What if they just put in the EULA, "By clicking Yes, you agree to let us do what we want with your computer and any information passing through it which will be determined by us unbeknown to you at any time"? Of course it will have much more legalese in it and be on at least page 8 of the legalese.
Also, there is no law that says that one must be above the age of 18 to install software, but there is a law that noone under 18 can sign a legally binding contract, so the 1st "spyware like" thing that happens to a minor is not protected by their EULA.
The $show example is not PHP specific. That is just bad web programming, and that can be done in C, ASP, Perl, shell, or any language. If the web developer blindly uses user input unchecked to access a resource on the webserver, then that web developer made a mistake.
Granted there have been PHP issues, but this is not one of them.
1. low costs of production. The cost of producting "Hoes on Hoes" or "Bratman" is painfully small, the small cost of a video camera, a tape and serveral people willing to have sex for money. 2. The porn industry has already been moving to the internet model, lower overhead. 3. Piracy HELPS media companies.
4. Porn producers can produce more new material than most anyone can stand. There are only so many Britney Spears CDs or songs or similar artists.
I know a young single mother in the US who got sued and had to use her kid's college fund to pay the RIAA.
Would you be so outraged by this if she had commited some other crime and been fined for that? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested - is it the thing that she's being punished for that's so bad, or the fact that she did something wrong and now her kid is having to pay for it too?
Yes, I would be outraged if she commited a crime like sitting at the front of a bus, or something else silly like got high (a simple possession charge, nothing else).
No. The key phrase there is "temporary copy which is transient or incidental". Transferring the music from a CD to another format for storage is not considered temporary, transient or incidental, and is prohibitted by UK law.
IANAL and IANABL (british lawer), but to me I would consider storage of MP3s on an iPod as temporary and transient. I can easily and quickly delete them at any time off of my iPod to make room for other songs or because I'm sick of them for now. The MP3 is a degraded copy of the CD and only works in MP3 players, whereas the CD is the canonical and properly licensed version of the music.
Now one can argue that if I loose or sell my music CD, then my iPod copy is _not_ temporary and transient, because it is the only copy I have, and I don't have the licensed copy anymore.
Amazon has patents and BN does not, or at least I don't know of them having any and it does not really matter. This was an executive decision at/. a while back.
Sometimes priciples comes before price, sometimes price comes before principles.
First, I'm a little annoyed that my post got modded as "Flamebait", when it wasn't, and the replies were not flames, but anyway. The moderation probably had more to do with my.sig. OK now for my reply.
What if they don't necessarily want to dump all their old PC hardware?
1st, its a nonissue for this case. If they are considering Mac OSX, it won't run on PC hardware. But for the sake of argument, lets consider this. If I were in charge of doing this migration/upgrade, I would leave their windows boxes on their desks for a while, and do the new boxes whatever they were in parallel. Doing a major switch like this will have many "gotcha"s that noone ever considered. Its the least painful thing to do provided there aren't networking issues with doubling the network drops, but this is a big project, and it should be done with thought and care not to interrupt normal operations.
Throw in OpenOffice and a few Windows Terminal Servers
I'm not too familiar with windows in general and no nothing about Windows Terminal Servers, so I can't comment on that, but OpenOffice. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, let alone someone I worked for in an environment which I am supporting their computers. Switching people from real Office to OO would be more problematic than any hardware and/or OS changes. That would be a nightmare. I only use it if some salesman gives me a quote in Excel format or something, and I cringe when that happens. If Office is in the equasion, I don't see how Linux is also. Office costs big bucks, regardless of platform, and its pretty much worth it. Again, it looks like OSX is still winning here once we bring up the "O" word.
Flamebait, I'm hurt. I guess next time I say something negative about Linux (gasp), I'll have to give it the slashdot mod-magic and prefice my post with "I know this will get modded to oblivion, but..." so everyone will mod it up.
First, my definition is a little different than the government's and press' definition of WMDs. I just leave it that a WMD is a weapon that can do mass destruction, especially at a distance. Nuclear bombs are good examples of WMDs. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe that all of the people killed from the advent of gas and chemical bombs would not equal to one of the nuclear bombs that the US government dropped on Japan. We know about WMDs, and have used them.
The number of Kurds that were _locally_ killed varies from source to source, but lets say for the sake of argument 5,000 that were gassed by Saddam. And that is not one from one bomb.
About 3,000 people were killed with box cutters not too long ago.
I would think that it is unanimously agreed that Saddam put up little to no fight when went over to their country and killed 1,000 of our people and over 10,000 of theirs. If Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction or even just weapons worthwhile to defend himself, I think he would have had no reservation to do whatever it took.
He's the nutcase that likes to kill people, right? Where's the evidence?
The FCC is clearly out of it's mandate here and I would say the odds of defeating it are good, not on the merits of violation of consumers rights, but that the FCC doesn't have the authority for Congress to do this.
Think again. From their about us page they say, "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress.">
Parallel that with the CIA, "The CIA is an independent agency, responsible to the President through the DCI, and accountable to the American people through the intelligence oversight committees of the U.S. Congress."
I'm growing skeptical of these "independant agencies". They are not elected, they are not part of the "checks and balances" system, there is no meantion of them in the Constitution, yet they appear to be having greater power than any real part of our government.
I mean the CIA still has publically downloadable 23page document from 2002 about "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" here, yet its pretty much common knowledge that they never existed. The document even has a map on page 9 that has 9, yes, 9 "Declared nuclear facilities".
Yeah, I guess that this dependance on ActiveX and MSIE for the past 50 years or so has always hindered change.
I almost wrecked my car on the way to work this morning trying to get around the horse and buggy in front of me. I mean the horse had every known disease to mankind, the horse is so sick all the time it gets other horses sick to the point that sometimes the highway is undrivable because of all the sick horses sitting in the middle of the road cripled from disease and neglect.
Maybe, just maybe when the people implemented their intranets with reliance on ActiveX and MSIE they should have considered using open standards vs proprietary ones. Part of any system install _should_ include a end of life plan. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe, just maybe, people will learn from their mistakes.
no, seriously now, a company with 7000 installed windozes has probably grown quite dependant on them. Migrating to another platform is not something that is done overnight.
This is such a crock. Modern windows (95 to current) is less than 10 years old, the feeble but network enabled Windows 3.11 came out when 1992 or 1993. What I'm getting at is that people switched "overnight" or somehow to the MS platform, and they can switch away from it.
If its that big of a deal for "legacy" apps or whatnot, have people keep their old windows computers to run those programs, or use a virtual desktop, or something for the transition period, and when everything has been ported over and replaced to run on OSX throw the old computers away.
"What's this about usability? I thought Macs were supposed to be so usable? I can't even find a start menu. How are you supposed to run anything"
Funny. Yeah, just the other day I let a car mechanic friend borrow my brand new Bentley, and he asked "I thought this thing was a good car and drivable? Where's the stick shift?"
I almost laughted when I saw the headline for this post. "AT&T considers Mac OSX, Linux for 7,000 Desktops".
I'm not one for making arguments for analogies, but I see no comparison between OSX and Linux for the Desktop, so an analogy is as appropriate as considering these two systems. OK, here we go...
Considering between OSX and Linux for the desktop is like being hungry and wanting a good meal and debating whether to take someone's leftover takeout for free out of the trash from a good restaurant or going inside and ordering what you want. Yeah, the stuff in the trash is free, and it did come from the same restaurant, but since I have the time and the money, I might as well just go inside and enjoy the meal like it was supposed to be enjoyed.
I used Linux almost exclusively for my desktop for about 8 years. Its OK I guess, but I'm a little more technically inclined and knowledgeable of linux and computers in general than 99% or more than the population.
OSX and Mac hardware is a complete vendor supported end to end system "that just works". Aside from their wireless issues for a couple of months about a year ago, the hardware and software are stable, looks nice. I can do things like easily install software, have multiple users, run Office if I want, and my friends can use it. Its simply the finest end user computer and operating system that one can buy. Considering you can get one of the new iMacs with OSX, a G5 processor and a nice flatscreen display, a DVD/cd burner, and a desktop footprint of about the same as a flat panel monitor for $1,500. I don't see any other competition in the desktop world. Unless you simply want/need more power, and then you can shell out a little more cash for a dual G5.
If I choose to buy a computer with spyware, or whatever, on it, I am choosing to buy a computer with that software on it. If I choose to install a piece of software, I am choosing to install that piece of software. If I choose to make these choices without finding out what these pieces of software actually do, I am making that choice, and am responsible for the consequences.
Sure, I'm all into personal responsibility and all that, but one's "choice" is not really the same when the other party involved is using deception to alter the person's choosing.
I'm sure you choose to buy things all the time, but don't you expect that your car does not have a GPS and voice recorder that sends data back to the car company or some other. Don't you expect your phones to not come with bugs in them?
And even if you don't expect to have phones and cars that don't spy on your behavior and report it to someone else, wouldn't you like to disable or even sell or throw away the product once you realize you made a "wrong choice"?
Yes, there is some degree of ignorance going on here, but I don't believe that we want to set a precident that doing business through deception should be accepted, if not the norm. Do you really want to hire a lawyer to follow you around everytime you purchase anything or agree to anything that involves another person? How carefully do you read your receipts for your credit card bills? If its OK to do business by deception, it would be OK for CC receipts that you sign say, OH BTW you owe us your car and your house and $500 every month for the rest of your life because you chose to buy a bagel and a coffee from us for $2.50 and you also signed away your car, house and $500 every month. Sorry dude, it was your choice. Not really, but pay anyway sukka!
The new law in the US is the wrong solution to an unnecessary problem. It further reinforces the idea that we are not responsible for what our computers do on our behalves. It panders to those who want to enjoy their rights, but don't want to be responsible for the consequences of how they exercise those rights. It treats computer users like children who are too young to take responsibility for their own choices.
Thats kinda a wierd statement. I don't know what a necessary or unnecessary problem is, but I do have issues against some of the language in this law/bill. Like many of the newer laws they are written so specifically, that new laws need to be written every time a new device or piece of technology is introduced. This bill is written about "computers" over and over again, but what about other products new or existing that do similar things?
The key component that is driving this legislation is deception. I personally am getting sick of the constant deception that businesses are relying upon as their business model. Look at your spam inbox sometime. I've gotten mails saying things like "Yeah, get your killer mortage rates here!" I know better, but I do sometimes follow urls in spam to see what these guys are doing, and if they are US companies I often call them and/or the local authorities, BBB, or whatever. One mortgage mail's website said "FDIC insured" and that they were on a "Secure server", etc. Well, no they weren't. They were from europe somewhere, their webserver had no https support, the RSA seal was faked, and I'm pretty sure these guys are outright crooks.
I am glad that a vast majority of all businesses are legit and give you what you expect. I could not imagine what it would be like if mail fraud were legal, or any other deceptive business practice.
I personally believe that you would change your mind about this personal opinion thing after the Nth time you get burned by a deceptive business practice. Yeah, you might be computer savy enough to know about spyware and whatnot, but if there is no blanket protection for all citizens, then we will have to continuously be fighting with businesses the rest of our lives.
1) File systems that are "in use" cannot be unmounted because there may be uncommitted writes to them. When an application writes to a filesystem, the data is not immediately written to the disk for performance reasons.
I don't care. I'm unmounting a filesystem for a reason, and I'm going to kill the offending processes anyway. I'm root dammit! Heh.
Also, its just inconsistant that I cannot unmount a filesystem, but I can do rm -rf on the entire filesystem. Another thing that gets me is that a filesystem can be "in use" just because an app is using it as its current working directory. No open files, no uncommited writes, just because some program is sitting there it can't be unmounted, but again I can rm -rf it. (Yes, I do know that rm -rf only removes the linkcount by one, and the files might actually really still be there and not there at the same time.)
2) The 'D' state does not exist because there is a "problem" with the file system. Processes are but into the D state because two processes are trying to access the same file or resource at the same time.
Thats not true. A 'D' state is when an app is waiting for a disk or tape, it has nothing to do with filesystems, its a device issue. Regardless, I should be able to kill the process vs having to reboot to get rid of it. There should be no software reason for rebooting a computer besides a fundamental OS change.
Has the Command Line Interface become outdated? What are your thoughts on the CLI and if you had to 'do it all again' would the CLI be as prevalent?
I'll answer that. NO!
Until you find an easier way to interface with files and a computer than the CLI, than the CLI will not be outdated. Granted there are a few things that are easier with a GUI like wierd file management. For example, selecting a bunch of files with a mouse and then "deselecting" a couple of them is kinda hard to do from a CLI, but most everything else is quicker and easier with a CLI. Examples include:
- command pipelining -- ps auxww | grep something
- command chaining -- test -f AFILE && do something with AFILE
- for loops -- this is a biggy, until a GUI can easily do multiple operations on a subset of files, then I will always jump to the command line to get stuff done
- file centric behavior vs GUI centric behavior -- I guess if your real diligent about keeping all your files in one place and never use more than one folder/directory for files, then this is not an issue. But for me, I like sitting at a prompt and seeing all of my files in front of me and I can edit them, compare them, move them, etc. In a GUI, I find that every app defaults to the wrong directory for where I want to be using at the time and I have to monkey around in the file dialog box to do something like save or open a file.
- tab completion
- !command and !!
- the list goes on, I like the CLI, especially on my Mac.
Recently on the Google Labs Aptitude Test there was a question: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"
I saw this google labs apt question, and while I've become numb to most of UNIX's issues and cannot think of a generic across the board (ie, cross vendor) "broken" thing except why the hell is UNIX so picky about 1) unmounting filesystems "that are in use" and 2) why the hell there is a 'D' run state that is completely uninterruptable?* The 2nd one really baffles me, and the first is just annoying, and fuser or some vendor specific tool can (sometimes) point you to the offending process that is using the filesystem. I found out today that fuser does not work on linux with the kernel NFS daemon sharing a filesystem and I try to unmount it. Annoying, but not as fundamentally broken as #2 in my opinion.
Another thing that I see as "broken" in UNIX is that there is no normal/standardized/sane way of installing software. Debian gets it the closest, but the LSB picked RPM for some insane reason for package mismanagement on Linux.
* For those that don't know, if there is something wrong with a disk subsystem, and a process tries to access that disk subsystem, the process is in an uninterruptable "disk wait state", that cannot be corrected without rebooting the computer. One can ususally safely ignore the processes stuck in this state, but its kinda irritating because it can often bring the system load up by one for each stuck process, yet it does not appear to hurt performance any.
Isn't mixing stimulants and depressants (ginseng and alcohol) a bad thing? There are incidences of people mixing vodka and Red Bull and actually dying. I'm sure this is due to drinking an inordinate amount, but still uppers and downers together doesn't sound like good eats.
Speedballs are still not that uncommon (IV cocaine and heroin). And yeah, its pretty easy to die from those. Its pretty common for people to take downers to take the edge off of uppers and to help with the "crash" from an upper high. However, its usually prescriptions and/or heroin that is used, and the uppers are usually something a little more interesting than caffeine and ginsing.
But how about a good Brown Ale? Or IPA, or a well served Belgian Wit, like Hoegaarden?
Those are nice. I love most all kinds of beer, but I have a problem with "good" beer or microbrews. They give me terrible hangovers. For the day to day drinking I just stick to one of the sodapop beers like Bud lite. Yeah, it has no taste, but it has a high drinkability factor. I can drink Bud lite for hours by the pitcher at a bar or in bottles at home and still be able to function. I can only drink less than 6 "good" beers without having adverse affects from it.
B(E)? The geek in me reads that as "B of E" and then turns that phonetically into BFE, a vulgar initialism for "bum f* egypt," meaning the middle of nowhere.
Actually, I didn't know what o think about that name, but apparently AB named "the new beer B(E) -- read as "B to the E power"". Try shouting that loudly and clearly enough at a noisy bar:)
Slashdot Mirror
There are a bunch of cars driving down the highway.
Ugh, am I missing something here, like content in this article?
Now this brings up again the legality of EULAs.
What if they just put in the EULA, "By clicking Yes, you agree to let us do what we want with your computer and any information passing through it which will be determined by us unbeknown to you at any time"? Of course it will have much more legalese in it and be on at least page 8 of the legalese.
Also, there is no law that says that one must be above the age of 18 to install software, but there is a law that noone under 18 can sign a legally binding contract, so the 1st "spyware like" thing that happens to a minor is not protected by their EULA.
Sure it is. The first one made it a civil matter, this makes it a crimal one.
The government does not want any competition in the wiretap, etc business.
1) Don't launch from the USA
But what about landing? I'm sure we will want to fingerprint all of the aliens coming to visit us. Provided they have fingers of course.
The $show example is not PHP specific. That is just bad web programming, and that can be done in C, ASP, Perl, shell, or any language. If the web developer blindly uses user input unchecked to access a resource on the webserver, then that web developer made a mistake.
Granted there have been PHP issues, but this is not one of them.
1. low costs of production. The cost of producting "Hoes on Hoes" or "Bratman" is painfully small, the small cost of a video camera, a tape and serveral people willing to have sex for money. 2. The porn industry has already been moving to the internet model, lower overhead. 3. Piracy HELPS media companies.
4. Porn producers can produce more new material than most anyone can stand. There are only so many Britney Spears CDs or songs or similar artists.
I know a young single mother in the US who got sued and had to use her kid's college fund to pay the RIAA.
Would you be so outraged by this if she had commited some other crime and been fined for that? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested - is it the thing that she's being punished for that's so bad, or the fact that she did something wrong and now her kid is having to pay for it too?
Yes, I would be outraged if she commited a crime like sitting at the front of a bus, or something else silly like got high (a simple possession charge, nothing else).
No. The key phrase there is "temporary copy which is transient or incidental". Transferring the music from a CD to another format for storage is not considered temporary, transient or incidental, and is prohibitted by UK law.
IANAL and IANABL (british lawer), but to me I would consider storage of MP3s on an iPod as temporary and transient. I can easily and quickly delete them at any time off of my iPod to make room for other songs or because I'm sick of them for now. The MP3 is a degraded copy of the CD and only works in MP3 players, whereas the CD is the canonical and properly licensed version of the music.
Now one can argue that if I loose or sell my music CD, then my iPod copy is _not_ temporary and transient, because it is the only copy I have, and I don't have the licensed copy anymore.
$26.39 at Amazon.com. $31.99 at BN.com
/. a while back.
Amazon has patents and BN does not, or at least I don't know of them having any and it does not really matter. This was an executive decision at
Sometimes priciples comes before price, sometimes price comes before principles.
register five variants of the name
It should be register five variants of the name for all of the top tld's.
I seem to be the only person alive who thinks that tlds are useless.
First, I'm a little annoyed that my post got modded as "Flamebait", when it wasn't, and the replies were not flames, but anyway. The moderation probably had more to do with my .sig. OK now for my reply.
What if they don't necessarily want to dump all their old PC hardware?
1st, its a nonissue for this case. If they are considering Mac OSX, it won't run on PC hardware. But for the sake of argument, lets consider this. If I were in charge of doing this migration/upgrade, I would leave their windows boxes on their desks for a while, and do the new boxes whatever they were in parallel. Doing a major switch like this will have many "gotcha"s that noone ever considered. Its the least painful thing to do provided there aren't networking issues with doubling the network drops, but this is a big project, and it should be done with thought and care not to interrupt normal operations.
Throw in OpenOffice and a few Windows Terminal Servers
I'm not too familiar with windows in general and no nothing about Windows Terminal Servers, so I can't comment on that, but OpenOffice. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, let alone someone I worked for in an environment which I am supporting their computers. Switching people from real Office to OO would be more problematic than any hardware and/or OS changes. That would be a nightmare. I only use it if some salesman gives me a quote in Excel format or something, and I cringe when that happens. If Office is in the equasion, I don't see how Linux is also. Office costs big bucks, regardless of platform, and its pretty much worth it. Again, it looks like OSX is still winning here once we bring up the "O" word.
Flamebait, I'm hurt. I guess next time I say something negative about Linux (gasp), I'll have to give it the slashdot mod-magic and prefice my post with "I know this will get modded to oblivion, but..." so everyone will mod it up.
First, my definition is a little different than the government's and press' definition of WMDs. I just leave it that a WMD is a weapon that can do mass destruction, especially at a distance. Nuclear bombs are good examples of WMDs. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe that all of the people killed from the advent of gas and chemical bombs would not equal to one of the nuclear bombs that the US government dropped on Japan. We know about WMDs, and have used them.
The number of Kurds that were _locally_ killed varies from source to source, but lets say for the sake of argument 5,000 that were gassed by Saddam. And that is not one from one bomb.
About 3,000 people were killed with box cutters not too long ago.
I would think that it is unanimously agreed that Saddam put up little to no fight when went over to their country and killed 1,000 of our people and over 10,000 of theirs. If Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction or even just weapons worthwhile to defend himself, I think he would have had no reservation to do whatever it took.
He's the nutcase that likes to kill people, right? Where's the evidence?
The FCC is clearly out of it's mandate here and I would say the odds of defeating it are good, not on the merits of violation of consumers rights, but that the FCC doesn't have the authority for Congress to do this.
Think again. From their about us page they say, "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress.">
Parallel that with the CIA, "The CIA is an independent agency, responsible to the President through the DCI, and accountable to the American people through the intelligence oversight committees of the U.S. Congress."
I'm growing skeptical of these "independant agencies". They are not elected, they are not part of the "checks and balances" system, there is no meantion of them in the Constitution, yet they appear to be having greater power than any real part of our government.
I mean the CIA still has publically downloadable 23page document from 2002 about "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" here, yet its pretty much common knowledge that they never existed. The document even has a map on page 9 that has 9, yes, 9 "Declared nuclear facilities".
Yeah, I guess that this dependance on ActiveX and MSIE for the past 50 years or so has always hindered change.
I almost wrecked my car on the way to work this morning trying to get around the horse and buggy in front of me. I mean the horse had every known disease to mankind, the horse is so sick all the time it gets other horses sick to the point that sometimes the highway is undrivable because of all the sick horses sitting in the middle of the road cripled from disease and neglect.
Maybe, just maybe when the people implemented their intranets with reliance on ActiveX and MSIE they should have considered using open standards vs proprietary ones. Part of any system install _should_ include a end of life plan. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe, just maybe, people will learn from their mistakes.
no, seriously now, a company with 7000 installed windozes has probably grown quite dependant on them. Migrating to another platform is not something that is done overnight.
This is such a crock. Modern windows (95 to current) is less than 10 years old, the feeble but network enabled Windows 3.11 came out when 1992 or 1993. What I'm getting at is that people switched "overnight" or somehow to the MS platform, and they can switch away from it.
If its that big of a deal for "legacy" apps or whatnot, have people keep their old windows computers to run those programs, or use a virtual desktop, or something for the transition period, and when everything has been ported over and replaced to run on OSX throw the old computers away.
"What's this about usability? I thought Macs were supposed to be so usable? I can't even find a start menu. How are you supposed to run anything"
Funny. Yeah, just the other day I let a car mechanic friend borrow my brand new Bentley, and he asked "I thought this thing was a good car and drivable? Where's the stick shift?"
I almost laughted when I saw the headline for this post. "AT&T considers Mac OSX, Linux for 7,000 Desktops".
I'm not one for making arguments for analogies, but I see no comparison between OSX and Linux for the Desktop, so an analogy is as appropriate as considering these two systems. OK, here we go...
Considering between OSX and Linux for the desktop is like being hungry and wanting a good meal and debating whether to take someone's leftover takeout for free out of the trash from a good restaurant or going inside and ordering what you want. Yeah, the stuff in the trash is free, and it did come from the same restaurant, but since I have the time and the money, I might as well just go inside and enjoy the meal like it was supposed to be enjoyed.
I used Linux almost exclusively for my desktop for about 8 years. Its OK I guess, but I'm a little more technically inclined and knowledgeable of linux and computers in general than 99% or more than the population.
OSX and Mac hardware is a complete vendor supported end to end system "that just works". Aside from their wireless issues for a couple of months about a year ago, the hardware and software are stable, looks nice. I can do things like easily install software, have multiple users, run Office if I want, and my friends can use it. Its simply the finest end user computer and operating system that one can buy. Considering you can get one of the new iMacs with OSX, a G5 processor and a nice flatscreen display, a DVD/cd burner, and a desktop footprint of about the same as a flat panel monitor for $1,500. I don't see any other competition in the desktop world. Unless you simply want/need more power, and then you can shell out a little more cash for a dual G5.
If I choose to buy a computer with spyware, or whatever, on it, I am choosing to buy a computer with that software on it. If I choose to install a piece of software, I am choosing to install that piece of software. If I choose to make these choices without finding out what these pieces of software actually do, I am making that choice, and am responsible for the consequences.
Sure, I'm all into personal responsibility and all that, but one's "choice" is not really the same when the other party involved is using deception to alter the person's choosing.
I'm sure you choose to buy things all the time, but don't you expect that your car does not have a GPS and voice recorder that sends data back to the car company or some other. Don't you expect your phones to not come with bugs in them?
And even if you don't expect to have phones and cars that don't spy on your behavior and report it to someone else, wouldn't you like to disable or even sell or throw away the product once you realize you made a "wrong choice"?
Yes, there is some degree of ignorance going on here, but I don't believe that we want to set a precident that doing business through deception should be accepted, if not the norm. Do you really want to hire a lawyer to follow you around everytime you purchase anything or agree to anything that involves another person? How carefully do you read your receipts for your credit card bills? If its OK to do business by deception, it would be OK for CC receipts that you sign say, OH BTW you owe us your car and your house and $500 every month for the rest of your life because you chose to buy a bagel and a coffee from us for $2.50 and you also signed away your car, house and $500 every month. Sorry dude, it was your choice. Not really, but pay anyway sukka!
The new law in the US is the wrong solution to an unnecessary problem. It further reinforces the idea that we are not responsible for what our computers do on our behalves. It panders to those who want to enjoy their rights, but don't want to be responsible for the consequences of how they exercise those rights. It treats computer users like children who are too young to take responsibility for their own choices.
Thats kinda a wierd statement. I don't know what a necessary or unnecessary problem is, but I do have issues against some of the language in this law/bill. Like many of the newer laws they are written so specifically, that new laws need to be written every time a new device or piece of technology is introduced. This bill is written about "computers" over and over again, but what about other products new or existing that do similar things?
The key component that is driving this legislation is deception. I personally am getting sick of the constant deception that businesses are relying upon as their business model. Look at your spam inbox sometime. I've gotten mails saying things like "Yeah, get your killer mortage rates here!" I know better, but I do sometimes follow urls in spam to see what these guys are doing, and if they are US companies I often call them and/or the local authorities, BBB, or whatever. One mortgage mail's website said "FDIC insured" and that they were on a "Secure server", etc. Well, no they weren't. They were from europe somewhere, their webserver had no https support, the RSA seal was faked, and I'm pretty sure these guys are outright crooks.
I am glad that a vast majority of all businesses are legit and give you what you expect. I could not imagine what it would be like if mail fraud were legal, or any other deceptive business practice.
I personally believe that you would change your mind about this personal opinion thing after the Nth time you get burned by a deceptive business practice. Yeah, you might be computer savy enough to know about spyware and whatnot, but if there is no blanket protection for all citizens, then we will have to continuously be fighting with businesses the rest of our lives.
Its bad enough with legal/que
1) File systems that are "in use" cannot be unmounted because there may be uncommitted writes to them. When an application writes to a filesystem, the data is not immediately written to the disk for performance reasons.
I don't care. I'm unmounting a filesystem for a reason, and I'm going to kill the offending processes anyway. I'm root dammit! Heh.
Also, its just inconsistant that I cannot unmount a filesystem, but I can do rm -rf on the entire filesystem. Another thing that gets me is that a filesystem can be "in use" just because an app is using it as its current working directory. No open files, no uncommited writes, just because some program is sitting there it can't be unmounted, but again I can rm -rf it. (Yes, I do know that rm -rf only removes the linkcount by one, and the files might actually really still be there and not there at the same time.)
2) The 'D' state does not exist because there is a "problem" with the file system. Processes are but into the D state because two processes are trying to access the same file or resource at the same time.
Thats not true. A 'D' state is when an app is waiting for a disk or tape, it has nothing to do with filesystems, its a device issue. Regardless, I should be able to kill the process vs having to reboot to get rid of it. There should be no software reason for rebooting a computer besides a fundamental OS change.
I think the OSX solution is by far the most elegant. Self contained packages with everything needed, drop and go.
Tell me about it. And the beautiful part is in order to do something crazy like uninstall software, you just drag the puppy in the trash.
Has the Command Line Interface become outdated? What are your thoughts on the CLI and if you had to 'do it all again' would the CLI be as prevalent?
I'll answer that. NO!
Until you find an easier way to interface with files and a computer than the CLI, than the CLI will not be outdated. Granted there are a few things that are easier with a GUI like wierd file management. For example, selecting a bunch of files with a mouse and then "deselecting" a couple of them is kinda hard to do from a CLI, but most everything else is quicker and easier with a CLI. Examples include:
- command pipelining -- ps auxww | grep something
- command chaining -- test -f AFILE && do something with AFILE
- for loops -- this is a biggy, until a GUI can easily do multiple operations on a subset of files, then I will always jump to the command line to get stuff done
- file centric behavior vs GUI centric behavior -- I guess if your real diligent about keeping all your files in one place and never use more than one folder/directory for files, then this is not an issue. But for me, I like sitting at a prompt and seeing all of my files in front of me and I can edit them, compare them, move them, etc. In a GUI, I find that every app defaults to the wrong directory for where I want to be using at the time and I have to monkey around in the file dialog box to do something like save or open a file.
- tab completion
- !command and !!
- the list goes on, I like the CLI, especially on my Mac.
Recently on the Google Labs Aptitude Test there was a question: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"
I saw this google labs apt question, and while I've become numb to most of UNIX's issues and cannot think of a generic across the board (ie, cross vendor) "broken" thing except why the hell is UNIX so picky about 1) unmounting filesystems "that are in use" and 2) why the hell there is a 'D' run state that is completely uninterruptable?* The 2nd one really baffles me, and the first is just annoying, and fuser or some vendor specific tool can (sometimes) point you to the offending process that is using the filesystem. I found out today that fuser does not work on linux with the kernel NFS daemon sharing a filesystem and I try to unmount it. Annoying, but not as fundamentally broken as #2 in my opinion.
Another thing that I see as "broken" in UNIX is that there is no normal/standardized/sane way of installing software. Debian gets it the closest, but the LSB picked RPM for some insane reason for package mismanagement on Linux.
* For those that don't know, if there is something wrong with a disk subsystem, and a process tries to access that disk subsystem, the process is in an uninterruptable "disk wait state", that cannot be corrected without rebooting the computer. One can ususally safely ignore the processes stuck in this state, but its kinda irritating because it can often bring the system load up by one for each stuck process, yet it does not appear to hurt performance any.
Isn't mixing stimulants and depressants (ginseng and alcohol) a bad thing? There are incidences of people mixing vodka and Red Bull and actually dying. I'm sure this is due to drinking an inordinate amount, but still uppers and downers together doesn't sound like good eats.
Speedballs are still not that uncommon (IV cocaine and heroin). And yeah, its pretty easy to die from those. Its pretty common for people to take downers to take the edge off of uppers and to help with the "crash" from an upper high. However, its usually prescriptions and/or heroin that is used, and the uppers are usually something a little more interesting than caffeine and ginsing.
I'm more of a pure downer guy myself though.
You think sex is a vice?!
:)
I think you may be doing it wrong.
It all depends on the grip
[ rimshot ]
But how about a good Brown Ale? Or IPA, or a well served Belgian Wit, like Hoegaarden?
Those are nice. I love most all kinds of beer, but I have a problem with "good" beer or microbrews. They give me terrible hangovers. For the day to day drinking I just stick to one of the sodapop beers like Bud lite. Yeah, it has no taste, but it has a high drinkability factor. I can drink Bud lite for hours by the pitcher at a bar or in bottles at home and still be able to function. I can only drink less than 6 "good" beers without having adverse affects from it.
YMMV
B(E)? The geek in me reads that as "B of E" and then turns that phonetically into BFE, a vulgar initialism for "bum f* egypt," meaning the middle of nowhere.
:)
Actually, I didn't know what o think about that name, but apparently AB named "the new beer B(E) -- read as "B to the E power"". Try shouting that loudly and clearly enough at a noisy bar