produced Star Wars III he chose to only allow for distribution to theaters under a royalty agreement. Redistribution is not permitted (except for perhaps companies who create film copies on behalf of Lucas) and thus is illegal if found on a P2P network.
When Napster was sued they actually had content in their possession. Not the case here.
It doesn't matter. If it was found that the only purpose of the search engine was to assist in illegal activities, it would be just as illegal as if it carried the content itself.
That being said, my understanding is that this is supposed to be a generic search engine. As long as the owner keeps his nose clean, a judge is likely to find in his favor due to an "overwhelming degree of legal uses".
BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast.
:-/
;-)
So fast that the browser times out on a search for "mozilla". Hopefully they'll get those kinks worked out soon.
Bandwidth generously provided by Hot or Not
That explains everything.
Will he get sued?
I still think that anyone trying to sue Bittorrent or a generic search engine would have a hard time of it. Bittorrent has so many legal uses that it just isn't funny. Here's some example of legal torrents:
Privateer Remake
OpenOffice
Star Trek: New Voyages (legal fan made)
FreeBSD
Star Wars: Revelations (legal fan made)
Xandros Free Edition
Mozilla Firefox
Doom 3 Demo
America's Army (now for Linux and OSX)
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
I had a usb mouse that chained through my keyboard a while back. I found that the extra length of mouse cord dangled from my desk to where my feet rested, and I'd often tug on my mouse cable which had gotten tangled in my feet... or I'd get up and pull the mouse *and* keyboard off the tray into the floor, nearly falling flat on my face in the process.
Bad design. I bought an optical mouse about a year ago that had a reasonably short cord. The problem you described doesn't happen with my mouse. Of course, it won't reach the back of a computer that way, so it also came with a USB extension cable. The extension cable was about 2.5x the length of the built in cable.
In the case of Sun machines, the mouse was required to be plugged into the keyboard, so the cord was sufficiently short to prevent such issues.
Phone companies usually have everything on redudant and battery backed power supplies. Much of this practice comes from the phone being the primary method of communicating in emergencies. If the phone system goes down, people may die. As far as I know, DSL subsystems tend to be integrated into the same emergency systems. (This may have to do with the rise in packet-switched networking popularity for POTS.)
'Tis true. Sun should really move that key to the dud in the upper-left corner, then extend the backspace out to be the same size as PC keyboards. :-)
Last night I lost power for about 3 hours. My laptop worked. My cable modem stayed connected on battery backup. My router is plugged in and died.
:-)
Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but you could have plugged your modem directly into your laptop. No other computers would have worked, but you would have had internet connectivity.
If you had any servers running, though... well... time to get a UPS.
As I understand it, the Unix Style of keyboard predated the PC keyboard design and was considered the "correct" keyboard layout. For some reason though, IBM decided to move a few keys around when they developed the IBM PC. IIRC, it had to do with IBM recycling their old terminal keyboard layouts, thus the reason for such odd keys as Scroll Lock.
Anyone who's had access to both a PS/2 computer and a old-style sun keyboard can tell you that even though it looks like a PS/2 connector, it isn't a PS/2 connector.
:-)
I do have both, but I've never tried connecting one to the other. The pinouts appear the same, so I've always considered it a PS/2 port. I never had a reason to connect a Sun keyboard to a PC.
Did you even try the content on that page?
Hmm... old link. The software page still works, but I hadn't realized that all the other links have gone dark. It looks like even the sunhelp links have gone dead. Apparently, Belkin's still got 'em, though.
But what the hell were "Compose" and "Alt Graph"??
They're left over from a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. (Cue thunderous orchestra.)
As I understand it, "Alt Graph" used to be used for swapping what keys did. e.g. The "delete" vs. "backspace" keys could be swapped. I'm none too sure about "compose", but I think it might have been for modal editors like VI. I do know that many advanced Sun GUI programs (i.e. Engineering and 3D programs) used these keys for special functions.
Does anyone around here remember using these keys? Care to share some experience?
The Sun keyboards are PS/2 (old) and USB (new), but are a bit odd. The PS/2 mouse is actually chained through the PS/2 keyboard, resulting in only on PS/2 port on Sun Machines. This method means that you never need to tug on your mouse cord, because it never gets caught on anything. There's always plenty of slack, and the wire is facing the direction of the mouse. Supporting this sort of design on a PC can be a bit problematic, though. Fortunately, methods do exist for attaching a Sun keyboard to a PC. Does that answer your question?