Invasion of privacy probably not. However unless they were very careful in the wording of their contracts and people didn't read very will it might well constitute a criminal offence under the computer misuse act. It may also be possible to take civil action against them if as reported it recorded material intended for adults and let children play it ignoring the parental controls.
WEP is worthless, MAC based authentication is worthless, basically treat the cards as a public shouting space no more.
You need end to end encryption for the users. That is easy for the Unix crowd but for "what does this button do" level folks something like PoPTOP and getting them to use PPTP may work out easier (although early PPTP isnt terribly secure either)
I have to completely disagree here. Free unix work existed before GNU and did not rely on GNU tools. There were plenty of other sources of tools than GNU, and there indeed still are. There were other x86 C compilers, (indeed Linux 8086 uses bcc) and everything else needed.
Neither did Richard exactly invent the free software movement it goes back years before him. What he did is very important - the GPL, the community stuff, articulating the actual message.
In terms of what rights people should have to the content I agree. One thing the USA and EU badly needs to figure out is what you can't be allowed to control. There are serious issues here. DRM doesn't just threaten personal rights it threatens the historical record and national security
How are you going to get a whistleblower or contact in a terrorist group to help you when the documents they leak contain watermarks the government has no infrastructure to remove and has banned research into circumventing ?
There is an alternative for the nvidia 3d - http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net has usable but far from complete XFree86 4.2 3d for Nvidia cards.
However its incomplete due to lack of info, its slow and it needs a few folks to bring utah-glx up to 4.2 - at that point lots of very old cards 3D also starts to work on Linux
If you are going to insult me look up your facts. If Microsoft paid typical US dividends they would have under 20% of their current slush fund. (under because at 80% dividends the investors not the corporation got the benefit of reinvestment of most of the interest)
If they choose to sit on that $40 billion they should be paying tax on it because I really doubt they can demonstrate its neccessary for operational overheads. In which case 39% of it belongs to the US people. Which on a quick back of the envelope calculation is a bit over $50 per US citizen
Eben says "the patent issue is unaffected by" - referring to the rotor source code license. Read - you didn't have any rights before, you don't have any now.
ECMA is not an immediate magical patent waiver system.
We have a variety of these people. There is a long standing joke that MFI furniture is good for people who move house a lot - one kick and it flatpacks again.
The best desks I've found lurk in dusty old second hand furniture shops. My desk has a 1.5" thick solid wooden top.Hardly sustainable forestry, but at least being old and second hand its not doing any more damage
Why pray do you need a commercial DVD to DVD copier. I doubt all the people who grabbed things like the leaked Star Wars II movie needed a DVD copier. All they needed was a network interface and a hard disk.
Do you not think that a couple of thousand students getting hit by small claims actions after their machines are shown to be used for mp3 distribution without the authors permission is going to have more effect ?
If you are thinking "they'll just go underground" thats perfect. The other 99% of the population won't be able to find the stuff.
There is no direct obligation to pay dividends but a company choosing to retain the cash as and above its needs (clearly the case IMHO) is required to pay tax on it
A PC beats a PDA any day
on
Sony PCG-U1
·
· Score: 2
I've had an IBM PC110 since 1994 - similar size machine but 486 era, much smaller disk/memory and only a 486 CPU. Its still vastly more useful in many ways than palmtoilets and the various other PDA devices that people use. The PDA's are slowly getting there but the PC110 has a real keyboard, runs X11, runs x86 binaries, supports every PCMCIA driver the x86 platform in general does and so forth.
Its close to pervasive computing - it lacks vga out to images projected onto mirror shades, it lacks a cable link down the sleeve to a chord keypad/mouse and it needs a nice microphone/earphone for voice/audio/encrpyted phonecalls via a GSM modem and 802.11 card
The last version of the proposal I saw (which is a while back now) set a minimal ceiling below which they didn't consider the hassle of collecting the tax justified nor the practicality of forcing small businesses to collect it.
Within the EU there are similar VAT floors below which VAT is optional (there are cases that it makes sense to charge it when doing business to business work).
This also leads to such fun as people who run two companies, a VAT registered one that paints buildings for businesses (who can claim it back) and a non VAT one that does smaller amounts of business keeps below the VAT limit and paints houses for individuals (who cant)
US software patents apply anyway. No doubt over time you will see microsoft try and eliminate free software from the USA. Quite what they think will happen when software is 100 times cheaper abroad than the USA I'm not sure.
It does maybe also explain the US governments position and desire to look the other way and not punish microsoft. Perhaps they think that a combination of draconian patent lobbying world wide combined with Microsoft co-operation will let them suck all the money out of foreign developing nations by enforcing windows (plus NSAKEY and the like) on any that threaten to become the new economic powers.
Actually gtk has supported this for some time
on
Qt For The Console
·
· Score: 2
Pavel Machek's "cursed-gtk" is a text mode gtk theme and some small patches to gtk where gtk pokes at X11 itself rather than going via gdk. It's far from perfect because of some of the current interactions but does work.
Having run tools like dmidecode across a lot of systems the laptop market definitely has a lot of rebadging going on. Taking apart other devices shows its nothing new. HP printers are full of canon parts, HP's early digital cameras are Konica, Dell laptops don't all seem to be made by Dell. Most vendors desktops at the lower end are handled by big.tw build to order houses.
Its not cost effective to run a computing hardware company in the USA
I've had network patches from interesting places. I've done work with bodies that wouldn't even tell me what they were using Linux for.
Linux is already used for signal descrambling, SToW (Simulated Theatre of War) and a large number of other things, many of which mere mortals are never likely to discover until thirty years on.
I get kernel fixes from such people, optimisations from such people and so forth, but I've yet to see any GPL'd nuclear attack management tools and I guess those won't be GPL 8)
Its mostly because a certain large vendors publicity machine keeps pushing any bug report that impacts open source in the slightest as a big thing and feeding it to the press.
Dirty game really, but thata how they play it.
This is why news stories keep starting with Linux blah and then turning into "everyone blah"
So its a faster version of a 1994 IBM !
on
Tiqit Handheld PC
·
· Score: 2
Yes IBM made a machine about the same weight with a 5" or so 640x480 DSTN colour display, a 486 CPU and 8-20Mb of RAM. Oh and its also a phone handset, modem, fax and has 2 PCMCIA slots and a CF slot.
Its sad its taken from 1994-now for anyone to do anything with the concept mass market, even sadder that IBM killed the original rather than following the line further.
As regards image quality - the PC110 runs XFCE acceptably and X is quite usable.
DivX is waste of energy and programmer time. Its so patent trapped that one yawn from the movie industry to the patent holders and it'll be gone except in very limited form
Something like VP3.2 holds more promise (and hey I got the lib to actually -compile- on a non windows/mac box two days ago)
Now combine VP3.2 video with Ogg audio and you have a credible media format. Add xhtml navigation and you have something really cool
Re:These patches can hardly be critical
on
Missing Kernel Patches
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Precisely. This patch was in fact submitted and the consensus was thats its tricky to prove correct, its 1 page of memory and it was better to wait for 2.5 before doing that work.
I don't know how it stands in the US, but the habit in the UK now days is either to flash the firmware for the DVD drive, buy it preflashed with region free firmware or for the terribly paranoid simply buy a couple more. At $30 a drive the cost for foreign film viewing is somewhat lower than the cost of a PAL/NTSC convertor 8)
Re:Remarkable: Already slashdotted
on
Alan Cox Interview
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I can do 2000 hits per second on a pentium 166, you have another zero to add on to your numbers
(Linux + thttpd)
Re:Remarkable: Already slashdotted
on
Alan Cox Interview
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I doubt the poor people knew what hit them. Its a tiny little site working on promoting and improving IT in wales 8)
Thank the tax system - it punishes you for not doign this kind of thing. Nor alas is it just a US problem.
Whats sad is the tax system ought to encourage radio shack to take the box down the local school or college and throw them into the "fun stuff for electronics lessons" bucket
Slashdot Mirror
Invasion of privacy probably not. However unless they were very careful in the wording of their contracts and people didn't read very will it might well constitute a criminal offence under the computer misuse act. It may also be possible to take civil action against them if as reported it recorded material intended for adults and let children play it ignoring the parental controls.
WEP is worthless, MAC based authentication is worthless, basically treat the cards as a public shouting space no more.
You need end to end encryption for the users. That is easy for the Unix crowd but for "what does this button do" level folks something like PoPTOP and getting them to use PPTP may work out easier (although early PPTP isnt terribly secure either)
I have to completely disagree here. Free unix work existed before GNU and did not rely on GNU tools. There were plenty of other sources of tools than GNU, and there indeed still are. There were other x86 C compilers, (indeed Linux 8086 uses bcc) and everything else needed.
Neither did Richard exactly invent the free software movement it goes back years before him. What he did is very important - the GPL, the community stuff, articulating the actual message.
That by the way is a peculiarly US institution. In most countries authors do get some returns from libraries
In terms of what rights people should have to the content I agree. One thing the USA and EU badly needs to figure out is what you can't be allowed to control. There are serious issues here. DRM doesn't just threaten personal rights it threatens the historical record and national security
How are you going to get a whistleblower or contact in a terrorist group to help you when the documents they leak contain watermarks the government has no infrastructure to remove and has banned research into circumventing ?
There is an alternative for the nvidia 3d -
http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net has usable but far from complete XFree86 4.2 3d for Nvidia cards.
However its incomplete due to lack of info, its slow and it needs a few folks to bring utah-glx up to 4.2 - at that point lots of very old cards 3D also starts to work on Linux
If you are going to insult me look up your facts. If Microsoft paid typical US dividends they would have under 20% of their current slush fund. (under because at 80% dividends the investors not the corporation got the benefit of reinvestment of most of the interest)
If they choose to sit on that $40 billion they should be paying tax on it because I really doubt they can demonstrate its neccessary for operational overheads. In which case 39% of it belongs to the US people. Which on a quick back of the envelope calculation is a bit over $50 per US citizen
Eben says "the patent issue is unaffected by" - referring to the rotor source code license. Read - you didn't have any rights before, you don't have any now.
ECMA is not an immediate magical patent waiver system.
We have a variety of these people. There is a long standing joke that MFI furniture is good for people who move house a lot - one kick and it flatpacks again.
The best desks I've found lurk in dusty old second hand furniture shops. My desk has a 1.5" thick solid wooden top.Hardly sustainable forestry, but at least being old and second hand its not doing any more damage
Why pray do you need a commercial DVD to DVD copier. I doubt all the people who grabbed things like the leaked Star Wars II movie needed a DVD copier. All they needed was a network interface and a hard disk.
Do you not think that a couple of thousand students getting hit by small claims actions after their machines are shown to be used for mp3 distribution without the authors permission is going to have more effect ?
If you are thinking "they'll just go underground" thats perfect. The other 99% of the population won't be able to find the stuff.
Title 26, Chapter 1 subchapter - G
IRS pub 542
IRS ruling 75-305
There is no direct obligation to pay dividends but a company choosing to retain the cash as and above its needs (clearly the case IMHO) is required to pay tax on it
I've had an IBM PC110 since 1994 - similar size machine but 486 era, much smaller disk/memory and only a 486 CPU. Its still vastly more useful in many ways than palmtoilets and the various other PDA devices that people use. The PDA's are slowly getting there but the PC110 has a real keyboard, runs X11, runs x86 binaries, supports every PCMCIA driver the x86 platform in general does and so forth.
Its close to pervasive computing - it lacks vga out to images projected onto mirror shades, it lacks a cable link down the sleeve to a chord keypad/mouse and it needs a nice microphone/earphone for voice/audio/encrpyted phonecalls via a GSM modem and 802.11 card
The last version of the proposal I saw (which is a while back now) set a minimal ceiling below which they didn't consider the hassle of collecting the tax justified nor the practicality of forcing small businesses to collect it.
Within the EU there are similar VAT floors below which VAT is optional (there are cases that it makes sense to charge it when doing business to business work).
This also leads to such fun as people who run two companies, a VAT registered one that paints buildings for businesses (who can claim it back) and a non VAT one that does smaller amounts of business keeps below the VAT limit and paints houses for individuals (who cant)
US software patents apply anyway. No doubt over time you will see microsoft try and eliminate free software from the USA. Quite what they think will happen when software is 100 times cheaper abroad than the USA I'm not sure.
It does maybe also explain the US governments position and desire to look the other way and not punish microsoft. Perhaps they think that a combination of draconian patent lobbying world wide combined with Microsoft co-operation will let them suck all the money out of foreign developing nations by enforcing windows (plus NSAKEY and the like) on any that threaten to become the new economic powers.
Pavel Machek's "cursed-gtk" is a text mode gtk theme and some small patches to gtk where gtk pokes at X11 itself rather than going via gdk. It's far from perfect because of some of the current interactions but does work.
Having run tools like dmidecode across a lot of systems the laptop market definitely has a lot of rebadging going on. Taking apart other devices shows its nothing new. HP printers are full of canon parts, HP's early digital cameras are Konica, Dell laptops don't all seem to be made by Dell. Most vendors desktops at the lower end are handled by big .tw build to order houses.
Its not cost effective to run a computing hardware company in the USA
I've had network patches from interesting places. I've done work with bodies that wouldn't even tell me what they were using Linux for.
Linux is already used for signal descrambling, SToW (Simulated Theatre of War) and a large number of other things, many of which mere mortals are never likely to discover until thirty years on.
I get kernel fixes from such people, optimisations from such people and so forth, but I've yet to see any GPL'd nuclear attack management tools and I guess those won't be GPL 8)
Its mostly because a certain large vendors publicity machine keeps pushing any bug report that impacts open source in the slightest as a big thing and feeding it to the press.
Dirty game really, but thata how they play it.
This is why news stories keep starting with Linux blah and then turning into "everyone blah"
Yes IBM made a machine about the same weight with a 5" or so 640x480 DSTN colour display, a 486 CPU and 8-20Mb of RAM. Oh and its also a phone handset, modem, fax and has 2 PCMCIA slots and a CF slot.
Its sad its taken from 1994-now for anyone to do anything with the concept mass market, even sadder that IBM killed the original rather than following the line further.
As regards image quality - the PC110 runs XFCE acceptably and X is quite usable.
DivX is waste of energy and programmer time. Its so patent trapped that one yawn from the movie industry to the patent holders and it'll be gone except in very limited form
Something like VP3.2 holds more promise (and hey I got the lib to actually -compile- on a non windows/mac box two days ago)
Now combine VP3.2 video with Ogg audio and you have a credible media format. Add xhtml navigation and you have something really cool
Precisely. This patch was in fact submitted and the consensus was thats its tricky to prove correct, its 1 page of memory and it was better to wait for 2.5 before doing that work.
I don't know how it stands in the US, but the habit in the UK now days is either to flash the firmware for the DVD drive, buy it preflashed with region free firmware or for the terribly paranoid simply buy a couple more. At $30 a drive the cost for foreign film viewing is somewhat lower than the cost of a PAL/NTSC convertor 8)
I can do 2000 hits per second on a pentium 166, you have another zero to add on to your numbers
(Linux + thttpd)
I doubt the poor people knew what hit them. Its a tiny little site working on promoting and improving IT in wales 8)
Thank the tax system - it punishes you for not doign this kind of thing. Nor alas is it just a US problem.
Whats sad is the tax system ought to encourage radio shack to take the box down the local school or college and throw them into the "fun stuff for electronics lessons" bucket