Actually, despite all this "piracy", the RIAA's sales continue to increase [theregister.com], as shown
In an astonishing trend, when the economy is better people spend more on music during a year when the RIAA reduced illegal copying through lawsuits. Hmmm.. Also note that the financial growth (4%) was basically that of inflation. And that while sales were up, they were still well under that of every year since at least 1994.
and the copyright industries are creating jobs at twice the rate of the rest of the economy.
Jobs that will be destroyed without copyright protection. Pretty simple.
And movies haven't even begun to be hit with big problems from downloading - bandwidth is still way too limited for most people.
I fail to see how you can call something "theft"
So, um, where in my post did I call anything "theft"?
Given the large amount of garbage put out by the **AA's and the inflated prices they charge for it, this does not seem an unreasonable precaution.
Would you agree to work for your boss for a year and at the end of a year he or she would evaluate your work and decide if they felt it was worth paying for? I have little trouble finding media that I enjoy. There are reviewers and friends that I trust; I can sample many of them online or in the stores I patronize.
I've got a better idea - get away from the entire *AA groups and seek out independent artists who will gladly let you download their products to evaluate them.
businesses which don't have a virtual monopoly
The RIAA is so far from having a monopoly at this point that it's laugable. If you really want a starting point, I'll give you a list of independent musicians who are well worth supporting. The reason that the RIAA has a grip on stores is the same reason that you'd have a very hard time selling a BBQ sauce that you manufacture directly to grocery stores - it's simply not feasible for retailers to deal directly with the tens of thousands of small manufacturers, hence the necessary evil of distributors.
The good news is that this internet thing has changed all that, so consumers can now buy music directly from the small artists.
Movies are tricky because even an inexpensive indy film costs more than most people will earn in a decade to make. Have you worked making a movie? Do you actually know what the costs are when you say how much they *should* cost?
And those inexpensive movies are the ones that are most likely to die in the creation process, leaving the investors with nothing. Are they right to want a good return from the ones that do actually make it? Of course, that's what investors do.
Don't put ads on something people have paid money for, it will turn them off very quickly.
True. This is why I patronize theatres that don't bombard me with annoying ads before the movie starts. This comes at the tradeoff of worse seats, worse sound, worse projectors, limited choice of movies, and having to wait past the release date for the movie to work its way down to my theatres. Everything has a tradeoff. The DVD with ads in it prolly costs less for the consumer to buy than a competing DVD without ads, and the public has shown time and time again that they'll buy the cheaper thing rather than spending more for the better thing.
I own ~80 DVDs and not a single one has a manditory ad on them, but I vote with my money (and good taste) and buy small indy stuff for the most part. Chances are I paid more on average per DVD than the latest $ACTION_HERO with $CUTE_GIRL_WHO_SHOWS_HER_BREASTS action movie. But I don't go and download bigger stuff and claim that the fact that they do something I don't like justifies it.
I can make a product and sell it to you with a contract that says you have to wear a pink kimono and hop on one foot while you use it. You can agree to my terms
Well, technically it's taking someone's work without someone else's permission.
It's the artists' permission by extension. The record company gives the musician (insert other forms of media/creators as necessary) money in exchange for certain rights, including the right to limit distribution as they see fit.
There are plenty of completely independent musicians who are hurt by unauthorized copying as well.
And weather or not you approve of it, it is voting with my wallet - I voted for free stuff copied from others.
Ah. So the Chicago mob was simply voting against prohibition and a mugger on the street is voting against a society that he or she feels is biased against them? Charming. Hey, we can carry this concept anywhere. Stalin was voting against corporate farms. A vandal who spraypaints your car is just voting against your choice of style/colour.
Voting with your wallet means you buy something or you don't. The fact that you choose to take it anyway is separate.
Though I don't think I was claiming any sort of "moral high ground", you just kinda made that part up, didn't you?
The term "vote" caries certain positive connentations in this society. Therefore, claiming that your actions are merely part of it would generally denote an attempt to raise the act of taking advantage of others in moral level. It's certainly a reasonable assumption.
Just for the record, if you're such a proponent of free stuff, exactly what have you contributed back to the public?
Even the law refers to the act under discussion as "copying" rather than "stealing" for a reason--so it would be conducive to the discussion if you would stick to the more accurate terms already in use
This would be a whole lot more interesting if I'd used a word such as "steal" anywhere in my message.
the loaded terms that a small group of corporations are attempting to push into use
Actually, the majority of my music industry clients are small independent groups who are either completely independent or on small, specialized labels such as Sugar Hill. And they tend to use words such as "steal" and "pirate" to describe those that make unauthorized copies of music. Some of them choose to make their entire catalogs available for anyone to download, copy, or share. Some do select songs, and some don't want anything they do copied. That's their choice. But they're certainly not getting rich or part of any giant media corporation.
show me one moral code in all of recorded history that even took a stance on this intellectual fraud known as "intellectual property".
How about the golden rule, which you'll find in most major religions in one phrasing or the other?
If you want to look at recorded history as your guide of how humans should behave, you'll see that generally we've been rather poor in our treatment to each other and that someone powerful has kept other people in abject poverty in order that they might benefit. There are problems now, but I'd certainly rather be alive now than 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago.
Most of the composers that are now considered great from years past lived on the whim of rich patrons. Mozart died in abject poverty. Is that the standard you'd like to return to, that great artists have to choose between finding some rich person to kiss up to, die young and pennyless, or give up their dream of creating great works and work a day job?
Next, there isn't much of a history on the concept of intellectual property because technology has been enough of a limiting factor until recently that it's not been a major factor in lives. Most people's jobs consisted of dealing with physical objects and most methods of duplicating text, books, etc. were so prohibitively difficult, lossy, or expensive that there was little incentive to do so.
A very large portion of this country's economy is now based on non-physical objects, including your work, from the look of it. There's no actual difference in the bits that make up a wave file to your documents that hold your database analysis to your ruby programs - it's all just a string of 1s and 0s. The difference between what puts food on musicians' tables and your table is that virtually no one cares about what you produce (this isn't a judgement on your work, just saying that it's only meaningful to your clients) whereas music is appealing to a [comparatively] wide number of people. Lucky you. It's easy to cast slings and arrows at others when you have nothing to loose, isn't it?
You proudly support the FSF and even have a few bits of code posted under what I'm guessing is the GPL, but the GPL is just another form of intellectual property, albeit a very liberal one. If you view intellectual property as a "fraud," you should support placing all code completely in the public domain without any restriction, right? Think your clients would object to adding that clause to your contract?
The spread of large digital media and bandwidth have also changed the game. As a teenager, taped copies of music were passed around by my friends, but no one viewed them as a long term thing - they didn't sound great, they degraded over time, and they weren't convenient when you wanted to hear the 4th song on them. And importantly, each copy took a fairly good amount of time to create and the copies were given to a very select few. MP3s have changed all of that. (They don't sound great to me, but I'm pickier than most.)
Um, no, that's not voting with your dollars, that's taking someones work without their permission. Voting with your dollars is supporting theatres that don't bury you in ads, supporting things such as the Indepedent Film Channel (or whatever it's called - I don't have TV so I'm not sure what it's called these days).
Don't pretend you're on some kind of moral high ground. Ghandi didn't take British salt, he made his own.
realize that as a whole IE 6 does adhere much better to web standards than previous versions.
That's true, but that doesn't mean that it does it well, or that IE shouldn't have been updated since version 6 for better compliance. A 50s era Ford may adhere to modern standards better than a Model T, but that doesn't mean that it's a good car to use on today's roads.
Ironically, I think that the IE 5 box model of including the border inside of the box is superior to the actual CSS specs. I'd love to be able to have one div have a 20% width and another have an 80% width and not have to worry about having the borders/margins/etc. do bad things to the alignment.
Please name me one proprietary piece of code that IE forces you to use in your web pages?
You mean besides all the ugly CSS hacks to make sure that IE 5 users can still use my pages?
to my stylesheets in order to force IE to have a minumun width (very important for some of my webapps), as it causes various validators/debuggers to complain. Particularly in that I think that min-width/height would have been one of the painfully obvious things to support.
The big problem is that people who *don't* have to use the proprietary stuff do anyway, causing problems for those of us who use other operating systems and browsers.
I'm somewhat surprised that it runs as fast as it does. They use javascript obfuscation with gmail as well, so I imagine they spent some time developing hard to read techniques that still execute quickly.
This is in fact why i've personally had a dim view of software, and now music/video copy protection
For what it's worth, media is different than computer software because the way that we interact with it is much different. Most computer software requires a large portion of your attention. Most people listen to music as background to something else and listen to quite a bit of it. Playing a computer game might occupy you for hours at a time, while I generally listen to around 15 songs/hour.
I suppose there is a certain amount of "gotta collect them all" to the people that have gobs and gobs of mp3s, but most of the people I know have them because they stick it in a giant mix and like a variety of music (which radio no longer provides). The fact that they conciously aquire specific songs or artists illegally rather than using one of the inexpensive streaming servers (RealRhapsody/Napster Pro etc.) or listening to free artists indicates that they do seek media in more than just a collector mode.
Movies are similar but different - most of them aren't worth watching more than a time or two to most people. But they occupy less time than most software does and have less replay value. Despite the fact that I live in a college town where you can rent any common DVD for $1, I know quite a few people who refuse to do so, prefering to download them out of cheapness. Explaining that removing the financial incentive to create the oddball (Firefly, Buffy, B5, etc.) entertainment that they enjoy will result in those things not being made any more doesn't seem to reach them, as they view themselves as having the magical right to watch whatever they want for free. Feh.
Dell probably knows their market better than they do.
Given the treatment I get from Dell's tech support (with me working for an institution with somewhere greater than 100,000 Dells, not just some random consumer) their market is one that you save money on by exporting tech support to India and basically fustrate until they give up. That is not the market that RedHat wants to go after.
If they make it too cheap, all of their money gets eaten up in support calls. If they make an inexpensive one sans support, then they risk getting a bad name when Joe MSCE Dell buyer opts for the cheaper check box on the checkout page, can't figure out how to configure it because, "There's no control panel!!", and then goes around badmouthing RH and Linux to everyone that will listen.
Being a bottom feeder tends to be a pretty unpleasant experience no matter what your business is. Apple could sell many more units if they lowered the price, but they seem pretty happy as is.
If the person who wrote the ram-only rootkit is a master of mojo, it's very hard. If I were doing something like that and was more concerned with not getting caught than maintaining a hold on the system, I'd design it to wipe itself from memory the instant anyone elevated their priviledges to root.
There's always a chance is that they got sloppy with _something_ and forgot to prevent some part of it from swapping to disc. If they're not paranoid enough to dump as soon as anyone becomes a superuser, theoretically if you can gain access to all of the RAM you can scan it for suspicious activity. At which point it becomes a test of whether the attacker modified the entire RAM subsystem to _not_ allow access to the location of the malware.
What does have potential for catching such a beast is running your server (ie the software that's most likely to offer a way into the system) using virtualization (be it VMWare or whathave you). Then you have the option of saving the entire image to hard drive, which you can then analyze at your leisure. Assuming that you can keep the underlying system safe as well.
You can also protect yourself by using network level logging to catch suspicious activity that rooting a box and modifying its logs can't cover over unless they completely run amuck on your entire infrastructure.
The Naked Lunch trial is a famous case of something that many people felt was filthy, disgusting, and without value being defended by both the artistic community and the courts. It was the last time (that I'm aware of) that a novel was prosecuted as obscene in the United States.
A more detailed discussion of literary obscenity can be found here. Site MAY not be safe for work. It's an adult theme website and the article has pictures of naked naughty bits, albeit artist ones. Click at your own risk.
I talked with one of the people who process these tickets at one point
In DC (at least as of a few years ago), the people that processed the tickets work for a company (ie not the government itself) that gets a cut of every ticket. There is a strong incentive for no slack to be cut as a result.
Fixed in later W2K Service packs and XP
on
Computer Forensics
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· Score: 1
These days if you have the entire drive encrypted, you can't just reset the password using Linux or whathaveyou. Look for the word "Caution"
There are ways around it, but it's non-trivial for Joe Random computer thief. So if I'm just worried about some personal data getting found while poking around on the hard drive, I'm good. The thief would have to get my personal password somehow (I use long, random passwords, so a dictionary attack would fail) and then use a specialized tool to read the drive. Very few thieves would go to that trouble unless they knew there was something _really_ worth looking for.
If I were hiding my Swiss Bank account with millions of dollars in it, I might consider using something stronger. But for most cases it's fine.
That'll catch a good number of attackers, but if I were doing serious blackhat stuff and had rooted a production *nix server, I'd keep all my nasty stuff in RAM at all times to avoid having anything caught on hard drive. (Yes, that also includes specifically preventing swapping to disc.) Combined with some good tactics against insertable media, it's possible to make it very hard to leave traces on a system.
OS X (with 10.3) makes encrypting your entire hard drive (or home directory) very easy. Just a few clicks to encryption. Windows makes it fairly easy. Not too hard either. There are options for the BSDs and Linuxes that vary in easiness based on how the distro has been designed.
If that's not hard enough, there's plenty of applications to encrypt specific files with higher level security.
Yes, with enough time and processing power, just about all of them can be cracked. How likely is it that anyone's going to spend that amount of effort on you? If you just want to keep your bank balance private if someone steals your laptop, you're fine. If you're suspected of being an Al Qaida operative, then the NSA might turn its acres of processors on you.
But they're not directly connected to the internet anyway. Or at least I hope not.
They have to be, in order to be useful. As an added bonus, this is in an accademic environment where there is no sitewide firewall. I'm not Windows fan - part of my job description is specifically to migrate systems from Windows to Linux where possible. But there's really not been any 0 day Windows events that I've had to worry about, and my systems have all been patched well before Sasser or whatever hit the net.
You get a large number of them getting redeployed inside corporations. About half of my Windows boxes are licensed with W2K and there's no particular reaso to pay to upgrade them. I install, run the MS supplied SP4/Blaster et al update CD, run the Sasser patch off a memory key and it's safe to download the rest of the updates, Mozilla, AV software, etc.
I took a break from IT work in 1999 to persue a career in sound reinforcement (ie making music loud at concerts) as well as some studio work. It was a good deal of fun and had many rewards, but after four years I detemined that IT provided certain benefits that I needed and returned to it.
I continue to work doing audio work on the side, averaging about 16 hours/week, although at this point I view it as a profitable hobby. All of the money I make gets put back into my business, so it's not something I do for money per say.
Getting out and away from computers provides me with a tremendous amount of stress refief that makes the workweek more palatable. I enjoy sysadmining and I enjoy programming, but there's a much different feel from doing something creating such as working in the arts. There's a certain reward that you get from pulling off a major event that hundreds or thousands of people get immediate enjoyment from that IT doesn't provide. Pushing up the faders as the first power chord hits the crowd and they go wild - there's nothing else like it for me. I'm just grateful that I have the opportunity to do it and get paid for it.
Even though it's hard work, doing something completely different than office work destresses me. I've been far happier working 40 hours in the office and 40 hours on the road than I am when I'm doing just 60 hours in the office.
Of course, the side perc of getting paid to go to a resort 1/4 weekends a year isn't too bad either...
I spent about a year working essentially two full time jobs - 40 hours a week doing IT and ~40 hours doing concerts. From late June until mid-september I didn't have a day off. And I was loving life. I enjoy both fields, and switching back and forth provided a great deal of variety and stimulation.
These days I tend to spend 60 hours a week at the IT job and am far less happy and more fatigued.
Something doesn't add up. I'm also a Unix type guy who doesn't like Windows, but I deploy W2K boxes without firewalls in academic environments (about as nasty as you can get) without a problem.
After installation, I run the MS supplied update disc, which brings it up to SP4 and installs the patch that covers Blaster et al. Then I put the Sasser patch on off a memory key, reboot, and it's now safe to put online and download the rest of the patches off of MS Update. (Along with Mozilla and AV software.) These machines run just fine.
Except for the two major QuickTime vulnerabilities this year, the Safari, Samba, blah blah blah. Review the archives of the Apple Security Announcement mailing list if you want the complete list.
They're out there, but there's comparatively few Mac users and Apple does a good job of forcing Mac users into the habbit of updating, so not too many Black hats bother. But it doesn't mean that you're safe.
There's no JOB that can't be done as well on a different platform, its the software that keeps Windows heavily entrenched. Database apps on the desktop, games at home.
The CRC is technically on campus. Half of RB XIV is CNS and half is IS&C. I have no idea what the first poster was talking about with NDAs - I walk (literally) through the cluster from time to time and I've never been NDAed regarding it.
[ob. Slashdot cliche]You must be new here.[/cliche]
The condescending part is quite certainly a a valid point (though in my view, a justified reaction to the rampant fanboyism), but unnecssary is entirely debatable.
First, the poster was bragging about his downloading large amounts of anime that is commercially available on DVD (in fact, linking to the authorized distribution), something that is heavily frowned upon by the fansub community. I happen to think that the fact that most of the anime companies are willing to look the other way or even encourage fansubbing is a very cool thing on their part, and idiots like this who go around bragging that BT allows them to get around paying for their entertainment is exactly the behaviour that will cause them to crack down on BT.
Second, my point that there's much better things to do in college is very valid. Even though I have a nice job where I have all the bandwidth I want, the computers & geek toys that I want, and have the freedom to work pretty much whenever I want, I still miss the freedom of college and the sense of community that was available to me at the time. I do know people who wasted their free time in college with $HABIT (there's a bunch of them) rather than experiencing some of the great joys of life - I watched a good friend from 7-12th grade retreat from being an active, social individual to someone who sat in his anime filled room while piling on the pounds. I suppose that may be his ultimate, fulfilling goal in life, and if so, I guess more power to him, but as noted, I think there's better things in life.
Geeks (myself included) often have a hard time finding people with which to be social and the temptation is to take the easy way out via computers and the like is strong. I met the loves (platonic and romantic) of my life by getting out and doing things, not by having a hard drive full of illegal anime.
So, a "benchmark" (that doesn't included any information on the configuration of the P4) shows that a dual CPU system running one specific application that had been tuned for dual processors and the G4 can sometimes keep up with a single low end P4 that is several steps behind the current generation.
I'm not biased for any particular brand - I'm currently using Dual G5s, Xserves, Athlon MPs, high end P4s, dual P3s, dual and single G4s for various things. But the G4 family really doesn't hold up well compared to a modern system. Using the same rendering software, my dual Athlon eats the dual G4s for breakfast.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, despite all this "piracy", the RIAA's sales continue to increase [theregister.com], as shown
In an astonishing trend, when the economy is better people spend more on music during a year when the RIAA reduced illegal copying through lawsuits. Hmmm.. Also note that the financial growth (4%) was basically that of inflation. And that while sales were up, they were still well under that of every year since at least 1994.
and the copyright industries are creating jobs at twice the rate of the rest of the economy.
Jobs that will be destroyed without copyright protection. Pretty simple.
And movies haven't even begun to be hit with big problems from downloading - bandwidth is still way too limited for most people.
I fail to see how you can call something "theft"
So, um, where in my post did I call anything "theft"?
Given the large amount of garbage put out by the **AA's and the inflated prices they charge for it, this does not seem an unreasonable precaution.
Would you agree to work for your boss for a year and at the end of a year he or she would evaluate your work and decide if they felt it was worth paying for? I have little trouble finding media that I enjoy. There are reviewers and friends that I trust; I can sample many of them online or in the stores I patronize.
I've got a better idea - get away from the entire *AA groups and seek out independent artists who will gladly let you download their products to evaluate them.
businesses which don't have a virtual monopoly
The RIAA is so far from having a monopoly at this point that it's laugable. If you really want a starting point, I'll give you a list of independent musicians who are well worth supporting. The reason that the RIAA has a grip on stores is the same reason that you'd have a very hard time selling a BBQ sauce that you manufacture directly to grocery stores - it's simply not feasible for retailers to deal directly with the tens of thousands of small manufacturers, hence the necessary evil of distributors.
The good news is that this internet thing has changed all that, so consumers can now buy music directly from the small artists.
Movies are tricky because even an inexpensive indy film costs more than most people will earn in a decade to make. Have you worked making a movie? Do you actually know what the costs are when you say how much they *should* cost?
And those inexpensive movies are the ones that are most likely to die in the creation process, leaving the investors with nothing. Are they right to want a good return from the ones that do actually make it? Of course, that's what investors do.
Don't put ads on something people have paid money for, it will turn them off very quickly.
True. This is why I patronize theatres that don't bombard me with annoying ads before the movie starts. This comes at the tradeoff of worse seats, worse sound, worse projectors, limited choice of movies, and having to wait past the release date for the movie to work its way down to my theatres. Everything has a tradeoff. The DVD with ads in it prolly costs less for the consumer to buy than a competing DVD without ads, and the public has shown time and time again that they'll buy the cheaper thing rather than spending more for the better thing.
I own ~80 DVDs and not a single one has a manditory ad on them, but I vote with my money (and good taste) and buy small indy stuff for the most part. Chances are I paid more on average per DVD than the latest $ACTION_HERO with $CUTE_GIRL_WHO_SHOWS_HER_BREASTS action movie. But I don't go and download bigger stuff and claim that the fact that they do something I don't like justifies it.
I can make a product and sell it to you with a contract that says you have to wear a pink kimono and hop on one foot while you use it. You can agree to my terms
Well, technically it's taking someone's work without someone else's permission.
It's the artists' permission by extension. The record company gives the musician (insert other forms of media/creators as necessary) money in exchange for certain rights, including the right to limit distribution as they see fit.
There are plenty of completely independent musicians who are hurt by unauthorized copying as well.
And weather or not you approve of it, it is voting with my wallet - I voted for free stuff copied from others.
Ah. So the Chicago mob was simply voting against prohibition and a mugger on the street is voting against a society that he or she feels is biased against them? Charming. Hey, we can carry this concept anywhere. Stalin was voting against corporate farms. A vandal who spraypaints your car is just voting against your choice of style/colour.
Voting with your wallet means you buy something or you don't. The fact that you choose to take it anyway is separate.
Though I don't think I was claiming any sort of "moral high ground", you just kinda made that part up, didn't you?
The term "vote" caries certain positive connentations in this society. Therefore, claiming that your actions are merely part of it would generally denote an attempt to raise the act of taking advantage of others in moral level. It's certainly a reasonable assumption.
Just for the record, if you're such a proponent of free stuff, exactly what have you contributed back to the public?
Even the law refers to the act under discussion as "copying" rather than "stealing" for a reason--so it would be conducive to the discussion if you would stick to the more accurate terms already in use
This would be a whole lot more interesting if I'd used a word such as "steal" anywhere in my message.
the loaded terms that a small group of corporations are attempting to push into use
Actually, the majority of my music industry clients are small independent groups who are either completely independent or on small, specialized labels such as Sugar Hill. And they tend to use words such as "steal" and "pirate" to describe those that make unauthorized copies of music. Some of them choose to make their entire catalogs available for anyone to download, copy, or share. Some do select songs, and some don't want anything they do copied. That's their choice. But they're certainly not getting rich or part of any giant media corporation.
show me one moral code in all of recorded history that even took a stance on this intellectual fraud known as "intellectual property".
How about the golden rule, which you'll find in most major religions in one phrasing or the other?
If you want to look at recorded history as your guide of how humans should behave, you'll see that generally we've been rather poor in our treatment to each other and that someone powerful has kept other people in abject poverty in order that they might benefit. There are problems now, but I'd certainly rather be alive now than 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago.
Most of the composers that are now considered great from years past lived on the whim of rich patrons. Mozart died in abject poverty. Is that the standard you'd like to return to, that great artists have to choose between finding some rich person to kiss up to, die young and pennyless, or give up their dream of creating great works and work a day job?
Next, there isn't much of a history on the concept of intellectual property because technology has been enough of a limiting factor until recently that it's not been a major factor in lives. Most people's jobs consisted of dealing with physical objects and most methods of duplicating text, books, etc. were so prohibitively difficult, lossy, or expensive that there was little incentive to do so.
A very large portion of this country's economy is now based on non-physical objects, including your work, from the look of it. There's no actual difference in the bits that make up a wave file to your documents that hold your database analysis to your ruby programs - it's all just a string of 1s and 0s. The difference between what puts food on musicians' tables and your table is that virtually no one cares about what you produce (this isn't a judgement on your work, just saying that it's only meaningful to your clients) whereas music is appealing to a [comparatively] wide number of people. Lucky you. It's easy to cast slings and arrows at others when you have nothing to loose, isn't it?
You proudly support the FSF and even have a few bits of code posted under what I'm guessing is the GPL, but the GPL is just another form of intellectual property, albeit a very liberal one. If you view intellectual property as a "fraud," you should support placing all code completely in the public domain without any restriction, right? Think your clients would object to adding that clause to your contract?
The spread of large digital media and bandwidth have also changed the game. As a teenager, taped copies of music were passed around by my friends, but no one viewed them as a long term thing - they didn't sound great, they degraded over time, and they weren't convenient when you wanted to hear the 4th song on them. And importantly, each copy took a fairly good amount of time to create and the copies were given to a very select few. MP3s have changed all of that. (They don't sound great to me, but I'm pickier than most.)
Because without the act n
Um, no, that's not voting with your dollars, that's taking someones work without their permission. Voting with your dollars is supporting theatres that don't bury you in ads, supporting things such as the Indepedent Film Channel (or whatever it's called - I don't have TV so I'm not sure what it's called these days).
Don't pretend you're on some kind of moral high ground. Ghandi didn't take British salt, he made his own.
realize that as a whole IE 6 does adhere much better to web standards than previous versions.
2 0px": "auto" );
That's true, but that doesn't mean that it does it well, or that IE shouldn't have been updated since version 6 for better compliance. A 50s era Ford may adhere to modern standards better than a Model T, but that doesn't mean that it's a good car to use on today's roads.
Ironically, I think that the IE 5 box model of including the border inside of the box is superior to the actual CSS specs. I'd love to be able to have one div have a 20% width and another have an 80% width and not have to worry about having the borders/margins/etc. do bad things to the alignment.
Please name me one proprietary piece of code that IE forces you to use in your web pages?
You mean besides all the ugly CSS hacks to make sure that IE 5 users can still use my pages?
I dislike the fact that I have to add:
width:expression(document.body.clientWidth (720) *p arseInt(document.body.currentStyle.fontSize)?
"7
to my stylesheets in order to force IE to have a minumun width (very important for some of my webapps), as it causes various validators/debuggers to complain. Particularly in that I think that min-width/height would have been one of the painfully obvious things to support.
The big problem is that people who *don't* have to use the proprietary stuff do anyway, causing problems for those of us who use other operating systems and browsers.
What language do you think that menu was programmed in?
I suspect the backend is C, but the browser part is obfuscated javascript. Here's an easy link to the code:
http://www.google.com/ac.js
I'm somewhat surprised that it runs as fast as it does. They use javascript obfuscation with gmail as well, so I imagine they spent some time developing hard to read techniques that still execute quickly.
This is in fact why i've personally had a dim view of software, and now music/video copy protection
For what it's worth, media is different than computer software because the way that we interact with it is much different. Most computer software requires a large portion of your attention. Most people listen to music as background to something else and listen to quite a bit of it. Playing a computer game might occupy you for hours at a time, while I generally listen to around 15 songs/hour.
I suppose there is a certain amount of "gotta collect them all" to the people that have gobs and gobs of mp3s, but most of the people I know have them because they stick it in a giant mix and like a variety of music (which radio no longer provides). The fact that they conciously aquire specific songs or artists illegally rather than using one of the inexpensive streaming servers (RealRhapsody/Napster Pro etc.) or listening to free artists indicates that they do seek media in more than just a collector mode.
Movies are similar but different - most of them aren't worth watching more than a time or two to most people. But they occupy less time than most software does and have less replay value. Despite the fact that I live in a college town where you can rent any common DVD for $1, I know quite a few people who refuse to do so, prefering to download them out of cheapness. Explaining that removing the financial incentive to create the oddball (Firefly, Buffy, B5, etc.) entertainment that they enjoy will result in those things not being made any more doesn't seem to reach them, as they view themselves as having the magical right to watch whatever they want for free. Feh.
Dell probably knows their market better than they do.
Given the treatment I get from Dell's tech support (with me working for an institution with somewhere greater than 100,000 Dells, not just some random consumer) their market is one that you save money on by exporting tech support to India and basically fustrate until they give up. That is not the market that RedHat wants to go after.
If they make it too cheap, all of their money gets eaten up in support calls. If they make an inexpensive one sans support, then they risk getting a bad name when Joe MSCE Dell buyer opts for the cheaper check box on the checkout page, can't figure out how to configure it because, "There's no control panel!!", and then goes around badmouthing RH and Linux to everyone that will listen.
Being a bottom feeder tends to be a pretty unpleasant experience no matter what your business is. Apple could sell many more units if they lowered the price, but they seem pretty happy as is.
If the person who wrote the ram-only rootkit is a master of mojo, it's very hard. If I were doing something like that and was more concerned with not getting caught than maintaining a hold on the system, I'd design it to wipe itself from memory the instant anyone elevated their priviledges to root.
There's always a chance is that they got sloppy with _something_ and forgot to prevent some part of it from swapping to disc. If they're not paranoid enough to dump as soon as anyone becomes a superuser, theoretically if you can gain access to all of the RAM you can scan it for suspicious activity. At which point it becomes a test of whether the attacker modified the entire RAM subsystem to _not_ allow access to the location of the malware.
What does have potential for catching such a beast is running your server (ie the software that's most likely to offer a way into the system) using virtualization (be it VMWare or whathave you). Then you have the option of saving the entire image to hard drive, which you can then analyze at your leisure. Assuming that you can keep the underlying system safe as well.
You can also protect yourself by using network level logging to catch suspicious activity that rooting a box and modifying its logs can't cover over unless they completely run amuck on your entire infrastructure.
http://www.lib.siu.edu/cni/b411.html
The Naked Lunch trial is a famous case of something that many people felt was filthy, disgusting, and without value being defended by both the artistic community and the courts. It was the last time (that I'm aware of) that a novel was prosecuted as obscene in the United States.
A more detailed discussion of literary obscenity can be found here. Site MAY not be safe for work. It's an adult theme website and the article has pictures of naked naughty bits, albeit artist ones. Click at your own risk.
I talked with one of the people who process these tickets at one point
In DC (at least as of a few years ago), the people that processed the tickets work for a company (ie not the government itself) that gets a cut of every ticket. There is a strong incentive for no slack to be cut as a result.
And in fact, Lockheed Martin (a major manufacturer, who again, gets a cut of every ticket) alledgedly forbids cities from improving intersections.. Or some more about dubious light tactics.
These days if you have the entire drive encrypted, you can't just reset the password using Linux or whathaveyou. Look for the word "Caution"
There are ways around it, but it's non-trivial for Joe Random computer thief. So if I'm just worried about some personal data getting found while poking around on the hard drive, I'm good. The thief would have to get my personal password somehow (I use long, random passwords, so a dictionary attack would fail) and then use a specialized tool to read the drive. Very few thieves would go to that trouble unless they knew there was something _really_ worth looking for.
If I were hiding my Swiss Bank account with millions of dollars in it, I might consider using something stronger. But for most cases it's fine.
That'll catch a good number of attackers, but if I were doing serious blackhat stuff and had rooted a production *nix server, I'd keep all my nasty stuff in RAM at all times to avoid having anything caught on hard drive. (Yes, that also includes specifically preventing swapping to disc.) Combined with some good tactics against insertable media, it's possible to make it very hard to leave traces on a system.
OS X (with 10.3) makes encrypting your entire hard drive (or home directory) very easy. Just a few clicks to encryption. Windows makes it fairly easy. Not too hard either. There are options for the BSDs and Linuxes that vary in easiness based on how the distro has been designed.
If that's not hard enough, there's plenty of applications to encrypt specific files with higher level security.
Yes, with enough time and processing power, just about all of them can be cracked. How likely is it that anyone's going to spend that amount of effort on you? If you just want to keep your bank balance private if someone steals your laptop, you're fine. If you're suspected of being an Al Qaida operative, then the NSA might turn its acres of processors on you.
But they're not directly connected to the internet anyway. Or at least I hope not.
They have to be, in order to be useful. As an added bonus, this is in an accademic environment where there is no sitewide firewall. I'm not Windows fan - part of my job description is specifically to migrate systems from Windows to Linux where possible. But there's really not been any 0 day Windows events that I've had to worry about, and my systems have all been patched well before Sasser or whatever hit the net.
You get a large number of them getting redeployed inside corporations. About half of my Windows boxes are licensed with W2K and there's no particular reaso to pay to upgrade them. I install, run the MS supplied SP4/Blaster et al update CD, run the Sasser patch off a memory key and it's safe to download the rest of the updates, Mozilla, AV software, etc.
I took a break from IT work in 1999 to persue a career in sound reinforcement (ie making music loud at concerts) as well as some studio work. It was a good deal of fun and had many rewards, but after four years I detemined that IT provided certain benefits that I needed and returned to it.
I continue to work doing audio work on the side, averaging about 16 hours/week, although at this point I view it as a profitable hobby. All of the money I make gets put back into my business, so it's not something I do for money per say.
Getting out and away from computers provides me with a tremendous amount of stress refief that makes the workweek more palatable. I enjoy sysadmining and I enjoy programming, but there's a much different feel from doing something creating such as working in the arts. There's a certain reward that you get from pulling off a major event that hundreds or thousands of people get immediate enjoyment from that IT doesn't provide. Pushing up the faders as the first power chord hits the crowd and they go wild - there's nothing else like it for me. I'm just grateful that I have the opportunity to do it and get paid for it.
Even though it's hard work, doing something completely different than office work destresses me. I've been far happier working 40 hours in the office and 40 hours on the road than I am when I'm doing just 60 hours in the office.
Of course, the side perc of getting paid to go to a resort 1/4 weekends a year isn't too bad either...
Variety is the spice of life
I spent about a year working essentially two full time jobs - 40 hours a week doing IT and ~40 hours doing concerts. From late June until mid-september I didn't have a day off. And I was loving life. I enjoy both fields, and switching back and forth provided a great deal of variety and stimulation.
These days I tend to spend 60 hours a week at the IT job and am far less happy and more fatigued.
Something doesn't add up. I'm also a Unix type guy who doesn't like Windows, but I deploy W2K boxes without firewalls in academic environments (about as nasty as you can get) without a problem.
After installation, I run the MS supplied update disc, which brings it up to SP4 and installs the patch that covers Blaster et al. Then I put the Sasser patch on off a memory key, reboot, and it's now safe to put online and download the rest of the patches off of MS Update. (Along with Mozilla and AV software.) These machines run just fine.
Unless you are a Mac user that is.
Except for the two major QuickTime vulnerabilities this year, the Safari, Samba, blah blah blah. Review the archives of the Apple Security Announcement mailing list if you want the complete list.
They're out there, but there's comparatively few Mac users and Apple does a good job of forcing Mac users into the habbit of updating, so not too many Black hats bother. But it doesn't mean that you're safe.
There's no JOB that can't be done as well on a different platform, its the software that keeps Windows heavily entrenched. Database apps on the desktop, games at home.
The CRC is technically on campus. Half of RB XIV is CNS and half is IS&C. I have no idea what the first poster was talking about with NDAs - I walk (literally) through the cluster from time to time and I've never been NDAed regarding it.
[ob. Slashdot cliche]You must be new here.[/cliche]
The condescending part is quite certainly a a valid point (though in my view, a justified reaction to the rampant fanboyism), but unnecssary is entirely debatable.
First, the poster was bragging about his downloading large amounts of anime that is commercially available on DVD (in fact, linking to the authorized distribution), something that is heavily frowned upon by the fansub community. I happen to think that the fact that most of the anime companies are willing to look the other way or even encourage fansubbing is a very cool thing on their part, and idiots like this who go around bragging that BT allows them to get around paying for their entertainment is exactly the behaviour that will cause them to crack down on BT.
Second, my point that there's much better things to do in college is very valid. Even though I have a nice job where I have all the bandwidth I want, the computers & geek toys that I want, and have the freedom to work pretty much whenever I want, I still miss the freedom of college and the sense of community that was available to me at the time. I do know people who wasted their free time in college with $HABIT (there's a bunch of them) rather than experiencing some of the great joys of life - I watched a good friend from 7-12th grade retreat from being an active, social individual to someone who sat in his anime filled room while piling on the pounds. I suppose that may be his ultimate, fulfilling goal in life, and if so, I guess more power to him, but as noted, I think there's better things in life.
Geeks (myself included) often have a hard time finding people with which to be social and the temptation is to take the easy way out via computers and the like is strong. I met the loves (platonic and romantic) of my life by getting out and doing things, not by having a hard drive full of illegal anime.
But mod me down if you like.
And to think I wasted time in college with friends, dating, hiking, a job, going to plays and concerts, playing music, etc.
So, a "benchmark" (that doesn't included any information on the configuration of the P4) shows that a dual CPU system running one specific application that had been tuned for dual processors and the G4 can sometimes keep up with a single low end P4 that is several steps behind the current generation.
I'm not biased for any particular brand - I'm currently using Dual G5s, Xserves, Athlon MPs, high end P4s, dual P3s, dual and single G4s for various things. But the G4 family really doesn't hold up well compared to a modern system. Using the same rendering software, my dual Athlon eats the dual G4s for breakfast.
Please show some benchmarks to back that up...