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  1. Blame in the wrong place on FCC to Fine Curses More Than Nuke Violations · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Much as I loathe some of the stupid things the FCC does, and makes broadcasters do, they're not the ones to blame here.

    Congress is pushing the stepped-up enforcement.
    Congress is responsible for the raise in fines.

    If you've got a problem with this, write your two senators, and representative.

    Furthermore, there is one group who are responsible for 99.9% of the FCC indecency complaints. Perhaps there's a problem not with the government, but with some ninnies who have nothing better to do than worry about what people are watching on TV, or listening to on the radio.

    (Yes, I am a broadcaster, no I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer, yadda, yadda, yadda).

  2. Re:Sirius sucks on Sirius Confirms iPod Satellite Talks · · Score: 1

    Signal angle. Driving back through North Dakota on I-94 (WA to VA), I'd lose XM reception when I'd pass a truck. :-)

    When you're not so far north, it's not bad at all.

  3. Re:Golden oppourtunity for L4/Hurd on Ars Technica's Hannibal on IBM's Cell · · Score: 1

    Marcus et. al. were discussing today something and they mentioned that there is nobody working on the driver interface for L4/Hurd yet.

    Like everything else with the Hurd, it'll come in time. I'd do something with it, but I don't have a clue as how I'd write a device driver, much less an interface for one.

    It seems a good match; i.e. L4 runs in the main core, and various translators and other processes run on the cells. If a cell could be programmed to run the filesystem, for instance, it would totally free up the core for other business.

    You could certainly do some interesting things as far as prioritization/realtime goes. I've kind of wondered what L4 hurd would be like if they sort of abandoned the standard mainframe timesharing model, and really focused it at desktop performance first. Drops has some interesting things going for it already, using L4, but anything unix-like you want to run is stuck in L4-linux. :-/

    The L4/Hurd team is real close to getting the last peices in place to compile Mach based Hurd under L4, and if you ever tried Debian GNU/Hurd, you know its pretty near feature-complete and a pretty neat system to run.

    Well, I won't go that far. The L4 port is still a way off, imo, having built it from CVS recently. It still is neat to see it boot the modules. L4 really reminds you how freakin' fast modern hardware is.

    As for the mach port, yes, it's _very_ stable these days. I have a machine running it, and got something like an 80-day uptime this summer. Very impressed. Running boa+qmail, as well as standard text-based unix apps (emacs, mutt, BitchX, etc.).

  4. NetBSD stands to gain share on Where Does NetBSD Fit In? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why? Because it now doesn't trail in performance, and the quality seems to be better than the FreeBSD 5.x releases. (i.e. *all* of PF works, not just parts.....pf doesn't work on bridge interfaces under FreeBSD. Nor does it play very nicely with vlan support)

    If you haven't tried NetBSD 2.0, you ought to. If you're looking at the now-looming death of FreeBSD 4.x and need a replacement, look at NetBSD. Also, if you have older hardware, NetBSD is probably a better choice than Linux. Glibc is very large these days, while NetBSD's libc is still pretty tight. I've been using an RC version of NetBSD 2.0 on a SS10MP machine for a few months now...zero problems, and the MP support works fine. It's also feels snappier than Solaris 9.

  5. Re:Get a real distro on 4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X · · Score: 1

    I may be feeding a troll here, but.....

    Huh? Slackware's setup is anything but easy for most people. It's no sweat for me, as I first used it in 1994, but compared to WinXP, OSX, or one of the fruitygui Linux distros, it's not at all intuitive. I even had a glitch with it after not using it for a couple of years (I use Debian mostly), as did a friend of mine who uses almost exclusively BSD (he needed to use a piece of hardware that FreeBSD doesn't support).

    Don't get me wrong, I like slackware a lot. But it's certainly not for novice users.

  6. Re:Off the top of my head, here you go on Comparing Linux To System VR4 · · Score: 1

    But that just barfs out what's written in device.map, a file that's sitting in /boot/grub. If those devices change and you don't update it...

    Or if you want to boot from a device you've just inserted, or you manage to kill the filesystem where grub lived (/me raises hand there)....

    PCs have this problem with too much backwards compatibility. The fucked up 1981 boot code perfectly illustrates that. There is absolutely no good reason that a PC built in 2005 should be able to boot DOS. Not one.

  7. Re:The difference is... on Comparing Linux To System VR4 · · Score: 1

    Haven't always been.

    And, on a kernel level, OSX isn't BSD, either. It's mach, which has things like native threading, and its own message-passing facility...separate from what you'd find in a traditional unix kernel. (NetBSD supports Mach IPC now, too, to support Darwin binary emulation)

  8. Re:Off the top of my head, here you go on Comparing Linux To System VR4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    3. Boot-up code. Grub + Linux rocks. It's the best solution out there. Vastly superious to everything, including Sun's implementation. Of course, Sun is hobbled by that Open Boot nonsense, where you have to type an absolutely absurd amount of stuff to specify a device.

    Not. OpenBoot/OpenFirmware are vastly superior to the cheesy i-must-look-like-a-floppy system that crippled pcs have. When grub supports testing hardware, or listing the devices present inside the system over a serial console, let me know. List the scsi busses and the devices present? I've used OpenBoot(sun), OpenFirmware(Apple), the NeXT Rom monitor, as well as the stuff on Alpha and PA-RISC, which I can't remember the names of right now -- they're all much more flexible than grub.

    Grub also still doesn't work on all PC hardware. I've never gotten it to work with a Compaq SmartArray card. Never. Several different versions of Grub, several different SmartArrays.

    Granted, Grub is a massive improvement over crap like lilo, but it's nowhere near as flexible as what you'd find on a good unix machine.

  9. Re:From the UVa Perspective .. on Who Needs Harvard? · · Score: 1

    I think VA is a bit of a different situation, though. We're really outside the Ivy League sphere of influence. The old boys network here consists of three schools: UVA, William and Mary, and Washington and Lee. Two of those schools happen to be public. Still, they're among the oldest universities in the country. The age of the institution directly affects the number of alumni floating around.

    I went to a small school, but I don't regret it. I think I met enough of the network that I can pull strings to get somewhere if I want to. At the moment, however, I'm trying to get my own business off the ground.

  10. I don't want to be in his mind on Inside the Mind of a Virus Writer · · Score: 1

    The only part of me I want inside a virus author is my boot in his ass.

    While hiring these guys might help in the short term, long term it does nothing to discourage other authors. If they manage to avoid jail, they've got a big payday coming. To me, that's exactly the wrong message to send.

    If viruses, worms, spyware, and spam disappeared tomorrow, I would probably be unemployed. And you know what, I'd be okay with that, because it'd mean that my customers don't need me to fix the problems these guys cause. There's lots of other things I could be doing.

  11. Re:GNUstep has, and always will, do this on Bundled Applications for GNU/Linux? · · Score: 1

    Uh, what's the big deal about one more exec? openapp is a very small program that runs quickly. It isn't like you're having to fire up oowriter to start a program.

    In fact, most of the time, starting a program undet the NeXT/Open/GNUstep/OSX environments, you're doing the clicky-da-purty-picture thing, not running the app from the command line. On the NeXTstep 3.3 machine here next to me, the unix programs are unix programs that you run directly, and the NeXT programs are the ones wtih app containers. It's a question of apples (no pun intended) and oranges -- you have app containers for the big graphical applications, and the stuff that runs on the command-line, you do the old-fashioned way.

  12. Re:+5: Anti-Bush Tirade on In the Year 2020 · · Score: 1

    f this is true, why haven't the economists been coming out of the woodwork in support of this plan? Why have so many of them come out of the woodwork to say that the centerpiece of his plan--private accounts--is more likely to hurt Social Security than help it?

    You haven't been paying much attention to Alan Greenspan's recent pronouncements, have you? I forgive you, because you're overseas and not paying attention to US news sources. But it's kind of hard to miss.

    It is not Iraq all over again. Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme, and has to fail -- maintaining it is impossible. People also don't pay attention to the harsh facts of the program when it was instituted.....there were sixteen payees to each recepiant, and the national life expectancy was below the retirement age. Today, there are three payees, and the average life expectancy is eleven years after the retirement age.

    Medicare has exacerbated the problem (and Bush made it worse by deciding that it's a good idea to force taxpayers to pay for old men's Viagra). Medicare is scheduled to go broke before Social Security.

    -- big anti-Bush rant snippage, because it's not even worth commenting on --

    The surface: We're trying to fix Social Security. Dig deeper: We're trying to dismantle a socialist program and return it to the hands of private industry. Dig deeper still: We believe it will benefit us in the long run, but we're not about to get bogged down by actually debating this.

    Government pensions should be eliminated -- I disagree with giving them to "private industry." Your retirement is your responsibility, not mine.

    Hence, we end up abusing projections, cherrypicking data for the worst case scenarios, and hauling out the boogeyman of a "bankrupt social security" that will leave us broke and destitute--which simply isn't the case.

    Take a math course, and a public finance course, it might do you good. It's a pyramid scheme. With a declining birthrate, and increasing number of beneficiaries, it's simple math -- it will collapse, unless you up taxes well over fifty percent, and eliminate the yearly caps for individuals. The only way to "save" it is to raise the retirement age to eighty or higher. Outlawing birth control and abortion would help matters, too, because getting that population up will be necessary. People, start gettin' busy, because the baby boomers begin retiring in fifteen years....those kids will need to go right to work!

    Yes, Social Security needs attention and adjustment.
    Wait a minute, you just said it was fine!
    No, it's not the ticking time bomb the administration is so fervently claiming it is.
    Then, why wait until it is, when it can be done cleanly now, without causing more people difficulty?

  13. Re:What's a bogus patent? on Altnet Threatens P2P Companies Over File Hash Patents · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But, you have to remember that patent attorneys aren't programmers. They search through prior patents to see if this particular method has been patented. If it has, the application is rejected. If not, the application is granted. There really isn't a way for them to search for prior art easily, especially if it's a subject they, themselves, don't understand.

    The answer, of course, is to change the law, and make due dilligence incumbent upon the applicant. Then you build in punative laws that discourage patenting things for which prior art obviously exists. And you make the patent holder pay for all litigation costs incurred by whoever sues them when the patent is overturned.

  14. Re:The Washington Post Article (registration req) on Altnet Threatens P2P Companies Over File Hash Patents · · Score: 1

    Thank you. The thing about this, though, is it has some far-reaching consequences outside the p2p community....

    Think, for example, of pretty much any internet-based software distribution. cd /usr/pkgsrc/misc/screen; make install clean

    The scripts go and fetch the source to GNU Screen from ftp.gnu.org, or a mirror site. It then checks the hash against the hash recorded in the distinfo file.

    Imagine if the non-profits like Debian, the BSDs, etc. would have to license this just to distribute software. It's not a pretty picture.

  15. Re:What's a bogus patent? on Altnet Threatens P2P Companies Over File Hash Patents · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, it's a real patent.

    But where the problem lies is that there's no requirement for the applicant to do due dilligence in seeking out prior art -- that's the job for the patent office. As many recent events have shown, they're not doing a very good job of it. So, the patent gets granted. Then it's a real pain to get it overturned, obvious prior art or not.

  16. I don't see how the patent attaches..... on Altnet Threatens P2P Companies Over File Hash Patents · · Score: 5, Informative

    What, from my reading, the patented technology does, is find dupes, and reassign the "truename." to the dupes, whether remotely or locally.

    For example, you have foo.txt. Someone copies foo.txt to bar.txt, without changing any of the data contained within foo.txt (it's some pretty piece of ascii art, just to keep you amused for a moment....).

    This thing would keep tables on the files, and when run, would go back and rename bar.txt to foo.txt if wanted, or could delete bar.txt if the user requested.

    But still, it's pretty obtuse. Even as someone with legal training, and a computing background, I had a hard time making out exactly what they were patenting.

    A link to the Washington Post article mentioned in the p2pnet article would be nice, too, if someone can find it...?

  17. The Pet Goat on Observer Gives Wikipedia Glowing Report · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are editors for a reason -- throwing out a picture that's a central point of a goddamn Michael Moore hit piece shows that some of the content isn't what you'd call, "objective." In fact, it makes Fox News look like an example of journalistic integrity.

    And it's not only this article. I was looking through a few things on Eastern Europe, specifically, the revolution in Romania in 1989. It's one thing to explain what happened -- it's another to assign motivations, for which you have zero evidence.

    Wikipedia is useful for some things, but when it comes to contentious political issues, it's pretty lousy.

  18. Re:Microbenchmarks... on NetBSD 2.0 vs FreeBSD 5.3 Benchmarks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Except that FGL isn't supported still on a good amount of hardware. Things as ubiquitous as a at keyboard, and last time I checked, the realtek 8139 network device give you the nice [GIANT LOCKED] message in dmesg.

    If you have blessed hardware, you get better SMP support.

    I will say that FreeBSD 5.x is better than 4.x in some areas (background fsck, smp on supported hardware, better threading support), however, as a total system, it's really not finished, and shouldn't have been released in its current state. Maybe Matt Dillon was right -- I don't know. But what they've put out isn't up-to-par quality-wise, when you compare it to 4.x.

    NetBSD, on the other hand, really has come a long way with the 2.0 release. I would say that it's a better choice on i386 now than either FreeBSD 4 (which is deprecated, although there will be a 4.11 release), or FreeBSD 5. That they've gotten to that point is really a testiment to the amazing design work they do. It's a very good system that doesn't get enough attention.

  19. Re:Remain SILENT on Apple Defendants Interviewed · · Score: 1

    Well, I should point out that my explanation isn't an oversimplification - the constitution really does say that. Check the findlaw link, honest. :) The fact that traffic cases have their own little corner of the law is pretty weird, actually.

    Actually, it makes quite a bit of sense, considering that traffic offenses (in most localities) carry no jail time, and, the state doesn't necessarily provide an attorney for the prosecution of the case. Where I live, the Commonwealth doesn't provide any assistance to the police department in traffic-related matters. When the accused goes to court, it is him versus the complaining officer.

    As for the jail rule, best I can imagine is it comes from Justice Clark's opinion in Gideon v. Wainwright . A fine is not a deprivation of liberty -- it's a deprivation of property. Jail, on the other hand....

    But, where I've worked in the law before, that was always the rule. I did victim/witness work, and one of the hearings I had to notify about was the appointment of counsel hearings.

  20. Re:Remain SILENT on Apple Defendants Interviewed · · Score: 1

    This is a bit of an oversimplification -- because a speeding ticket is technically a criminal case, and many states have no right to an attorney in traffic court.

    The rule is.....for any offense where a jail sentence is a possibility, the accused has the right to counsel.

    With that in mind, it's easy to see why it doesn't apply in civil cases; these guys aren't going to jail, but they are going to owe Apple a nice chunk of money. OJ was found liable for the wrongful death of his wife and Ron Goldman, and he's still walking the street.

  21. Re:Beat me to it: on Iran Cracks Down on Internet Sites · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    It would probably be more effective if our European "allies" would do something novel, like stop buying their oil and goods. An invasion isn't necessary here -- a revolution can occur from within, but the international community has to tighten the screws a bit.

    Liberation is the only recourse the US has, really, because we have *zero* contacts with them, diplomatically. All US official communication with Iran goes through a third country (normally Sweden).

  22. Re:I'll give you one on Local Root Exploit in Linux 2.4 and 2.6 · · Score: 1

    It's not like BSD is immune from kernel exploits.

    I use both linux and BSD. They both have problems from time to time....kernel-level problems. Admittedly, user-space programs are easier to fix, but there's problems everywhere. I also kind of laugh when I go to netcraft and see a FreeBSD box with a gazillion-day uptime. It would probably be pretty damn easy to root one of those boxes.

  23. Re:Nervous on LiveJournal Buyout Confirmed · · Score: 1

    Whats the big deal?

    It was a stupid change, almost on the level of the XFree86 license change.

    Pony up 500 bucks or install 70 instances of MT for your users yourself if your users are not techincal enough.

    No need, and why would we? Since we had to do all that work (because of them), it was better to move people to WordPress, which is free software. Why would we continue to support them by using their software? So they can start charging the individual users next? It's not like we're rich -- the hardware is nothing cutting-edge, and the bandwidth is unused co-lo space at a company owned by a couple of the users. This is not something to which we really dedicate any money.

  24. Re:Why upgrade? on LiveJournal Buyout Confirmed · · Score: 1

    2.6 is still around, but what happens when someone finds yet another vuln in it? Do I just leave insecure software out there? From my reading of things, they won't be doing anything on the 2.x code branch anymore.....

    And the pricing structure is too little too late. It's still damn expensive, and when I asked about special licensing, they wouldn't even entertain it at the time.

    So, goodbye MT, goodbye SixApart.

  25. Re:Nervous on LiveJournal Buyout Confirmed · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I haven't been on LJ nearly that long, but I share your concerns.

    I don't trust SixApart as far as I can throw them. That Brad does is all well and good, but I don't. Not after what they did with the MT license. I help maintain a community machine shared among about 70 people. We had quite a few users who were using MT to host blogs. Mind you, this is a community machine, composed of donated hardware, run with donated power and bandwidth. SixApart refused to give us a free license for the new version. They wanted $500, or whatever it was. They said that we could do the individual install thing, but we would have had to have each user install his own copy of MT. Because some of our users aren't geeks, this was really out-of-the question.

    In the end, we ended up doing lots of work moving people to WordPress. But I really don't want to do business with SixApart after the way they handled MT. So, I think I probably be taking down my LJ sometime soon. It's sad, really, because I do enjoy using it.

    Just my $0.02.