What amazes me is nobody complains about regular make-up for stars (of any caliber). Have you ever seen your favourite movie star without make up? How about a tv announcer? Not quite the same, huh? Yet nobody screams "CHEATING!!!" because it's a part of professional life. Why sound should be different?
Have you ever seen yourself in bright studio lighting? Not the same as the mirror is it? "Natural" makeup keeps your skin from looking oily and translucent all at once under those hot and bright lights. Now once you do accept some makeup it is of course possible to overdo it, and if you see some of these stars in real life you will see why they are tempted. That nasty stage makeup destroys your skin, thirty five year old actors look like black death survivors.
You could probaly just run gnome with the KDE apps just fine.
The secret to doing this and still having reasonable application startup times is to always leave one runing KDE app. I use kworldclock, just put it on an extra virtual desktop. This keeps their object broker running (CORBA/COM++ish thingy), and keeps major qt/kde libraries in memory.
Before anyone clicks on the Reply to This link to pipe up that it's double taxation on the telcos too... yes, it is. It's an extra tax they pay in exchange for having a government-mandated monopoly. They pass that tax along to their captive customer base, which is oblivious to the fact that businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.
It's worse than that, they are allowed to bill you $5 for XYZ tax when they are only paying a 5 cent tax to some government, which in part gets spent on telco services from the telco anyway, and then the telco pockets the other $4.95... The local telco "taxes" are absolutely insane, I don't think we really want to bring that system to any other part of the economy.
The problem from what I understand is there are so many iterations of it that the devs simply can't get the kernel to work with all of them. I can't fault them for that, but ACPI is as common as TCPIP now and this is one area where Linux has fallen way behind the curve. Having only some hardware work and only certain functions available just isn't good enough.
As somebody who wrote an early user space cpu frequency scaling deamon, I think it's not just all the broken ACPI tables but also the fact that the intel engineers change the interface at ever minor iteration. Even with all the changes they still have very strange convetions such as numbering CPU's starting at 1. If you just want to last longer on batteries you can use the cpufreq deamon, it's a strange beast in 2.4, but makes some sense in 2.6 with the/sys filesystem interface. There is an effort to backport the/sys interface if like me your laptop doesn't like 2.6. When ACPI doesn't work there are also CPU only modules that don't rely on ACPI. The only hitch is that your laptop may not be enabled if no one has posted to the list that it works for them, cuz different motherboards require different voltages and may need longer times between frequency changes than the CPU does (memory bus lines, support chips, and power supply all effect these params.) This is one of the things ACPI is supposed to tell you but most BIOSes are very broken, which is why ACPI doesn't always work when it should.
Once it's working though your Linux laptop can be both more responsive and last longer on batteries than Windows. Windows is very conservative in interpreting ACPI tables and also doesn't have a very flexible set of frequency scaling algorithms.
Actually, you can't. IIRC, public dissemination of bomb-building techniques was made illegal in 1997. Something as simple as talking about using match heads to build pyrotechnic devices is now a federal felony.
Better close down the New York Public Library then. It's not yet illegal for me to tell you to combine a volatile petrochemical with some high nitrogen content fertilizer and use high current and thin wire as a fuse to blow up a hill for your road project in a pinch. It is illegal for me to bring up bomb making techniques in a political discussion. It's all about perceived intent.
RaiseTheFist.com was shut down because the kid had a public defender instead of the best lawyer his mom could borrow money for.
First, we tend to focus on the flaws in Windows. Windows contains a lot of good ideas (which originated at many companies over many years...Apple, for instance, is a major contributor). Just because it isn't as good as it could be and isn't improving doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
I used to, but I hardly know what the flaws are anymore, except for the ones that have remained since Windows 95. Once I stopped having a Windows partition I had less and less opportunities to be annoyed by them, and much more likely to send patches to KDE projects with no idea if the UI problem I encountered exists in Windows or what their solution was if it didn't. I think it was maybe two years ago since I switched completely, but the two years before that I basically used Windows only with Visual Studio and the Cygwin tools for development. So I wasn't really exposed to much beyond changing the screen resolution and installing WinCVS for new developers and setting the clock. (The latter required you to log in with root privledges, though a Windows using friend tells me they have a Mandrake like "right click to run as admin w/password prompt" feature now.) I wrote up some docs on installing the IBM JDK and installing an NTP deamon too, but still it only required a half hour of actual exposure to Windows.
The point is the emphasis on Windows flaws will die out naturally as fewer Free Software and Open Source developers are exposed to their tools. Just using a Mac can be an entirely frustrating experience these days, "What do you mean there is no way to change the TCP/IP Window size? You need to sign over IP rights to even look at Apple's code? The MTU calculation has been broken for several releases and a patch was sent to them a year ago? So the user I'm trying to help is just screewed? Okay..." I actually managed to help that user by reprogramming the router to only send packet fragments to that machine, insane workaround in my book, the user offered to buy me a dinner in addition to the bottle of wine she gave me, at least Mac users are nicer than the Windows users you try to help.
PS It's not that I hate the Windows GUI, I absolutely drooled over Win95. Windows just evolves at such a glacial pace, and they don't seem to fix interaction bugs in any kind of organized way. Open Source is much maligned for only fixing interesting bugs instead of easy but annoying ones, but Gnome and KDE really are organized when it comes to improving the interaction model.
Then I moved to Sweden. My in-laws quickly informed me that they only drink Skona roast by Zeagas (a VERY strong coffee blend) and showed me how to make it at their incredibly high strength level. All of my corporate English student who have been to the U.S. complains about the piss-weakness of the coffee there.
My lab had some visitors from Sweden last year. As a coffee lover^ and Scandinavian I warned my boss not to give them crappy coffee and give them the good stuff. Apparently I wasn't specific enough because she sent someone out to pick up Starbucks instead of coffee from the guy down the street who roasts a regional of the day every morning and serves up good strong cups of drip coffee in addition to the Italian preperations.* When given the Starbucks coffee they reacted as you might imagine, something akin to being given McDonalds by hosts that thought they were serving caviar. I asked my boss about it later and she thought the good coffee was too strong and the Starbucks had to be better since it costs twice as much!
^Ironically my grandmother and mother roasted coffee for a living for some years but liked their coffee pretty weak & my father drinks Robusta!
*Saturdays have been the Jamaica Blue Mountain day for years. Yumm. Plus, if you buy beans the day's roast is 1/2 price.
In all my business and personal dealings with Microsoft, I've always gotten the feeling I'm really dealing with a maturity level equivalent to the "100sr sux!! We r0xx0rd U!!! doofuses that infest many online games.
This may happen with the product groups but I haven't seen this in Microsoft Research, they seemed much more comfortable bashing C# or.NET than I had the guts to do. And some of the Microsoft evengalists are super smooth. The worst they will do is plead with you to use XYZ because their boss is asking "What are we getting from this relationship?"
Microsoft is a soulless company, but not everyone that works there is too immature or naive to see that. I think many are more like those people who decide to work inside a corrupt system because they think they can resist becoming corrupted themselves and think they can do more good from inside than outside. I'm sure some do, just based on all the Schindler's List type stories you read about good Nazi's who tried to use their position to work against the greater evil they were a part of. If no one worked there they of course wouldn't exist, but within a world where they do exist and there are plenty of '100sr sux!!!' people, some people with a soul chose to work there to try to do good.
If you look at a place like Iraq I'm sure you'll find many decent people who joined the Bathist party after it was apparent they were evil. I'm sure some did it because they just wanted running water to reach more people, or thought that exporting more oil would mean more money for schools and needed infrastructure. Thomas Jefferson was not evil incarnate simply because he owned slaves and treated them badly.
If I were a German of turkish origin, my experience would be totally different. German or French border police would have picked me up, would have checked my passport and maybe my pockets.
Same rules apply in the USA. If you look non-white hispanic in the South and not carrying papers you can find yourself deported to Mexico pretty quick. I was in a bus a few years ago in New Orleans that got stopped by the INS. They asked us all where we were born, and then some roughs came on and pulled out all the people who they thought lied or who answered incorrectly. There are always some US citizens in Mexico trying to find a way to contact friends and family to get them their papers so they can get back, if they never got a passport it is a beaurocratic nightmare. I'm foreign born but whitish so I was able to talk myself out of the sticky situation, it had never occured to me to bring my passport for a in-country bus trip. It seems like crossing country borders in Europe is roughly equivalent to crossing state borders in the USA.
If you are driving in the US South and consent to a car search at a police checkpoint they give you a receipt that can help you get through other checkpoints more quickly, do they do something like that in Europe?
There is a difference between what the KKK and the Boy Scouts of America can do behind closed doors and who Denny's is allowed to deny service too. Both operate on private property, but Denny's is a place of "public accommodation" while the others are members only hate groups. I seriously think you have your ideas screwed up. Since when have the boy scouts been a part of ANY hate group?
In the context of being allowed to kick out gay Eagle Scouts they were enjoy the same right as the KKK enjoys of being able to exclude the Irish. I don't think they are the same in infamy, I've never known the Boy Scouts organize the burning of living people. But that wasn't really legal even when it was common.
Here's the interesting part: at least two of those are 12.* addresses --- cablemodems with attbi.com. So if you want to know who the developer responsible is, it might be a reasonable guess it's whoever lives at those IP addresses!:-)
Clever, we can all make those our primary NTP servers...
I'm not one to blame the developer though. Once long ago I wrote usenet and e-mail client that integrated into a larger suite which tracked some business transactions and associated the pertinent (threaded) e-mails with the transaction (The usenet wasn't advertised as such, just another forum from the users PoV). Kinda neat, except I didn't encrypt the passwords because there was someone else looking at rearchitecturing overall security. I documented this and told the CEO, COO and the security guy. Then I left to pursue a graduate degree. Two years later I was talking with someone who had left there (the security guy). They had shipped the product without any security for the passwords except for only allowing the db superuser to read the cleartext passwords. Further they hadn't put in all the proper BSD advert notices in the documentation. I got them to fix the BSD violation with an e-mail, but I never got any follow-up on the password issue.
The programmer may have made the "Oh, Duh!" mistakes of not including back-off and not using DNS, but the fixed IP may have been well documented as needing changing once they had their NTP servers up and running...
All of the code examples I've seen have come from BSD-licensed code. This code can be freely reused, but is no more in the public domain than is GPL code.
Historical malloc is in the public domain. BSD claims copyright on a version of it, that is almost certainly not valid, but just in case it is they give you blanket permission to use it under BSD.
The BPF algorithm in Linux is well documented as being a clean room implementation from the spec. The equivalent algorithm in the SCO code appears to be a derivative of the BSD version derived from an public domain work. Whether Berkeley contributed enough originality to the code for the copyright to be valid and so they have the right to sue SCO is unknown to me. So far they haven't, and so it is somewhat safe to assume that SCO has a seperate license from Berkley to use the code without the Berkeley copyright notice which apparently is missing for them to claim it as their own. Remember, two owners down the line there was a secret settlement between Berkeley and the System V copyright holders. This happened after the judge found large amounts of copying from BSD into System V without proper copyright notices, and the discovery that pre-System V UNIX was never copyrighted.
Conclusion
* malloc -- public domain
* SCO BPF algorithm -- copyright Berkeley, possibly licensed under non-BSD license
* Linux BPF algorithm -- copyright Jay Schulist, GNU only license
SCO has no standing to copyright these and to sue for either of these. They possibly could be sued for using BPF, but I doubt it. Either they are protected by the BSD license or they can claim it's in the public domain as a non-creative derivation of the bnet code. In any case, Berkley can't claim damages for using it before SCO claimed it was theirs as they had every reason to know remedy the problem earlier when they saw the code in the discovery phase of their case. They might have some cause to sue because of the SCO claim, but most likely this is governed by the settlement.
UC Berkeley has no cause to sue Jay or any of the distributors since his implementation of is not a derivative of the BPF code. Berkeley or copyright holders using a BSD license might find some of their code in Linux without proper attribution if they looked, but they would have little reason to act as irrationally as SCO. The copying could be understood and dealt with quickly by all involved anyway as all sources are available without NDA.
Uh no it couldn't. While the DMCA does have provisions for reverse engineering it doesn't "suddenly" give you permission to violate existing copyright law for the sake of doing the reverse engineering.
Um, yes it does. The, DMCA as idiotic as it may be, is the existing copyright law in the USA. You can't even appeal it on TRIPS grounds since the treaty specifically allows the fair-use rights granted by the United States of America. Still this would only allow you to make unlimited copies of an executable that actually WAS required for interoperability because of some lookup like this. There are many other ways to make reverse engineering a secret hard. You can stick it in a self-decrypting windows driver or set of drivers, make the number of instructions that look like they might be the hidden secret large, you can patch the CPU microcode with secret instructions... and of course you make the protocol itself encrypted and timestamped in such a way as to make replay attacks ineffective.
I don't understand why people are all pissy about this. Microsoft built a private system for communication, they allowed/tolerated anyone connecting to the network with any compatible client up to this point.
There is a difference between what the KKK and the Boy Scouts of America can do behind closed doors and who Denny's is allowed to deny service too. Both operate on private property, but Denny's is a place of "public accommodation" while the others are members only hate groups. Their "christian values" define them, and anyone they believe is an anathema to those values obviously can't join.
In general the more open you are the less power you have to descriminate unfairly. I don't know if MS crosses the line here? But it still sucks even if it doesn't compare to say the US telephone system back when you had to rent your phone from General Electric. Imagine if that were the case today and they interrupted your telephone call every 15 seconds with a 5 second advertisement for the shows on their TV network.
Illegal? Probably not.
But would it suck? Hell yea!
On the internet this is worse because the whole basis of the inter-net was that by speaking common protocols the whole network would be richer than the parts, remember MCIMail, ATTMail, Bitnet, CompuServe, Delphi, Fidonet (woo hoo!;), GEnie, MCIMail, Prodigy, and all the smaller scale yet coast-to-coast BBS networks? Remember bang! addressing?
PS Just saying Private Property is not some magical phrase that makes all things all-right. If some miscreant shoots you in the head, you ain't gonna be saying, "Oh, it's ok, don't worry! That bullet is bought and paid for!" As a society we're allowed to say, "well it sucks anyway, we're gonna do something about that guy wasting perfectly good bullets!" PP does make some things all right; if you either shoot yourself in the foot or take reckless doses of cocaine and your IQ is above 60, I think you have every right too do it. You can even burn down your house when the morgage is paid for if it's done with due regard for the safety of others. In general, I also think the government way underpays when condemning property, just the fact they don't compensate renters whose leases are broken has ended many a business and even some families, but worse makes economically idiotic projects look good on paper. But, I'm not even sure it's right to think of MS-IM as "property", it's a protocol, and while they can charge the users for using their servers to connect I don't think they should be allowed to dictate your client. That's akin to saying, "'Lolita' must be read by 25 Watt GE lightbulbs." Always bad, and something we worry about when such a large player in the market says it.)
Wouldn't a standard *something* be nice? I always thought we had it with IRC, but them IM became a reality.. *sigh*
I thought it was talk... I made the transition to ytalk, but IRC and then IM never really appealed to me. Too much noise. But there really are a couple standard *somethings* e-mail and POTS. Well I have VoIP that bridges to the POTS network somewhere close to the person I'm calling, but the interaction model is the same.
My ping times to www.mit.edu (my personal benchmark, as its on the next POP over and always up) are normally 25ms from home, they grew slowly from about 30 ms Monday morning to as high as 2600 ms yesterday with 2/3 packet drop. But today and especially in the last few hours it's fallen back to about 29 ms with 1/3 packet drop.
There are still occasional storms, I guess as a new host gets infected nearby. But things are good compared to the last two days when I couldn't even listen to internet radio and plain old web browsing and e-mail were slow...
BTW I haven't seen any of the e-mails myself do to our spam filter but I have gotten some returned e-mail the virus sent and a non-tech friend who got this one and another friend (who's very non-tech) got last weeks virus. I usually don't personally know the people who get these things, it has been a good week for discussing an OS upgrade to Linux with non-techies;)
If the new "windows" is different and their new Wal-Mart computer comes with the new "windows", then developers will have to choose between developing for a nice platform
Well if Longhorn decides to keep the Mandrake L&F they won't look so different after all....
I can't be the only one that this looks a lot like Mandrake 9.0 too.
I guess the MS Look and Feel people visited the testing lab and found it too their liking.;)
We can finally compete with the MacHeads. Look Redmond is copying our look and feel now, look at that Mandra..err Longhorn background, try than new and improved CLI. Remind you of anything?
How else are you going to get your Windows patches and virus updates?
No, you do not patch safety critical machines in situ.
You don't put them on an unsecured network!
You can get the data out of them with a serial cable with the RX pin disconnected.
And you don't run Windows on them in the first place.
I wouldn't even run Linux/*BSD, this is the type of thing you buy a Sun for.
You can visualize the data outside with anything you like, but the technicians monitoring the safety of the reactor shouldn't see any safety data that depends on machines that can read any data from the outside. It's not so hard to give them two monitors on two computers one secured and one not. You make sure there is no CDROM/floopy or other way to get data onto the safety monitoring system other than a technician consciously entering it by hand. If the engineer at the business office wants something tuned she can call the tech up or send some data and instructions to the unsecured machine. This way you may lose a couple % efficiency when the network goes down or a virus spreads but there are enough techs to monitor the system and keep it running safely.
When you have patches for UI enhancements and OS/patch upgrades you image a new machine and run it in parallel on a third monitor until you feel it's safe to remove the old machine and use it for the next upgrade. You do not place the new machine on a network with the old one, if it turns out to be infected you don't want to contaminate the running systen. In addition you keep enough techs on site to read and interpret the analog system when the digital one fails. They can be sleeping or doing some other task but you shouldn't have to beep them and hope they show up on time.
But the blame lies with presidents Clinton and Bush for allowing the NRC regulation to become so lax that they allow two way data connections to safety monitoring equipment when there is no concievable need for two way data other than a few thousand dollar cost savings per year on a multibillion dollar revenue stream. (You can do all the reactor tuning to squeeze a few million extra out with one way data, as that's all the engineers use anyway...)
When travelling through a medium, the photons run into various atoms and kick them up into a higher, unstable energy level. The light is then re-emitted in a fairly random direction after a very short duration. This gives us the _apparent_ slowing of light.
Nope. Think about it for a second. If this were the case how many colors would you see in light passing through a window? one? two? ten? certainly you would never see white sunlight.. and well if it were absorbed and reabsorbed a great deal and re-emitted in a _random_direction_ would you ever see _through_ a window?
If specialization is as important as they state this only indicates that sewn cotton clothes with seams originated in the last 200,000 years. It doesn't tell us when Lama/Wool sweaters were first worn or when furs were first worn or even when we started wrapping ourselves in decorative blankets...
It seems like all of those would serve the same sexual and political purposes as tailored slacks.
"Dude, she's wrapped in a purple blanket! Choice!" -- da Caveman speaks...
"i c u'r wearing a lion skin, let's make babies" -- da Cavewomyn speaks...
I haven't seen this virus in my mailbox, but my ping time went way up and bandwidth way down at home. I guess there are some Windows users sharing my ISP with me. It didn't happen with last weeks virus though. Is this one especially prolific at e-mailing?
Even vaccines are voluntary things that have risks...
Some vaccines use just virus parts that are not infectious and with them you are correct in stating they are completely voluntary. But some vaccines use live virus. This has come up in the debate over Smallpox vaccination. The vaccination is actually a live "Vaccinia" virus which can kill and the vaccinated folks are infectious. I know some folks in the military that were told not to have intimate contact with their SO while on leave because of live virus vaccinations... Worse people who are most vulnerable, like those with excema, often don't even know they should keep their distance from those recently vaccinated.
But we accept vaccines as a society knowing they will kill some because without the vaccines many more would die, and those most vulnerable to the vaccine would usually be the first to die anyway if the more dangerous virus the vaccine prevents were not stopped when it reached the vaccinated people that surround them. If we can vaccinate most people and keep the vulnerable safe from the vaccine then we protect them in the long run since they will have a smaller chance of getting either the vaccine virus or scarier virus in an uncontrolled outbreak.
Even though he would have far too little work to do most of the time you still want him around in case something goes wrong, so hiring a part time Linux admin wouldn't solve the problem. In a small organization Linux might even be more expensive than windows as the Linux admin may require higher salery.
Why not adopt the old New York model of outsourcing to gain economies of scale for small companies? There is garment district and financial district and were electrical and other districts in large part because the businesses used similar services and these could be outsourced if the businesses were in close proximity. If two or more Linux using businesses were located nearby they could share a Linux admin. This might be even simpler as these could be non-competing businesses so we wouldn't need the same strict ethical codes that developed when competing businesses shared the same contractors for their outsourced needs. There are still many businesses in cities, especially some of the 3rd sector (information processing) businesses that have the most use for PCs.
From what I've seen on TV coverage, they showed the source of the black smoke. Looked to me like a refinery or something with the safety flare-off stacks burning. I live in the heart of petrochemical alley down along the southern Mississippi River, and believe me, whenever there is a widespread power failure, they all do the same thing.
I live a few hundred feet from those smoke stacks. It is not a petrochemical plant. There are none in Manhattan for obvious reasons. It's a very old co-generation plant that supplies steam to midtown and downtown Manhattan and electricity to the Lower East Side. There was an explosion and fire at that plant last year, I guess caused by the construction (they are upgrading it), the same stack was affected. I can understand why people thought there was a fire, when I got there (I was at a Cafe around the corner when the brownout began) there was a thick cloud of smoke and fire engines rushing to the scene along with a cop keeping non-residents from entering the area. By the time I got to my apartment a few minutes later there there was a total blackout. The plant is near the East River for cooling purposes. When the brownout started we just thought it was a blown transformer as there was already another four engine fire in the neighborhood, but then the internet connection went down and we started to think it was something bigger.
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What amazes me is nobody complains about regular make-up for stars (of any caliber). Have you ever seen your favourite movie star without make up? How about a tv announcer? Not quite the same, huh? Yet nobody screams "CHEATING!!!" because it's a part of professional life. Why sound should be different?
Have you ever seen yourself in bright studio lighting? Not the same as the mirror is it? "Natural" makeup keeps your skin from looking oily and translucent all at once under those hot and bright lights. Now once you do accept some makeup it is of course possible to overdo it, and if you see some of these stars in real life you will see why they are tempted. That nasty stage makeup destroys your skin, thirty five year old actors look like black death survivors.
You could probaly just run gnome with the KDE apps just fine.
The secret to doing this and still having reasonable application startup times is to always leave one runing KDE app. I use kworldclock, just put it on an extra virtual desktop. This keeps their object broker running (CORBA/COM++ish thingy), and keeps major qt/kde libraries in memory.
Before anyone clicks on the Reply to This link to pipe up that it's double taxation on the telcos too... yes, it is. It's an extra tax they pay in exchange for having a government-mandated monopoly. They pass that tax along to their captive customer base, which is oblivious to the fact that businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.
It's worse than that, they are allowed to bill you $5 for XYZ tax when they are only paying a 5 cent tax to some government, which in part gets spent on telco services from the telco anyway, and then the telco pockets the other $4.95... The local telco "taxes" are absolutely insane, I don't think we really want to bring that system to any other part of the economy.
Communications taxes never made sense anyway...
The problem from what I understand is there are so many iterations of it that the devs simply can't get the kernel to work with all of them. I can't fault them for that, but ACPI is as common as TCPIP now and this is one area where Linux has fallen way behind the curve. Having only some hardware work and only certain functions available just isn't good enough.
/sys filesystem interface. There is an effort to backport the /sys interface if like me your laptop doesn't like 2.6. When ACPI doesn't work there are also CPU only modules that don't rely on ACPI. The only hitch is that your laptop may not be enabled if no one has posted to the list that it works for them, cuz different motherboards require different voltages and may need longer times between frequency changes than the CPU does (memory bus lines, support chips, and power supply all effect these params.) This is one of the things ACPI is supposed to tell you but most BIOSes are very broken, which is why ACPI doesn't always work when it should.
As somebody who wrote an early user space cpu frequency scaling deamon, I think it's not just all the broken ACPI tables but also the fact that the intel engineers change the interface at ever minor iteration. Even with all the changes they still have very strange convetions such as numbering CPU's starting at 1. If you just want to last longer on batteries you can use the cpufreq deamon, it's a strange beast in 2.4, but makes some sense in 2.6 with the
Once it's working though your Linux laptop can be both more responsive and last longer on batteries than Windows. Windows is very conservative in interpreting ACPI tables and also doesn't have a very flexible set of frequency scaling algorithms.
Actually, you can't. IIRC, public dissemination of bomb-building techniques was made illegal in 1997. Something as simple as talking about using match heads to build pyrotechnic devices is now a federal felony.
Better close down the New York Public Library then. It's not yet illegal for me to tell you to combine a volatile petrochemical with some high nitrogen content fertilizer and use high current and thin wire as a fuse to blow up a hill for your road project in a pinch. It is illegal for me to bring up bomb making techniques in a political discussion. It's all about perceived intent.
RaiseTheFist.com was shut down because the kid had a public defender instead of the best lawyer his mom could borrow money for.
First, we tend to focus on the flaws in Windows. Windows contains a lot of good ideas (which originated at many companies over many years...Apple, for instance, is a major contributor). Just because it isn't as good as it could be and isn't improving doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
I used to, but I hardly know what the flaws are anymore, except for the ones that have remained since Windows 95. Once I stopped having a Windows partition I had less and less opportunities to be annoyed by them, and much more likely to send patches to KDE projects with no idea if the UI problem I encountered exists in Windows or what their solution was if it didn't. I think it was maybe two years ago since I switched completely, but the two years before that I basically used Windows only with Visual Studio and the Cygwin tools for development. So I wasn't really exposed to much beyond changing the screen resolution and installing WinCVS for new developers and setting the clock. (The latter required you to log in with root privledges, though a Windows using friend tells me they have a Mandrake like "right click to run as admin w/password prompt" feature now.) I wrote up some docs on installing the IBM JDK and installing an NTP deamon too, but still it only required a half hour of actual exposure to Windows.
The point is the emphasis on Windows flaws will die out naturally as fewer Free Software and Open Source developers are exposed to their tools. Just using a Mac can be an entirely frustrating experience these days, "What do you mean there is no way to change the TCP/IP Window size? You need to sign over IP rights to even look at Apple's code? The MTU calculation has been broken for several releases and a patch was sent to them a year ago? So the user I'm trying to help is just screewed? Okay..." I actually managed to help that user by reprogramming the router to only send packet fragments to that machine, insane workaround in my book, the user offered to buy me a dinner in addition to the bottle of wine she gave me, at least Mac users are nicer than the Windows users you try to help.
PS It's not that I hate the Windows GUI, I absolutely drooled over Win95. Windows just evolves at such a glacial pace, and they don't seem to fix interaction bugs in any kind of organized way. Open Source is much maligned for only fixing interesting bugs instead of easy but annoying ones, but Gnome and KDE really are organized when it comes to improving the interaction model.
Then I moved to Sweden. My in-laws quickly informed me that they only drink Skona roast by Zeagas (a VERY strong coffee blend) and showed me how to make it at their incredibly high strength level. All of my corporate English student who have been to the U.S. complains about the piss-weakness of the coffee there.
My lab had some visitors from Sweden last year. As a coffee lover^ and Scandinavian I warned my boss not to give them crappy coffee and give them the good stuff. Apparently I wasn't specific enough because she sent someone out to pick up Starbucks instead of coffee from the guy down the street who roasts a regional of the day every morning and serves up good strong cups of drip coffee in addition to the Italian preperations.* When given the Starbucks coffee they reacted as you might imagine, something akin to being given McDonalds by hosts that thought they were serving caviar. I asked my boss about it later and she thought the good coffee was too strong and the Starbucks had to be better since it costs twice as much!
^Ironically my grandmother and mother roasted coffee for a living for some years but liked their coffee pretty weak & my father drinks Robusta!
*Saturdays have been the Jamaica Blue Mountain day for years. Yumm. Plus, if you buy beans the day's roast is 1/2 price.
In all my business and personal dealings with Microsoft, I've always gotten the feeling I'm really dealing with a maturity level equivalent to the "100sr sux!! We r0xx0rd U!!! doofuses that infest many online games.
.NET than I had the guts to do. And some of the Microsoft evengalists are super smooth. The worst they will do is plead with you to use XYZ because their boss is asking "What are we getting from this relationship?"
This may happen with the product groups but I haven't seen this in Microsoft Research, they seemed much more comfortable bashing C# or
Microsoft is a soulless company, but not everyone that works there is too immature or naive to see that. I think many are more like those people who decide to work inside a corrupt system because they think they can resist becoming corrupted themselves and think they can do more good from inside than outside. I'm sure some do, just based on all the Schindler's List type stories you read about good Nazi's who tried to use their position to work against the greater evil they were a part of. If no one worked there they of course wouldn't exist, but within a world where they do exist and there are plenty of '100sr sux!!!' people, some people with a soul chose to work there to try to do good.
If you look at a place like Iraq I'm sure you'll find many decent people who joined the Bathist party after it was apparent they were evil. I'm sure some did it because they just wanted running water to reach more people, or thought that exporting more oil would mean more money for schools and needed infrastructure. Thomas Jefferson was not evil incarnate simply because he owned slaves and treated them badly.
If I were a German of turkish origin, my experience would be totally different. German or French border police would have picked me up, would have checked my passport and maybe my pockets.
Same rules apply in the USA. If you look non-white hispanic in the South and not carrying papers you can find yourself deported to Mexico pretty quick. I was in a bus a few years ago in New Orleans that got stopped by the INS. They asked us all where we were born, and then some roughs came on and pulled out all the people who they thought lied or who answered incorrectly. There are always some US citizens in Mexico trying to find a way to contact friends and family to get them their papers so they can get back, if they never got a passport it is a beaurocratic nightmare. I'm foreign born but whitish so I was able to talk myself out of the sticky situation, it had never occured to me to bring my passport for a in-country bus trip. It seems like crossing country borders in Europe is roughly equivalent to crossing state borders in the USA.
If you are driving in the US South and consent to a car search at a police checkpoint they give you a receipt that can help you get through other checkpoints more quickly, do they do something like that in Europe?
There is a difference between what the KKK and the Boy Scouts of America can do behind closed doors and who Denny's is allowed to deny service too. Both operate on private property, but Denny's is a place of "public accommodation" while the others are members only hate groups.
I seriously think you have your ideas screwed up. Since when have the boy scouts been a part of ANY hate group?
In the context of being allowed to kick out gay Eagle Scouts they were enjoy the same right as the KKK enjoys of being able to exclude the Irish. I don't think they are the same in infamy, I've never known the Boy Scouts organize the burning of living people. But that wasn't really legal even when it was common.
Here's the interesting part: at least two of those are 12.* addresses --- cablemodems with attbi.com. So if you want to know who the developer responsible is, it might be a reasonable guess it's whoever lives at those IP addresses!
Clever, we can all make those our primary NTP servers...
I'm not one to blame the developer though. Once long ago I wrote usenet and e-mail client that integrated into a larger suite which tracked some business transactions and associated the pertinent (threaded) e-mails with the transaction (The usenet wasn't advertised as such, just another forum from the users PoV). Kinda neat, except I didn't encrypt the passwords because there was someone else looking at rearchitecturing overall security. I documented this and told the CEO, COO and the security guy. Then I left to pursue a graduate degree. Two years later I was talking with someone who had left there (the security guy). They had shipped the product without any security for the passwords except for only allowing the db superuser to read the cleartext passwords. Further they hadn't put in all the proper BSD advert notices in the documentation. I got them to fix the BSD violation with an e-mail, but I never got any follow-up on the password issue.
The programmer may have made the "Oh, Duh!" mistakes of not including back-off and not using DNS, but the fixed IP may have been well documented as needing changing once they had their NTP servers up and running...
All of the code examples I've seen have come from BSD-licensed code. This code can be freely reused, but is no more in the public domain than is GPL code.
Historical malloc is in the public domain. BSD claims copyright on a version of it, that is almost certainly not valid, but just in case it is they give you blanket permission to use it under BSD.
The BPF algorithm in Linux is well documented as being a clean room implementation from the spec. The equivalent algorithm in the SCO code appears to be a derivative of the BSD version derived from an public domain work. Whether Berkeley contributed enough originality to the code for the copyright to be valid and so they have the right to sue SCO is unknown to me. So far they haven't, and so it is somewhat safe to assume that SCO has a seperate license from Berkley to use the code without the Berkeley copyright notice which apparently is missing for them to claim it as their own. Remember, two owners down the line there was a secret settlement between Berkeley and the System V copyright holders. This happened after the judge found large amounts of copying from BSD into System V without proper copyright notices, and the discovery that pre-System V UNIX was never copyrighted.
Conclusion
* malloc -- public domain
* SCO BPF algorithm -- copyright Berkeley, possibly licensed under non-BSD license
* Linux BPF algorithm -- copyright Jay Schulist, GNU only license
SCO has no standing to copyright these and to sue for either of these. They possibly could be sued for using BPF, but I doubt it. Either they are protected by the BSD license or they can claim it's in the public domain as a non-creative derivation of the bnet code. In any case, Berkley can't claim damages for using it before SCO claimed it was theirs as they had every reason to know remedy the problem earlier when they saw the code in the discovery phase of their case. They might have some cause to sue because of the SCO claim, but most likely this is governed by the settlement.
UC Berkeley has no cause to sue Jay or any of the distributors since his implementation of is not a derivative of the BPF code. Berkeley or copyright holders using a BSD license might find some of their code in Linux without proper attribution if they looked, but they would have little reason to act as irrationally as SCO. The copying could be understood and dealt with quickly by all involved anyway as all sources are available without NDA.
Uh no it couldn't. While the DMCA does have provisions for reverse engineering it doesn't "suddenly" give you permission to violate existing copyright law for the sake of doing the reverse engineering.
Um, yes it does. The, DMCA as idiotic as it may be, is the existing copyright law in the USA. You can't even appeal it on TRIPS grounds since the treaty specifically allows the fair-use rights granted by the United States of America. Still this would only allow you to make unlimited copies of an executable that actually WAS required for interoperability because of some lookup like this. There are many other ways to make reverse engineering a secret hard. You can stick it in a self-decrypting windows driver or set of drivers, make the number of instructions that look like they might be the hidden secret large, you can patch the CPU microcode with secret instructions... and of course you make the protocol itself encrypted and timestamped in such a way as to make replay attacks ineffective.
I don't understand why people are all pissy about this.
;), GEnie, MCIMail, Prodigy, and all the smaller scale yet coast-to-coast BBS networks? Remember bang! addressing?
Microsoft built a private system for communication, they allowed/tolerated anyone connecting to the network with any compatible client up to this point.
There is a difference between what the KKK and the Boy Scouts of America can do behind closed doors and who Denny's is allowed to deny service too. Both operate on private property, but Denny's is a place of "public accommodation" while the others are members only hate groups. Their "christian values" define them, and anyone they believe is an anathema to those values obviously can't join.
In general the more open you are the less power you have to descriminate unfairly. I don't know if MS crosses the line here? But it still sucks even if it doesn't compare to say the US telephone system back when you had to rent your phone from General Electric. Imagine if that were the case today and they interrupted your telephone call every 15 seconds with a 5 second advertisement for the shows on their TV network.
Illegal? Probably not.
But would it suck? Hell yea!
On the internet this is worse because the whole basis of the inter-net was that by speaking common protocols the whole network would be richer than the parts, remember MCIMail, ATTMail, Bitnet, CompuServe, Delphi, Fidonet (woo hoo!
PS Just saying Private Property is not some magical phrase that makes all things all-right. If some miscreant shoots you in the head, you ain't gonna be saying, "Oh, it's ok, don't worry! That bullet is bought and paid for!" As a society we're allowed to say, "well it sucks anyway, we're gonna do something about that guy wasting perfectly good bullets!" PP does make some things all right; if you either shoot yourself in the foot or take reckless doses of cocaine and your IQ is above 60, I think you have every right too do it. You can even burn down your house when the morgage is paid for if it's done with due regard for the safety of others. In general, I also think the government way underpays when condemning property, just the fact they don't compensate renters whose leases are broken has ended many a business and even some families, but worse makes economically idiotic projects look good on paper. But, I'm not even sure it's right to think of MS-IM as "property", it's a protocol, and while they can charge the users for using their servers to connect I don't think they should be allowed to dictate your client. That's akin to saying, "'Lolita' must be read by 25 Watt GE lightbulbs." Always bad, and something we worry about when such a large player in the market says it.)
Wouldn't a standard *something* be nice? I always thought we had it with IRC, but them IM became a reality.. *sigh*
I thought it was talk... I made the transition to ytalk, but IRC and then IM never really appealed to me. Too much noise. But there really are a couple standard *somethings* e-mail and POTS. Well I have VoIP that bridges to the POTS network somewhere close to the person I'm calling, but the interaction model is the same.
My ping times to www.mit.edu (my personal benchmark, as its on the next POP over and always up) are normally 25ms from home, they grew slowly from about 30 ms Monday morning to as high as 2600 ms yesterday with 2/3 packet drop. But today and especially in the last few hours it's fallen back to about 29 ms with 1/3 packet drop.
;)
There are still occasional storms, I guess as a new host gets infected nearby. But things are good compared to the last two days when I couldn't even listen to internet radio and plain old web browsing and e-mail were slow...
BTW I haven't seen any of the e-mails myself do to our spam filter but I have gotten some returned e-mail the virus sent and a non-tech friend who got this one and another friend (who's very non-tech) got last weeks virus. I usually don't personally know the people who get these things, it has been a good week for discussing an OS upgrade to Linux with non-techies
If the new "windows" is different and their new Wal-Mart computer comes with the new "windows", then developers will have to choose between developing for a nice platform
Well if Longhorn decides to keep the Mandrake L&F they won't look so different after all....
I can't be the only one that this looks a lot like Mandrake 9.0 too.
I guess the MS Look and Feel people visited the testing lab and found it too their liking.
We can finally compete with the MacHeads. Look Redmond is copying our look and feel now, look at that Mandra..err Longhorn background, try than new and improved CLI. Remind you of anything?
hehe
How else are you going to get your Windows patches and virus updates?
No, you do not patch safety critical machines in situ.
You don't put them on an unsecured network!
You can get the data out of them with a serial cable with the RX pin disconnected.
And you don't run Windows on them in the first place.
I wouldn't even run Linux/*BSD, this is the type of thing you buy a Sun for.
You can visualize the data outside with anything you like, but the technicians monitoring the safety of the reactor shouldn't see any safety data that depends on machines that can read any data from the outside. It's not so hard to give them two monitors on two computers one secured and one not. You make sure there is no CDROM/floopy or other way to get data onto the safety monitoring system other than a technician consciously entering it by hand. If the engineer at the business office wants something tuned she can call the tech up or send some data and instructions to the unsecured machine. This way you may lose a couple % efficiency when the network goes down or a virus spreads but there are enough techs to monitor the system and keep it running safely.
When you have patches for UI enhancements and OS/patch upgrades you image a new machine and run it in parallel on a third monitor until you feel it's safe to remove the old machine and use it for the next upgrade. You do not place the new machine on a network with the old one, if it turns out to be infected you don't want to contaminate the running systen. In addition you keep enough techs on site to read and interpret the analog system when the digital one fails. They can be sleeping or doing some other task but you shouldn't have to beep them and hope they show up on time.
But the blame lies with presidents Clinton and Bush for allowing the NRC regulation to become so lax that they allow two way data connections to safety monitoring equipment when there is no concievable need for two way data other than a few thousand dollar cost savings per year on a multibillion dollar revenue stream. (You can do all the reactor tuning to squeeze a few million extra out with one way data, as that's all the engineers use anyway...)
When travelling through a medium, the photons run into various atoms and kick them up into a higher, unstable energy level. The light is then re-emitted in a fairly random direction after a very short duration. This gives us the _apparent_ slowing of light.
Nope. Think about it for a second. If this were the case how many colors would you see in light passing through a window? one? two? ten? certainly you would never see white sunlight.. and well if it were absorbed and reabsorbed a great deal and re-emitted in a _random_direction_ would you ever see _through_ a window?
If specialization is as important as they state this only indicates that sewn cotton clothes with seams originated in the last 200,000 years. It doesn't tell us when Lama/Wool sweaters were first worn or when furs were first worn or even when we started wrapping ourselves in decorative blankets...
It seems like all of those would serve the same sexual and political purposes as tailored slacks.
"Dude, she's wrapped in a purple blanket! Choice!" -- da Caveman speaks...
"i c u'r wearing a lion skin, let's make babies" -- da Cavewomyn speaks...
I haven't seen this virus in my mailbox, but my ping time went way up and bandwidth way down at home. I guess there are some Windows users sharing my ISP with me. It didn't happen with last weeks virus though. Is this one especially prolific at e-mailing?
Even vaccines are voluntary things that have risks...
Some vaccines use just virus parts that are not infectious and with them you are correct in stating they are completely voluntary. But some vaccines use live virus. This has come up in the debate over Smallpox vaccination. The vaccination is actually a live "Vaccinia" virus which can kill and the vaccinated folks are infectious. I know some folks in the military that were told not to have intimate contact with their SO while on leave because of live virus vaccinations... Worse people who are most vulnerable, like those with excema, often don't even know they should keep their distance from those recently vaccinated.
But we accept vaccines as a society knowing they will kill some because without the vaccines many more would die, and those most vulnerable to the vaccine would usually be the first to die anyway if the more dangerous virus the vaccine prevents were not stopped when it reached the vaccinated people that surround them. If we can vaccinate most people and keep the vulnerable safe from the vaccine then we protect them in the long run since they will have a smaller chance of getting either the vaccine virus or scarier virus in an uncontrolled outbreak.
Even though he would have far too little work to do most of the time you still want him around in case something goes wrong, so hiring a part time Linux admin wouldn't solve the problem. In a small organization Linux might even be more expensive than windows as the Linux admin may require higher salery.
Why not adopt the old New York model of outsourcing to gain economies of scale for small companies? There is garment district and financial district and were electrical and other districts in large part because the businesses used similar services and these could be outsourced if the businesses were in close proximity. If two or more Linux using businesses were located nearby they could share a Linux admin. This might be even simpler as these could be non-competing businesses so we wouldn't need the same strict ethical codes that developed when competing businesses shared the same contractors for their outsourced needs. There are still many businesses in cities, especially some of the 3rd sector (information processing) businesses that have the most use for PCs.
From what I've seen on TV coverage, they showed the source of the black smoke. Looked to me like a refinery or something with the safety flare-off stacks burning. I live in the heart of petrochemical alley down along the southern Mississippi River, and believe me, whenever there is a widespread power failure, they all do the same thing.
I live a few hundred feet from those smoke stacks. It is not a petrochemical plant. There are none in Manhattan for obvious reasons. It's a very old co-generation plant that supplies steam to midtown and downtown Manhattan and electricity to the Lower East Side. There was an explosion and fire at that plant last year, I guess caused by the construction (they are upgrading it), the same stack was affected. I can understand why people thought there was a fire, when I got there (I was at a Cafe around the corner when the brownout began) there was a thick cloud of smoke and fire engines rushing to the scene along with a cop keeping non-residents from entering the area. By the time I got to my apartment a few minutes later there there was a total blackout. The plant is near the East River for cooling purposes. When the brownout started we just thought it was a blown transformer as there was already another four engine fire in the neighborhood, but then the internet connection went down and we started to think it was something bigger.