They can pay for the phone calls...
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 2
DSSAgent is a small application that runs in the background and when it sees an Internet connection, it checks with our Web site to see if a new splash screen graphic is available
and from the article:
The agent normally detects when a user is online only to do its transactions; it is not designed to try to connect independently.
What both of these comments show is a lot of ignorance. The only surefire way to check if the user is online is to try connecting to somewhere. Now in my home setup, I have dial on demand, so that if an network packet is detected, it'll dial up my ISP automatically, and I have the illusion of permanent access. The same is true of most of my friends, whether they're using Linux or Windows. So each time DSSAgent checks to see if I'm online, it actually forces me online whether I was already connected or not. Being in Europe, I have to pay for that -- local calls aren't free here. If Mattel had installed this product on my machine without my knowledge or consent, they'd be getting a bill for my phone calls, and a law suit if they didn't pay up...
Why switch from the powerful, scalable OpenServer to a slightly less capable version of the same code?
OK, so you're a troll, but I'll respond anyway. I used to use SCO quite extensively, and I can honestly say if I never have to do so again, it'll be too soon. Now maybe it's improved in the last few years, but I doubt it's changes that much. Maybe that's why SCO have been plugging UnixWare more than OpenServer in recent years, and why the merged codebase of Monterrey is almost all UnixWare and AIX, with little trace of OpenServer, by all accounts.
The stylized folders are nice, and the overlays are clean and intuitive, i.e. broken pencil for (I assume) files w/o write access, the blue megaphone to indicate a playable sound file, and the broken glasses to indicate that the user doesn't have read access to certain files.
I don't like the icons. Sure, they look fine, but they're too big. Yes, I know Nautilus can stretch icons, but they're not likely to look good at anything other than they're natural size. This is one thing that every Unix file manager I've seen has got wrong, and MS (for all their other faults) has got right. Sigh.
It makes sense if you think about it -- you have to draw a line somewhere. There comes a point below which you aren't big enough for big backbones like UUNet or AT&T to care if they lose all your traffic.
Yes, but that's not what they're doing. If you look at the matrix of UK peering agreements, you'll notice that UUNet doesn't peer with quite a lot of the other Linx members. All Linx members are backbone ISPs, not small local outfits, but UUNet (and some of the other larger players) still refuse to peer. And that's refuse to peer, not "we'll peer with you if you pay us". Because at the end of the day, refusing to peer with the smaller guys protects their monopoly, and that's far more valuable to them than the income they'd get by selling peering agreements.
Be able to do word wrap without inserting hard linefeeds in my files!! These just make it look wrong next time I open it up.
What an utterly bizzare feature to desire in a text editor. I'd hate an editor to do this -- you have no idea whether those spaces are really in your text, or just inserted by the editor for display purposes.
Still, as Harri mentioned, you can just do:set linebreak in vim to get the behaviour you want.
a 19-year-old student being suspended for wearing a Pepsi shirt on "Coke Day."
Coke day? What sort of screwed up educational establishment is it that has a Coke day? Not that they'd need one. Certainly when I was at University, Coke was one of the primary food groups, and was positioned right next to the munchie machine to provide handy 24 hour supplies of all your snacking needs:-) But seriously, Coke day? Something's very wrong with that...
All the principles explained in the above article are equally present (or perhaps more so) in Cyberpunk 2020. When I first played Shadowrun, I couldn't help thinking how it was just Cyberpunk with added magic. Of course, I don't know which came first, and I've enjoyed playing both, but for me, Cyberpunk gives a stronger impression of the all powerful global corporation opressing the individual. Sadly, they're both right. The future is going to look far more like a Philip K. Dick novel than an Isaac Asimov one. In many ways, I'm glad I'm not younger than I am. I don't want to be part of that future.
Can it? Last time I looked, the slang code for BRIEF emulation was coded specifically for the DOS version of jed, and I couldn't be bothered to learn enough slang to fix it to work for Linux.
IN the uk we have ac.uk. And no it stands for Academic, not Anonymous Coward.
Actually, it stands for "Academic Community". Similarly,.co.uk represents a "Commercial Organisation", not the commonly used contraction of "company". As such, it should really be pronounced "see-oh-dot-yoo-kay", rather than the "coh-dot-yoo-kay" currently used on TV, but the latter pronunciation is probably too entrenched in the minds of the general population to be changed now.
In addition, he uses the GPL as leverage by refusing to allow the developers who wrote software and released it under the GPL (as the GPL is non-revokable) to compile their programs for use with Motif. That is precisely why I will use proprietary licenses and avoid the GPL; I simply cannot entrust my code to Stallman.
He does no such thing. Releasing software under the GPL gives Stallman no rights whatsoever to your code, unless you assign copyright to him or to some group in which he has influence (such as the FSF). He cannot, and does not, try and prevent you from using Motif with your program. If you wish to do so, go ahead (although you may want to explicitly give permission to link with Motif for those OSes that don't ship Motif as standard). The only possible influence he could have is from the clause stating that software may be relicensed under future versions of the GPL, which he will naturally influence. If you don't like that clause (clause 9), remove it. Simple, really.
Having experienced what it's like to have defamatory stuff published about me and several friends on newsgroups, I'm not too sure where I stand on this one.
Hmmm. Given how much Killing Miranda have played up to the "most hated band in the goth scene" image, are you really in much of a position to complain about defamatory stuff being posted about you? I'd say yes, depending on the circumstances (particularly for non-KM related stuff), but you're treading awfully close to the line. As you say, the real problem is when it spills over into real life, and the smaller the community (such as a small town in Utah, or maybe the UK goth scene), the more likely this is to happen.
If I'm in a crowded room and I yell offensive things about somebody -- even if they're untrue -- I can't get in trouble. If I do the exact same things in print -- like a magazine or a newspaper -- then I can.
Utter rubbish. Libel is the process of causing harm to another's reputation, and it comes in two forms. If the process is written, it's called Defamation. If it's spoken (as in your example), it's called Slander. The only difference is that Defamation, by its very nature, tends to leave some kind of lasting proof, and hence is easier to persue in the courts. Slander relies on witnesses being present (usually when spoken in a public place, or in a televised interview, for example). Also note that truth isn't always a valid defense against libel, if the intent is to maliciously harm reputation, rather than just expose the truth. IANAL.
Definitely not in the same league as many fne polish and russian vodkas.
Indeed. My personal favourite at the moment is Polmos Wyborova. If you're in London, Gerry's off license in Old Compton Street sells a fairly decent selection of vodkas.
Re:Christmas Island TLD
on
DeCSS Update
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· Score: 2
.cx domains are freely available and cheap. 20 UKP for the first year and 10 for every year afterwards.
Amusingly enough, though, they're more expensive than a genuine.uk domain, which costs £7.50 for 2 years at http://www.f2s.net. The subscription form is available in MS Word or PDF formats.
Additionally, how do we know other nations cannot interfere with Sealand? Even a tiny nation like Iraq could take over the island with a few gunboats and some chemical gases.
Mostly because to get to it, they'd have to pass through British territorial waters, something I doubt our beloved government would tollerate. Actually, Sealand has relatively few potential military threats. The UK is one of the safest nations in the world. It has a disproprtionately well equipped military for the size of population, compared to just about any other country in the world. If we treat every nation as hostile to the UK, there are only two that actually pose a real threat -- the USA and Russia. Although others (e.g., China, Iraq, etc.) have armies more than large enough to overrun the UK, only the two I mentioned actually have to capability to get sufficient numbers physically to the UK to cause a problem. The UK would defend Sealand far more readily (as part of the defense of it's own territorial waters) than it would let a foreign nation attack Sealand.
After the trial period you will need to purchase it for $25
Or fire up regedit, remove all entries from your registry that contain the phrase "MicroImages" and reinstall. It won't timeout again. Alternatively, as you say, you could try and find a copy of MI/X v1. I have a copy at home somewhere. Personally, I've given up on MI/X -- it was just too slow. We had to bite the bullet and go for a copy of Exceed instead. Much faster, but its font handling sucks (although no worse than MI/X, it has to be said).
The idea is that each processor module has its own dedicated RAM, which can be accessed both locally and remotely by other machines across the network.
Ideally, yes, although to meet the strict definition of NUMA, it only needs dedicated RAM. That RAM doesn't have to be shared with other (remote) CPU blocks. All it needs is for the memory to not be equally available to all CPUs. See the following example from a DG AViiON:
CPU 15: Model: Intel PentiumPro, 200MHz, online Version: 0 Family: PentiumPro class Stepping: 01/09 8 KB L1 read-only instruction cache 8 KB L1 writeback data cache 1 MB L2 writeback data & instruction cache 128 MB L3 writeback data & instruction cache (shared between CPUs 12 to 15) 896 MB L3 shared UMA memory (shared between CPUs 12 to 15) 1 GB L3 shared UMA memory (shared between CPUs 12 to 15)
As you can see, the memory is shared between each block of 4 CPUs, but it's not accessable by remote blocks. NUMA AViiONs have 3 basic memory types -- shared UMA, local NUMA and remote NUMA.
Maxed out, with the enterprise cabinet, 4GB of RAM and 100GB of storage
Pah! 4GB RAM? Call that maxed out? From one of the DG AViiONs I'm using at work:
$>./hinv Model ID: 0x0001abd2 -- AViiON AV20000 (SMCS (Multi-node)) Prom revision: E00.08 Number of CPUs: 16 Memory: 8 GB
Fully laden, it'll take 32 CPUs and significantly more than 100GB of storage. The newer AV25000 takes up to 64 CPUs and 64GB RAM. I'm hoping that if IBM add NUMA support to Linux for the Sequent box, it'll help with getting it running on the DG NUMA boxen too...
I've noticed that most Beowulf clusters (although admittedly, I don't know about the NOAA one) tend to use standard desktop mini tower cases. Is there any particular reason for doing so, as opposed to going for rackmount servers. I'd expect the latter to provide a much more space efficient system, and in my experience, rack mounted cases tend to have better cooling than their desktop equivalents. This should be particularly noticable when using large number of machines in close proximity. Is it purely a cost issue?
If you've got a problem, post it to Usenet or a listserver. Or e-mail the guy who wrote the SCSI driver in the first place!
Go away, and come back when you've got a clue! That might be an appropriate solution for you or I, but to a company that's basing its business around Linux, it's clearly not. They need guaranteed response times, and that's where someone like Linuxcare comes in. Posting a request on a newsgroup, or emailing someone just isn't going to cut it.
Given that the processors used at the time (6502?) aren't terribly popular anymore, I'm not sure how educational you'd find it.
Nope. In my opinion, 6502 assembler is the best possible way to teach programming. In fact, I'd make a strong case for it being a first language, even before higher level languages. It's simple enough to be easily understood, yet it's complex enough that the student should be able to recognise certain traits when they get to higher level languages -- explaining pointers in C to someone that understands indirect addressing is a lot easier than explaining it to someone that doesn't. Having a quantity of available 6502 code would be a great teaching aid.
Sun is winning in the big server market with upto 64 processors, what is Intel offering, are these 2/4/8 way limited processors, or are we just going to have to wait and see what sort of motherboards appear?
Although Sun support up to 64 CPUs with the E10000, they're not all on one motherboard. Similarly, 64 CPU Intel servers (such as the Data General AV25000) will typically only use 4 CPUs per motherboard. Some newer configurations may use 8, but time will tell. The difference is that Sun have 64 CPUs in traditional SMP configuration. The Intel machines tend to have them in NUMA configurations.
the Progressive Policy Institute has written a report that recommends extending the DMCA to explicitly outlaw technologies like Napster
Actually, no it hasn't. It recommends changing the DMCA such that if a service provider wants to claim protection under the DMCA's safe harbor provisions, they have to be able to track users (no more anonymous access), and that there must be a fixed timeframe in which they must respond to a request to remove infringing material once notified (much like we already have in the UK).
I mean, what can Mozilla do that IE doesn't do already?
Run on my DG/UX box. And my Sparc Linux box. And my x86 Linux box. If you're going to troll, at least come up with something that isn't so trivial to counter...
There's no technical reason "mainstream," by which I assume you mean "x86" processors could not be arranged in such an architecture.
Indeed not, and in fact, some are already doing so. See Data General's PIII Xeon based 64-CPU AV 25000 server, and their AV Flex offering. You can run DG/UX and NT simultaneously on the same machine. As far as I can tell, they developed AV Flex because they're quite securely in bed with Microsoft now, and having NT unable to run on their top of the line box was a bit of an embarassment. As it is, you can now run NT on the AV25000, even if each NT partition can only be allocated 4 CPUs. DG/UX, of course, runs just fine on all 64...
Slashdot Mirror
and from the article:
The agent normally detects when a user is online only to do its transactions; it is not designed to try to connect independently.
What both of these comments show is a lot of ignorance. The only surefire way to check if the user is online is to try connecting to somewhere. Now in my home setup, I have dial on demand, so that if an network packet is detected, it'll dial up my ISP automatically, and I have the illusion of permanent access. The same is true of most of my friends, whether they're using Linux or Windows. So each time DSSAgent checks to see if I'm online, it actually forces me online whether I was already connected or not. Being in Europe, I have to pay for that -- local calls aren't free here. If Mattel had installed this product on my machine without my knowledge or consent, they'd be getting a bill for my phone calls, and a law suit if they didn't pay up...
OK, so you're a troll, but I'll respond anyway. I used to use SCO quite extensively, and I can honestly say if I never have to do so again, it'll be too soon. Now maybe it's improved in the last few years, but I doubt it's changes that much. Maybe that's why SCO have been plugging UnixWare more than OpenServer in recent years, and why the merged codebase of Monterrey is almost all UnixWare and AIX, with little trace of OpenServer, by all accounts.
I don't like the icons. Sure, they look fine, but they're too big. Yes, I know Nautilus can stretch icons, but they're not likely to look good at anything other than they're natural size. This is one thing that every Unix file manager I've seen has got wrong, and MS (for all their other faults) has got right. Sigh.
Yes, but that's not what they're doing. If you look at the matrix of UK peering agreements, you'll notice that UUNet doesn't peer with quite a lot of the other Linx members. All Linx members are backbone ISPs, not small local outfits, but UUNet (and some of the other larger players) still refuse to peer. And that's refuse to peer, not "we'll peer with you if you pay us". Because at the end of the day, refusing to peer with the smaller guys protects their monopoly, and that's far more valuable to them than the income they'd get by selling peering agreements.
What an utterly bizzare feature to desire in a text editor. I'd hate an editor to do this -- you have no idea whether those spaces are really in your text, or just inserted by the editor for display purposes.
Still, as Harri mentioned, you can just do :set linebreak in vim to get the behaviour you want.
Coke day? What sort of screwed up educational establishment is it that has a Coke day? Not that they'd need one. Certainly when I was at University, Coke was one of the primary food groups, and was positioned right next to the munchie machine to provide handy 24 hour supplies of all your snacking needs :-) But seriously, Coke day? Something's very wrong with that...
All the principles explained in the above article are equally present (or perhaps more so) in Cyberpunk 2020. When I first played Shadowrun, I couldn't help thinking how it was just Cyberpunk with added magic. Of course, I don't know which came first, and I've enjoyed playing both, but for me, Cyberpunk gives a stronger impression of the all powerful global corporation opressing the individual. Sadly, they're both right. The future is going to look far more like a Philip K. Dick novel than an Isaac Asimov one. In many ways, I'm glad I'm not younger than I am. I don't want to be part of that future.
Can it? Last time I looked, the slang code for BRIEF emulation was coded specifically for the DOS version of jed, and I couldn't be bothered to learn enough slang to fix it to work for Linux.
Actually, it stands for "Academic Community". Similarly, .co.uk represents a "Commercial Organisation", not the commonly used contraction of "company". As such, it should really be pronounced "see-oh-dot-yoo-kay", rather than the "coh-dot-yoo-kay" currently used on TV, but the latter pronunciation is probably too entrenched in the minds of the general population to be changed now.
He does no such thing. Releasing software under the GPL gives Stallman no rights whatsoever to your code, unless you assign copyright to him or to some group in which he has influence (such as the FSF). He cannot, and does not, try and prevent you from using Motif with your program. If you wish to do so, go ahead (although you may want to explicitly give permission to link with Motif for those OSes that don't ship Motif as standard). The only possible influence he could have is from the clause stating that software may be relicensed under future versions of the GPL, which he will naturally influence. If you don't like that clause (clause 9), remove it. Simple, really.
Hmmm. Given how much Killing Miranda have played up to the "most hated band in the goth scene" image, are you really in much of a position to complain about defamatory stuff being posted about you? I'd say yes, depending on the circumstances (particularly for non-KM related stuff), but you're treading awfully close to the line. As you say, the real problem is when it spills over into real life, and the smaller the community (such as a small town in Utah, or maybe the UK goth scene), the more likely this is to happen.
BTW, what's the reason for the no show at Gotham?
Utter rubbish. Libel is the process of causing harm to another's reputation, and it comes in two forms. If the process is written, it's called Defamation. If it's spoken (as in your example), it's called Slander. The only difference is that Defamation, by its very nature, tends to leave some kind of lasting proof, and hence is easier to persue in the courts. Slander relies on witnesses being present (usually when spoken in a public place, or in a televised interview, for example). Also note that truth isn't always a valid defense against libel, if the intent is to maliciously harm reputation, rather than just expose the truth. IANAL.
Indeed. My personal favourite at the moment is Polmos Wyborova. If you're in London, Gerry's off license in Old Compton Street sells a fairly decent selection of vodkas.
Amusingly enough, though, they're more expensive than a genuine .uk domain, which costs £7.50 for 2 years at http://www.f2s.net. The subscription form is available in MS Word or PDF formats.
Mostly because to get to it, they'd have to pass through British territorial waters, something I doubt our beloved government would tollerate. Actually, Sealand has relatively few potential military threats. The UK is one of the safest nations in the world. It has a disproprtionately well equipped military for the size of population, compared to just about any other country in the world. If we treat every nation as hostile to the UK, there are only two that actually pose a real threat -- the USA and Russia. Although others (e.g., China, Iraq, etc.) have armies more than large enough to overrun the UK, only the two I mentioned actually have to capability to get sufficient numbers physically to the UK to cause a problem. The UK would defend Sealand far more readily (as part of the defense of it's own territorial waters) than it would let a foreign nation attack Sealand.
Or fire up regedit, remove all entries from your registry that contain the phrase "MicroImages" and reinstall. It won't timeout again. Alternatively, as you say, you could try and find a copy of MI/X v1. I have a copy at home somewhere. Personally, I've given up on MI/X -- it was just too slow. We had to bite the bullet and go for a copy of Exceed instead. Much faster, but its font handling sucks (although no worse than MI/X, it has to be said).
Ideally, yes, although to meet the strict definition of NUMA, it only needs dedicated RAM. That RAM doesn't have to be shared with other (remote) CPU blocks. All it needs is for the memory to not be equally available to all CPUs. See the following example from a DG AViiON:
As you can see, the memory is shared between each block of 4 CPUs, but it's not accessable by remote blocks. NUMA AViiONs have 3 basic memory types -- shared UMA, local NUMA and remote NUMA.
Pah! 4GB RAM? Call that maxed out? From one of the DG AViiONs I'm using at work:
Fully laden, it'll take 32 CPUs and significantly more than 100GB of storage. The newer AV25000 takes up to 64 CPUs and 64GB RAM. I'm hoping that if IBM add NUMA support to Linux for the Sequent box, it'll help with getting it running on the DG NUMA boxen too...
I've noticed that most Beowulf clusters (although admittedly, I don't know about the NOAA one) tend to use standard desktop mini tower cases. Is there any particular reason for doing so, as opposed to going for rackmount servers. I'd expect the latter to provide a much more space efficient system, and in my experience, rack mounted cases tend to have better cooling than their desktop equivalents. This should be particularly noticable when using large number of machines in close proximity. Is it purely a cost issue?
Go away, and come back when you've got a clue! That might be an appropriate solution for you or I, but to a company that's basing its business around Linux, it's clearly not. They need guaranteed response times, and that's where someone like Linuxcare comes in. Posting a request on a newsgroup, or emailing someone just isn't going to cut it.
Nope. In my opinion, 6502 assembler is the best possible way to teach programming. In fact, I'd make a strong case for it being a first language, even before higher level languages. It's simple enough to be easily understood, yet it's complex enough that the student should be able to recognise certain traits when they get to higher level languages -- explaining pointers in C to someone that understands indirect addressing is a lot easier than explaining it to someone that doesn't. Having a quantity of available 6502 code would be a great teaching aid.
Although Sun support up to 64 CPUs with the E10000, they're not all on one motherboard. Similarly, 64 CPU Intel servers (such as the Data General AV25000) will typically only use 4 CPUs per motherboard. Some newer configurations may use 8, but time will tell. The difference is that Sun have 64 CPUs in traditional SMP configuration. The Intel machines tend to have them in NUMA configurations.
Actually, no it hasn't. It recommends changing the DMCA such that if a service provider wants to claim protection under the DMCA's safe harbor provisions, they have to be able to track users (no more anonymous access), and that there must be a fixed timeframe in which they must respond to a request to remove infringing material once notified (much like we already have in the UK).
Run on my DG/UX box. And my Sparc Linux box. And my x86 Linux box. If you're going to troll, at least come up with something that isn't so trivial to counter...
Indeed not, and in fact, some are already doing so. See Data General's PIII Xeon based 64-CPU AV 25000 server, and their AV Flex offering. You can run DG/UX and NT simultaneously on the same machine. As far as I can tell, they developed AV Flex because they're quite securely in bed with Microsoft now, and having NT unable to run on their top of the line box was a bit of an embarassment. As it is, you can now run NT on the AV25000, even if each NT partition can only be allocated 4 CPUs. DG/UX, of course, runs just fine on all 64...