Fair enough, but many people may opt not to download updates because of their rediculous size.
Under Debian, at least, if a package is found to have a security hole, I have several options.
I can download only the affected package. Of course, since it's Debian, I can always opt to just bring the whole system up to date. If bandwidth is really a problem, I can even manually rsync an older local copy of the package against the updated version upstream.
Unfortunately, rsync isn't done by apt-get automatically, but the option to do it manually is there, as many Debian mirrors do support rsync.
The point is, though, that with Linux and the BSDs, you can find out exactly what you're downloading, and determine exactly what effect the new package will have. With XP, you might have no idea what you're getting. Spending eight hours downloading MS updates when you don't know what you're getting isn't something most people consider worthwhile, especially when it's often the case that after updating Windows, it's found that there have been refinements to the updates that just occurred, and so Windows wants to download yet more stuff, and reboot yet again!
People want to use their systems, not maintain them. As long as the MS "critical updates" take ages to download and often create the need for further updates, people will continue to ignore the "Windows updates are available" messages.
Rebooting is a lot to ask. Large downloads are a lot to ask. If I were to install all of the "important" updates available to Windows at the moment, it would require several reboots, especially since many components can't be installed at the same time. Under Debian, not even one reboot would be required, unless the kernel were updated. Under Windows, if I update Media Player, a reboot is required, and Windows won't even let me update other things at the same time!
now the worm is spreading from their machines and spoofing my email address as the source. I totally resent this and actually worry about my liability.
To whomever modded this post up, you have apparently been trolled.
First of all, your fear of liability is irrational. If it is known and documented that a trojan will forge the sender address, and the headers show that the mail was not sent from your ISP, it sounds like you're in the clear. Even if it were sent from your ISP, one would have to show that you controlled that IP at the time the message was sent.
Furthermore, unless you can cite a case in which a user was held responsible for the activities of a trojan running on his or her system, I feel pretty safe in calling you paranoid. Unless you did knowingly spread the trojan, you're fine, except for the aforementioned paranoia.
That aside...
Do I now have to trademark my own email address or something and then include a disclaimer in my email saying "This email address is my trademark, you are not allowed to add me to your address book in any way"?
Nice try.
Too bad you seem to have no clue what trademark actually covers. Contrary to what you seem to believe, owning a trademark does not give you exclusive right to control the use of a certain combination of letters in the Roman alphabet.
This means that Bertelsmann can't do a damned thing about me saying "Bertelsmann" here. Bertelsmann Bertelsmann Bertelsmann. Nor can the RIAA. From the USPTO:
A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others.
As long as I'm not using a trademark to mislead people by implying that a product was provided the company which holds that trademark when the product hadn't really been provided by said company, there really isn't a problem.
Go try to register your email address at the USPTO. If you succeed, let me know what it is, and I'll email you letting you know that I heard a story about the Recording Industry Association of America (TM) was suing students from colleges including Princeton University (TM), that I saw the story on MTV's (TM) website, as well as on the news on a Time-Warner (TM) station, and that the students were likely running Microsoft (TM) Windows (TM).
Then I'll invite you to imitate the actions of The SCO Group (TM) and file a lawsuit against me which is destined to do nothing but waste court time.
Hell, you can even forward a copy to each of the companies which own the aforementioned trademarks.
When the court case is thrown out, I'll buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks (TM), which buys its milk from Horizon Organic Dairy (TM).
True, but I'm slightly annoyed by the popup blocker. I also have Merriam-Webster's toolbar installed, and Google's popup blocker prevents the Merriam-Webster toolbar from displaying anything.
"Similar problem", in this case, means that "nothing happened and an urban legend was started."
I'd not saying that problems never happen, I'm just saying that the person claiming to have been amused when the GM blunder occurred is bluffing; he heard the story and took it as fact without factual evidence, such as sales numbers to back up his claims of unmet sales goals. I decided to try to help to debunk this myth. I'm a Ford guy myself, but I do think it's a little sad how people will spread untruth about a company when information debunking the rumor is easily found.
Or is spreading unfounded myth about companies only a bad thing when SCO does it?
Re:I doubt that this ubiquious stuff will ever wor
on
Spray-On Computers
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· Score: 4, Informative
XML not being "binary based" is a good thing -- you can view the file contents with anything from a program created specifically to work with that schema down to lowly "cat" or "less".
XML's textual nature keeps XML documents "open". I did a Google search a while ago when trying to determine whether there was a standard scheme for putting binary data into XML, and came across somebody discussing parse times for XML. He'd written a program which parsed XML and saved the parsed version in a binary format, and found that it was actually faster to just parse the XML again than to reconstruct the information from his binary format.
On one hand, sure, perhaps his coding wasn't up to the level of those who'd written the XML parser, which might account for the slower loading.
On the other hand, there's a good chance that someone writing an XML parser intended for general inclusion within other programs is paying a lot more attention to doing things right (in terms of speed, security, etc.) than the person who writes a quick data-parsing routine.
Computers don't care if humans can read their data, sure. But, humans do. Parsing a simple, well-defined text format isn't computationally expensive, and makes the job easier for those who might have cause to view the data.
Finally, XML tags can and do carry important semantic information. It's much easier to write a program to parse an arbitrary unknown XML schema (say, GnuCash's file format) than to have to reverse-engineer an arbitrary unknown binary format (yes, I've done both). This is important because it helps to ensure that the data isn't quite as bound to the program -- parsing and conversion between schemas is generally much easier than, say, translating a WordPerfect document to MS Word format.
Hans Reiser has even decided to use text in his transaction-control syscalls:
To anyone who has worked in databases or any other aspect of language design, this design surely seems exceedingly simple and modest. To many filesystem and OS folks, this seems like something extraordinary; commands that are parsed, oh no! The complexity will be extraordinary, oh no! Sigh. Namesys, determined to bring radical new 1960's technology from other areas of computer science into the filesystems field no matter how crazy our competitors think we are! Sigh. Reiser4 will be smaller than XFS much less VxFS....
Text parsing isn't as bad as people like to make it, as long as you aren't parsing a horribly ugly specification (like, say, C++ code).
Besides, how is carrying something on top of HTTP going to introduce new security holes? I haven't been able to decide where you are implying the issues might arise.
It's almost as funny as when General Motors executives couldn't understand why the Chevy Nova was not selling in South America. Then some bright boy realized that 'No Va' is spanish for 'it doesn't go - it doesn't work'.
...which is to say, not very funny at all, as the GM "marketing blunder" wasn't a blunder at all.
The first link revealed by Google debunks this myth:
For starters, nova and no va don't sound alike and are unlikely to be confused, just as "carpet" and "car pet" are unlikely to be confused in English. Additionally, no va would be an awkward way in Spanish to describe a nonfunctioning car (no funciona, among others, would do better), just as in English we'd be more likely to say "it doesn't run" than "it doesn't go."
The second linkprovided by Google is slightly better.
My favorite quote from the article:
Assuming that Spanish speakers would naturally see the word "nova" as equivalent to the phrase "no va" and think "Hey, this car doesn't go!" is akin to assuming that English speakers woud spurn a dinette set sold under the name Notable because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn't include a table.
The article also points out the fact that you can't market a car in Spanish-speaking countries without Spanish-speaking people finding out about it. GM dealers in South America would be stupid to sit idly by while GM asked them to sell a car whose very name implied that it was unable to move.
But, I guess it's easier to assume that GM's entire marketing team didn't know enough to realize that people on a different continent speaking another language might have another interpretation for the name of a product, and that everyone in Mexico and South America involved in marketing and selling the car would be too lazy and drunk to mention anything to their regional managers if the name actually was likely to kill sales.
Even if nobody in Detroit knew enough rudimentary Spanish to notice the coincidence, the Nova could not have brought to market in Mexico and/or South America without the involvement of numerous Spanish speakers engaged to translate user manuals, prepare advertising and promotional materials, communicate with the network of Chevrolet dealers in the target countries, etc.
As both articles point out, the Nova actually sold quite well in South America, exceeding GM's expectations.
Too many years ago, I remember writing some C code using Borland's Turbo C++ compiler (which, coincidentally, I downloaded today from Borland's website purely for nostalgia) that polled the keyboard controller directly.
You could choose to get both key-down and key-up events, although keyboard repeat was still a factor. While multiple keys were held down, you'd get repeated key-down events for the last key pressed, until you let it up (at which point you'd get a key-up event) or pressed yet another key (which would then generate an initial key-down event for that key...).
I believe I based my code upon something from Andre LeMothe's original "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus" (which covered DOS-only, sidescrolling and Wolfenstein-ish games; I see on Amazon that in years since LaMothe has maintained the series).
Due to mental bitrot, I don't remember specifically how to put the keyboard controller into this mode, but I'm sure it's irrelevant anyways, as it isn't likely to be useful in more modern operating systems. It might have been as simple as trapping the keyboard interrupt instead of passing it on to DOS.
Again, context is important. My post mentioned Sun and HP -- companies which provide hardware much, much more powerful than the average Lindows machine.
It's much easier for a company to standardize on one distribution for as much as possible. Can Lindows provide enterprise-level support on Sun's larger servers, or do they only focus on home users running Wintel-ish hardware?
Without having listened to the interviews (yeah, yeah, so I didn't RTFA, or LTTFI in this case, so sue me), I'm going to respond to what comment was posted to the./ front page about them. Here goes.
What's the point of this? Is corporate influence good or bad for Linux? What? From whose perspective are you asking?
I really don't think that the question itself is worth asking. You can't boil a complex set of technologies and interactions down to a simple "it's great!" or "it sucks!".
Based on the list of people interviewed, I'd imagine that more than just the Linux kernel is being addressed -- GNU, distros, free software in general.
Is modifying it all to work with new systems a good thing in general? I'd say yes, as it's always nice to have interested people making sure that code is truly portable. Note that I'm not saying, "more users mean more bugs found!", but that if a company wants to spend time and money fixing portability and compatibility issues, then I don't see how that's a bad thing.
Anyone contributing to a project has a reason for doing so. This is true whether they're paid for it or not -- either they're working to meet their own needs, or the needs of someone else. Code gets implemented for a reason, and I think that saying "Is corporate involvement in Linux a good thing?" is similar to asking "Was DJ Delorie's port of GCC to DOC a good thing?"
Obviously, if someone spends resources making free software into something that is useful to them, then it could be seen as having been a "good thing" for them.
Are corporations exploiting the OSS community? I don't know. Define "exploit". I'd imagine that for every company "exploiting" OSS by using it without contributing there are 1000 people who downloaded and installed OSS without ever having contributed anything back.
Maybe there's something Zen-like to my point of view on the topic. Is widespread adoption of GNU/Linux on the desktop a good thing? Is widespread adoption of computers in general a good thing? Is it better for Linux to improve, or for Microsoft to pull their heads a little further out of their asses with regards to quality control? These are questions you can't answer without context. Good for whom? For the desktop user? For me? For you? For your employer? Your grandmother? Residents of Uganda?
Until context is provided, I suppose the answer to the question, "Boon or Bane?" is simply, mu.
First of all, I really don't think that this interview was very interesting.
What seems to have gotten it onto Slashdot was his "only two distros" comment. However, what the person submitting the story left out was one minor detail: context.
He said HP, Sun, etc., are mostly backing off from pushing their own proprietary operating systems and opting to push Linux-based products. In that context, there are two highly relevant Linux distributions: Redhat and SuSE.
Can you name another distro with the resources to provide support to a major hardware vendor deploying Linux?
Isn't it amazing how much less interesting and inflammatory his comment seems with a little context surrounding it?
...which is why I addressed the fact that I was assuming a child of above-average intelligence.
So, not only did I realize that, but I specifically addressed it. I did not say "a five-year-old child", but a child with the capabilities of a five-year-old, which could certainly include a precocious three-year-old.
I could read at the age of three, something with which some Slashdot posters still seem to have trouble. I'd provide an example of one, but I think you've done that nicely enough already.
Allowing the use of marijuana would have a larger impact on the budget than most people think.
I came close to posting some numbers quoted from Google here, but I don't want to be accused of selectively choosing sources to support my point. From the numbers I've seen, it's pretty hard to deny that enforcing the law with regards to marijuana offenses costs taxpayers billions per year, and ties up prison cells which could be put to better use.
In addition to the lost prison space and money spent to house and care for these drug offenders, there's the fact that those people are no longer contributing to society (many likely had jobs before being jailed, after all). Those hidden costs to society aren't often thought about.
Do I support legalization of marijuana? I support it as much as I support any attempt to remove legislation put into place for the purpose of fighting an idiot's right to participate in natural selection. A lot of money which goes towards "the war on drugs" could be better spent, say, regulating the utility industries, or researching the societal benefits of obscenely long copyright terms vs. the benefits of a larger (and more current) public domain.
Yeah, yeah, I'm a smartass, I know. I do think that a person's views on "the war on drugs" can indicate their willingness to do what they think is best for society as opposed to simply supporting the status quo.
What would make me happy is a politician willing to say, "Let's legalize marijuana and return copyright to its original 14[/+14] year period, and we'll spend the money we'd have put towards the war on drugs next year to buy the RIAA some farmland so they can stop whining about decreasing revenue", I'd not only vote for him, but I'd probably be willing to fellate him as well.
It was originally "mental age/chronological age" times 100. I know it's no longer calculated that way; I'm pretty sure I said "roughly" or "about" or something to allow for fuzziness.
I also gave myself 6 years (if you recheck the subject of the post), which would allow for a 100% "average" kid.
However, clarifications and random trivia are always useful, so thanks for the reply!
It would probably take my girlfriend and I about four years to produce something with the capabilities of the average 5-year-old.
I'm pretty bright, and my girlfriend recently graduated from CMU with a degree in CS, and is now attending Johns Hopkins. It would (roughly speaking) take a 4-year-old child with an IQ of 125 to match a 5-year-old.
And for the quarter billion per year Japan is spending, I'd be able to afford some pretty neat educational toys, too!
You claim that "The Hulk" "wasn't terrible". Doesn't he throw a tank into ORBIT in that movie?
Consider the amount of energy he'd have to put into accelerating a tank into orbit around the earth.
Acceleration due to gravity is -32ft per second per second.
Let's use nice round numbers, shall we? 60 mph (just under 100 kph) equals 88 ft/sec. Assuming the Hulk threw the tank straight upward as a speed of 240 mph (or 352 ft/sec), it would take 11 seconds to reach a maximum height of 1936 feet over your green friend's head, and another 11 seconds later would crash back down upon it.
So, at 240 mph the tank wouldn't come close to entering an earth orbit. Now assume that the tank travelled, say, 88 feet while the Hulk brought it from a dead stop to 240 mph. This would assume that the Hulk has an incredibly long reach, but I'm being generous here.
Now, let's compute acceleration (we'll call it k. We'll need to find out how long the tank would take to go from 0-240mph in the large green hands of the Hulk. Assuming an initial speed of 0 (which we are), speed equals acceleration multiplies by time:
vel = k * t
We know that the velocity is 240 mph, or 352 ft/sec:
352 ft/sec = k * t
The position at time t is known -- the tank has travelled 88 feet. Again assuming an initial velocity and position of 0, we have:
pos = 1/2 * k * t * t
Since we know that the ending position is 88 feet from the original position, we can say:
88 ft = 1/2 * k * t * t
Let's multiply both sides by two and toss in some parenthesis:
176 ft = (k * t) * t
Now, we've said earlier that k*t is 352 ft/sec, so we can now say:
176 ft = (352 ft/sec) * t
So, t is 0.5 seconds. To throw the tank even 2000 feet into the air, even with an 88-foot swing, the Hulk would have to bring the tank from a dead stop to 240 mph in exactly half a second.
Somehow I doubt that the hulk could throw a tank 2000 feet into the air, let alone into orbit.
And this is the sort of movie you say "wasn't terrible."
I'm not asking for complete accuracy -- some suspension of disbelief is possible. However, unless the Hulk happened to be on a planet much, much less massive than the earth, expecting me to believe that he could launch a tank into orbit is pathetic. Even if his muscles could provide the required force, asking us to believe that his skeletal structure might survive such an assault is just plain silly, and I'm appalled that you aren't offended by such an insult to your intelligence.
That aside, the article simply says that people are finding out that many movies are a ripoff much sooner, and that deceptive marketing is no longer enough to get money from a bad film.
How many value systems would endorse trying to sell penis pills to people without any attempt to verify their age?
Are you suggesting that we should condone any behaviour which hasn't been deemed illegal by local authorities?
Laws are not absolute either -- they're quite subject to the whims of local legislature. In all 50 states you'll find many, many people who would consider exposing a child to pornographic emails or infringing upon another's ability to use a communications medium for useful purposes to be immoral.
At least morals don't require a lawyer to interpret.
And if you can show me someone who considers nudity to be immoral, I'll show you one fucked-up individual, since considering "nudity" to be immoral would put a moral strain upon activities like changing one's underwear or bathing.
Isn't it amazing that people like this seem to equate legality with morality?
There are lots of things which one can do which are legal but immoral, or moral but illegal. "I thought it was legal" is never an acceptable excuse for doing something which you know to be immoral.
just when you thought it was safe to stock your home or office the 802.11x way, another possibility springs up
... and I just dropped $80 on an access point/100Mb router. Had I seen this article, I _definitely_ would have waited for something which Bell Labs is working on in their spare time.
Last time this happened, I'd just installed BSD when Bell Labs announced their work on Plan 9. Boy, was I left in the dust on that one!
Do you feel that music is a significant part of American culture?
If so, do you consider it moral to refuse to allow America to hold an important cultural component in the public domain until the music is no longer culturally relevant?
How do you feel about the length of copyright protection? As I understand it, copyright was invented as a way to encourage creators to share their work with the general public. Do you think that without copyright terms of nearly a century artists would generally be less likely to share their work with the public?
Honestly, when it comes to handhelds I'd much rather use a less powerful Palm than anything with PC in the name.
I have no experience with their newer devices, but the fact that the Palm OS has no way of indicating to the user that the system is currently busy (like an hourglass mouse cursor, for instance) is one design decision I love -- it makes it more difficult for developers to feel comfortable leaving the user hanging while the application processes.
Palm tells developers not to do any processing on the handheld that can be offloaded to a more powerful machine. This design philosophy means that Palm developers have to keep efficiency in mind, and not bloat apps with all kinds of unneeded garbage, and the fact that developers have to work within hardware constraints keeps them from using the "a faster one will be out soon!" excuse from bloating up the software. Handhelds should be wicked quick, and I'd wager that the average machine running PalmOS is tons more responsive than anything you can show me with WinCE installed.
My Palm V can go for weeks without a recharge and fits easily in my pocket. Try to do that on a PocketPC before you start knocking Palm's offerings.
Regarding the desktop dying, I seriously doubt it. People may like their neat little all-in-one flatscreen Macs to some extent, but given that hardware is easier and cheaper to manufacture for the desktop leads me to think that the desktop PC is here to stay.
While you joke about having desks chained to computers, the fact remains that I can fit a much nicer monitor on my desk than I'd be willing to lug around.
A laptop is a pain in the ass to lug around, even without a huge display. I want my portables to be portable (the size of a Palm V or smaller), and my desktops to do the work that computers normally do.
I see portable devices as extensions of the PC -- they're nifty for helping you keep notes and information with you, but a portable device will not replace the need for a desktop system anytime soon.
It's all about tradeoffs. I don't want a portable that can handle CPU-intensive tasks, because that means a much shorter battery life cycle. That's why I'm blown away that people keep talking about moving tasks away from the desktop -- I don't want a portable that can play DVDs, because then it'll no longer fit in my pocket, and probably won't be able to go for a week or more without recharging.
The best thing that an OS can do for users is to let them share their data seamlessly between apps and computers. The biggest profit potential from Linux within the next 5 years, as I see it, would be a distro with this in mind.
If a home user could purchase a distro for $30 which they could install on as many of their own computers as they wanted and would automatically share resources in a secure yet seamless way would be the killer application that everybody's been waiting for. A system which makes full usage of distributed file systems with offline support (AFS or Coda does this as I recall), distributed authentication, printer and other device sharing, and such neat tricks would solve a lot of user headaches, as tasks like these are what normal users often try to do with an OS.
If a user could just plug a Linux-based laptop into their home network and have printers and their MP3 and document collections automatically available, they'd never look back.
I can't wait until Linux does see widespread home use, though -- it'll be great to see all of the "RMS sucks and the Hurd is a joke" people realize that they can no longer feel elite just for running Linux. I guess we'll either see a ton of people moving to BSD, or lots of people drooling over new Hurd features.
Either way, desktops will be around for a long, long time. Predicting the death of the desktop just because laptops exist is like predicting the death of the table saw just because you saw a circular saw at Home Depot -- both statements reveal a lack of understanding of the relative merits of both classes of device.
a given percentage of the population has religious reasons to "do the right thing".
This statement saddens me.
I agree with your post. It makes me sad, though, that many people never choose to consider the benefits of a strong system of morals, but simply adopt the viewpoints of their religion. People like this will often do things which would be considered immoral by their religion, but having never thought about the reasons for having morals in the first place they don't often notice their transgressions. When they "do the right thing", however, they pat themselves on the back and convince themselves that their God is happy with them.
Sorry for the slight rant, but a good friend and his girlfriend are living with his parents (she's going to school, and didn't have any place to stay), and his father, a compassionate, wonderful man who loves his children, is taking a lot of crap from his church because he allows his son's girlfriend to live in his house.
He's welcoming someone who had nowhere to stay, and accepts his son unconditionally, while members of his church (including the pastor) throw verbal stones.
Rather than think about the fact that a loving and accepting community is probably more in line with what a religion would strive for, these people do nothing but fight amongst themselves.
I'm not bothered because I think they're going against God's commands (I find the whole religion thing rather farfetched, but that's neither here nor there), but because I think that society in general would be better off if people made more of a habit of thinking about why morals are good for society, and why a moral breakdown can hurt everybody.
Whether it's scams on ebay or people sending spam, the major complaints that people have about the online actions of others generally come down to immoral actions.
I really wish that people didn't tie morals to religion so strongly; most people don't see a reason to hold themselves to moral standards other than fear of getting caught, whether by the proper authorities, or some God in the clouds. Schools in America could do much for the world in general if people were taught from an early age how their moral choices can affect not just themselves but the people with whom they interact.
Think about how much happier the Slashdot readership would be if Sonny Bono, Hilary Rosen, and their ilk had really considered the idea that they were stealing from the public domain by making sure that rigid copyright laws exist which will keep content locked away for decades, or if spammers thought about the fact that companies spend billions per year to filter their unwanted content, which drives the cost of goods and services up for everybody.
Talking about scammers and spammers and the RIAA being bad is one thing, but why not talk about the problem at the root of the problem?
I really really really hate making a Star Trek reference, but I caught an old episode of TNG recently in which Picard and Data snuck onto Romulus to find out what Spock (still alive!) was doing there. Spock said something about a turning point in Romulan evolution, and being there to help the Romulans turn from their emotionally driven ways towards a more systematic, logical way of life.
The idea comes to mind now that we are at a cultural turning point. People see the possibility of operating anonymously, and can choose to either conduct themselves honestly, or to say "fuck the system" and do whatever they think will maximize their experience on this rock called Earth.
It's just too bad that there's no Spock here to guide us through it.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, but many people may opt not to download updates because of their rediculous size.
Under Debian, at least, if a package is found to have a security hole, I have several options.
I can download only the affected package. Of course, since it's Debian, I can always opt to just bring the whole system up to date. If bandwidth is really a problem, I can even manually rsync an older local copy of the package against the updated version upstream.
Unfortunately, rsync isn't done by apt-get automatically, but the option to do it manually is there, as many Debian mirrors do support rsync.
The point is, though, that with Linux and the BSDs, you can find out exactly what you're downloading, and determine exactly what effect the new package will have. With XP, you might have no idea what you're getting. Spending eight hours downloading MS updates when you don't know what you're getting isn't something most people consider worthwhile, especially when it's often the case that after updating Windows, it's found that there have been refinements to the updates that just occurred, and so Windows wants to download yet more stuff, and reboot yet again!
People want to use their systems, not maintain them. As long as the MS "critical updates" take ages to download and often create the need for further updates, people will continue to ignore the "Windows updates are available" messages.
Rebooting is a lot to ask. Large downloads are a lot to ask. If I were to install all of the "important" updates available to Windows at the moment, it would require several reboots, especially since many components can't be installed at the same time. Under Debian, not even one reboot would be required, unless the kernel were updated. Under Windows, if I update Media Player, a reboot is required, and Windows won't even let me update other things at the same time!
I'm just glad I'm behind a firewall.
First of all, your fear of liability is irrational. If it is known and documented that a trojan will forge the sender address, and the headers show that the mail was not sent from your ISP, it sounds like you're in the clear. Even if it were sent from your ISP, one would have to show that you controlled that IP at the time the message was sent.
Furthermore, unless you can cite a case in which a user was held responsible for the activities of a trojan running on his or her system, I feel pretty safe in calling you paranoid. Unless you did knowingly spread the trojan, you're fine, except for the aforementioned paranoia.
That aside...
Nice try.
Too bad you seem to have no clue what trademark actually covers. Contrary to what you seem to believe, owning a trademark does not give you exclusive right to control the use of a certain combination of letters in the Roman alphabet.
This means that Bertelsmann can't do a damned thing about me saying "Bertelsmann" here. Bertelsmann Bertelsmann Bertelsmann. Nor can the RIAA. From the USPTO:
As long as I'm not using a trademark to mislead people by implying that a product was provided the company which holds that trademark when the product hadn't really been provided by said company, there really isn't a problem.
Go try to register your email address at the USPTO. If you succeed, let me know what it is, and I'll email you letting you know that I heard a story about the Recording Industry Association of America (TM) was suing students from colleges including Princeton University (TM), that I saw the story on MTV's (TM) website, as well as on the news on a Time-Warner (TM) station, and that the students were likely running Microsoft (TM) Windows (TM).
Then I'll invite you to imitate the actions of The SCO Group (TM) and file a lawsuit against me which is destined to do nothing but waste court time.
Hell, you can even forward a copy to each of the companies which own the aforementioned trademarks.
When the court case is thrown out, I'll buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks (TM), which buys its milk from Horizon Organic Dairy (TM).
True, but I'm slightly annoyed by the popup blocker. I also have Merriam-Webster's toolbar installed, and Google's popup blocker prevents the Merriam-Webster toolbar from displaying anything.
"Similar problem", in this case, means that "nothing happened and an urban legend was started."
I'd not saying that problems never happen, I'm just saying that the person claiming to have been amused when the GM blunder occurred is bluffing; he heard the story and took it as fact without factual evidence, such as sales numbers to back up his claims of unmet sales goals. I decided to try to help to debunk this myth. I'm a Ford guy myself, but I do think it's a little sad how people will spread untruth about a company when information debunking the rumor is easily found.
Or is spreading unfounded myth about companies only a bad thing when SCO does it?
XML's textual nature keeps XML documents "open". I did a Google search a while ago when trying to determine whether there was a standard scheme for putting binary data into XML, and came across somebody discussing parse times for XML. He'd written a program which parsed XML and saved the parsed version in a binary format, and found that it was actually faster to just parse the XML again than to reconstruct the information from his binary format.
On one hand, sure, perhaps his coding wasn't up to the level of those who'd written the XML parser, which might account for the slower loading.
On the other hand, there's a good chance that someone writing an XML parser intended for general inclusion within other programs is paying a lot more attention to doing things right (in terms of speed, security, etc.) than the person who writes a quick data-parsing routine.
Computers don't care if humans can read their data, sure. But, humans do. Parsing a simple, well-defined text format isn't computationally expensive, and makes the job easier for those who might have cause to view the data.
Finally, XML tags can and do carry important semantic information. It's much easier to write a program to parse an arbitrary unknown XML schema (say, GnuCash's file format) than to have to reverse-engineer an arbitrary unknown binary format (yes, I've done both). This is important because it helps to ensure that the data isn't quite as bound to the program -- parsing and conversion between schemas is generally much easier than, say, translating a WordPerfect document to MS Word format.
Hans Reiser has even decided to use text in his transaction-control syscalls:
Text parsing isn't as bad as people like to make it, as long as you aren't parsing a horribly ugly specification (like, say, C++ code).
Besides, how is carrying something on top of HTTP going to introduce new security holes? I haven't been able to decide where you are implying the issues might arise.
As a simple Google search for "Chevy Nova Spanish" reveals, this never happened.
The first link revealed by Google debunks this myth:
The second linkprovided by Google is slightly better.
My favorite quote from the article:
The article also points out the fact that you can't market a car in Spanish-speaking countries without Spanish-speaking people finding out about it. GM dealers in South America would be stupid to sit idly by while GM asked them to sell a car whose very name implied that it was unable to move.
But, I guess it's easier to assume that GM's entire marketing team didn't know enough to realize that people on a different continent speaking another language might have another interpretation for the name of a product, and that everyone in Mexico and South America involved in marketing and selling the car would be too lazy and drunk to mention anything to their regional managers if the name actually was likely to kill sales.
As both articles point out, the Nova actually sold quite well in South America, exceeding GM's expectations.
Too many years ago, I remember writing some C code using Borland's Turbo C++ compiler (which, coincidentally, I downloaded today from Borland's website purely for nostalgia) that polled the keyboard controller directly.
You could choose to get both key-down and key-up events, although keyboard repeat was still a factor. While multiple keys were held down, you'd get repeated key-down events for the last key pressed, until you let it up (at which point you'd get a key-up event) or pressed yet another key (which would then generate an initial key-down event for that key...).
I believe I based my code upon something from Andre LeMothe's original "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus" (which covered DOS-only, sidescrolling and Wolfenstein-ish games; I see on Amazon that in years since LaMothe has maintained the series).
Due to mental bitrot, I don't remember specifically how to put the keyboard controller into this mode, but I'm sure it's irrelevant anyways, as it isn't likely to be useful in more modern operating systems. It might have been as simple as trapping the keyboard interrupt instead of passing it on to DOS.
Again, context is important. My post mentioned Sun and HP -- companies which provide hardware much, much more powerful than the average Lindows machine.
It's much easier for a company to standardize on one distribution for as much as possible. Can Lindows provide enterprise-level support on Sun's larger servers, or do they only focus on home users running Wintel-ish hardware?
I'd bet the latter is true.
Without having listened to the interviews (yeah, yeah, so I didn't RTFA, or LTTFI in this case, so sue me), I'm going to respond to what comment was posted to the ./ front page about them. Here goes.
What's the point of this? Is corporate influence good or bad for Linux? What? From whose perspective are you asking?
I really don't think that the question itself is worth asking. You can't boil a complex set of technologies and interactions down to a simple "it's great!" or "it sucks!".
Based on the list of people interviewed, I'd imagine that more than just the Linux kernel is being addressed -- GNU, distros, free software in general.
Is modifying it all to work with new systems a good thing in general? I'd say yes, as it's always nice to have interested people making sure that code is truly portable. Note that I'm not saying, "more users mean more bugs found!", but that if a company wants to spend time and money fixing portability and compatibility issues, then I don't see how that's a bad thing.
Anyone contributing to a project has a reason for doing so. This is true whether they're paid for it or not -- either they're working to meet their own needs, or the needs of someone else. Code gets implemented for a reason, and I think that saying "Is corporate involvement in Linux a good thing?" is similar to asking "Was DJ Delorie's port of GCC to DOC a good thing?"
Obviously, if someone spends resources making free software into something that is useful to them, then it could be seen as having been a "good thing" for them.
Are corporations exploiting the OSS community? I don't know. Define "exploit". I'd imagine that for every company "exploiting" OSS by using it without contributing there are 1000 people who downloaded and installed OSS without ever having contributed anything back.
Maybe there's something Zen-like to my point of view on the topic. Is widespread adoption of GNU/Linux on the desktop a good thing? Is widespread adoption of computers in general a good thing? Is it better for Linux to improve, or for Microsoft to pull their heads a little further out of their asses with regards to quality control? These are questions you can't answer without context. Good for whom? For the desktop user? For me? For you? For your employer? Your grandmother? Residents of Uganda?
Until context is provided, I suppose the answer to the question, "Boon or Bane?" is simply, mu.
Okay, everybody calm down.
First of all, I really don't think that this interview was very interesting.
What seems to have gotten it onto Slashdot was his "only two distros" comment. However, what the person submitting the story left out was one minor detail: context.
He said HP, Sun, etc., are mostly backing off from pushing their own proprietary operating systems and opting to push Linux-based products. In that context, there are two highly relevant Linux distributions: Redhat and SuSE.
Can you name another distro with the resources to provide support to a major hardware vendor deploying Linux?
Isn't it amazing how much less interesting and inflammatory his comment seems with a little context surrounding it?
...which is why I addressed the fact that I was assuming a child of above-average intelligence.
So, not only did I realize that, but I specifically addressed it. I did not say "a five-year-old child", but a child with the capabilities of a five-year-old, which could certainly include a precocious three-year-old.
I could read at the age of three, something with which some Slashdot posters still seem to have trouble. I'd provide an example of one, but I think you've done that nicely enough already.
Allowing the use of marijuana would have a larger impact on the budget than most people think.
I came close to posting some numbers quoted from Google here, but I don't want to be accused of selectively choosing sources to support my point. From the numbers I've seen, it's pretty hard to deny that enforcing the law with regards to marijuana offenses costs taxpayers billions per year, and ties up prison cells which could be put to better use.
In addition to the lost prison space and money spent to house and care for these drug offenders, there's the fact that those people are no longer contributing to society (many likely had jobs before being jailed, after all). Those hidden costs to society aren't often thought about.
Do I support legalization of marijuana? I support it as much as I support any attempt to remove legislation put into place for the purpose of fighting an idiot's right to participate in natural selection. A lot of money which goes towards "the war on drugs" could be better spent, say, regulating the utility industries, or researching the societal benefits of obscenely long copyright terms vs. the benefits of a larger (and more current) public domain.
Yeah, yeah, I'm a smartass, I know. I do think that a person's views on "the war on drugs" can indicate their willingness to do what they think is best for society as opposed to simply supporting the status quo.
What would make me happy is a politician willing to say, "Let's legalize marijuana and return copyright to its original 14[/+14] year period, and we'll spend the money we'd have put towards the war on drugs next year to buy the RIAA some farmland so they can stop whining about decreasing revenue", I'd not only vote for him, but I'd probably be willing to fellate him as well.
It was originally "mental age/chronological age" times 100. I know it's no longer calculated that way; I'm pretty sure I said "roughly" or "about" or something to allow for fuzziness.
I also gave myself 6 years (if you recheck the subject of the post), which would allow for a 100% "average" kid.
However, clarifications and random trivia are always useful, so thanks for the reply!
It would probably take my girlfriend and I about four years to produce something with the capabilities of the average 5-year-old.
I'm pretty bright, and my girlfriend recently graduated from CMU with a degree in CS, and is now attending Johns Hopkins. It would (roughly speaking) take a 4-year-old child with an IQ of 125 to match a 5-year-old.
And for the quarter billion per year Japan is spending, I'd be able to afford some pretty neat educational toys, too!
You claim that "The Hulk" "wasn't terrible". Doesn't he throw a tank into ORBIT in that movie?
Consider the amount of energy he'd have to put into accelerating a tank into orbit around the earth.
Acceleration due to gravity is -32ft per second per second.
Let's use nice round numbers, shall we? 60 mph (just under 100 kph) equals 88 ft/sec. Assuming the Hulk threw the tank straight upward as a speed of 240 mph (or 352 ft/sec), it would take 11 seconds to reach a maximum height of 1936 feet over your green friend's head, and another 11 seconds later would crash back down upon it.
So, at 240 mph the tank wouldn't come close to entering an earth orbit. Now assume that the tank travelled, say, 88 feet while the Hulk brought it from a dead stop to 240 mph. This would assume that the Hulk has an incredibly long reach, but I'm being generous here.
Now, let's compute acceleration (we'll call it k. We'll need to find out how long the tank would take to go from 0-240mph in the large green hands of the Hulk. Assuming an initial speed of 0 (which we are), speed equals acceleration multiplies by time:
vel = k * t
We know that the velocity is 240 mph, or 352 ft/sec:
352 ft/sec = k * t
The position at time t is known -- the tank has travelled 88 feet. Again assuming an initial velocity and position of 0, we have:
pos = 1/2 * k * t * t
Since we know that the ending position is 88 feet from the original position, we can say:
88 ft = 1/2 * k * t * t
Let's multiply both sides by two and toss in some parenthesis:
176 ft = (k * t) * t
Now, we've said earlier that k*t is 352 ft/sec, so we can now say:
176 ft = (352 ft/sec) * t
So, t is 0.5 seconds. To throw the tank even 2000 feet into the air, even with an 88-foot swing, the Hulk would have to bring the tank from a dead stop to 240 mph in exactly half a second.
Somehow I doubt that the hulk could throw a tank 2000 feet into the air, let alone into orbit.
And this is the sort of movie you say "wasn't terrible."
I'm not asking for complete accuracy -- some suspension of disbelief is possible. However, unless the Hulk happened to be on a planet much, much less massive than the earth, expecting me to believe that he could launch a tank into orbit is pathetic. Even if his muscles could provide the required force, asking us to believe that his skeletal structure might survive such an assault is just plain silly, and I'm appalled that you aren't offended by such an insult to your intelligence.
That aside, the article simply says that people are finding out that many movies are a ripoff much sooner, and that deceptive marketing is no longer enough to get money from a bad film.
How many value systems would endorse trying to sell penis pills to people without any attempt to verify their age?
Are you suggesting that we should condone any behaviour which hasn't been deemed illegal by local authorities?
Laws are not absolute either -- they're quite subject to the whims of local legislature. In all 50 states you'll find many, many people who would consider exposing a child to pornographic emails or infringing upon another's ability to use a communications medium for useful purposes to be immoral.
At least morals don't require a lawyer to interpret.
And if you can show me someone who considers nudity to be immoral, I'll show you one fucked-up individual, since considering "nudity" to be immoral would put a moral strain upon activities like changing one's underwear or bathing.
Isn't it amazing that people like this seem to equate legality with morality?
There are lots of things which one can do which are legal but immoral, or moral but illegal. "I thought it was legal" is never an acceptable excuse for doing something which you know to be immoral.
Last time this happened, I'd just installed BSD when Bell Labs announced their work on Plan 9. Boy, was I left in the dust on that one!
Do you feel that music is a significant part of American culture?
If so, do you consider it moral to refuse to allow America to hold an important cultural component in the public domain until the music is no longer culturally relevant?
How do you feel about the length of copyright protection? As I understand it, copyright was invented as a way to encourage creators to share their work with the general public. Do you think that without copyright terms of nearly a century artists would generally be less likely to share their work with the public?
Where are the mod points when you need them? In terms of the comments-to-laugh ratio, this is the best story I've read in ages ;-)
Honestly, when it comes to handhelds I'd much rather use a less powerful Palm than anything with PC in the name.
I have no experience with their newer devices, but the fact that the Palm OS has no way of indicating to the user that the system is currently busy (like an hourglass mouse cursor, for instance) is one design decision I love -- it makes it more difficult for developers to feel comfortable leaving the user hanging while the application processes.
Palm tells developers not to do any processing on the handheld that can be offloaded to a more powerful machine. This design philosophy means that Palm developers have to keep efficiency in mind, and not bloat apps with all kinds of unneeded garbage, and the fact that developers have to work within hardware constraints keeps them from using the "a faster one will be out soon!" excuse from bloating up the software. Handhelds should be wicked quick, and I'd wager that the average machine running PalmOS is tons more responsive than anything you can show me with WinCE installed.
My Palm V can go for weeks without a recharge and fits easily in my pocket. Try to do that on a PocketPC before you start knocking Palm's offerings.
Regarding the desktop dying, I seriously doubt it. People may like their neat little all-in-one flatscreen Macs to some extent, but given that hardware is easier and cheaper to manufacture for the desktop leads me to think that the desktop PC is here to stay.
While you joke about having desks chained to computers, the fact remains that I can fit a much nicer monitor on my desk than I'd be willing to lug around.
A laptop is a pain in the ass to lug around, even without a huge display. I want my portables to be portable (the size of a Palm V or smaller), and my desktops to do the work that computers normally do.
I see portable devices as extensions of the PC -- they're nifty for helping you keep notes and information with you, but a portable device will not replace the need for a desktop system anytime soon.
It's all about tradeoffs. I don't want a portable that can handle CPU-intensive tasks, because that means a much shorter battery life cycle. That's why I'm blown away that people keep talking about moving tasks away from the desktop -- I don't want a portable that can play DVDs, because then it'll no longer fit in my pocket, and probably won't be able to go for a week or more without recharging.
The best thing that an OS can do for users is to let them share their data seamlessly between apps and computers. The biggest profit potential from Linux within the next 5 years, as I see it, would be a distro with this in mind.
If a home user could purchase a distro for $30 which they could install on as many of their own computers as they wanted and would automatically share resources in a secure yet seamless way would be the killer application that everybody's been waiting for. A system which makes full usage of distributed file systems with offline support (AFS or Coda does this as I recall), distributed authentication, printer and other device sharing, and such neat tricks would solve a lot of user headaches, as tasks like these are what normal users often try to do with an OS.
If a user could just plug a Linux-based laptop into their home network and have printers and their MP3 and document collections automatically available, they'd never look back.
I can't wait until Linux does see widespread home use, though -- it'll be great to see all of the "RMS sucks and the Hurd is a joke" people realize that they can no longer feel elite just for running Linux. I guess we'll either see a ton of people moving to BSD, or lots of people drooling over new Hurd features.
Either way, desktops will be around for a long, long time. Predicting the death of the desktop just because laptops exist is like predicting the death of the table saw just because you saw a circular saw at Home Depot -- both statements reveal a lack of understanding of the relative merits of both classes of device.
I agree with your post. It makes me sad, though, that many people never choose to consider the benefits of a strong system of morals, but simply adopt the viewpoints of their religion. People like this will often do things which would be considered immoral by their religion, but having never thought about the reasons for having morals in the first place they don't often notice their transgressions. When they "do the right thing", however, they pat themselves on the back and convince themselves that their God is happy with them.
Sorry for the slight rant, but a good friend and his girlfriend are living with his parents (she's going to school, and didn't have any place to stay), and his father, a compassionate, wonderful man who loves his children, is taking a lot of crap from his church because he allows his son's girlfriend to live in his house.
He's welcoming someone who had nowhere to stay, and accepts his son unconditionally, while members of his church (including the pastor) throw verbal stones.
Rather than think about the fact that a loving and accepting community is probably more in line with what a religion would strive for, these people do nothing but fight amongst themselves.
I'm not bothered because I think they're going against God's commands (I find the whole religion thing rather farfetched, but that's neither here nor there), but because I think that society in general would be better off if people made more of a habit of thinking about why morals are good for society, and why a moral breakdown can hurt everybody.
Whether it's scams on ebay or people sending spam, the major complaints that people have about the online actions of others generally come down to immoral actions.
I really wish that people didn't tie morals to religion so strongly; most people don't see a reason to hold themselves to moral standards other than fear of getting caught, whether by the proper authorities, or some God in the clouds. Schools in America could do much for the world in general if people were taught from an early age how their moral choices can affect not just themselves but the people with whom they interact.
Think about how much happier the Slashdot readership would be if Sonny Bono, Hilary Rosen, and their ilk had really considered the idea that they were stealing from the public domain by making sure that rigid copyright laws exist which will keep content locked away for decades, or if spammers thought about the fact that companies spend billions per year to filter their unwanted content, which drives the cost of goods and services up for everybody.
Talking about scammers and spammers and the RIAA being bad is one thing, but why not talk about the problem at the root of the problem?
I really really really hate making a Star Trek reference, but I caught an old episode of TNG recently in which Picard and Data snuck onto Romulus to find out what Spock (still alive!) was doing there. Spock said something about a turning point in Romulan evolution, and being there to help the Romulans turn from their emotionally driven ways towards a more systematic, logical way of life.
The idea comes to mind now that we are at a cultural turning point. People see the possibility of operating anonymously, and can choose to either conduct themselves honestly, or to say "fuck the system" and do whatever they think will maximize their experience on this
rock called Earth.
It's just too bad that there's no Spock here to guide us through it.