Kazaa has always been the seamy underbelly of the internet. While Napster at least had a little swagger as the slick pirate software, Kazaa has been plagued from the start with spyware and other malware.
If Ichitaro would have just used the standard Microsoft (that's the software platform they target) context-sensitive help, none of this would be an issue.
Instead, they hired on an ex-Matsushita employee and he went on to use the Matsushita patented method for the help system. So they sued, as is their right.
This is not a problem with the patent system. However what it does bring up is "How much knowledge can you take away from your previous employer, even if all that knowledge is just in your head?" As we gain ground in technology, such to the point that Johnny Bnemonic-style memory expansion is possible, how can patent holders and companies owning "trade secret" IP be protected from information pirates?
But everything is so huge. The screen resolution looks really terrible. What is that 640x480? Did GNOme just enter the VGA world?
And I'm not sure I'd like that "Courtesy of OSshots" banner at the top. Ugly.
So my initial reaction, is, "Hey, that's cool. Where did the mouse pointer go?" Then my second reaction was, "It looks like every other window manager out there."
Screenshots are nice, but what are they trying to show us that can't be done with any other window manager?
Other than maybe Eben Moglen, I can't think of anyone who would defend the purity of Debian more strongly than Richard Stallman. The Debian project has always been about providing a Free operating system that works great rather than a semi-Free operating system. This is in line with RMS's original goal of Hurd (which is booting now!).
If you want a laptop, you usually want to use it for work, you know, to have a mobile computer away from your main desktop.
Now, most people use Windows or Mac for their primary desktop. Hardly any users that buy their computers at Walmart are running Linux on their main machine. So what are they going to do with this laptop? It's not really compatible with their standard machine.
My best guess is that the hardware is basic enough that they can probably install Win98 on it with very little trouble. This is a computer for software license violaters, in that case.
From what I understand of physics, different elements and compounds have different weights per volume. So gold, being heavy, would be heavier than the same volume of hydrogen.
Archimede's principle dictates that an object will displace its weight in water, which leads to the conclusion that the heavier something is, the lower it will sink in relation to other material surrounding it.
Computers are made up of meltable parts. By melting the computers down, would it not be possible to skim off various useful elements and compounds at certain depths? This is how they separate kerosene jet fuel from high octane gasoline. It's all together in a vat, but sucked out from different depths.
Such a system could be set up in someone's back yard (given a large enough back yard). It's well known that some manufacturers use gold to conduct electricity, and silicon is resaleable. So is copper and a host of other really common elements in computers.
Hopefully he finishes it before he finishes living.
All the best to the man, but seriously, dude, get on the ball. You don't have that many years left. If you can distill what's in your brain into book form, you will have done all of us a huge service.
When developing a web browser, if a plug-in needs to be launched, don't let the plug-in's loading cause all other instances of the browser to lock up.
I'm looking at you, Firefox.
What's the deal with the PDF-format anyway? The document is 17 pages of Powerpoint-like slides. I'm sure some nice, simple HTML could have displayed that much more quickly. And not locked up Firefox for a minute.
What you are talking about is letting the fox guard the henhouse. While I am not one to be defending P2P music piracy, I certainly can't see the tangible harm in it.
Nor, frankly do I see the harm in selling a few answers (nothing more than bits, if you ask me) to some insignificant high school tests. Time will tell whether these kids learned their shit or are faking it. Let's not blow this out of proportion. No one is dying from the actions of this idiot.
That said, I do think that some punitive actions are in order. Perhaps, as I stated above, the crime is relatively minor and can be treated with a slap on the wrist. He's 16 now, so in a year and a half he'll be out of juvi and back in the real world. So a year and a half for his crime isn't such a huge deal. (They have school in juvi too.)
I'm never one to say that there ought to be an example made of a single student. Each case must be judged on its own merits, and in this case it is clear that the crime deserves *some* punishment, but not the book.
Every computer added to a classroom is another nail in the coffin of modern teaching. There is nothing added by adding a computer, but much is taken away.
Computers ought to remain in "computer labs" and perhaps on the desks for specialized "computer classes", but they definitely don't belong anywhere else.
Creative usage of computers for teaching is a copout on the kids. By removing the teacher/student relationship and replacing it with an inanimate object, the kids lose out on a great deal of education. This is why home-schooled kids typically do better in college than "computer schooled" kids do.
Is it any surprise that the more technology becomes a part of these kids' educations, the more likely it is that the bad apples are going to find ways to exploit the system?
This is like saying that you shouldn't build model trains unless you are motivated to do it. Poppycock.
Doing anything for pay is a great way to guide your career. Here's the thing: You never know what the next step will lead to. That's really essential.
I was reading about a guy in Ohio who married a Japanese exchange student. They were dirt poor, he was only, through odd jobs, able to bring home about $100 a month. They lived in his parents' basement and it was really a terrible life.
So his wife suggested that he and she move to Kyoto, where she is from, and she could have better job prospects and he could work as an English teacher. They moved and actually did fairly well in Japan.
Then he decided to follow a "career path" and started his own English school. It failed, miserably. They were forced to move further out into the countryside of Japan.
Out in the country, there was less demand for English teachers, but the wife was able to make enough to survive on.
The husband was experienced in some carpentry since he worked a little with his father in Ohio building houses and furniture. So he built a house for the family out in the countryside of Japan. Very Western. Next thing you know, his neighbors are asking him to build houses and furniture and to redecorate homes in Western style.
Well, if he had followed his career path, then he'd be flat broke and living on the streets of Ohio or Kyoto. But because he was flexible, he was able to find a way to make money and support his family.
There is no such thing as a "career path" except for people with very narrow minds.
No one asked me if I wanted vapor trails in the sky. But there they are. Every day, the sky is crisscrossed with vapor trails from airplanes. Even on hiking trips, far away from civilization, these things still exist. I hate them. But I have come to accept tham as part of Nature.
The only time I've ever seen the sky without them was in the few weeks following the WTC attack. All planes were grounded. Not a vapor trail to be seen.
The ionosphere is an amazing thing. Circling and enveloping the Earth from pole to pole, it captures and blocks much of the deadly radiation from the Sun. Without it, we'd be as dead as Deimos.
So what's the big deal with shooting a few billion particles at it from ground level? Well, those particles, if you've studied any physics at all, are highly charged and very high in energy. That means that as they travel through the ionosphere, they are blasting a hole (albeit on a tiny scale) through the atomsphere. These holes, unlike the Aurora activity caused by the Sun, are directed straight through. The Sun's rays travel perpendicular to the ionosphere, so although there is a lot of particle activity from the Sun, it is mostly absorbed and bent in to the shape of the Van Halen radiation belt. It's a good system, and produces some really beautiful natural artwork.
But poking holes in the ionosphere that lead directly out can lead to any number of consequences. The least among these is that the ionosphere somehow regains and replenishes itself with charged particles. The worst is that a "leak" in the ionosphere leads to a complete destruction of the radiation-blocking area that keeps us alive.
Put advertisments on the Moon, or fly giant reflective satellites around the Earth. Just don't be trying to put a hole in our ozone on purpose.
I was reading about the "American GI (Joe) captured in Iraq" yesterday and the same thought crossed my mind today.
If you are going to tell everyone that spam zombies (or terrorist websites) are out there, why don't you give details like processname (or website URL)?
It does no one any good if you just say, "Hey, there's a chance your computer may be infected and is a zombie spammer," if you don't also tell us the zombie process name.
On occasion I like to call it Santix, but I don't want to step on anyone's toes, so I just prepend my initials in front of "Linux" (RMS be damned).
The main thing that I try to focus on is security, and being on the LCML security mailing list has greatly improved my ability to find and squash security issues. You wouldn't believe how many security issues Linux has, actually. Luckily, most of the easy things like buffer exploits are already taken care of. The remaining issues are primarily involved in the timing issues of thread and process context switching. Exploiting the system vulnerability when it is grabbing and releasing resources. That kind of thing.
Whether or not the security list is part of the main LCML list is not really a primary concern. I'd rather have those guys working on features and we on the Security side can get those features secure. If we spent all our time thinking about how to make the system secure, we'd still be stuck with an age-old kernel like OpenBSD!
I don't see Linux as being ready for "mum and pup". But I also don't see this as a big deal.
As you get dumber users, you inevitably get a dumber system to hold their fidgety, trembling hands in every little thing.
You don't like the installer? Well, sorry you're not smart enough to grasp "./configure make". (Gee that was tough!)
You don't like the Help system? Oh, did you forget to read the MANUAL that CAME WITH YOUR PACKAGED CD?
Linux is not here to hold our hands. That's what Linux distributors are here for. If you are too cheap to buy the product and receive all the glorious documentation that these companies (Redhat, SuSE, TurboLinux, ad infinitum) provide, and instead you decide to save a few bucks by downloading the product, then how much do you really expect to get out of a system?
I wouldn't expect "mum and pup" to sit down with a Microsoft Windows CD either and be able to figure it out. But of course, Windows comes with a MANUAL. So if you can read (kinda a perquisite to using a computer, don'cha think?) you should be able to get through the basics of installing the system, installing apps, and getting help (hint: it's in the fine manual).
The same goes for any Linux distribution that you can buy packaged up at the store. They all come with manuals, they all come with help, and most come with a phone number to call when you have problems.
I don't feel sorry for "mum and pup" for not being able to work Linux, I feel sorry for them because they obviously can't RTFM.
The hole in our Apple theories
on
Solaris 10 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Everyone around here keeps saying that Apple should get out of the PPC business and get into licensing OSX for the Intel x86 procs. They argue that selling the software is more lucrative than selling the hardware.
I think that Sun is providing us with a very good example of the opposite being true. Even though they literally give their product away for free, they still make money on their hardware. Apple would be fools to give up the high-margin hardware market and try to compete toe to toe with Microsoft Windows.
If IBM really had this "in the bag", why would they need to do such a huge step as issuing a subpoena to Intel for all that information?
No company wants to give up that much information, especially when much of it is not useful for the case and possibly damaging to Intel's business.
So far, Intel has been a relative outsider in all of this, and it is hard to understand what IBM is trying to get by bringing in a hardware manufacturer into this software matter. This may be a motion to subpoena, but even IBM's army of lawyers seems to be grasping at any straw now.
I personally don't think SCO has a very strong case, but watching IBM's actions, it seems that IBM is the one with the lack of firm ground.
Flops at Apple are predictable
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Apple has always had significant trouble when Steve Jobs is not at the helm. Gil Amelio and his drive to gain business credibility really put a huge pain on the company.
It has always been about Steve Jobs. The man has insight and what could almost be considered clairvoyance when it comes to building things that people crave. God knows that I'm one of those at his feet, weeping and bathing him in frankincense.
The problem is not the process. It is in the way they present the issue. Any project needs to have a central management team that takes patch submissions and vets them before it goes into the main source.
However, the way they present it is that if you want to contribute, well, tough. You gotta be part of the team, and this is an invitation-only club. So someone comes along and says, "Hey, I'd like to have feature X work. How can I contribute?" And the website says "Fuck off, you're not wanted here." So he says, "Well, screw it. It probably wasn't a good idea in the first place." And then the project loses out on what might be a good feature.
They say "Members only" and "Please help us" simultaneously. Mixed signals, to say the least.
If it requires an article of that length to be written clarifying what really ought to be a straightforward issue, then the people who presented the it are at fault for clouding the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Kazaa has always been the seamy underbelly of the internet. While Napster at least had a little swagger as the slick pirate software, Kazaa has been plagued from the start with spyware and other malware.
Good riddance.
If Ichitaro would have just used the standard Microsoft (that's the software platform they target) context-sensitive help, none of this would be an issue.
Instead, they hired on an ex-Matsushita employee and he went on to use the Matsushita patented method for the help system. So they sued, as is their right.
This is not a problem with the patent system. However what it does bring up is "How much knowledge can you take away from your previous employer, even if all that knowledge is just in your head?" As we gain ground in technology, such to the point that Johnny Bnemonic-style memory expansion is possible, how can patent holders and companies owning "trade secret" IP be protected from information pirates?
But everything is so huge. The screen resolution looks really terrible. What is that 640x480? Did GNOme just enter the VGA world?
And I'm not sure I'd like that "Courtesy of OSshots" banner at the top. Ugly.
So my initial reaction, is, "Hey, that's cool. Where did the mouse pointer go?" Then my second reaction was, "It looks like every other window manager out there."
Screenshots are nice, but what are they trying to show us that can't be done with any other window manager?
Other than maybe Eben Moglen, I can't think of anyone who would defend the purity of Debian more strongly than Richard Stallman. The Debian project has always been about providing a Free operating system that works great rather than a semi-Free operating system. This is in line with RMS's original goal of Hurd (which is booting now!).
Let Freedom ring!
If you want a laptop, you usually want to use it for work, you know, to have a mobile computer away from your main desktop.
Now, most people use Windows or Mac for their primary desktop. Hardly any users that buy their computers at Walmart are running Linux on their main machine. So what are they going to do with this laptop? It's not really compatible with their standard machine.
My best guess is that the hardware is basic enough that they can probably install Win98 on it with very little trouble. This is a computer for software license violaters, in that case.
So all those college-age kids with their DOS computers would still be using DOS.
Microsoft would have ruled the roost.
Nothing is different than it is now.
Just like a computer with nothing on it, it's a blank slate.
Perhaps a blank slate would be better because it's only a matter of hours to get a working Linux system on one.
From what I understand of physics, different elements and compounds have different weights per volume. So gold, being heavy, would be heavier than the same volume of hydrogen.
Archimede's principle dictates that an object will displace its weight in water, which leads to the conclusion that the heavier something is, the lower it will sink in relation to other material surrounding it.
Computers are made up of meltable parts. By melting the computers down, would it not be possible to skim off various useful elements and compounds at certain depths? This is how they separate kerosene jet fuel from high octane gasoline. It's all together in a vat, but sucked out from different depths.
Such a system could be set up in someone's back yard (given a large enough back yard). It's well known that some manufacturers use gold to conduct electricity, and silicon is resaleable. So is copper and a host of other really common elements in computers.
I'm surprised no one's done this yet.
does slashdot look like shit?
You must be new here.
Hopefully he finishes it before he finishes living.
All the best to the man, but seriously, dude, get on the ball. You don't have that many years left. If you can distill what's in your brain into book form, you will have done all of us a huge service.
Link to article
Be careful, it locks up Firefox until it loads.
When developing a web browser, if a plug-in needs to be launched, don't let the plug-in's loading cause all other instances of the browser to lock up.
I'm looking at you, Firefox.
What's the deal with the PDF-format anyway? The document is 17 pages of Powerpoint-like slides. I'm sure some nice, simple HTML could have displayed that much more quickly. And not locked up Firefox for a minute.
But this is another step backwards for European National sovereignty.
This probably isn't the place to discuss this kind of thing. So I'll just toss a couple meaningless phrases out to blend in with Slashbots.
w00t! Victery 4 Freedom and democracy! Down with patents! Software wants 2B FREE!
What you are talking about is letting the fox guard the henhouse. While I am not one to be defending P2P music piracy, I certainly can't see the tangible harm in it.
Nor, frankly do I see the harm in selling a few answers (nothing more than bits, if you ask me) to some insignificant high school tests. Time will tell whether these kids learned their shit or are faking it. Let's not blow this out of proportion. No one is dying from the actions of this idiot.
That said, I do think that some punitive actions are in order. Perhaps, as I stated above, the crime is relatively minor and can be treated with a slap on the wrist. He's 16 now, so in a year and a half he'll be out of juvi and back in the real world. So a year and a half for his crime isn't such a huge deal. (They have school in juvi too.)
I'm never one to say that there ought to be an example made of a single student. Each case must be judged on its own merits, and in this case it is clear that the crime deserves *some* punishment, but not the book.
Every computer added to a classroom is another nail in the coffin of modern teaching. There is nothing added by adding a computer, but much is taken away.
Computers ought to remain in "computer labs" and perhaps on the desks for specialized "computer classes", but they definitely don't belong anywhere else.
Creative usage of computers for teaching is a copout on the kids. By removing the teacher/student relationship and replacing it with an inanimate object, the kids lose out on a great deal of education. This is why home-schooled kids typically do better in college than "computer schooled" kids do.
Is it any surprise that the more technology becomes a part of these kids' educations, the more likely it is that the bad apples are going to find ways to exploit the system?
This is like saying that you shouldn't build model trains unless you are motivated to do it. Poppycock.
Doing anything for pay is a great way to guide your career. Here's the thing: You never know what the next step will lead to. That's really essential.
I was reading about a guy in Ohio who married a Japanese exchange student. They were dirt poor, he was only, through odd jobs, able to bring home about $100 a month. They lived in his parents' basement and it was really a terrible life.
So his wife suggested that he and she move to Kyoto, where she is from, and she could have better job prospects and he could work as an English teacher. They moved and actually did fairly well in Japan.
Then he decided to follow a "career path" and started his own English school. It failed, miserably. They were forced to move further out into the countryside of Japan.
Out in the country, there was less demand for English teachers, but the wife was able to make enough to survive on.
The husband was experienced in some carpentry since he worked a little with his father in Ohio building houses and furniture. So he built a house for the family out in the countryside of Japan. Very Western. Next thing you know, his neighbors are asking him to build houses and furniture and to redecorate homes in Western style.
Well, if he had followed his career path, then he'd be flat broke and living on the streets of Ohio or Kyoto. But because he was flexible, he was able to find a way to make money and support his family.
There is no such thing as a "career path" except for people with very narrow minds.
Have you ever seen a sky without vapor trails?
No one asked me if I wanted vapor trails in the sky. But there they are. Every day, the sky is crisscrossed with vapor trails from airplanes. Even on hiking trips, far away from civilization, these things still exist. I hate them. But I have come to accept tham as part of Nature.
The only time I've ever seen the sky without them was in the few weeks following the WTC attack. All planes were grounded. Not a vapor trail to be seen.
It was beautiful.
The ionosphere is an amazing thing. Circling and enveloping the Earth from pole to pole, it captures and blocks much of the deadly radiation from the Sun. Without it, we'd be as dead as Deimos.
So what's the big deal with shooting a few billion particles at it from ground level? Well, those particles, if you've studied any physics at all, are highly charged and very high in energy. That means that as they travel through the ionosphere, they are blasting a hole (albeit on a tiny scale) through the atomsphere. These holes, unlike the Aurora activity caused by the Sun, are directed straight through. The Sun's rays travel perpendicular to the ionosphere, so although there is a lot of particle activity from the Sun, it is mostly absorbed and bent in to the shape of the Van Halen radiation belt. It's a good system, and produces some really beautiful natural artwork.
But poking holes in the ionosphere that lead directly out can lead to any number of consequences. The least among these is that the ionosphere somehow regains and replenishes itself with charged particles. The worst is that a "leak" in the ionosphere leads to a complete destruction of the radiation-blocking area that keeps us alive.
Put advertisments on the Moon, or fly giant reflective satellites around the Earth. Just don't be trying to put a hole in our ozone on purpose.
I was reading about the "American GI (Joe) captured in Iraq" yesterday and the same thought crossed my mind today.
If you are going to tell everyone that spam zombies (or terrorist websites) are out there, why don't you give details like processname (or website URL)?
It does no one any good if you just say, "Hey, there's a chance your computer may be infected and is a zombie spammer," if you don't also tell us the zombie process name.
On occasion I like to call it Santix, but I don't want to step on anyone's toes, so I just prepend my initials in front of "Linux" (RMS be damned).
The main thing that I try to focus on is security, and being on the LCML security mailing list has greatly improved my ability to find and squash security issues. You wouldn't believe how many security issues Linux has, actually. Luckily, most of the easy things like buffer exploits are already taken care of. The remaining issues are primarily involved in the timing issues of thread and process context switching. Exploiting the system vulnerability when it is grabbing and releasing resources. That kind of thing.
Whether or not the security list is part of the main LCML list is not really a primary concern. I'd rather have those guys working on features and we on the Security side can get those features secure. If we spent all our time thinking about how to make the system secure, we'd still be stuck with an age-old kernel like OpenBSD!
Keep those bug reports coming!
I don't see Linux as being ready for "mum and pup". But I also don't see this as a big deal.
As you get dumber users, you inevitably get a dumber system to hold their fidgety, trembling hands in every little thing.
You don't like the installer? Well, sorry you're not smart enough to grasp "./configure make". (Gee that was tough!)
You don't like the Help system? Oh, did you forget to read the MANUAL that CAME WITH YOUR PACKAGED CD?
Linux is not here to hold our hands. That's what Linux distributors are here for. If you are too cheap to buy the product and receive all the glorious documentation that these companies (Redhat, SuSE, TurboLinux, ad infinitum) provide, and instead you decide to save a few bucks by downloading the product, then how much do you really expect to get out of a system?
I wouldn't expect "mum and pup" to sit down with a Microsoft Windows CD either and be able to figure it out. But of course, Windows comes with a MANUAL. So if you can read (kinda a perquisite to using a computer, don'cha think?) you should be able to get through the basics of installing the system, installing apps, and getting help (hint: it's in the fine manual).
The same goes for any Linux distribution that you can buy packaged up at the store. They all come with manuals, they all come with help, and most come with a phone number to call when you have problems.
I don't feel sorry for "mum and pup" for not being able to work Linux, I feel sorry for them because they obviously can't RTFM.
Everyone around here keeps saying that Apple should get out of the PPC business and get into licensing OSX for the Intel x86 procs. They argue that selling the software is more lucrative than selling the hardware.
I think that Sun is providing us with a very good example of the opposite being true. Even though they literally give their product away for free, they still make money on their hardware. Apple would be fools to give up the high-margin hardware market and try to compete toe to toe with Microsoft Windows.
If IBM really had this "in the bag", why would they need to do such a huge step as issuing a subpoena to Intel for all that information?
No company wants to give up that much information, especially when much of it is not useful for the case and possibly damaging to Intel's business.
So far, Intel has been a relative outsider in all of this, and it is hard to understand what IBM is trying to get by bringing in a hardware manufacturer into this software matter. This may be a motion to subpoena, but even IBM's army of lawyers seems to be grasping at any straw now.
I personally don't think SCO has a very strong case, but watching IBM's actions, it seems that IBM is the one with the lack of firm ground.
Apple has always had significant trouble when Steve Jobs is not at the helm. Gil Amelio and his drive to gain business credibility really put a huge pain on the company.
It has always been about Steve Jobs. The man has insight and what could almost be considered clairvoyance when it comes to building things that people crave. God knows that I'm one of those at his feet, weeping and bathing him in frankincense.
The problem is not the process. It is in the way they present the issue. Any project needs to have a central management team that takes patch submissions and vets them before it goes into the main source.
However, the way they present it is that if you want to contribute, well, tough. You gotta be part of the team, and this is an invitation-only club. So someone comes along and says, "Hey, I'd like to have feature X work. How can I contribute?" And the website says "Fuck off, you're not wanted here." So he says, "Well, screw it. It probably wasn't a good idea in the first place." And then the project loses out on what might be a good feature.
They say "Members only" and "Please help us" simultaneously. Mixed signals, to say the least.
If it requires an article of that length to be written clarifying what really ought to be a straightforward issue, then the people who presented the it are at fault for clouding the issue.