...And tell them that record is MINE! I got a Packard Bell 9508 (P75, 8Mb, 540Mb HDD) for a couple of hundred quid - including a monitor - (I'm in the UK) about eight years ago, and it's still running just fine.
I've upgraded the CPU once (to a mighty P-90, about six years ago), added an 850Mb HDD and upped memory once (to 24Mb from 8Mb) at the same time). It runs Windows 95 like a dream, and suits my friend's occasional e-mail, surfing and word-processing requirements to a T.
Until recently, I managed an AlphaServer 8200 running NT4 and (believe it or not) Exchange 5.5.
It was solid as a rock - we only rebooted it for service pack updates and the like. The downside was getting a decent virus scanner, as we originally had Norton (which sucked). Trend eventually did the job for us, though. The other PITA was that VNC wouldn't run on it - something to do with the video card not supporting (IIRC) the Nagle algorithm. Of course, that might just be my memory playing tricks with me...
What did make me laugh, though, was that it had a single, measly 10Mbps NIC in it (there were 100Mbps and gigabot cards available, but there was this long-running plan to bin it and buy an Intel-based box, so it never got a higher bandwidth card). And this was the main Exchange box for a 200+ user site. I'm amazed we didn't get more complaints about the response from it.
Sadly, I had to decommission it recently. The company that owned it got bought out, and the lucky buyers wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Oh, and they're using E2K, which kind of precluded any future for the trusty 8200 anyway...
What an amazing idea - usually this sort of thing just gets written into your T&Cs. It certainly does where I work. If you hit a certain salary grade, they don't pay you overtime - you get TOIL instead.
Donating to the FSF that way sounds like a great idea, but here's some flamebait... Do you think your family will be all that happy about giving money to the NRA if you are unlawfully killed by a gunman who just happens to be a member?
FWIW, I live in Scotland - gun crime has been falling consistently here since the Dublane massacre (13 March 96) in which 16 kids and their teacher were killed by a gunman who walked into their school (sound familiar?). In 1999, the homicide rate here was 0.12 per 100,000. That's about five people in a population of five million. By contrast, the US rate was 4.08 in 100,000 - that's (assuming a population of about 250,000,000) 10,000 homicides, or thereabouts. That, btw doesn't include suicides with guns, where the rate was about 50% higher. The numbers to back all this up are here. I'm not a member of this lot, but the facts speak for themselves, IMNSHO.
I'd rather live in a country where I have a one-in-a-million chance of being shot dead than one where I have a one in 25,000 chance.
I know it's not in the FSF's remit, but perhaps Professor Moglen would like to comment?
First off, I don't live in the US - I'm in the UK. Consider yourselves lucky you don't have this thing the UK calls parliamentary supremacy - this means no court has power over parliament, and, by extension, the government. At least the supreme court can overturn laws that don't fit in with your constitution... We don't even have one of them!
What happened to the much-vaunted freedom of expression and speech (and is someone going to remove the lyrics about the "land of the free" from the US national anthem as a consequence)? Example: what constitites "material support" to a terrorist group? Handing out flyers? "Political donations"? Well, that's anyone who gives money to NORAID out, unless the IRA aren't terrorists according to the definition of the US government.
To take it to an extreme, what would stop (say) the Republicans declaring the Democrats (or any other political party) a "terrorist group"? I admit it's highly unlikely, but stranger things have happened. All the party in power needs is a huge majority. Like the one Labour have in the UK parliament (160-odd seats out of about 659).
One of the posters below this one suggested that you yanks are going to have to live under the threat of being expatriated for supporting a group the USG doesn't like... Well, IANAL but I can't see this particular power-grab standing up in your Supreme Court if it comes to that. You lucky people.
The fashion industry will probably announce that "superblack is the new black". Which manages to sound faintly ridiculous and be true at the same time.
I've just had a look at the EULA supplied with Microsoft Office 2000 (which is sitting in c:\program files\microsoft office\office\1033\eula9.txt) on this PC at work.
IANAL, but there isn't anything I can find in it - express or implied (to use the favoured term of the EULA authors) - about submitting to audits by the BSA or anyone else in it.
It appears to be solely the users resposibility to ensure that they have the correct license for use of the software they have, and the BSA et al would have to get a court order, or whatever it is called in your legal jurisdiction, in order to obtain details of the software and licenses you have, either by audit or other means.
BTW - the BSA doesn't produce software, just like the RIAA doesn't produce music. They are trade associations and nothing else.
MS themselves have reverse engineered software without (AFAIK) ever seeing the code - ever heard of NWLink? It's Microsoft's "clean room" implementation of IPX/SPX.
In tandem with that, MS wrote a Novell client - to allow MS boxes to authenticate on Novell networks - and a Novell gateway, which effectively allowed an NT box to appear as a Novell server to Novell clients.
Of course, that's all in the past, and what was legal then (how did they reverse engineer the security in Novell, for example?) might be illegal now...
Just a quick reply to this - I won't pretend to have read all the comments, so this might already be in there somewhere.
Pumping the appropriate info into Schwarzchild's equation will give you an event horizon with a radius a little under 11 million km (assuming G = 6.67E-11Nm^2/kg^2, M = 3.7 million solar masses, where one solar mass is 1.99E^30 kg, and c = 299792458 m/sec).
Bear in mind that that is the event horizon. and nothing else. It's reasonable to assume that there will be a sizable accretion disk orbiting the object, which would push the overall radius of the object out considerably.
If cinemas start hiring rent-a-thug to beat people up for using cellphones, they'll probably get a license to kill anyone trying to take a camcorder into a theatre.
I appreciate that cellphones are annoying if they go off during a film, but the screaming kid anecdote above happens more frequently (in my experience) than a cellphone going off nowadays. Personally, I put my phone on vibrate only if I'm in a cinema... If it goes off, I check who's calling. If it's important, I leave the theatre to take the call. Otherwise, I reject the call. Simple.
I can't understand why anyone thinks banning camcorders in cinemas is "insane". There is pretty much no reason for anyone to need a camcorder in a cinema, other than to bootleg the film, and that's copyright infringement, period. I doubt there's any constitutional backing (I'm a Brit, BTW, so I don't pretend to know all that much about your constitution) for taking a camcorder into a theatre. So deal with it.
Something that is made a big song-and-dance of here, but I have spotted a mention (OK, I haven't read all the comments) is that the PJB-100 has a GPL'ed SDK available from Compaq (registrationblahrequiredblah). Compaq are good enough to put the license terms up on that page so you can read them before you register - the source is available under GPL2e.
There's also a separate effort ongoing at the OpenPJB site at SourceForge. There are various (also GPL'ed) packages available for managing the data you keep on the PJB as well, for both Linux and Windoze.
As far as jog-protection goes, because it's an HD-based player, you'd think it might be a bit on the poor side for this, but the way the PJB is designed, this kind of problem is avoided - the HD is only spun up when needed, the data required is loaded into a 10MB DRAM buffer, and played from there. And yes, I've dropped it, and I've had no ill-effects. Yet:-). It comes in 6Gb, 10Gb, 20Gb, 20Gb (the one I have) and 40Gb(!!) denominations.
Without doubt, the best feature this player has is it's ability to store non-MP3 files. I don't have a whizz-bang ADSL connection at home, so I do most of my downloading at work, upload it to the PJB, take it home, and download it to my home PCs.
There is a downside - it's bigger than most of the MP3 players on the go, primarily because of the 2.5" laptop IDE HD in it. The dimensions are (approx) 6"x3"x1". My brother remarked that when it was attached to my belt under my shirt/coat, it looked like I was (quote) packing heat. If you want to avoid getting shot, though, you can stick it in your jacket pocket.
So much for the land of the free. The US is becoming more like Iraq every day. Does Bush want to get rid of Saddam Hussein so he can take over the newly-vacated position as world's most-hated dictator?
For a democracy, you lot seem to be very happy to just roll over and take it when it comes to legislation. Even us conservative (small "C") Brits have managed to force a rethink recently over the enforcement of increased powers of surveillance in the RIP act... Do things only ever get fixed in the US if you throw money at them? Maybe you should start a "sponsor your senator" program... Then the people who the US legislature claims to represent can get legislation passed that they want to see.
Don't lecture the world about democracy until you start practising it yourself. You seem to have forgotten that your own founding fathers wrote "We the people..." not "We the corporations..."
Got to agree with Mr. Chunder on this one. I don't know if the US has speed cameras, but we in the rest of the UK are plagued with them. Same idea, but they take a snap of the back of your car as you drive by at whatever speed it is above the limit they are set to. A few weeks later, you get a photo in the post, and a speeding ticket. There are ways to appeal this, however.
The UK has fairly strict privacy laws, and is a signatory to the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) - they wouldn't be able to do photograph your car if it violated the privacy of the individual. Interestingly enough, they can't take a photo of the car from the front for privacy reasons - never mind the fact that having a camera flash going off in your face would render you unable to drive safely for at least a few seconds.
So are Slashdot and it's readers for or against the DMCA? There have been scores of articles posted here in the past couple of years calling for the abolition of this nonsensical piece of legislation (a couple of things here - IANAL, and I'm in the UK, where we don't have anything quite this silly - yet). However, in this article, you're actually advocating making use of it to beat these people in the courts. While one can make use of procedural anomalies on the part of VUG, I don't see how one could logically use the DMCA to argue their case when, generally, opinion is completely against the existence of this statute.
The fact of the matter is, no matter how noble your cause might be, you can't use what could reasonably be called the "tools of the enemy" to achieve that end (imagine www.gnu.org being hosted on W2K/IIS, for example).
Make your mind up, Slashdotters - either you want this law, or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
Well, I work for an oil company, so there are plenty of people out in middle of the North Sea depending on me to fix their PCs (remotely of course - you can't get a 'copter out there on Xmas day, and my own one's being serviced right now:-)). As well as that, there is plenty of scripted monitoring on the various NT, Exchange, UNIX, VMS etc boxen that we have...
I'm currently carrying three pagers (one automatic systems pager, one emergency response, one manual support pager) and four(!) mobile phones (no, really - the CEO of the firm has a hotline for support because he doesn't believe in using helpdesks). I'm the only person on my team that carries this particular burden, because I do a couple of different jobs - I'm a systems manager (NT/Exchange in the main, I'm afraid), as well as doing the desktop support jobs no-one else can fix, so I get the best - and worst - of both worlds. I'm just glad I hand them over before New Year - we make a big deal of that here in Scotland.
Have a great 2002 all!
Well, we use NTFS, and we're not in quite as much trouble as that - apply a domain-wide policy to remove the offending entry from HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and everything is ok there.
Or, you could use NTFSDOS Pro. Or slave the problem drive to an non-networked NT box and remove the file that way. You could even clear out the registry of the infected box while the drive is slaved. Doesn't need much lateral thinking, does it?
Oh, and in NT, much of the stuff it tries to delete are files that are in use or services that it tries remove, so it doesn't have too much of an effect in that respect. Nae luck.
Re. a point someone else made, there was no way you could get into our office this morning without being bombarded with notes saying "don't open this". A yet some idiots still opened it. Is that ignorance, stupidity, or insubordination?
I'm not a lawyer, so don't sue on the basis of this. I work for a large oil co., and whether you are contract or staff, this company pays a fixed monthly allowance (based on rota) and a minimum of 3 hours (pro-rata if staff) for every page, if you are on-call. Any time spent over three hours is, obviously, paid at your hourly rate.
For example, I work on a 1 in 4 rota, so I get £x per month as a flat on-call payment, whether or not I'm paged. If I get paged (and this could be anything from a disaster on an oil platform to someone paging me to find out who is on call), I get a minimum of 3 hours pay for each and every page I get.
This model has been used for years here, and applies equally to both consultants and staff - although the rates will obviously be different.
The "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" game cabinets run NT, as do a bunch of the other touch-screen based ones in British pubs nowadays.
I saw one guy mucking around in the innards of one a few weeks back (looked like a service engineer), but there didn't appear to be a keyboard anywhere.
It's probably just got a big reset button somewhere (like the power switch;-), and the pubs have to pay £££ per minute to have some guy come out and tell them to switch it off and switch it on again when it bombs...
Slashdot Mirror
...And tell them that record is MINE! I got a Packard Bell 9508 (P75, 8Mb, 540Mb HDD) for a couple of hundred quid - including a monitor - (I'm in the UK) about eight years ago, and it's still running just fine.
I've upgraded the CPU once (to a mighty P-90, about six years ago), added an 850Mb HDD and upped memory once (to 24Mb from 8Mb) at the same time). It runs Windows 95 like a dream, and suits my friend's occasional e-mail, surfing and word-processing requirements to a T.
I look forward to reading about myself...
Alan.
Quasimodo - now that name rings a bell.
Pavlov did an experiment with cats as well:
Day 1
Rang bell.
Cat ate food.
Day 2
Rang bell.
Cat scratched couch.
Day 3
Rang bell.
Cat fucked off.
Day 4
Cat rang bell.
I ate food.
(With apologies to Eddie Izzard.)
Until recently, I managed an AlphaServer 8200 running NT4 and (believe it or not) Exchange 5.5.
It was solid as a rock - we only rebooted it for service pack updates and the like. The downside was getting a decent virus scanner, as we originally had Norton (which sucked). Trend eventually did the job for us, though. The other PITA was that VNC wouldn't run on it - something to do with the video card not supporting (IIRC) the Nagle algorithm. Of course, that might just be my memory playing tricks with me...
What did make me laugh, though, was that it had a single, measly 10Mbps NIC in it (there were 100Mbps and gigabot cards available, but there was this long-running plan to bin it and buy an Intel-based box, so it never got a higher bandwidth card). And this was the main Exchange box for a 200+ user site. I'm amazed we didn't get more complaints about the response from it.
Sadly, I had to decommission it recently. The company that owned it got bought out, and the lucky buyers wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Oh, and they're using E2K, which kind of precluded any future for the trusty 8200 anyway...
Alan.
What an amazing idea - usually this sort of thing just gets written into your T&Cs. It certainly does where I work. If you hit a certain salary grade, they don't pay you overtime - you get TOIL instead.
Donating to the FSF that way sounds like a great idea, but here's some flamebait... Do you think your family will be all that happy about giving money to the NRA if you are unlawfully killed by a gunman who just happens to be a member?
FWIW, I live in Scotland - gun crime has been falling consistently here since the Dublane massacre (13 March 96) in which 16 kids and their teacher were killed by a gunman who walked into their school (sound familiar?). In 1999, the homicide rate here was 0.12 per 100,000. That's about five people in a population of five million. By contrast, the US rate was 4.08 in 100,000 - that's (assuming a population of about 250,000,000) 10,000 homicides, or thereabouts. That, btw doesn't include suicides with guns, where the rate was about 50% higher. The numbers to back all this up are here. I'm not a member of this lot, but the facts speak for themselves, IMNSHO.
I'd rather live in a country where I have a one-in-a-million chance of being shot dead than one where I have a one in 25,000 chance.
I know it's not in the FSF's remit, but perhaps Professor Moglen would like to comment?
First off, I don't live in the US - I'm in the UK. Consider yourselves lucky you don't have this thing the UK calls parliamentary supremacy - this means no court has power over parliament, and, by extension, the government. At least the supreme court can overturn laws that don't fit in with your constitution... We don't even have one of them!
What happened to the much-vaunted freedom of expression and speech (and is someone going to remove the lyrics about the "land of the free" from the US national anthem as a consequence)? Example: what constitites "material support" to a terrorist group? Handing out flyers? "Political donations"? Well, that's anyone who gives money to NORAID out, unless the IRA aren't terrorists according to the definition of the US government.
To take it to an extreme, what would stop (say) the Republicans declaring the Democrats (or any other political party) a "terrorist group"? I admit it's highly unlikely, but stranger things have happened. All the party in power needs is a huge majority. Like the one Labour have in the UK parliament (160-odd seats out of about 659).
One of the posters below this one suggested that you yanks are going to have to live under the threat of being expatriated for supporting a group the USG doesn't like... Well, IANAL but I can't see this particular power-grab standing up in your Supreme Court if it comes to that. You lucky people.
The fashion industry will probably announce that "superblack is the new black". Which manages to sound faintly ridiculous and be true at the same time.
I've just had a look at the EULA supplied with Microsoft Office 2000 (which is sitting in c:\program files\microsoft office\office\1033\eula9.txt) on this PC at work.
IANAL, but there isn't anything I can find in it - express or implied (to use the favoured term of the EULA authors) - about submitting to audits by the BSA or anyone else in it.
It appears to be solely the users resposibility to ensure that they have the correct license for use of the software they have, and the BSA et al would have to get a court order, or whatever it is called in your legal jurisdiction, in order to obtain details of the software and licenses you have, either by audit or other means.
BTW - the BSA doesn't produce software, just like the RIAA doesn't produce music. They are trade associations and nothing else.
Cheers,
Alan.
MS themselves have reverse engineered software without (AFAIK) ever seeing the code - ever heard of NWLink? It's Microsoft's "clean room" implementation of IPX/SPX.
In tandem with that, MS wrote a Novell client - to allow MS boxes to authenticate on Novell networks - and a Novell gateway, which effectively allowed an NT box to appear as a Novell server to Novell clients.
Of course, that's all in the past, and what was legal then (how did they reverse engineer the security in Novell, for example?) might be illegal now...
Just a quick reply to this - I won't pretend to have read all the comments, so this might already be in there somewhere.
Pumping the appropriate info into Schwarzchild's equation will give you an event horizon with a radius a little under 11 million km (assuming G = 6.67E-11Nm^2/kg^2, M = 3.7 million solar masses, where one solar mass is 1.99E^30 kg, and c = 299792458 m/sec).
Bear in mind that that is the event horizon. and nothing else. It's reasonable to assume that there will be a sizable accretion disk orbiting the object, which would push the overall radius of the object out considerably.
Alan.
If cinemas start hiring rent-a-thug to beat people up for using cellphones, they'll probably get a license to kill anyone trying to take a camcorder into a theatre.
I appreciate that cellphones are annoying if they go off during a film, but the screaming kid anecdote above happens more frequently (in my experience) than a cellphone going off nowadays. Personally, I put my phone on vibrate only if I'm in a cinema... If it goes off, I check who's calling. If it's important, I leave the theatre to take the call. Otherwise, I reject the call. Simple.
I can't understand why anyone thinks banning camcorders in cinemas is "insane". There is pretty much no reason for anyone to need a camcorder in a cinema, other than to bootleg the film, and that's copyright infringement, period. I doubt there's any constitutional backing (I'm a Brit, BTW, so I don't pretend to know all that much about your constitution) for taking a camcorder into a theatre. So deal with it.
Something that is made a big song-and-dance of here, but I have spotted a mention (OK, I haven't read all the comments) is that the PJB-100 has a GPL'ed SDK available from Compaq (registrationblahrequiredblah). Compaq are good enough to put the license terms up on that page so you can read them before you register - the source is available under GPL2e.
:-). It comes in 6Gb, 10Gb, 20Gb, 20Gb (the one I have) and 40Gb(!!) denominations.
There's also a separate effort ongoing at the OpenPJB site at SourceForge. There are various (also GPL'ed) packages available for managing the data you keep on the PJB as well, for both Linux and Windoze.
As far as jog-protection goes, because it's an HD-based player, you'd think it might be a bit on the poor side for this, but the way the PJB is designed, this kind of problem is avoided - the HD is only spun up when needed, the data required is loaded into a 10MB DRAM buffer, and played from there. And yes, I've dropped it, and I've had no ill-effects. Yet
Without doubt, the best feature this player has is it's ability to store non-MP3 files. I don't have a whizz-bang ADSL connection at home, so I do most of my downloading at work, upload it to the PJB, take it home, and download it to my home PCs.
There is a downside - it's bigger than most of the MP3 players on the go, primarily because of the 2.5" laptop IDE HD in it. The dimensions are (approx) 6"x3"x1". My brother remarked that when it was attached to my belt under my shirt/coat, it looked like I was (quote) packing heat. If you want to avoid getting shot, though, you can stick it in your jacket pocket.
HTH,
Alan.
So much for the land of the free. The US is becoming more like Iraq every day. Does Bush want to get rid of Saddam Hussein so he can take over the newly-vacated position as world's most-hated dictator?
For a democracy, you lot seem to be very happy to just roll over and take it when it comes to legislation. Even us conservative (small "C") Brits have managed to force a rethink recently over the enforcement of increased powers of surveillance in the RIP act... Do things only ever get fixed in the US if you throw money at them? Maybe you should start a "sponsor your senator" program... Then the people who the US legislature claims to represent can get legislation passed that they want to see.
Don't lecture the world about democracy until you start practising it yourself. You seem to have forgotten that your own founding fathers wrote "We the people..." not "We the corporations..."
Got to agree with Mr. Chunder on this one. I don't know if the US has speed cameras, but we in the rest of the UK are plagued with them. Same idea, but they take a snap of the back of your car as you drive by at whatever speed it is above the limit they are set to. A few weeks later, you get a photo in the post, and a speeding ticket. There are ways to appeal this, however.
The UK has fairly strict privacy laws, and is a signatory to the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) - they wouldn't be able to do photograph your car if it violated the privacy of the individual. Interestingly enough, they can't take a photo of the car from the front for privacy reasons - never mind the fact that having a camera flash going off in your face would render you unable to drive safely for at least a few seconds.
HTH,
Alan.
So are Slashdot and it's readers for or against the DMCA? There have been scores of articles posted here in the past couple of years calling for the abolition of this nonsensical piece of legislation (a couple of things here - IANAL, and I'm in the UK, where we don't have anything quite this silly - yet). However, in this article, you're actually advocating making use of it to beat these people in the courts. While one can make use of procedural anomalies on the part of VUG, I don't see how one could logically use the DMCA to argue their case when, generally, opinion is completely against the existence of this statute.
The fact of the matter is, no matter how noble your cause might be, you can't use what could reasonably be called the "tools of the enemy" to achieve that end (imagine www.gnu.org being hosted on W2K/IIS, for example).
Make your mind up, Slashdotters - either you want this law, or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
Alan.
Well, I work for an oil company, so there are plenty of people out in middle of the North Sea depending on me to fix their PCs (remotely of course - you can't get a 'copter out there on Xmas day, and my own one's being serviced right now :-)). As well as that, there is plenty of scripted monitoring on the various NT, Exchange, UNIX, VMS etc boxen that we have...
I'm currently carrying three pagers (one automatic systems pager, one emergency response, one manual support pager) and four(!) mobile phones (no, really - the CEO of the firm has a hotline for support because he doesn't believe in using helpdesks). I'm the only person on my team that carries this particular burden, because I do a couple of different jobs - I'm a systems manager (NT/Exchange in the main, I'm afraid), as well as doing the desktop support jobs no-one else can fix, so I get the best - and worst - of both worlds. I'm just glad I hand them over before New Year - we make a big deal of that here in Scotland.
Have a great 2002 all!
Well, we use NTFS, and we're not in quite as much trouble as that - apply a domain-wide policy to remove the offending entry from HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and everything is ok there.
Or, you could use NTFSDOS Pro. Or slave the problem drive to an non-networked NT box and remove the file that way. You could even clear out the registry of the infected box while the drive is slaved. Doesn't need much lateral thinking, does it?
Oh, and in NT, much of the stuff it tries to delete are files that are in use or services that it tries remove, so it doesn't have too much of an effect in that respect. Nae luck.
Re. a point someone else made, there was no way you could get into our office this morning without being bombarded with notes saying "don't open this". A yet some idiots still opened it. Is that ignorance, stupidity, or insubordination?
For example, I work on a 1 in 4 rota, so I get £x per month as a flat on-call payment, whether or not I'm paged. If I get paged (and this could be anything from a disaster on an oil platform to someone paging me to find out who is on call), I get a minimum of 3 hours pay for each and every page I get.
This model has been used for years here, and applies equally to both consultants and staff - although the rates will obviously be different.
The "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" game cabinets run NT, as do a bunch of the other touch-screen based ones in British pubs nowadays. I saw one guy mucking around in the innards of one a few weeks back (looked like a service engineer), but there didn't appear to be a keyboard anywhere. It's probably just got a big reset button somewhere (like the power switch ;-), and the pubs have to pay £££ per minute to have some guy come out and tell them to switch it off and switch it on again when it bombs...