It's people who want streaming audio and video, or massive file sharing.
Exactly. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already squandered my points!
I don't buy this whole "power users are consuming a disproportionate amount of resources" argument. The "average joe" who is into downloading movies, streaming audio and running P2P nodes is usually far more of a resource hog than the guy running a home network or even a server.
I think that the good news is, there are more and more tech savvy kids out there every year. Pretty soon, if ISP's want to start kicking out people like this, they're going to end up terminating a lot of customers.
Donating to these parties is what CAUSES these problems!
It can, but it can also prevent these kinds of problems (assuming that the problems in question are things like unlimited extension of copyright).
What I am proposing would make running for office fair to ANYONE can take public office...
Again, I certainly admire the goal, but I don't think your proposed changes would bring us further towards that goal. Putting control of campaign resources in the hands of the government pretty much guarantees that the crooked politicians will determine the allocation of those resource to their own advantage.
all candidates would get EQUAL exposure when running for office... they would have EQUAL resources available to them (which would be provided with tax dollars instead of campaign contributions)..... and that they would have to prove that they are serious about running for office by earning the right to run the old fashioned way... with signitures and the backing of the people that they would go out and get by "walking the streets".
So if the Nazi Party candidate can gather enough signatures to prove that he is serious, I should have to support him with a portion of my tax dollars? No fucking way! It's bad enough that my tax money is used to bolster the careers of the incumbants. And BTW, signatures are quite frequently obtained by paid petitioners (just another way that money is required to even get in the game).
More fundamentally, though, what I was trying to say is that I think it is unrealistic to expect to see any kind of major overhaul of our political system and that any such overhaul is even less likely to be more equitable than what we currently have.
So if you want to effect change, work within the framework towards incremental change. As far as changing the framework, it takes a lot of pissed off people to start a revolution, and revolutions are seldom non-violent.
And that, my friend, is my two cents on the issue:-)
You say you want a revolution? [awaiting descent of copyright police]
I agree with your opinion that our government is largely controlled by commercial forces, and I share your frustration over the matter, but I disagree with your prescription for change.
First of all, you can't run a political campaign without money. Money is one very important way that people support politicians (and thereby political causes) that they agree with. If you make it illegal to donate money to politicians you are limiting political expression. By funneling money (or any derived resources, such as advertising) through the government, giving it the power to allocate these resources based on some criteria of "popularity", you are just putting a barrier (and what has been shown to be a very corruptible barrier) between interested parties and the political system.
Secondly, corporations represent the interests of their stockholders. They have as much right to access the political system as individuals. Also, there are lots of other non-corporate institutions that are heavily (often exclusively) involved in funding political campaigns. These organizations represent the political interests of their contributors, and often serve as a way for individuals to rally around a common cause (as in the case of the EFF and ACLU, two political organizations that I'm rather fond of).
Finally, from what I've seen it seems to me that attempts at "campaign reform" are invariably perverted into laws to thwart the efforts of the opponents of those currently in power. What congressman is going to promote a law that affects his own revenue stream?
So what's the answer? I don't know. I'm open to suggestions. I've been contributing to political causes for some time now, and I'm starting to learn to focus on the things that get results (rather than trying to promote a new political party or constitutional amendment).
So my advice is instead of trying to limit the institutions (which I don't think is going to happen), use them. Donate to the organizations that promote what you believe. And if that doesn't work, let us gather together on the steps of the Capitol with torches and pitchforks, and force the leaders to see that we will not be marginalized!!!;-)
OK, I'm no security expert, but this sounds like a hoax to me (somebody already said it was a joke, a quick google search did nothing to confirm this).
When the player is exploited, a few things happen. First, all p2p-serving software on the machine is infected,
Interesting. So I guess this announcement fails to mention that they also crafted patches for _all_ of the major p2p programs. It also fails to describe how p2p programs on a UNIX system (generally installed as root) can be infected by someone running a media client from a normal user account.
I grabbed the exploit file from what I believe is the original report, it was an executable named e8vbkxdn.exe. I was unable to unzip it, I tried running it under wine and got "cannot determine executable type". Has anyone successfully obtained the source code of this exploit from this exe?
Your comments concerning alternate languages and shells available for OS/2 are correct, but please note that my statements were in response to claims by "Listen Up" and not part of my case against OS/2 as a server OS.
The Workplace Shell can be restarted easily without rebooting
I'm curious: how exactly do you "easily restart" the workplace shell when it's not accepting any input and you can't telnet into the computer because the telnet daemon needs to use the workplace shell to create a session?
Then I would expect that banks would not use it quite so much.
I'd really like to hear from someone at a bank who is using OS/2 on the server side and hear exactly what they're doing with it. I'll wager all of the accounting work (the real mission-critical activity) is done on mainframes.
And BTW, I'm not trying to be a troll here: I'm just trying to point out that there are fundamental issues that make OS/2 unsuitable for use as a server.
What a bunch of total crap. OS/2 was SMP enabled from 2.11 (or 2.1 I believe) and scaled almost flawlessly linear as the number of processors grew.
I have to back down on this one. As it turns out there are SMP enabled versions of OS/2. But this in turn brings up the question of what are we talking about? Standard OS/2 or OS/2 server? Because there's a huge price difference between the two.
Didn't know how to use REXX, eh?
I started using REXX in 1990 and it was my primary scripting language until I discovered realscripting languages.
command line OS/2 was as much Unix like as you could want
OS/2's command line is no more powerful than the DOS command line. It pales in comparison to the UNIX shell, which is why several companies released enhanced shells for for OS/2.
used OS/2 for three 800 person 24-hour call centers
I developed for OS/2 over the course of 12 years at a factory with hundreds of OS/2 workstations. The stability of later versions of the OS/2 kernel is impressive: I've seen the kernel keep chugging along after the desktop hangs on a number of occassions. But what good is that when other layers of the system are so confounded that the only thing that solves the problem is a reboot?
So best of luck in your advocacy of a dying OS (and in the improvement of your manners) but I stand by my statement: OS/2 is not a good server operating system.
I'm sorry, but OS/2 has never been and will never be a "world-class server entry". It's not multiuser, doesn't scale onto multiprocessor boxes, requires reboots after software installs/upgrades, relies too heavily on the desktop for administration, and just generally isn't stable enough for the corporate server.
The shop I last worked at had to use OS/2 as a server platform in a number of cases. These machines needed regular attention. We had to set up hacks to do things like restart critical services when they went belly-up for no known reason. If a client came to me suggesting that OS/2 be used for a 100 system server farm, I'd probably laugh in their face (and then agree to help at a significantly higher rate:-).
They don't. Or at least all of the IBM sites that I have worked for have switched to either Windows or Linux.
I've been trying to figure out IBM's position on OS/2 for years now, and I don't think that they have one, at least not at the corporate level. There are just so many organizations within IBM that "OS/2 strategy" has a different meaning depending on who you talk to.
hmmmm... come to think of it there have been a couple of funny looking guys in butterfly outfits hanging out near my house lately...
Seriously, though, if being able to easily view quicktime movies in my browser was very important to me, I guess I would fork up the $25 for a registered crossover plugin. As it stands, this isn't something I care too much about.
I have never considered the prospect of running anything other than a free UNIX on my desktop. Mac OS/X seems nice, but only runs on a Mac. Everytime I try to do anything Windows I am filled with disgust and amazement that millions of programmers are willing to use such a system.
On the other hand, QuickTime Player plays these without having to be compiled, and it comes with all the proper codecs.;-)
... unless, of course, you're running Linux and then you also have to have Wine installed, and the crossover plugin [the free version of which displays regular harassment messages urging you to buy the licensed version].
And I'm sorry, but I refuse to spend $25 to buy a piece of glue-ware that I very rarely use [and have to move out of my plug-in directory so that my browser can play mp3s] when I haven't paid a dime for an awesome program like mplayer that I use practically every day.
... but we can't find the HomePage you've requested. It's possible that:
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I seem to remember that in some of the early discussions about "smart guns", police organizations were dead set against having to use them (do you really want to have another reason why your gun might fail during a confrontation with a violent criminal?)
Anyone know if there's an excemption for law enforcement?
Freenet would fall under the same classification as Kazaa/Gnutella... It functions as a server in the same sense as these programs and can be used as a means of distributing copyrighted information.
Whether or not OOL will actually begin enforcing their Terms Of Service is another matter.
If the big corporations would only learn that this is The Way, The Light, and The Answer to a lot of their financial problems, not to mention publicity problems, they would see that there is a real future with online distribution and sales of music, and STILL be able to make a profit. Oh, and not piss off the general public to boot. Did I mention lower prices due to a higher number of potential purchasers?
I think the problem that the record companies see with this mode of distribution is that anyone can do it - the barriers of entry become too low and you don't need media giants anymore. I suspect that they are not so much fighting piracy, but their own extinction.
...for a large client several years ago. We needed to deploy software to > 400 factory tool control workstations. The prototype was written in Perl, the final version was reimplemented in Python.
The basic features of the system were as follows:
1) Packaging of software into the smallest deployable units. Define a standard for how files and meta-information are grouped together into a package (e.g. tarfiles, RPM's) so that the packages can be created and installed in a common manner. 2) tracking of dependencies and compatibilities between packages 3) Specification of the set of top-level packages that are required by an individual workstation 4) dependency evaluation to calculate the final set of packages to be installed, or determine if no viable package set existed because of dependency conflicts 5) a sizeable set of tools to allow us to manage this information, build packages, and track what got downloaded, why it got downloaded, and who changed what when;-).
The combination of these features is very much like what RedHat's "update agent" (and other Linux update utilities) provides. If you have the luxury of only having to support Linux, your best bet is probably to try to adapt one of these to your needs.
According to my college chemistry professor, carbon dating (and radioactive dating in general) is based on determining the current percentage of the isotope relative to the percentage of the non-radioactive element. This percentage is then compared to the original percentage and the half-life of the isotope - about 5K years for carbon.
Therefore, radioactive dating works best for time periods where the value of n in half_life * 2^n (^ = to the power of) is closest to 0. Very accurate for 5K years, 2.5K years, 1.25K years,10K years, 20K years. Very inaccurate for 1 year or 1 million years.
[btw, I'm no expert - just sayin' what I heard to the best of my recollection]
It sounds like you're looking for something that will allow you more control at the point where you're listening, but...
I've been using the Jensen Matrix audio transmitter to transmit from my computer to a receiver attached to my stereo over 900mhz. It's convenient because I mostly listen to random mixes, but I'm a little disappointed in the sound quality and my cordless phone tends to interfere with it.
The nature of the posts so far clearly demonstrates how tired this debate has become.
Bottom line is, people are going to call the system whatever they want - nobody controls it so nobody controls what you call your distro.
I do find it deliciously ironic that the world's biggest advocate of "being free to do whatever you want with the software" is working so hard to control the name used to refer to it.
Actually, it looks like he got arrested for an earlier incident. The hack occurred on March 8, his demonstration was on March 18th.
So basically, since he was able to demonstrate how easy it was, he must have been responsible for hacking them the first time;-). I will never point out anyones security holes again.
Slashdot Mirror
It's people who want streaming audio and video, or massive file sharing.
Exactly. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already squandered my points!
I don't buy this whole "power users are consuming a disproportionate amount of resources" argument. The "average joe" who is into downloading movies, streaming audio and running P2P nodes is usually far more of a resource hog than the guy running a home network or even a server.
I think that the good news is, there are more and more tech savvy kids out there every year. Pretty soon, if ISP's want to start kicking out people like this, they're going to end up terminating a lot of customers.
I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned the TuxBox project.
Donating to these parties is what CAUSES these problems!
...
... they would have EQUAL resources available to them (which would be provided with tax dollars instead of campaign contributions) ..... and that they would have to prove that they are serious about running for office by earning the right to run the old fashioned way ... with signitures and the backing of the people that they would go out and get by "walking the streets".
:-)
It can, but it can also prevent these kinds of problems (assuming that the problems in question are things like unlimited extension of copyright).
What I am proposing would make running for office fair to ANYONE can take public office
Again, I certainly admire the goal, but I don't think your proposed changes would bring us further towards that goal. Putting control of campaign resources in the hands of the government pretty much guarantees that the crooked politicians will determine the allocation of those resource to their own advantage.
all candidates would get EQUAL exposure when running for office
So if the Nazi Party candidate can gather enough signatures to prove that he is serious, I should have to support him with a portion of my tax dollars? No fucking way! It's bad enough that my tax money is used to bolster the careers of the incumbants. And BTW, signatures are quite frequently obtained by paid petitioners (just another way that money is required to even get in the game).
More fundamentally, though, what I was trying to say is that I think it is unrealistic to expect to see any kind of major overhaul of our political system and that any such overhaul is even less likely to be more equitable than what we currently have.
So if you want to effect change, work within the framework towards incremental change. As far as changing the framework, it takes a lot of pissed off people to start a revolution, and revolutions are seldom non-violent.
And that, my friend, is my two cents on the issue
You say you want a revolution? [awaiting descent of copyright police]
;-)
I agree with your opinion that our government is largely controlled by commercial forces, and I share your frustration over the matter, but I disagree with your prescription for change.
First of all, you can't run a political campaign without money. Money is one very important way that people support politicians (and thereby political causes) that they agree with. If you make it illegal to donate money to politicians you are limiting political expression. By funneling money (or any derived resources, such as advertising) through the government, giving it the power to allocate these resources based on some criteria of "popularity", you are just putting a barrier (and what has been shown to be a very corruptible barrier) between interested parties and the political system.
Secondly, corporations represent the interests of their stockholders. They have as much right to access the political system as individuals. Also, there are lots of other non-corporate institutions that are heavily (often exclusively) involved in funding political campaigns. These organizations represent the political interests of their contributors, and often serve as a way for individuals to rally around a common cause (as in the case of the EFF and ACLU, two political organizations that I'm rather fond of).
Finally, from what I've seen it seems to me that attempts at "campaign reform" are invariably perverted into laws to thwart the efforts of the opponents of those currently in power. What congressman is going to promote a law that affects his own revenue stream?
So what's the answer? I don't know. I'm open to suggestions. I've been contributing to political causes for some time now, and I'm starting to learn to focus on the things that get results (rather than trying to promote a new political party or constitutional amendment).
So my advice is instead of trying to limit the institutions (which I don't think is going to happen), use them. Donate to the organizations that promote what you believe. And if that doesn't work, let us gather together on the steps of the Capitol with torches and pitchforks, and force the leaders to see that we will not be marginalized!!!
OK, I'm no security expert, but this sounds like a hoax to me (somebody already said it was a joke, a quick google search did nothing to confirm this).
When the player is exploited, a few things happen. First, all p2p-serving
software on the machine is infected,
Interesting. So I guess this announcement fails to mention that they also crafted patches for _all_ of the major p2p programs. It also fails to describe how p2p programs on a UNIX system (generally installed as root) can be infected by someone running a media client from a normal user account.
I grabbed the exploit file from what I believe is the original report, it was an executable named e8vbkxdn.exe. I was unable to unzip it, I tried running it under wine and got "cannot determine executable type". Has anyone successfully obtained the source code of this exploit from this exe?
... so if I fly nekkid in front of a school while rubbing a balloon against my hair...
(sorry)
Your comments concerning alternate languages and shells available for OS/2 are correct, but please note that my statements were in response to claims by "Listen Up" and not part of my case against OS/2 as a server OS.
The Workplace Shell can be restarted easily without rebooting
I'm curious: how exactly do you "easily restart" the workplace shell when it's not accepting any input and you can't telnet into the computer because the telnet daemon needs to use the workplace shell to create a session?
Then I would expect that banks would not use it quite so much.
I'd really like to hear from someone at a bank who is using OS/2 on the server side and hear exactly what they're doing with it. I'll wager all of the accounting work (the real mission-critical activity) is done on mainframes.
And BTW, I'm not trying to be a troll here: I'm just trying to point out that there are fundamental issues that make OS/2 unsuitable for use as a server.
What a bunch of total crap. OS/2 was SMP enabled from 2.11 (or 2.1 I believe) and scaled almost flawlessly linear as the number of processors grew.
I have to back down on this one. As it turns out there are SMP enabled versions of OS/2. But this in turn brings up the question of what are we talking about? Standard OS/2 or OS/2 server? Because there's a huge price difference between the two.
Didn't know how to use REXX, eh?
I started using REXX in 1990 and it was my primary scripting language until I discovered real scripting
languages.
command line OS/2 was as much Unix like as you could want
OS/2's command line is no more powerful than the DOS command line. It pales in comparison to the UNIX shell, which is why several companies released enhanced shells for for OS/2.
used OS/2 for three 800 person 24-hour call centers
I developed for OS/2 over the course of 12 years at a factory with hundreds of OS/2 workstations. The stability of later versions of the OS/2 kernel is impressive: I've seen the kernel keep chugging along after the desktop hangs on a number of occassions. But what good is that when other layers of the system are so confounded that the only thing that solves the problem is a reboot?
So best of luck in your advocacy of a dying OS (and in the improvement of your manners) but I stand by my statement: OS/2 is not a good server operating system.
I'm sorry, but OS/2 has never been and will never be a "world-class server entry". It's not multiuser, doesn't scale onto multiprocessor boxes, requires reboots after software installs/upgrades, relies too heavily on the desktop for administration, and just generally isn't stable enough for the corporate server.
:-).
The shop I last worked at had to use OS/2 as a server platform in a number of cases. These machines needed regular attention. We had to set up hacks to do things like restart critical services when they went belly-up for no known reason. If a client came to me suggesting that OS/2 be used for a 100 system server farm, I'd probably laugh in their face (and then agree to help at a significantly higher rate
I didn't even think IBM used OS/2
They don't. Or at least all of the IBM sites that I have worked for have switched to either Windows or Linux.
I've been trying to figure out IBM's position on OS/2 for years now, and I don't think that they have one, at least not at the corporate level. There are just so many organizations within IBM that "OS/2 strategy" has a different meaning depending on who you talk to.
No, my point was that in order to view the movies embedded (within the web page), you need Crossover plugin/WINE/Quicktime.
With respect to format, I have yet to encounter a format that I can't view with mplayer.
If there's a way to set up Mozilla so that it uses mplayer when it encounters embedded QuickTime video, I want to know about it.
Seriously, though, if being able to easily view quicktime movies in my browser was very important to me, I guess I would fork up the $25 for a registered crossover plugin. As it stands, this isn't something I care too much about.
I have never considered the prospect of running anything other than a free UNIX on my desktop. Mac OS/X seems nice, but only runs on a Mac. Everytime I try to do anything Windows I am filled with disgust and amazement that millions of programmers are willing to use such a system.
... unless, of course, you're running Linux and then you also have to have Wine installed, and the crossover plugin [the free version of which displays regular harassment messages urging you to buy the licensed version].
And I'm sorry, but I refuse to spend $25 to buy a piece of glue-ware that I very rarely use [and have to move out of my plug-in directory so that my browser can play mp3s] when I haven't paid a dime for an awesome program like mplayer that I use practically every day.
/rant ;-)
The address was entered incorrectly. Check your spelling and try again.
The
There is no
/.ed, perhaps?
I seem to remember that in some of the early discussions about "smart guns", police organizations were dead set against having to use them (do you really want to have another reason why your gun might fail during a confrontation with a violent criminal?)
Anyone know if there's an excemption for law enforcement?
Freenet would fall under the same classification as Kazaa/Gnutella... It functions as a server in the same sense as these programs and can be used as a means of distributing copyrighted information.
Whether or not OOL will actually begin enforcing their Terms Of Service is another matter.
I'd really like to see some scheme for filtering music similar to what /. has done for forums.
In particular, I'd like to be able to see the recommendations of people with a history of similar taste to me.
You're right, and that's the irony of it: the tighter you squeeze the more sand trickles out of your hand!
If the big corporations would only learn that this is The Way, The Light, and The Answer to a lot of their financial problems, not to mention publicity problems, they would see that there is a real future with online distribution and sales of music, and STILL be able to make a profit. Oh, and not piss off the general public to boot. Did I mention lower prices due to a higher number of potential purchasers?
I think the problem that the record companies see with this mode of distribution is that anyone can do it - the barriers of entry become too low and you don't need media giants anymore. I suspect that they are not so much fighting piracy, but their own extinction.
...for a large client several years ago. We needed to deploy software to > 400 factory tool control workstations. The prototype was written in Perl, the final version was reimplemented in Python.
;-).
The basic features of the system were as follows:
1) Packaging of software into the smallest deployable units. Define a standard for how files and meta-information are grouped together into a package (e.g. tarfiles, RPM's) so that the packages can be created and installed in a common manner.
2) tracking of dependencies and compatibilities between packages
3) Specification of the set of top-level packages that are required by an individual workstation
4) dependency evaluation to calculate the final set of packages to be installed, or determine if no viable package set existed because of dependency conflicts
5) a sizeable set of tools to allow us to manage this information, build packages, and track what got downloaded, why it got downloaded, and who changed what when
The combination of these features is very much like what RedHat's "update agent" (and other Linux update utilities) provides. If you have the luxury of only having to support Linux, your best bet is probably to try to adapt one of these to your needs.
According to my college chemistry professor, carbon dating (and radioactive dating in general) is based on determining the current percentage of the isotope relative to the percentage of the non-radioactive element. This percentage is then compared to the original percentage and the half-life of the isotope - about 5K years for carbon.
Therefore, radioactive dating works best for time periods where the value of n in half_life * 2^n (^ = to the power of) is closest to 0. Very accurate for 5K years, 2.5K years, 1.25K years,10K years, 20K years. Very inaccurate for 1 year or 1 million years.
[btw, I'm no expert - just sayin' what I heard to the best of my recollection]
It sounds like you're looking for something that will allow you more control at the point where you're listening, but...
I've been using the Jensen Matrix audio transmitter to transmit from my computer to a receiver attached to my stereo over 900mhz. It's convenient because I mostly listen to random mixes, but I'm a little disappointed in the sound quality and my cordless phone tends to interfere with it.
The nature of the posts so far clearly demonstrates how tired this debate has become.
Bottom line is, people are going to call the system whatever they want - nobody controls it so nobody controls what you call your distro.
I do find it deliciously ironic that the world's biggest advocate of "being free to do whatever you want with the software" is working so hard to control the name used to refer to it.
My friend, you are on the first step to becoming a contractor! No point in hanging around once the development work is done.
Actually, it looks like he got arrested for an earlier incident. The hack occurred on March 8, his demonstration was on March 18th.
;-). I will never point out anyones security holes again.
So basically, since he was able to demonstrate how easy it was, he must have been responsible for hacking them the first time