I hope the Mandrake employees read this Slashdot news an don't float the company any personal loans or hang on too long without pay like Loki employees did.
I don't know, it seems odd to me for a publicly traded company to post a notice like that asking for financial support in the form of donations. That seems like it would panic the shareholders and hurt them even more in the long run. The sensible thing would be to lay off those emplyees not contributing to the core of Mandrake's business and save some money in those non revenue generating areas.
Its because buffer overflows are a hot topic now. Microsoft made them famous due to the exploits. Now everyone is quick to point them out and post them on their websites. I'd almost bet buffer overflow news in your favorite OS would get just as many hits as your favorite teen popstar naked. God knows I've done more searches this year for Red Hat and Windows bug errata than I have for Britney Spears' boobs.
As for the quality of free and open source software, well, I've never understood why people think it is any better than commercial software. I've been a professional programmer for 10 years and I've seen whack commercial code, whack open source code, and I'm pretty sure I've written some whack code myself. The license doesn't have much to do with it except for having NDA's keeping me from discussing some commercial code. Having open source visible on the bug watch list doesn't hurt much because fixes are usually available. Its when people don't pay attention to the fixes that the problem gets out of hand. Remember, the fix to the exploit that Code Red used was out a few weeks before Code Red. Now if we see this zlib bug take down a big chunk of the Linux communitiy in a few weeks then it will be a bad thing because we didn't pay attention.
It looks like the majority of/.ers are siding with Verio on this one. I read Gilmore's web site and he has some interesting views on a lot of things. His opinons on SMTP blacklisting and list operators control over ISP's is a very good read. I think Gilmore makes some valid points and raises some valid concerns. For example, The current list of anti-spam restrictions is not written down anywhere that I could find; you only find out when a blacklist notice appears in your inbox, telling you that you are going to be thrown off the Internet unless you immediately change. Next week they could demand that any ISP which is also a phone company must cut off phone service to alleged spammers; the following month demand that every ISP turn over credit card and/or customer address information on demand. (Some people claim that thir "fee" for reading a spam is $50 or $500; I'm sure they would like to immediately charge somebody's credit card for it,and let the details and legalities sort themselves out later).
One thing that is being missed is he was once the co-founder of this ISP which over time and various mergers is now Verio. When he founded his ISP their policy was to give the subscribers the ability to do what they wanted. My ISP has changed hands several times in the last three years. With each change of hands there is a new TOS agreement. What is acceptable use today might not be acceptable use by the owners of tomorrow. As it stands my service is getting cut down one port at a time. Rather than educate its customers about viruses and exploits my ISP would rather just block the ports that are exploited. In their mind as long as they provide a portal web site to thier subscribers they are providing service.
I'm glad there are people like Gilmore who have the resources to challenge ISP's. Who else is there who stand up for the rights of the customers? Surely its not our government who passes laws like the DMCA which strips away our privacy when it comes to the internet. Today Gilmore's battle is with SMTP relays and blacklist operators. Tomorrow it might very well be the RIAA and ISP's blocking ports of known P2P clients.
Call the guy crazy if you want but I think his fight is a good one. Its about freedom, something which is slowly dying on the internet.
Casting spells to install applications sounds pretty cool. While I have found tools like Red Hat's Up2Date and Ximian's Red Carpet very nice there's still some dependancy problems encountered when you try to go with the latest and greatest versions of Gnome and other libraries. From the review it sounded like Sorcerer downloads and compiles the packages you are installing. Would it pull dependencies too?
I'll have to check this distro out. I can see it now.
>Turn on PC Your monitor flashes. You are greeted with the message "Loading Windows 2000..." >Insert Sorcerer boot floppy There is an audible click as the floppy settles in the drive. >Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete A menu is presented giving you several options [more] >Click Shutdown Your computer restarts. Your floppy drive begins to whirr and churn with excitement. You feel a sense of power rush through you. A message slowly begins to emerge on your screen. >read message Hail and well met sysadmin. Sorcerer Linux sees you have Windows currently installed on this PC. What is thy choice friend? >cast magic missile at/dev/hda1 Formatting... Please wait.
From what I gather is your company is skating around buying licenses for a commercial development tool and using a student version or other version that is restrictive. You are then mangling the tool's generated code so it can't be identified and then compiling the mangled source with GNU tools.
Your company is still benefitting from the commercial tool and not paying the authors what is due them. The mangling doesn't change the fact that the tool was used and benefit was obtained in the first place. But the only reason you are mangling is to hide the generated code which you feel you need to distribute with the GPL code you are also using in the project. I think you should fire your lawyer.
While I think it would be wrong to hold the entertainment industry financially responsible for such things as Columbine, I do believe they should feel somewhat responsible when something like this occurs. There have always been weak minded people who are easily influenced by others. Since the early days of radio and television kids have acted out what they have seen and heard. The problem however is today's kids want the 9mm assult pistol just like Phat Puffed G-Doopy-Dawg has in latest new video. Their desire is no different than their grandparents' desire for the Secret Society Decoder Ring of the 1950's. The result however is a little more drastic. Rather than thwarting the invasion of the mole men you end up with several dead classmates. Perhaps a little bit of responsibility needs to be taken sometimes.
When you've got only one internal drive, it's always a good idea to make two partitions. When one fails for whatever reason, you can still boot from the other (always keep a backup System handy!).
If your drive fails you're still screwed. I knew a guy who partitioned a drive into two like partitions and then mirrored them. I suppose it could have been worse. He could have done three partitions and used one as a hot backup.;)
With all the metal removed and a plexiglass frame replacing it the FCC could probably tell its not a real Indigo from the EMF radiation.
I think though that I might be inspired to do a case mod now using a Sun 411 enclosure. Given the past two days bigger cases seem to be better, perhaps I can mount my Handspring inside it.
It makes sense to me but I would have thought someone by now someone would have challenged a EULA in the past.
Other multiplayer games I am familiar with have banned people for EULA violations. Sony is really good at doing it for Everquest. They will ban people for emulating servers or even something as minor as running a hack that allows you to play EQ in a window so you can do other things with your PC (like play MP3's). While Joe Sixpack can't fight them in a big court surely small claims court would be a viable option for getting your $39.95 back (plus pain and suffering over losing your hard earned gear) since they are taking away your ability to play the game.
A EULA has got to be worth something more to the software publisher than an extra mouse click.
Clearly, one solution is keeping copyright data encrypted until it is eventually displayed. This can be strengthened by ensuring that copyright data that is distributed is encrypted only for the recipient.
And this is how you do it... Implant everyone with a microchip that acts as a private key. It solves a lot of problems. The device can act as a key for unlocking digital content, it can serve as a GUID for a national ID system, and it can fulfill biblical prophesy as being the "mark of the beast". With that last part you could probably even get Bill Gates and Microsoft to develop it.
But seriously, if you could get the media giants to buy into something like this you'd have every Southern Baptist from Alabama to North Carolina marching on Washington DC to where it would be political suicide for a politician to even listen to the special interest groups that want this. That dog just wouldn't hunt.
And I think I may have lived in the South just a little too long.
The reason is the network that's picking this up. I'm not going to subscribe to a general movie channel to watch a sci fi series.
If the show is any good it will probably be syndicated like SG-1 is.
I was a big fan of B5 but missed most of the first season because of our local channel that aired it. They never could find a slot for it that worked and moved it around too much for me to keep up. It wasn't until TNT finally picked it up that I got to see them all. Its possible that experience with B5 could have been the common place in many markets which might have led him to shop it to cable and Showtime showed the most interest. I'd like to hear JMS's take though. But yeah, I'm not going to subscribe to Showtime for one show. I already do that with HBO.
As I understand it, people aren't forging false CD KEYs and inappropriately using battle.net server's resources -- doing so would make the case more plausible. Yet in this case, it would an individual service hijacking player who should be the focus of legal attention.
The problem for Blizzard is (from what I understood from the original article) with bnetd Blizzard has no way of expiring their betas. Currently, the way I understand it, when the WC3 beta is over, BattleNet will stop letting the beta keys on the servers thus forcing the beta testers (and those who got a copy from a friend) to buy WC3 to keep playing. With bnetd in place these people can continue to play the game for free and Blizzard loses revenue.
Maybe Blizzard should take this as a wakeup call and fix the problems with BattleNet that have caused people to write their own servers. Or possibly in future games provide players with the ability to host their own servers.
Is every one here really thinking that all those funny EULA statements are really legal..... No... they are not legal until a judge says they are.
I always thought they were legal. What is your basis for the statement? Is it like saying you're innocent until proven guilty? For example I can commit a crime but in actuality I am innocent of the crime until found guilty by a jury of my peers?
I'm not trying to troll here. I just want to know where you got this from. If this is true then I'm going to set up a booth at the flea market and sell enterprise software at half price. (like that will be a big seller)
Earlier in the EULA, Windows Media Player is described as an"OS Component". So, it looks like any use of Windows Media Player on a non-Windows operating system is probably not permitted. If it were, you can be sure MS would fix that in the next version of the EULA.
There could be ways around it. For instance, Linus could implement an IUnknown interface in the kernel and say he is "working on" a kernel that runs under COM in Windows. That would probably make the crossover plugin legal. Of course no one really needs to complete the IUnknown interface. It could be a perpetual work in progress to satisfy the requirement that Linux is part of Windows.
The leading distros are improving in leaps and bounds for making Linux easy to install. There's still a few things that I think are lacking after the install but we are starting to see improvements in this area thanks to Ximian's Red Carpet and Red Hat's Up2Date.
I'd personally like to see a facility to make it easy to install something you might have missed during the original install. For example, Joe user installs Linux and when its all over and done with he wishes he could connect to a file share on his Windows box. He remembers seeing something about Windows connectivity during his install but doesn't know how to get back to that dialog or what the package was even called. His choice is to either reinstall or go to a newsgroup and ask for help, which leads me to my main point.
I think the linux community needs to lighten up when it comes to "newbies". Linux users should think of themselves as evangelists and when a new user asks a question not be so quick to flame them for not reading the HOWTO before coming to them with such a trivial question. If you go to your local church and ask an elder or a member of the clergy a question about somthing that has you confused do they jump up your ass for not reading the bible first for the answers? No, they are happy to see that you are interested and they try hard to help you. Why can't we be the same when someone approaches us with a question about Linux, no matter how trivial it may be? I'm not saying we should be there to answer all their questions, but in the process of answering their first questions we might want to show them where to find the answers so the next time they can help themselves. We just need to be more tactful when educating new users.
The distributions are doing a good job, the developers are doing a good job, now it is time for the users to do a good job. If Linux is to succeed on the desktop it is up to the users to give it a good image.
Re:GNOME vs KDE for the newbie
on
GNOME 2.0 Beta
·
· Score: 2
Nautilus seems to get slower with each release. I use gmc now as my file/desktop manager and I have been a much happier person.
I really don't understand why Nautilus needs to have so many features, ie web browsing and themes. On my installation, Red Hat 7.1, Ximian Gnome 1.4, Gnome starts, sets my background, then Nautilus starts and sets my background. I click on the slashdot link on my desktop, Nautilus starts and loads the site in its file pane and then in the left pane asks if I want to open it with Mozilla, Opera, or Galeon. Now Galeon is associated as my html default viewer. In my opinion Galeon should load the website and Nautilus should not even execute at all. Perhaps this is all resolved in 2.0. Other than Nautilus, I am very impressed with Gnome.
KDE is nice too. I used both for a while until I decided I liked one better. It's nice having more than one desktop option. What kind of influenced my switch to Gnome was Ximian's Red Carpet. I always had dependancy hell when keeping KDE up to date on Red Hat. Gnome was easy to update using Red Carpet so I eventually removed KDE.
Yeah, you could even make your XBox think the controller is an iMac mouse. As soon as you did it however you'd be carted to jail for violating the DMCA.
Someone already posted a link to a program that allows you to edit USB ID's.
Hey, its Slashdot. Unless you say Linux rules, Windows sucks, and intellectual property rights are for ninnies you're going to be modded down. I don't mind, hell I expect this post to get nailed as flamebait. I don't mind the bad karma, that's what Google cache is for. (A quick way to get +5 informative. LOL)
Oooh! gotta run. KDE just added a new font and subsequently released a new beta. Gotta get it ere the servers clog.
You have clearly not answered the question. What was asked was where there is a copyright violation. Copyright has nothing to do with patents, except that the whole concept is muddled together under the vague idea of intellectual property.
Well perhaps I am just as clueless as the customs agent who stopped the shipment. Forgetting the patent issue (which was pure speculation on my part) is it possible (more speculation on my part) that perhaps the serial cable with its funky connector could have been used in the past as a great copy protection circumvention device ala connecting it to a terminal for remote debugging? This would land it in that category. Now considering this is the case then doesn't every debugging tool allow a person to do the same? With NuMega's SoftIce I can trace a running program and circumvent copy protection. Those of us who are against the DMCA could easily report this to the authorities and watch NuMega developer get tossed into jail. While we're at it we can do the same for anyone who makes or sells PCI video cards. Everyone knows all good PC's use AGP video cards. And everyone knows the only reason for a PCI card is to use a second monitor for cracking copy protection during runtime. More people arrested here. In the investigation the Feds will raid all the companies that have purchased SoftIce and PCI cards. Thousands upon thousands of people will be hauled off to jail. Tech companies will fold. And in the end those who passed the DMCA will be tried as terrorists for writing such a law.
I don't get how this cable is a copyright breach, though
If the cable has a proprietary interface that Sega holds a patent for and this company in Hong Kong is making them without a license then it is clearly a violation.
Maybe it is not proof because Windows 95 is no longer supported and Windows 98 isn't too far behind it. I don't recall my copy of Windows 95 even having IE when I first got it so naturally it can do without it. Since then Microsoft has built everything using COM. By their definitions IE probably can't be removed without causing problems with other software. This doesn't mean they couldn't do it though. I think if given enough time they could find a way to make it happen, they just don't want to and personally I don't see why they should.
Sun bundles their own browser with Solaris and no one seems to give a shit. IBM has their own browser in AIX and had their own browser in OS/2. KDE is heavily rooted with Konqueror and it looks like GNOME is basing their desktop around Nautilus. If everybody else is bundling and co-mingling and it is ok then why isn't it ok for Microsoft? Is it because Netscape was a piece of shit and reloaded the whole page whenever you resized the browser? That's why I dumped Navigator in favor of IE. Now I use Opera, best $39 I ever spent. Microsoft didn't help Netscape that much but neither did Netscape.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope the Mandrake employees read this Slashdot news an don't float the company any personal loans or hang on too long without pay like Loki employees did.
I don't know, it seems odd to me for a publicly traded company to post a notice like that asking for financial support in the form of donations. That seems like it would panic the shareholders and hurt them even more in the long run. The sensible thing would be to lay off those emplyees not contributing to the core of Mandrake's business and save some money in those non revenue generating areas.
Its because buffer overflows are a hot topic now. Microsoft made them famous due to the exploits. Now everyone is quick to point them out and post them on their websites. I'd almost bet buffer overflow news in your favorite OS would get just as many hits as your favorite teen popstar naked. God knows I've done more searches this year for Red Hat and Windows bug errata than I have for Britney Spears' boobs.
As for the quality of free and open source software, well, I've never understood why people think it is any better than commercial software. I've been a professional programmer for 10 years and I've seen whack commercial code, whack open source code, and I'm pretty sure I've written some whack code myself. The license doesn't have much to do with it except for having NDA's keeping me from discussing some commercial code. Having open source visible on the bug watch list doesn't hurt much because fixes are usually available. Its when people don't pay attention to the fixes that the problem gets out of hand. Remember, the fix to the exploit that Code Red used was out a few weeks before Code Red. Now if we see this zlib bug take down a big chunk of the Linux communitiy in a few weeks then it will be a bad thing because we didn't pay attention.
It looks like the majority of /.ers are siding with Verio on this one. I read Gilmore's web site and he has some interesting views on a lot of things. His opinons on SMTP blacklisting and list operators control over ISP's is a very good read. I think Gilmore makes some valid points and raises some valid concerns. For example, The current list of anti-spam restrictions is not written down anywhere that I could find; you only find out when a blacklist notice appears in your inbox, telling you that you are going to be thrown off the Internet unless you immediately change. Next week they could demand that any ISP which is also a phone company must cut off phone service to alleged spammers; the following month demand that every ISP turn over credit card and/or customer address information on demand. (Some people claim that thir "fee" for reading a spam is $50 or $500; I'm sure they would like to immediately charge somebody's credit card for it,and let the details and legalities sort themselves out later).
One thing that is being missed is he was once the co-founder of this ISP which over time and various mergers is now Verio. When he founded his ISP their policy was to give the subscribers the ability to do what they wanted. My ISP has changed hands several times in the last three years. With each change of hands there is a new TOS agreement. What is acceptable use today might not be acceptable use by the owners of tomorrow. As it stands my service is getting cut down one port at a time. Rather than educate its customers about viruses and exploits my ISP would rather just block the ports that are exploited. In their mind as long as they provide a portal web site to thier subscribers they are providing service.
I'm glad there are people like Gilmore who have the resources to challenge ISP's. Who else is there who stand up for the rights of the customers? Surely its not our government who passes laws like the DMCA which strips away our privacy when it comes to the internet. Today Gilmore's battle is with SMTP relays and blacklist operators. Tomorrow it might very well be the RIAA and ISP's blocking ports of known P2P clients.
Call the guy crazy if you want but I think his fight is a good one. Its about freedom, something which is slowly dying on the internet.
Casting spells to install applications sounds pretty cool. While I have found tools like Red Hat's Up2Date and Ximian's Red Carpet very nice there's still some dependancy problems encountered when you try to go with the latest and greatest versions of Gnome and other libraries. From the review it sounded like Sorcerer downloads and compiles the packages you are installing. Would it pull dependencies too?
/dev/hda1
I'll have to check this distro out. I can see it now.
>Turn on PC
Your monitor flashes. You are greeted with the message "Loading Windows 2000..."
>Insert Sorcerer boot floppy
There is an audible click as the floppy settles in the drive.
>Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete
A menu is presented giving you several options [more]
>Click Shutdown
Your computer restarts. Your floppy drive begins to whirr and churn with excitement. You feel a sense of power rush through you. A message slowly begins to emerge on your screen.
>read message
Hail and well met sysadmin. Sorcerer Linux sees you have Windows currently installed on this PC. What is thy choice friend?
>cast magic missile at
Formatting... Please wait.
From what I gather is your company is skating around buying licenses for a commercial development tool and using a student version or other version that is restrictive. You are then mangling the tool's generated code so it can't be identified and then compiling the mangled source with GNU tools.
Your company is still benefitting from the commercial tool and not paying the authors what is due them. The mangling doesn't change the fact that the tool was used and benefit was obtained in the first place. But the only reason you are mangling is to hide the generated code which you feel you need to distribute with the GPL code you are also using in the project. I think you should fire your lawyer.
While I think it would be wrong to hold the entertainment industry financially responsible for such things as Columbine, I do believe they should feel somewhat responsible when something like this occurs. There have always been weak minded people who are easily influenced by others. Since the early days of radio and television kids have acted out what they have seen and heard. The problem however is today's kids want the 9mm assult pistol just like Phat Puffed G-Doopy-Dawg has in latest new video. Their desire is no different than their grandparents' desire for the Secret Society Decoder Ring of the 1950's. The result however is a little more drastic. Rather than thwarting the invasion of the mole men you end up with several dead classmates. Perhaps a little bit of responsibility needs to be taken sometimes.
When you've got only one internal drive, it's always a good idea to make two partitions. When one fails for whatever reason, you can still boot from the other (always keep a backup System handy!).
;)
If your drive fails you're still screwed. I knew a guy who partitioned a drive into two like partitions and then mirrored them. I suppose it could have been worse. He could have done three partitions and used one as a hot backup.
You would never know it's not a real Iris Indigo.
With all the metal removed and a plexiglass frame replacing it the FCC could probably tell its not a real Indigo from the EMF radiation.
I think though that I might be inspired to do a case mod now using a Sun 411 enclosure. Given the past two days bigger cases seem to be better, perhaps I can mount my Handspring inside it.
who is and should be legally responsible for insecure software?
A. The Author/Publisher
B. The User
C. CowboyNeil
It makes sense to me but I would have thought someone by now someone would have challenged a EULA in the past.
Other multiplayer games I am familiar with have banned people for EULA violations. Sony is really good at doing it for Everquest. They will ban people for emulating servers or even something as minor as running a hack that allows you to play EQ in a window so you can do other things with your PC (like play MP3's). While Joe Sixpack can't fight them in a big court surely small claims court would be a viable option for getting your $39.95 back (plus pain and suffering over losing your hard earned gear) since they are taking away your ability to play the game.
A EULA has got to be worth something more to the software publisher than an extra mouse click.
Clearly, one solution is keeping copyright data encrypted until it is eventually displayed. This can be strengthened by ensuring that copyright data that is distributed is encrypted only for the recipient.
And this is how you do it... Implant everyone with a microchip that acts as a private key. It solves a lot of problems. The device can act as a key for unlocking digital content, it can serve as a GUID for a national ID system, and it can fulfill biblical prophesy as being the "mark of the beast". With that last part you could probably even get Bill Gates and Microsoft to develop it.
But seriously, if you could get the media giants to buy into something like this you'd have every Southern Baptist from Alabama to North Carolina marching on Washington DC to where it would be political suicide for a politician to even listen to the special interest groups that want this. That dog just wouldn't hunt.
And I think I may have lived in the South just a little too long.
The reason is the network that's picking this up. I'm not going to subscribe to a general movie channel to watch a sci fi series.
If the show is any good it will probably be syndicated like SG-1 is.
I was a big fan of B5 but missed most of the first season because of our local channel that aired it. They never could find a slot for it that worked and moved it around too much for me to keep up. It wasn't until TNT finally picked it up that I got to see them all. Its possible that experience with B5 could have been the common place in many markets which might have led him to shop it to cable and Showtime showed the most interest. I'd like to hear JMS's take though. But yeah, I'm not going to subscribe to Showtime for one show. I already do that with HBO.
As I understand it, people aren't forging false CD KEYs and inappropriately using battle.net server's resources -- doing so would make the case more plausible. Yet in this case, it would an individual service hijacking player who should be the focus of legal attention.
The problem for Blizzard is (from what I understood from the original article) with bnetd Blizzard has no way of expiring their betas. Currently, the way I understand it, when the WC3 beta is over, BattleNet will stop letting the beta keys on the servers thus forcing the beta testers (and those who got a copy from a friend) to buy WC3 to keep playing. With bnetd in place these people can continue to play the game for free and Blizzard loses revenue.
Maybe Blizzard should take this as a wakeup call and fix the problems with BattleNet that have caused people to write their own servers. Or possibly in future games provide players with the ability to host their own servers.
Is every one here really thinking that all those funny EULA statements are really legal ..... No ... they are not legal until a judge says they are.
I always thought they were legal. What is your basis for the statement? Is it like saying you're innocent until proven guilty? For example I can commit a crime but in actuality I am innocent of the crime until found guilty by a jury of my peers?
I'm not trying to troll here. I just want to know where you got this from. If this is true then I'm going to set up a booth at the flea market and sell enterprise software at half price. (like that will be a big seller)
Earlier in the EULA, Windows Media Player is described as an"OS Component". So, it looks like any use of Windows Media Player on a non-Windows operating system is probably not permitted. If it were, you can be sure MS would fix that in the next version of the EULA.
There could be ways around it. For instance, Linus could implement an IUnknown interface in the kernel and say he is "working on" a kernel that runs under COM in Windows. That would probably make the crossover plugin legal. Of course no one really needs to complete the IUnknown interface. It could be a perpetual work in progress to satisfy the requirement that Linux is part of Windows.
It sounds crazy but what the heck.
The leading distros are improving in leaps and bounds for making Linux easy to install. There's still a few things that I think are lacking after the install but we are starting to see improvements in this area thanks to Ximian's Red Carpet and Red Hat's Up2Date.
I'd personally like to see a facility to make it easy to install something you might have missed during the original install. For example, Joe user installs Linux and when its all over and done with he wishes he could connect to a file share on his Windows box. He remembers seeing something about Windows connectivity during his install but doesn't know how to get back to that dialog or what the package was even called. His choice is to either reinstall or go to a newsgroup and ask for help, which leads me to my main point.
I think the linux community needs to lighten up when it comes to "newbies". Linux users should think of themselves as evangelists and when a new user asks a question not be so quick to flame them for not reading the HOWTO before coming to them with such a trivial question. If you go to your local church and ask an elder or a member of the clergy a question about somthing that has you confused do they jump up your ass for not reading the bible first for the answers? No, they are happy to see that you are interested and they try hard to help you. Why can't we be the same when someone approaches us with a question about Linux, no matter how trivial it may be? I'm not saying we should be there to answer all their questions, but in the process of answering their first questions we might want to show them where to find the answers so the next time they can help themselves. We just need to be more tactful when educating new users.
The distributions are doing a good job, the developers are doing a good job, now it is time for the users to do a good job. If Linux is to succeed on the desktop it is up to the users to give it a good image.
Nautilus seems to get slower with each release. I use gmc now as my file/desktop manager and I have been a much happier person.
I really don't understand why Nautilus needs to have so many features, ie web browsing and themes. On my installation, Red Hat 7.1, Ximian Gnome 1.4, Gnome starts, sets my background, then Nautilus starts and sets my background. I click on the slashdot link on my desktop, Nautilus starts and loads the site in its file pane and then in the left pane asks if I want to open it with Mozilla, Opera, or Galeon. Now Galeon is associated as my html default viewer. In my opinion Galeon should load the website and Nautilus should not even execute at all. Perhaps this is all resolved in 2.0. Other than Nautilus, I am very impressed with Gnome.
KDE is nice too. I used both for a while until I decided I liked one better. It's nice having more than one desktop option. What kind of influenced my switch to Gnome was Ximian's Red Carpet. I always had dependancy hell when keeping KDE up to date on Red Hat. Gnome was easy to update using Red Carpet so I eventually removed KDE.
but based on personal experience, Windows ME is pretty much a cluster.
Check out Windows Media Player's Super Cookie. They already have a GUID, although you can change that if you wish. My theory is many people won't.
Yeah, you could even make your XBox think the controller is an iMac mouse. As soon as you did it however you'd be carted to jail for violating the DMCA.
Someone already posted a link to a program that allows you to edit USB ID's.
Hey, its Slashdot. Unless you say Linux rules, Windows sucks, and intellectual property rights are for ninnies you're going to be modded down. I don't mind, hell I expect this post to get nailed as flamebait. I don't mind the bad karma, that's what Google cache is for. (A quick way to get +5 informative. LOL)
Oooh! gotta run. KDE just added a new font and subsequently released a new beta. Gotta get it ere the servers clog.
You have clearly not answered the question. What was asked was where there is a copyright violation. Copyright has nothing to do with patents, except that the whole concept is muddled together under the vague idea of intellectual property.
Well perhaps I am just as clueless as the customs agent who stopped the shipment. Forgetting the patent issue (which was pure speculation on my part) is it possible (more speculation on my part) that perhaps the serial cable with its funky connector could have been used in the past as a great copy protection circumvention device ala connecting it to a terminal for remote debugging? This would land it in that category. Now considering this is the case then doesn't every debugging tool allow a person to do the same? With NuMega's SoftIce I can trace a running program and circumvent copy protection. Those of us who are against the DMCA could easily report this to the authorities and watch NuMega developer get tossed into jail. While we're at it we can do the same for anyone who makes or sells PCI video cards. Everyone knows all good PC's use AGP video cards. And everyone knows the only reason for a PCI card is to use a second monitor for cracking copy protection during runtime. More people arrested here. In the investigation the Feds will raid all the companies that have purchased SoftIce and PCI cards. Thousands upon thousands of people will be hauled off to jail. Tech companies will fold. And in the end those who passed the DMCA will be tried as terrorists for writing such a law.
Then you call them and talk to them. They will give you a new key.
I don't get how this cable is a copyright breach, though
If the cable has a proprietary interface that Sega holds a patent for and this company in Hong Kong is making them without a license then it is clearly a violation.
Maybe it is not proof because Windows 95 is no longer supported and Windows 98 isn't too far behind it. I don't recall my copy of Windows 95 even having IE when I first got it so naturally it can do without it. Since then Microsoft has built everything using COM. By their definitions IE probably can't be removed without causing problems with other software. This doesn't mean they couldn't do it though. I think if given enough time they could find a way to make it happen, they just don't want to and personally I don't see why they should.
Sun bundles their own browser with Solaris and no one seems to give a shit. IBM has their own browser in AIX and had their own browser in OS/2. KDE is heavily rooted with Konqueror and it looks like GNOME is basing their desktop around Nautilus. If everybody else is bundling and co-mingling and it is ok then why isn't it ok for Microsoft? Is it because Netscape was a piece of shit and reloaded the whole page whenever you resized the browser? That's why I dumped Navigator in favor of IE. Now I use Opera, best $39 I ever spent. Microsoft didn't help Netscape that much but neither did Netscape.