As a cable subscriber, I never really consider picking up signals in the air theft of service. If a company is willing to send the signal everywhere, and I go through the trouble of decrypting it, then why can't I go read it? I can't say I don't want DirecTV signals sent to me. DirecTV is sending them no matter if I like it or not. With cable I don't have to have the signal sent if I don't like it. I could go rip the cable out of our yard and cut it off at the box.
Would I be a pirate if I bought a DirecTV dish and reciever and then never used it? Maybe because the sale means they need to see another subscriber added to the quarterly report? Is it theft because they sell the equipment at a loss? If so, what about hacking all the other set top boxes and not getting their service? What if I built a receiver without their box, would that be OK?
Some people are saying it's worse to pickup DirecTV then it is to hack into somebodys computer. I don't think so. Picking up a signal from a satellite would be more like picking up packets on the internet. Listening to DirecTV is more like packet sniffing. Soon that will probably be illegal as well.
Irregardless, what DirecTV did sounds like a cool hack. It even has rumors like "98% of the hacked cards were destroyed..." I just picture all these recievers suddenly smoking all at the same time. Sort of like "Lawnmower Man" ringing all the phones in the world at the same time.
"However in the 20th century, certain monopolies focused on providing the best product and price to their customers. Microsoft did just that, and judging from their economic success, they accomplished this extremely well."
So because they are succesful, they must be putting out the best product at the best price? By this logic, why was Standard Oil, and AT&T broken up? MS doesn't have the best price. MacOS, Be, *BSD, and Linux all cost less. Which one is better is a another topic...but I don't like rebooting, so MS is the worse choice IMO. YMMV.
It's easy for Mac people to know where to turn it off at, but I remember trying to get the thing to go away as well when I first used a Mac. I still have problems figuring out what extensions I need, etc. just because the Mac paradigms are so different than other OSes.
I can understand why people who only use Macs feel like they are in an alien environment when they use Windows.
I've installed PHP on Windows NT, IIS 4.0 and Linux. It's easy on both. It is harder than ASP, because you do have to download it and copy a file. I think most web admins can handle the task.
Also, DB portability thing gets messed up right away. Try inserting a date/time field into any DB, then take that same syntax and use it in Oracle. What?!? Doesn't work?! Oh that's right Oracle can't deal with raw dates, you need to use a TO_DATE (or something) function. Of course, no other DB uses that, so you now have DB specific code with a common API.
I'm suprised by the developer cost/learning score they gave to PHP. I always thought PHP was very easy to learn, even easier than ASP. PHP always takes less code than ASP in my experience. You don't end up with the "Response.Write" when all you mean is "print". Don't get me started about "MoveNext". Arg!
On the other hand, I do think PHP needs a more consistent DB API. (I think they are working on it.) But ASPs is only consistant because there is only really one direct way, ODBC. If you only used ODBC on PHP all your code would be more portable among DBs. But it's much more fun to use FreeTDS to hit a MS SQL server with a Linux/Apache/PHP server than an expensive ODBC driver.
I've also found that all of our contractors that we have hired that know ASP learn PHP very quickly. They all have the same comments about the PHP code being much smaller and easier to read. VBScript that is used in most ASP pages just doesn't quite fit the web as well as PHP.
And another thing. ColdFusion is the cheap way to start a web project? I guess that fits if you rate PHP hard to learn and expensive to develop, but $5000 is a hard price to take up against free for almost anything else. Sounds like Dilbert logic to me. The most expensive product will obviously make our programmers more productive.
VMS also lets you set how many versions you want. You can have none, 10 or whatever. I used to use this when I used RS/1 on VMS. All my critical tables with source code had a 100 versions. If I ever wanted to go back you could just rename the old versions to a newer version. You also had to use weird looking commands like DEL FILE.*;* to delete all the files.
Windows has a program called GoBack that lets you set aside a percentage of your drive and you can recover any files, or the whole system from a previous time. So you could install a bad video driver that wrecks Windows, and not have to re-install. Just tell GoBack to revert to yesterday or something and you have your system back to that time. I think WinnyME has a system like GoBack, but more limited.
Fort Apocalypse rocked! I got the game right after I got the C64 programmers guide. My first C64 game (The only one I paided for in those days.), and it was way cool. I also liked jumpman, and all the other stuff Mike J. Henry cracked.
I predict there will never be a need to crack SDMI. It would be almost like cracking DivX. Nobody will buy it. (Well, hardly anyone.) The industry would still need to make CDs for a long time before any new equipment is out in enough force to publish only a SDMI version of an album.
By that time I think that all the MP3 players will be way to mainstream to forget about. They almost are now.
Isn't AOL making their IM software available on Linux? If so, their probably just doing it to have AOL only clients whenever (somewhat nicely) possible. They were only bugging the MS clients before, because they could just use AOLs own client. I assume the AOL client has ads, or something. So now, they want the Linux people to see the ads?
Isn't an EverQuest server being illegal to use with official EQ clients, like MS saying that it's illegal to use Windows to connect to a Samba server? Especially if it emulate NT domains?
From the book "Switched, Fast, and Gigabit Ethernet":
"What made ethernet the ultimate victor was not technical superiority or speed but Metcalfe's vision to turn Ethernet into an industry standard and not keep it a vendor-specific proprietary technology."
That's why I always wonder what's up with Bob. From what I read, Bob got Xerox (Where he worked when it was invented.) to turn over the patents to the IEEE to make sure ethernet would be open. So apparently they gave up the IP for free. It's just seems like he would have more of an open mind...
It always makes me wonder what Bob's smoking when he writes about Open Source (or "Open Sores" as he sometimes puts it).
Isn't openness one reason ethernet is so successful? Most competing technologies have lost. We used to have ATM and FDDI in our LAN at work, and since last year (actually ~18 months) we have had a pure ethernet LAN. Switching out 622 Mbps ATM and 100 Mbps FDDI for 1 Gbps ethernet, to connect up the buildings. If I remember correctly when ethernet was first released, it was just an open spec. Then 3Com (which he helped start) made up some hardware to sell, built to that spec. Then when everybody else made there hardware, it all worked together.
I know ethernet is software vs. hardware, so maybe I'm just seeing it wrong.
They had a download of 9.2 for an upgrade, but apparently you had to have 9.0 installed before it would run. (I stopped messing with the machine right before this, so I can't recall exactly. It was a co-workers machine.) So, yes, v9.2 should have no problems. But then again, neither did VNC (plus it's open source). The video worked fine, but it was whenever we tried to log in, it would crash. I can't remember the error now, but you couldn't even log in locally.
It bugged me that I couldn't revive the machine from a command prompt. Maybe not enough Win2000 knowledge? Probably. But the "normal" route of Windows software install, of run setup.exe, and then if it screws up uninstall it is what we couldn't do. In Linux, or Win9x, I can boot up with a floppy and get back to a working system. I know some companies out there make some boot disks that read/write to NTFS, but I don't know about NTFS5.
So, anyways, it's not like I was logging in as root and running "rm / -rf". It was a normal install that I had done dozens of times in NT4. It wasn't a production machine, so we tried to revive it only to learn what had happened. We had only installed Win2000 a few hours earlier. It did make me nervous about installing more software on it though. Was is Win2000's fault, or Symantecs? Probably both. My main gripe was that ever since NT, it's very difficult to restore a machine that's gone haywire. I've had to do things like put the HD from a messed up machine in a good one, just to restore files. (That could have fit on a floppy.)
How do Linux and Win2000 compare? Win2000 finally has a command prompt only mode(from the HD), that Linux has always had(Floppy of from the HD).
Win2000 finally adds a command prompt only mode. It's more like the Win95 "safe mode", but it's better than nothing.
Right after Win2000 came out we were moving out stuff from an NT4 workstation to a Win2000 Professional machine. We made a huge mistake by installing PC Anywhere on it (what dummies!). This brought the whole machine down (The auto fixing DLLs didn't help or anything). We ended up using the command prompt to try to get it uninstalled, but it woudln't go away. I had to laugh that installing an application can actually destroy a Win2000 install. What a joke. That must be one of those 63K bugs or something. We ended up reformating and using VNC instead.
The moral of the story is that Win2000 has a command prompt only mode. I don't think it's very useful, but YMMV.
What if you have a web site that has a CGI script that e-mails a list of links (in plain text) to the user. When the user gets it in their e-mail program, most of them will make URLs live. Does that count as being illegal? If it is, is it the CGI script, the mail program (for making them live), or the user for clicking on the "E-mail some links" button?
NT may run faster benchmarks than Linux/FreeBSD/whatever, but as far as being stable under load, I think it's not.
All the NT people I've talked to that run enterprise DBs, printing, DNS, domain logins, etc. have the same problem. If you put too many services on one NT server, it reliably crashes under heavy load. The only way I've seen to fix it, is to break up the Windows services onto more servers. When I load down a Linux machine, it slows until it's not so loaded. It never justdies like NT. (All the NT people I've talked to is 5 sysadmins and 4 DBAs, not many, but they found out the same way I did, real world apps) I don't know about 2000 server, I have only been using 2000 workstation recently. All my servers are still running NT4, or Linux of course.
So I'm thinking that NT being better under load is MS FUD. Maybe better like a Pentium 1133, looks good if it runs.
Actually, since I started using "Open Source" or "Free Software" is the first time I've even fully complied with the licensing of the software. If anything, I am now not a software pirate. I don't have multiple copies of DOS or Windows running at home when I only have one license. Instead I have multiple copies of Linux and FreeBSD, and full permission to run it and give it to my friends.
Wait, that sucks. I feel guilty. I'm starting a web site to take donations just like paylars.com. I want make sure that I don't destroy the current music industry fat cats and I send them money for all the artists that let me buy music directly from them without the RIAA middlemen.
I'm suprised that they aren't scared for their lives. Don't they know that Manson^H^H^H^H^H^H Linus and his cult following will kill Hollywood people that stand in the way of world domination, fast?
Aren't you worried about people printing through the AppleTalk shares (DSL and Cable modem users) and using up all your paper and ink? That stuff's expensive. If you run out and can't print, isn't that a DOS?
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As a cable subscriber, I never really consider picking up signals in the air theft of service. If a company is willing to send the signal everywhere, and I go through the trouble of decrypting it, then why can't I go read it? I can't say I don't want DirecTV signals sent to me. DirecTV is sending them no matter if I like it or not. With cable I don't have to have the signal sent if I don't like it. I could go rip the cable out of our yard and cut it off at the box.
Would I be a pirate if I bought a DirecTV dish and reciever and then never used it? Maybe because the sale means they need to see another subscriber added to the quarterly report? Is it theft because they sell the equipment at a loss? If so, what about hacking all the other set top boxes and not getting their service? What if I built a receiver without their box, would that be OK?
Some people are saying it's worse to pickup DirecTV then it is to hack into somebodys computer. I don't think so. Picking up a signal from a satellite would be more like picking up packets on the internet. Listening to DirecTV is more like packet sniffing. Soon that will probably be illegal as well.
Irregardless, what DirecTV did sounds like a cool hack. It even has rumors like "98% of the hacked cards were destroyed..." I just picture all these recievers suddenly smoking all at the same time. Sort of like "Lawnmower Man" ringing all the phones in the world at the same time.
I wonder about the whole article...
"However in the 20th century, certain monopolies focused on providing the best product and price to their customers. Microsoft did just that, and judging from their economic success, they accomplished this extremely well."
So because they are succesful, they must be putting out the best product at the best price? By this logic, why was Standard Oil, and AT&T broken up? MS doesn't have the best price. MacOS, Be, *BSD, and Linux all cost less. Which one is better is a another topic...but I don't like rebooting, so MS is the worse choice IMO. YMMV.
It's easy for Mac people to know where to turn it off at, but I remember trying to get the thing to go away as well when I first used a Mac. I still have problems figuring out what extensions I need, etc. just because the Mac paradigms are so different than other OSes.
I can understand why people who only use Macs feel like they are in an alien environment when they use Windows.
I've installed PHP on Windows NT, IIS 4.0 and Linux. It's easy on both. It is harder than ASP, because you do have to download it and copy a file. I think most web admins can handle the task.
Also, DB portability thing gets messed up right away. Try inserting a date/time field into any DB, then take that same syntax and use it in Oracle. What?!? Doesn't work?! Oh that's right Oracle can't deal with raw dates, you need to use a TO_DATE (or something) function. Of course, no other DB uses that, so you now have DB specific code with a common API.
I'm suprised by the developer cost/learning score they gave to PHP. I always thought PHP was very easy to learn, even easier than ASP. PHP always takes less code than ASP in my experience. You don't end up with the "Response.Write" when all you mean is "print". Don't get me started about "MoveNext". Arg!
On the other hand, I do think PHP needs a more consistent DB API. (I think they are working on it.) But ASPs is only consistant because there is only really one direct way, ODBC. If you only used ODBC on PHP all your code would be more portable among DBs. But it's much more fun to use FreeTDS to hit a MS SQL server with a Linux/Apache/PHP server than an expensive ODBC driver.
I've also found that all of our contractors that we have hired that know ASP learn PHP very quickly. They all have the same comments about the PHP code being much smaller and easier to read. VBScript that is used in most ASP pages just doesn't quite fit the web as well as PHP.
And another thing. ColdFusion is the cheap way to start a web project? I guess that fits if you rate PHP hard to learn and expensive to develop, but $5000 is a hard price to take up against free for almost anything else. Sounds like Dilbert logic to me. The most expensive product will obviously make our programmers more productive.
VMS also lets you set how many versions you want. You can have none, 10 or whatever. I used to use this when I used RS/1 on VMS. All my critical tables with source code had a 100 versions. If I ever wanted to go back you could just rename the old versions to a newer version. You also had to use weird looking commands like DEL FILE.*;* to delete all the files.
Windows has a program called GoBack that lets you set aside a percentage of your drive and you can recover any files, or the whole system from a previous time. So you could install a bad video driver that wrecks Windows, and not have to re-install. Just tell GoBack to revert to yesterday or something and you have your system back to that time. I think WinnyME has a system like GoBack, but more limited.
Fort Apocalypse rocked! I got the game right after I got the C64 programmers guide. My first C64 game (The only one I paided for in those days.), and it was way cool. I also liked jumpman, and all the other stuff Mike J. Henry cracked.
If anyone is giving away any SGI hardware, just talk to me first. I can take it off your hands, no problem. That goes for Crays as well.
Wait, what? Now I'm confused.
I predict there will never be a need to crack SDMI. It would be almost like cracking DivX. Nobody will buy it. (Well, hardly anyone.) The industry would still need to make CDs for a long time before any new equipment is out in enough force to publish only a SDMI version of an album.
By that time I think that all the MP3 players will be way to mainstream to forget about. They almost are now.
I think even thinking it up after the patent (and you never even heard of it) still falls under the patent.
Paper tape. Hmm. A better encrytion method than the Cue Cat's.
Looks like Trolltech is showing two prices for Qt!
/sharecontrib/
This one costs $1550: http://www.trolltech.com/pr oducts/purchase/pricing.html
and this one's free: http://www.trolltech.com/developer
Those bastards! I bet RMS is really pissed now!
Isn't AOL making their IM software available on Linux? If so, their probably just doing it to have AOL only clients whenever (somewhat nicely) possible. They were only bugging the MS clients before, because they could just use AOLs own client. I assume the AOL client has ads, or something. So now, they want the Linux people to see the ads?
Isn't an EverQuest server being illegal to use with official EQ clients, like MS saying that it's illegal to use Windows to connect to a Samba server? Especially if it emulate NT domains?
From the book "Switched, Fast, and Gigabit Ethernet":
"What made ethernet the ultimate victor was not technical superiority or speed but Metcalfe's vision to turn Ethernet into an industry standard and not keep it a vendor-specific proprietary technology."
That's why I always wonder what's up with Bob. From what I read, Bob got Xerox (Where he worked when it was invented.) to turn over the patents to the IEEE to make sure ethernet would be open. So apparently they gave up the IP for free. It's just seems like he would have more of an open mind...
It always makes me wonder what Bob's smoking when he writes about Open Source (or "Open Sores" as he sometimes puts it).
Isn't openness one reason ethernet is so successful? Most competing technologies have lost. We used to have ATM and FDDI in our LAN at work, and since last year (actually ~18 months) we have had a pure ethernet LAN. Switching out 622 Mbps ATM and 100 Mbps FDDI for 1 Gbps ethernet, to connect up the buildings. If I remember correctly when ethernet was first released, it was just an open spec. Then 3Com (which he helped start) made up some hardware to sell, built to that spec. Then when everybody else made there hardware, it all worked together.
I know ethernet is software vs. hardware, so maybe I'm just seeing it wrong.
They had a download of 9.2 for an upgrade, but apparently you had to have 9.0 installed before it would run. (I stopped messing with the machine right before this, so I can't recall exactly. It was a co-workers machine.) So, yes, v9.2 should have no problems. But then again, neither did VNC (plus it's open source). The video worked fine, but it was whenever we tried to log in, it would crash. I can't remember the error now, but you couldn't even log in locally.
It bugged me that I couldn't revive the machine from a command prompt. Maybe not enough Win2000 knowledge? Probably. But the "normal" route of Windows software install, of run setup.exe, and then if it screws up uninstall it is what we couldn't do. In Linux, or Win9x, I can boot up with a floppy and get back to a working system. I know some companies out there make some boot disks that read/write to NTFS, but I don't know about NTFS5.
So, anyways, it's not like I was logging in as root and running "rm / -rf". It was a normal install that I had done dozens of times in NT4. It wasn't a production machine, so we tried to revive it only to learn what had happened. We had only installed Win2000 a few hours earlier. It did make me nervous about installing more software on it though. Was is Win2000's fault, or Symantecs? Probably both. My main gripe was that ever since NT, it's very difficult to restore a machine that's gone haywire. I've had to do things like put the HD from a messed up machine in a good one, just to restore files. (That could have fit on a floppy.)
How do Linux and Win2000 compare? Win2000 finally has a command prompt only mode(from the HD), that Linux has always had(Floppy of from the HD).
Jeez. Tough crowd.
Win2000 finally adds a command prompt only mode. It's more like the Win95 "safe mode", but it's better than nothing.
Right after Win2000 came out we were moving out stuff from an NT4 workstation to a Win2000 Professional machine. We made a huge mistake by installing PC Anywhere on it (what dummies!). This brought the whole machine down (The auto fixing DLLs didn't help or anything). We ended up using the command prompt to try to get it uninstalled, but it woudln't go away. I had to laugh that installing an application can actually destroy a Win2000 install. What a joke. That must be one of those 63K bugs or something. We ended up reformating and using VNC instead.
The moral of the story is that Win2000 has a command prompt only mode. I don't think it's very useful, but YMMV.
What if you have a web site that has a CGI script that e-mails a list of links (in plain text) to the user. When the user gets it in their e-mail program, most of them will make URLs live. Does that count as being illegal? If it is, is it the CGI script, the mail program (for making them live), or the user for clicking on the "E-mail some links" button?
Since Star Wars is losing it's old charm, maybe they can bring back the Amiga to render the new R2D2.
NT may run faster benchmarks than Linux/FreeBSD/whatever, but as far as being stable under load, I think it's not.
All the NT people I've talked to that run enterprise DBs, printing, DNS, domain logins, etc. have the same problem. If you put too many services on one NT server, it reliably crashes under heavy load. The only way I've seen to fix it, is to break up the Windows services onto more servers. When I load down a Linux machine, it slows until it's not so loaded. It never justdies like NT. (All the NT people I've talked to is 5 sysadmins and 4 DBAs, not many, but they found out the same way I did, real world apps) I don't know about 2000 server, I have only been using 2000 workstation recently. All my servers are still running NT4, or Linux of course.
So I'm thinking that NT being better under load is MS FUD. Maybe better like a Pentium 1133, looks good if it runs.
Actually, since I started using "Open Source" or "Free Software" is the first time I've even fully complied with the licensing of the software. If anything, I am now not a software pirate. I don't have multiple copies of DOS or Windows running at home when I only have one license. Instead I have multiple copies of Linux and FreeBSD, and full permission to run it and give it to my friends.
Wait, that sucks. I feel guilty. I'm starting a web site to take donations just like paylars.com. I want make sure that I don't destroy the current music industry fat cats and I send them money for all the artists that let me buy music directly from them without the RIAA middlemen.
I'm suprised that they aren't scared for their lives. Don't they know that Manson^H^H^H^H^H^H Linus and his cult following will kill Hollywood people that stand in the way of world domination, fast?
Aren't you worried about people printing through the AppleTalk shares (DSL and Cable modem users) and using up all your paper and ink? That stuff's expensive. If you run out and can't print, isn't that a DOS?