Want to know something else interesting about CD-Keyus as handed out mby MS? My company has a copy of Win2K Server, and Advanced server. I also have a legit copy of Server. Interestingly, all three have the same CD Key, even though mine was acquired completely separately from my company.... I found it rather interesting.
For a bill almost entriely by the MPAA/RIAA, this seems very strange. Are they really that confident they can devise a scheme that can survive for long when the code is out on the open? Or else do they think they can put it out there, watch people crack it and based on the cracks improve it more quickly?
It would be interesting to think about the consequences here. In the past, they've required all the protection schemes they use be kept sealed as tightly as possible. I guess a good theory is that they have realized this only delays cracks, as it eventually leaks out. And if there is one thing they don't want, is for a crack only to be discovered after it has become a dominant market force. It better be early in the adoption phase so it can be scrapped, or never..
Cool, I thought I remembered that from KDE2, but the option seems to have disappeared in the 3.0 branch... Or else moved. If it has moved, could someone tell me where?
Another point I wanted to make, this time in favor of Gnome:) Galeon is a truly top notch browser. Konqueror is ok, but everything renders with mozilla's engine, and khtml sometimes falls short. Additionally, Konqueror seems to completely dismiss the notion of tab browsing. Though so many people want it and request it, it seems like the stance they take is "no, tabbed browsing is not good UI design, it's not as easy to use, even if so many users think it is". Of course, this is unsubstantiated claim, but it feels that way. I just don't get how so many people can dismiss concepts in UI design through supposed expert research that tells users they don't know what they want.
I've been playing with both. I can certainly say both offer great speedups over their current stable versions. However, I must say that KDE3 feels a lot closer to release quality than Gnome2, even though Gnome2 supposedly has a sooner release date...
Everything in KDE (at lleast as of RC2) seems to work, I haven't seen any crashes. All the utilities and such seem pretty complete.
Gnome2, as of a few days ago, still seemed broken in so many ways. On log out, the panel always segfaulted. The appearance is, well, pretty crappy compared with KDE (one font selector, which doesn't seem to work right). Gdm is completely broken (the daemon continuously restarts, and the configuration tools are broken and won't even start. Sawfish 2 doesn't seem to want to even pull up any configuration applets. Interoperability between Gnome2 and Gnome1 apps seems ok, until gGConf comes into play. If gnome1 installed gconf is running, Gnome2 apps screw up, if gnome2 is running it's gconf, Gnome1 apps that are GConf aware mess up. All this is my own machine, with gnome prefixes differing between 1 and 2, but under the same configuration, KDE is good to go... Maybe at release time, we will see a different story. Both show great promise.
I dunno, sometimes modern environments tend to push the X system a bit harder somehow. In any case, I occasionally get a similar problem out of my Voodoo3 configuration under 4.2.0. Fortunately, I have a network so I can telnet in and kill -9 the X server. I don't remember all these problems back in the 3.3.6 days, and I would go back, but XVideo is too cool:) I really have to wonder if X 4.2.0 in general still isn't true "production quality"....
BTW, for reference, here is a URL to Real's download area that still has linux versions, if anyone wants to grab them before real, say, distcontinues them: http://scopes.real.com/real/player/unix/uni x.html
http://scopes.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html? src=rpbform Is the url for the unix players:) Those updates you list are very important too though
Re:Sounds weak to me
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, in any case it is good to get DoS bugs fixed.
But with regards to IDing the server, you can't with certainty determine what SMTP server is running. Sure you can make a reasonable guess based on what strings follow the numbers during the SMTP transaction, but for some mailservers this is configurable or even could be disabled.
Let's say there was an envelope type that postfix occasionally lets through. Now, if the admin of that for some reason actually wants to exploit this to have an open mail relay, it could fake the strings to make it look like a server that wouldn't get probed for it...
In any case, I started work for a company and one of the first things I did was fix their mail servers so that they both did not offer open mail relays, and also played nice with ORBZ testing procuedure, and it was Lotus Domino, FYI. It's not like they randomly probe you into oblivion, you request the test and have a reasonable picture of when it will happen, and if you have been digging around the mailserver and fix it right before asking, this isn't a problem. Cases like this should show companies it is worth the money to hire competent systems administrators.
Re:SerialATA doesn't seem very advanced
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 2
to 3), I was under the impression that the "official" spec was 18" for traditional ATA, though 36" cables are available, they are not compliant with the SPEC. I still says that 36" (the sATA spec) is enough room from the adapter to make an external device possible, just not nearly as flexibile as SCSI external devices. In my experience, SCSI devices are typically placed frequently right next to the computer that uses it, well within 3 ft of the connector..
Is crap for a mailserver, I've always had problems out of it and avoid it like the plague when I can get away with it. For one, it tries to do too much for a mailserver, and its functionality as a mail server seems to be secondary to it's database features. Domino may work well as a workflow engine/document management, but it really isn't a good Mail server implementation. Unfortunately, so many companies use it as an Exchange replacement, even though it is intended to do much more and mail is done in a really clunky way.. Just spend a few days using Notes and you'll agree that mail does not seem to be a central concern in the scheme of domino..
Perosnally, I think postfix or qmail are good mail servers (though postfix doesn't cope at all with accounts that have uppercase in them, and qmail is only marginally better at it...). They are simple, short, and to the point. If you must use domino for mail serving, I would suggest having some sort of minimalistic mail server to act as a go between between domino and the outside world, as domino's is flawed in so many ways...
Re:SerialATA doesn't seem very advanced
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 2
Open mouth, insert foot... My statement that *serial* ata definitely meant lengthening the chain is false, it seems that hardware compatibility is a significant issue, but it seems that at least initially chains are likely not to increase significant. 1) and 3) still stand though:)
Re:SerialATA doesn't seem very advanced
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Ok, let's see here:
For 1), I have heard that, indeed, power and data are together in a single connection, or at least it is tandardized to make hotswap feasible.
2) This is completely false, one of the main points of *serial* ATA was to increase the chain lengths to SCSI level capacities. The focus is on software compatibility, not transparent hardware compatibility. They say in the beginning, they expect motherboards that have Serial ATA to also have Parallel ATA on the same motherboard...
3) Why is it not usable for external devices? For one, they have extended cable length to three feet between points on the chain. No where near SCSI capability, but three feet from an interface card isn't bad. I suspect you could at the very least have SCSI solutions in ATA with this.
You are right that FireWire or USB2 might be worth a second look, but at the current rate, no one wants to bother scrapping everything they have based on ATA to pursue such a dream. I would much rather have Serial ATA than our current ATA. Of course, I have to wonder if the industry will even see this move as worth it. Even if from a software perspective it behaves similarly to ATA, I would think the hardware implementers have been holdig back. ATA is seen to meet the demands of home users, and SCSI supplies advanced features to businesses that need it. Hardware vendors have a vested interest in maintaining that dicotomy, since they can charge a huge premium for SCSI without problems coming up in the Desktop market...
Give us a viable alternative that works any better? Quicktime? RealPlayer? Well, for QuickTime (Sorenson codec QuickTime), your choices are either Mac or Windows binary, not much bettter than WMP....
RealPlayer? Once upon a time, maybe. The quality is crap, but at the very least they *had* native linux player versions. Now, while they are still physically on the site, the non-win32, non-realone real player versions are no longer just difficult to find from the main page, they are now completely gone. They don't even want to support Mac, they are full out Windows now, click on the check out realon player link, and you auotmatically get a.exe. I have native versions of Real8 and a beta of RealOne for Linux, because I was around when they had them available, nowadays users are screwed...
Now, what is left that is a viable alternative? You could use quicktime with a differenet codec, but even then player support under linux is not great. Ogg Tarkin might be good when it is released, but for now it isn't an option.
Now, let's re-examine the situation with AVI/ASF/WMV (of which ASF/WMV is the streaming option). Most of these files can be played under linux (though ASF, and I would imagine WMV are illegal due to patents, but that hasn't stopped projects from putting it in), and many without ever resorting to win32 code. For example, consider MPlayer. If a file is indeo created, it can use an xanim module. If it is divx encoded, ffmpeg or divxdecore can be done to natively open it (though divx is snubbed by MS, so that isn't much of a streaming option). Ultimately, for commercial streaming you would probably end up using a Windows dll, unfortunately, but of the options that you can try to plug through right now off the web, Windows content actually involves running the least win32 code.
When Ogg Tarkin or something like that comes out, *then* you can push forward and protest sites that don't use a good alternative, but in the meantime, the multimedia providers have to serve it *somehow*, and none of the streaming options right now are any better to linux than others.
Until recently, an official MPEG-4 release looked like it could be the ticket, but the proposed licensing really messes that up. And don't even begin to suggest that you could use MPEG-1 for streaming, if you thought Real is crappy at low bitrates, well, just try MPEG at those bitrates and even Real looks better..
But I can't understand why anyone would use it to play RealMedia content. Although Real's site has seemingly obfuscated the links to it out of existence, there is both a native RealPlayer8 and beta quality RealOne player for linux, with plugins included.
That said, I can barely see any reason to use Windows Media Player from crossover, as a number of linux players (numerous avifile based programs, xine, and mplayer) can play Traditionally Windows-only (avi/asf/wmv/etc.) media in much more efficient ways. With CrossOver, pretty much everything is done in win32 binary format before being put on the display. Whatever you may say about wine's efficiency, it still is simply not feasible to beat native code. With the semi-native players, most of the time they get away with native codecs, resulting in no win32 code at all. Even in cases where codecs have to be pulled from win32 codecs, as little as possible is done there. The file is demultiplxed, the video stream is passed through the win32 dll, and is only required to provide decoding of frames, and in the case of video, usually in the easiest colorspace for that dll to produce. From there, native code takes over, and, if available, passes the data straight to an Xvideo overlay of the appropriate colorspace, and hardware does some filtering, colorspace conversion, and scaling. Even if hardware can't be used, native methods to do this outperform wine-mode code. The only reason I can see is for the plugin aspect of this implementation. Of course, I have always hated the "plugin" style of viewing content, and have always saved to disk when I could. Same with "embedded" playback in file managers (i.e. Konqueror), I always disable that crap...
Now with QuickTime, you have a pretty good reason to use CrossOver, the best (only way) to view Sorenson codec material is QuickTime's player. Plus you get browser embedding if you like that. A little tip for those who just want standalone player, wine is enough to run the full installation. In fact, if you disable ddraw.dll in your wine config, you get CrossOver level cleanness (i.e. no black all over the screen, no messed up menus, etc).
As far as the office format viewing, I have no clue, I don't have to deal with that much:) This may very well be where CrossOver truly shines in business, making a friendly desktop more feasible. Though most of us will download a file and use some imperfect converter/importer to load it into another editor, or use wine itself to view the material, a lot of business people want the convenience of viewing it in the browser, and for.doc content and the like, this makes a lot more sense than multimedia does in the browser paradigm...
While I agree with the intent, I have a couple of questions...
Are the ISPs to be reimbursed by the government for whatever additional resources they require in order to comply with this law? Seems hardly fair if not...
Also, how are organizations like UPS, USPS, etc regulated in this respect? For one, it doesn't seem that the statres have the authority to do that, and that such regulations would have to be federal. And to my knowledge, shipping companies aren't required to break open every box to see if they are shipping illegal material, nor are they given a blacklist of postal address that are not allowed to send or receive mail. So, if a forum of child pron freaks organized it such that all materials were transfered through parcel post, would it then be ok?
The way I see it, if they have the addresses, it is the responsibility of the government to shut these sites down, not any private organization. Now there comes a problem with sites hosted in other countries providing material to the US, and I suppose this is where this law is intended to come into play. With this, I ask what are the regulations on international shipping? Can someone in another country just seal up a box of child porn and send it on over? If so, I'm afraid the same has to be possible through the internet.
The problem is due to its convenience, the internet keeps being considered a special case with regards to everything. I think similar standards as applied to shipping companies should be applied to internet providers. If there are restrictions on international shipping with regards to all this, then, sadly, a national firewall would be the only fair way to do it. It sounds atrocious, but if done *Really* carefully with a large review process to ensure only what the public agrees to is kept out, it might work. From my experience with international shipping, however, they aren't that restrictive on what you could send.
In the end, I suppose it makes sense for the rule that if the site is on US soil, shut it down, otherwise, report the site to the country with jurisdiction. If they choose not to pursue it, well, it's not 'our' children to protect at that point.. It would certainly be worth putting pressure on that nation to be better about laws, but ultimately it isn't our responsibility to prtect their children..
Wow, so you are still running that 386DX/25Mhz? Only way I could see you even attempting to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein is if you had it now. Of course, I would thinnk a 386DX/25Mhz would be incapable of playing RTCW, seeing as how the CPUI is so slow, likely wouldn't support enough memory, and no graphics card it could take would be supported for 3D...
With my broadband provider, I have had similar conversations. Basicvally, the external modem could not get a signal over the line, the LEDs made this very clear that the problem was between the modem and their end. When I call and they ask what OS, I said Linux, and they said, "we don't support that, could you reboot into another system?" And I said the problem is not within the system, it is the connection, the LEDs indicate power,b ut no signal, etc. etc. And they said, could you just please reboot into Windows? And so I said ok, waited a few seconds and did nothing, then said, I'm in windows. Then that same person asked me to describe the LEDs, when I had described them five seconds ago without being asked, before asking me to do anything with the computer. Then says "oh, the problem appears to be on our end somewhere, we'll look into it, here is your ticket number, etc....
Ever since then, whenever I call I have actually been known to say "what operating system would you *like* me to be running, and we'll just claim that....". It is very annoying when techs won't even listen to what you have to say..
This is a good reason to have/home as a separate partition:) In any case, backing up home is easy if you have a place to stick the tarball. tar czvf home.tar.gz/home should give you a nice backup that preserves ownership and permissions to stick somehwere... Don't need a GUI for something that straightforward...
I personally keep all data that I want persistant accross installs on non-root partitions:/opt,/home, and/usr/local are the key htings I keep around when I upgrade. I also have extra software installs and multimedia files, but I keep those on the file server, and there it is also kept separate from the partitions the distro gets to screw with (and on a RAID array).
Well, not just the GPL, but the iconset looks very much dangerously close to violating MS copyrights.... I personally think this distro could be in veyr hot water from both sides. Though MS seems to be less active about such things than Apple, they could very well pull this trump card when they like and screw over something like this.
As far as the swapfile/partition issue, he raises a valid point. parittioning is a pain in the arse for new users. You ask a user who really doesn't have any idea of how he will be pushing the system to make a permament decision about how his swap should be and he will be confused. You have been able to swap to files for a long time, and I do it, as sometimes I need a lot of swap, and other times I need next to done, and that flexibility is not easy with a partition. A parttion may give a speed boost, but with a good filesystem that becomes less and less of an issue.
As far as the second issue, I have no clue how those fat32 mounts can cause such a slow issue. He is trying to look at it from an end user perspective, and this is exactly the sort of thought an end user would have. Likely the distro is doing something extra that is slow enough to block mounts, maybe some sort of indexing service or something. His statement about an algorithm is silly, but perhaps apt if the distro is doing something special at mount time that it could postpone to run in the background...
I know nothing about this distro and am completely uninterested, but I think his review was very good look from a user level perspective. Not big on techinical details, but the target audience of this distro isn't very technical...
Ok, you don't really understand how the whole system works.
First off, the claim is Hurd, the GNU kernel, is going to be released 'real soon now'. Of course, it has been coming 'real soon now' for the past few years. When Linus first began work on the Linux kernel, Hurd was expected to be released in one, maybe two years, and we see how that has gone:)
Secondly, the completion of the Hurd kernel simply means you can finally build a complete Unix-like system from only GNU (to do it stable you had to use the Linux kernel before. Nothing changes for Linux here. Debian has a Hurd distro, but companies are likely going to ignore Hurd more than theyw ould ignore Linux.
Also, I doubt that any successful linux company has realistic ambitions for the home desktop. The place they have been targetting are servers and professional desktops. They will spend no less time fiddling with the GNU tools simply because a GNU system is available. The "duplication of work" you mention wouldn't change, though GNU utilities have little to do with duplication, distro-specific enhancements typically get folded into the GNU sources after time, and thus all distros eventually inherit each others work...
From a business perspective where you are focusing on the product more than the services, GPL is a horrible, horrible idea. His company is intentionally trying to profit off of the work of others, charging for the programs and making it more difficult to get the source.
At the core, they are selling code written by others without compensation.
In this circumstance, there are two ways to go. First, find BSD licensed code to steal from. This is still bad behavior, but it is more legitimate bad behavior, the original authors by using BSD license have consented to the bad behavior.
Also, how much of what they make use of from the GPL community is LGPLed? That is a very good license for libraries that don't mind commercial products based on them, yet want to protect the freedom of the bits they did themselves. This would fit perfectly with the Kompany's goals without bastardizing themselves.
On a side note, how does QTs licensing play into commercial products like this? I guess they can still claim the work is GPLed and therefore they can ignore the commercial license of qt, but in practice could Trolltech have legal grounding to punish them for being a commercial product without paying commercial fees?
I think qt's license is a very big reason why a lot of companies push gnome more than KDE. Even though they have to dance around the GPL with Gnome, at least they don't have to worry about Qt's license on top of everything else. The result I see is that very good free software is available for KDE (qt's license is perfectly fine for free software), but some big players mostly ignore KDE if they can..
Well, I wouldn't say veteran users are any more likely to look at porn than novices, novices are just as much out for porn as anyone else. I think the articles conclusion was reasonable, that it was related to email address exposure more than anything else. For example, even though I never distributed my email address to any adult site for any reason, I get adult spam. Same with several other people I know. Even for those who visit porn sites, they refuse to identify themselves in any way (including email) and go through some length to ensure the address is not known to that site.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to know something else interesting about CD-Keyus as handed out mby MS? My company has a copy of Win2K Server, and Advanced server. I also have a legit copy of Server. Interestingly, all three have the same CD Key, even though mine was acquired completely separately from my company.... I found it rather interesting.
For a bill almost entriely by the MPAA/RIAA, this seems very strange. Are they really that confident they can devise a scheme that can survive for long when the code is out on the open? Or else do they think they can put it out there, watch people crack it and based on the cracks improve it more quickly?
It would be interesting to think about the consequences here. In the past, they've required all the protection schemes they use be kept sealed as tightly as possible. I guess a good theory is that they have realized this only delays cracks, as it eventually leaks out. And if there is one thing they don't want, is for a crack only to be discovered after it has become a dominant market force. It better be early in the adoption phase so it can be scrapped, or never..
Cool, I thought I remembered that from KDE2, but the option seems to have disappeared in the 3.0 branch... Or else moved. If it has moved, could someone tell me where?
Another point I wanted to make, this time in favor of Gnome :) Galeon is a truly top notch browser. Konqueror is ok, but everything renders with mozilla's engine, and khtml sometimes falls short. Additionally, Konqueror seems to completely dismiss the notion of tab browsing. Though so many people want it and request it, it seems like the stance they take is "no, tabbed browsing is not good UI design, it's not as easy to use, even if so many users think it is". Of course, this is unsubstantiated claim, but it feels that way. I just don't get how so many people can dismiss concepts in UI design through supposed expert research that tells users they don't know what they want.
I've been playing with both. I can certainly say both offer great speedups over their current stable versions. However, I must say that KDE3 feels a lot closer to release quality than Gnome2, even though Gnome2 supposedly has a sooner release date...
Everything in KDE (at lleast as of RC2) seems to work, I haven't seen any crashes. All the utilities and such seem pretty complete.
Gnome2, as of a few days ago, still seemed broken in so many ways. On log out, the panel always segfaulted. The appearance is, well, pretty crappy compared with KDE (one font selector, which doesn't seem to work right). Gdm is completely broken (the daemon continuously restarts, and the configuration tools are broken and won't even start. Sawfish 2 doesn't seem to want to even pull up any configuration applets. Interoperability between Gnome2 and Gnome1 apps seems ok, until gGConf comes into play. If gnome1 installed gconf is running, Gnome2 apps screw up, if gnome2 is running it's gconf, Gnome1 apps that are GConf aware mess up. All this is my own machine, with gnome prefixes differing between 1 and 2, but under the same configuration, KDE is good to go... Maybe at release time, we will see a different story. Both show great promise.
I dunno, sometimes modern environments tend to push the X system a bit harder somehow. In any case, I occasionally get a similar problem out of my Voodoo3 configuration under 4.2.0. Fortunately, I have a network so I can telnet in and kill -9 the X server. I don't remember all these problems back in the 3.3.6 days, and I would go back, but XVideo is too cool :) I really have to wonder if X 4.2.0 in general still isn't true "production quality"....
BTW, for reference, here is a URL to Real's download area that still has linux versions, if anyone wants to grab them before real, say, distcontinues them:i x.html
http://scopes.real.com/real/player/unix/un
http://scopes.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html? src=rpbform :)
Is the url for the unix players
Those updates you list are very important too though
Well, in any case it is good to get DoS bugs fixed.
But with regards to IDing the server, you can't with certainty determine what SMTP server is running. Sure you can make a reasonable guess based on what strings follow the numbers during the SMTP transaction, but for some mailservers this is configurable or even could be disabled.
Let's say there was an envelope type that postfix occasionally lets through. Now, if the admin of that for some reason actually wants to exploit this to have an open mail relay, it could fake the strings to make it look like a server that wouldn't get probed for it...
In any case, I started work for a company and one of the first things I did was fix their mail servers so that they both did not offer open mail relays, and also played nice with ORBZ testing procuedure, and it was Lotus Domino, FYI. It's not like they randomly probe you into oblivion, you request the test and have a reasonable picture of when it will happen, and if you have been digging around the mailserver and fix it right before asking, this isn't a problem. Cases like this should show companies it is worth the money to hire competent systems administrators.
to 3), I was under the impression that the "official" spec was 18" for traditional ATA, though 36" cables are available, they are not compliant with the SPEC. I still says that 36" (the sATA spec) is enough room from the adapter to make an external device possible, just not nearly as flexibile as SCSI external devices. In my experience, SCSI devices are typically placed frequently right next to the computer that uses it, well within 3 ft of the connector..
Is crap for a mailserver, I've always had problems out of it and avoid it like the plague when I can get away with it. For one, it tries to do too much for a mailserver, and its functionality as a mail server seems to be secondary to it's database features. Domino may work well as a workflow engine/document management, but it really isn't a good Mail server implementation. Unfortunately, so many companies use it as an Exchange replacement, even though it is intended to do much more and mail is done in a really clunky way.. Just spend a few days using Notes and you'll agree that mail does not seem to be a central concern in the scheme of domino..
Perosnally, I think postfix or qmail are good mail servers (though postfix doesn't cope at all with accounts that have uppercase in them, and qmail is only marginally better at it...). They are simple, short, and to the point. If you must use domino for mail serving, I would suggest having some sort of minimalistic mail server to act as a go between between domino and the outside world, as domino's is flawed in so many ways...
Open mouth, insert foot... My statement that *serial* ata definitely meant lengthening the chain is false, it seems that hardware compatibility is a significant issue, but it seems that at least initially chains are likely not to increase significant. 1) and 3) still stand though :)
Ok, let's see here:
For 1), I have heard that, indeed, power and data are together in a single connection, or at least it is tandardized to make hotswap feasible.
2) This is completely false, one of the main points of *serial* ATA was to increase the chain lengths to SCSI level capacities. The focus is on software compatibility, not transparent hardware compatibility. They say in the beginning, they expect motherboards that have Serial ATA to also have Parallel ATA on the same motherboard...
3) Why is it not usable for external devices? For one, they have extended cable length to three feet between points on the chain. No where near SCSI capability, but three feet from an interface card isn't bad. I suspect you could at the very least have SCSI solutions in ATA with this.
You are right that FireWire or USB2 might be worth a second look, but at the current rate, no one wants to bother scrapping everything they have based on ATA to pursue such a dream. I would much rather have Serial ATA than our current ATA. Of course, I have to wonder if the industry will even see this move as worth it. Even if from a software perspective it behaves similarly to ATA, I would think the hardware implementers have been holdig back. ATA is seen to meet the demands of home users, and SCSI supplies advanced features to businesses that need it. Hardware vendors have a vested interest in maintaining that dicotomy, since they can charge a huge premium for SCSI without problems coming up in the Desktop market...
Give us a viable alternative that works any better? Quicktime? RealPlayer? Well, for QuickTime (Sorenson codec QuickTime), your choices are either Mac or Windows binary, not much bettter than WMP....
.exe. I have native versions of Real8 and a beta of RealOne for Linux, because I was around when they had them available, nowadays users are screwed...
RealPlayer? Once upon a time, maybe. The quality is crap, but at the very least they *had* native linux player versions. Now, while they are still physically on the site, the non-win32, non-realone real player versions are no longer just difficult to find from the main page, they are now completely gone. They don't even want to support Mac, they are full out Windows now, click on the check out realon player link, and you auotmatically get a
Now, what is left that is a viable alternative? You could use quicktime with a differenet codec, but even then player support under linux is not great. Ogg Tarkin might be good when it is released, but for now it isn't an option.
Now, let's re-examine the situation with AVI/ASF/WMV (of which ASF/WMV is the streaming option). Most of these files can be played under linux (though ASF, and I would imagine WMV are illegal due to patents, but that hasn't stopped projects from putting it in), and many without ever resorting to win32 code. For example, consider MPlayer. If a file is indeo created, it can use an xanim module. If it is divx encoded, ffmpeg or divxdecore can be done to natively open it (though divx is snubbed by MS, so that isn't much of a streaming option). Ultimately, for commercial streaming you would probably end up using a Windows dll, unfortunately, but of the options that you can try to plug through right now off the web, Windows content actually involves running the least win32 code.
When Ogg Tarkin or something like that comes out, *then* you can push forward and protest sites that don't use a good alternative, but in the meantime, the multimedia providers have to serve it *somehow*, and none of the streaming options right now are any better to linux than others.
Until recently, an official MPEG-4 release looked like it could be the ticket, but the proposed licensing really messes that up. And don't even begin to suggest that you could use MPEG-1 for streaming, if you thought Real is crappy at low bitrates, well, just try MPEG at those bitrates and even Real looks better..
wmv all the way to 8 can be parsed and decoded by avifile (therefore pythontheater as well, my player :) and mpalyer, maybe xine too, I dunno....
But I can't understand why anyone would use it to play RealMedia content. Although Real's site has seemingly obfuscated the links to it out of existence, there is both a native RealPlayer8 and beta quality RealOne player for linux, with plugins included.
:) This may very well be where CrossOver truly shines in business, making a friendly desktop more feasible. Though most of us will download a file and use some imperfect converter/importer to load it into another editor, or use wine itself to view the material, a lot of business people want the convenience of viewing it in the browser, and for .doc content and the like, this makes a lot more sense than multimedia does in the browser paradigm...
That said, I can barely see any reason to use Windows Media Player from crossover, as a number of linux players (numerous avifile based programs, xine, and mplayer) can play Traditionally Windows-only (avi/asf/wmv/etc.) media in much more efficient ways. With CrossOver, pretty much everything is done in win32 binary format before being put on the display. Whatever you may say about wine's efficiency, it still is simply not feasible to beat native code. With the semi-native players, most of the time they get away with native codecs, resulting in no win32 code at all. Even in cases where codecs have to be pulled from win32 codecs, as little as possible is done there. The file is demultiplxed, the video stream is passed through the win32 dll, and is only required to provide decoding of frames, and in the case of video, usually in the easiest colorspace for that dll to produce. From there, native code takes over, and, if available, passes the data straight to an Xvideo overlay of the appropriate colorspace, and hardware does some filtering, colorspace conversion, and scaling. Even if hardware can't be used, native methods to do this outperform wine-mode code. The only reason I can see is for the plugin aspect of this implementation. Of course, I have always hated the "plugin" style of viewing content, and have always saved to disk when I could. Same with "embedded" playback in file managers (i.e. Konqueror), I always disable that crap...
Now with QuickTime, you have a pretty good reason to use CrossOver, the best (only way) to view Sorenson codec material is QuickTime's player. Plus you get browser embedding if you like that. A little tip for those who just want standalone player, wine is enough to run the full installation. In fact, if you disable ddraw.dll in your wine config, you get CrossOver level cleanness (i.e. no black all over the screen, no messed up menus, etc).
As far as the office format viewing, I have no clue, I don't have to deal with that much
While I agree with the intent, I have a couple of questions...
Are the ISPs to be reimbursed by the government for whatever additional resources they require in order to comply with this law? Seems hardly fair if not...
Also, how are organizations like UPS, USPS, etc regulated in this respect? For one, it doesn't seem that the statres have the authority to do that, and that such regulations would have to be federal. And to my knowledge, shipping companies aren't required to break open every box to see if they are shipping illegal material, nor are they given a blacklist of postal address that are not allowed to send or receive mail. So, if a forum of child pron freaks organized it such that all materials were transfered through parcel post, would it then be ok?
The way I see it, if they have the addresses, it is the responsibility of the government to shut these sites down, not any private organization. Now there comes a problem with sites hosted in other countries providing material to the US, and I suppose this is where this law is intended to come into play. With this, I ask what are the regulations on international shipping? Can someone in another country just seal up a box of child porn and send it on over? If so, I'm afraid the same has to be possible through the internet.
The problem is due to its convenience, the internet keeps being considered a special case with regards to everything. I think similar standards as applied to shipping companies should be applied to internet providers. If there are restrictions on international shipping with regards to all this, then, sadly, a national firewall would be the only fair way to do it. It sounds atrocious, but if done *Really* carefully with a large review process to ensure only what the public agrees to is kept out, it might work. From my experience with international shipping, however, they aren't that restrictive on what you could send.
In the end, I suppose it makes sense for the rule that if the site is on US soil, shut it down, otherwise, report the site to the country with jurisdiction. If they choose not to pursue it, well, it's not 'our' children to protect at that point.. It would certainly be worth putting pressure on that nation to be better about laws, but ultimately it isn't our responsibility to prtect their children..
Wow, so you are still running that 386DX/25Mhz? Only way I could see you even attempting to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein is if you had it now. Of course, I would thinnk a 386DX/25Mhz would be incapable of playing RTCW, seeing as how the CPUI is so slow, likely wouldn't support enough memory, and no graphics card it could take would be supported for 3D...
With my broadband provider, I have had similar conversations. Basicvally, the external modem could not get a signal over the line, the LEDs made this very clear that the problem was between the modem and their end. When I call and they ask what OS, I said Linux, and they said, "we don't support that, could you reboot into another system?" And I said the problem is not within the system, it is the connection, the LEDs indicate power,b ut no signal, etc. etc. And they said, could you just please reboot into Windows? And so I said ok, waited a few seconds and did nothing, then said, I'm in windows. Then that same person asked me to describe the LEDs, when I had described them five seconds ago without being asked, before asking me to do anything with the computer. Then says "oh, the problem appears to be on our end somewhere, we'll look into it, here is your ticket number, etc....
Ever since then, whenever I call I have actually been known to say "what operating system would you *like* me to be running, and we'll just claim that....". It is very annoying when techs won't even listen to what you have to say..
This is a good reason to have /home as a separate partition :) In any case, backing up home is easy if you have a place to stick the tarball. /home should give you a nice backup that preserves ownership and permissions to stick somehwere...
/opt, /home, and /usr/local are the key htings I keep around when I upgrade. I also have extra software installs and multimedia files, but I keep those on the file server, and there it is also kept separate from the partitions the distro gets to screw with (and on a RAID array).
tar czvf home.tar.gz
Don't need a GUI for something that straightforward...
I personally keep all data that I want persistant accross installs on non-root partitions:
Well, not just the GPL, but the iconset looks very much dangerously close to violating MS copyrights.... I personally think this distro could be in veyr hot water from both sides. Though MS seems to be less active about such things than Apple, they could very well pull this trump card when they like and screw over something like this.
As far as the swapfile/partition issue, he raises a valid point. parittioning is a pain in the arse for new users. You ask a user who really doesn't have any idea of how he will be pushing the system to make a permament decision about how his swap should be and he will be confused. You have been able to swap to files for a long time, and I do it, as sometimes I need a lot of swap, and other times I need next to done, and that flexibility is not easy with a partition. A parttion may give a speed boost, but with a good filesystem that becomes less and less of an issue.
As far as the second issue, I have no clue how those fat32 mounts can cause such a slow issue. He is trying to look at it from an end user perspective, and this is exactly the sort of thought an end user would have. Likely the distro is doing something extra that is slow enough to block mounts, maybe some sort of indexing service or something. His statement about an algorithm is silly, but perhaps apt if the distro is doing something special at mount time that it could postpone to run in the background...
I know nothing about this distro and am completely uninterested, but I think his review was very good look from a user level perspective. Not big on techinical details, but the target audience of this distro isn't very technical...
Ok, you don't really understand how the whole system works.
:)
First off, the claim is Hurd, the GNU kernel, is going to be released 'real soon now'. Of course, it has been coming 'real soon now' for the past few years. When Linus first began work on the Linux kernel, Hurd was expected to be released in one, maybe two years, and we see how that has gone
Secondly, the completion of the Hurd kernel simply means you can finally build a complete Unix-like system from only GNU (to do it stable you had to use the Linux kernel before. Nothing changes for Linux here. Debian has a Hurd distro, but companies are likely going to ignore Hurd more than theyw ould ignore Linux.
Also, I doubt that any successful linux company has realistic ambitions for the home desktop. The place they have been targetting are servers and professional desktops. They will spend no less time fiddling with the GNU tools simply because a GNU system is available. The "duplication of work" you mention wouldn't change, though GNU utilities have little to do with duplication, distro-specific enhancements typically get folded into the GNU sources after time, and thus all distros eventually inherit each others work...
From a business perspective where you are focusing on the product more than the services, GPL is a horrible, horrible idea. His company is intentionally trying to profit off of the work of others, charging for the programs and making it more difficult to get the source.
At the core, they are selling code written by others without compensation.
In this circumstance, there are two ways to go. First, find BSD licensed code to steal from. This is still bad behavior, but it is more legitimate bad behavior, the original authors by using BSD license have consented to the bad behavior.
Also, how much of what they make use of from the GPL community is LGPLed? That is a very good license for libraries that don't mind commercial products based on them, yet want to protect the freedom of the bits they did themselves. This would fit perfectly with the Kompany's goals without bastardizing themselves.
On a side note, how does QTs licensing play into commercial products like this? I guess they can still claim the work is GPLed and therefore they can ignore the commercial license of qt, but in practice could Trolltech have legal grounding to punish them for being a commercial product without paying commercial fees?
I think qt's license is a very big reason why a lot of companies push gnome more than KDE. Even though they have to dance around the GPL with Gnome, at least they don't have to worry about Qt's license on top of everything else. The result I see is that very good free software is available for KDE (qt's license is perfectly fine for free software), but some big players mostly ignore KDE if they can..
Well, I wouldn't say veteran users are any more likely to look at porn than novices, novices are just as much out for porn as anyone else. I think the articles conclusion was reasonable, that it was related to email address exposure more than anything else. For example, even though I never distributed my email address to any adult site for any reason, I get adult spam. Same with several other people I know. Even for those who visit porn sites, they refuse to identify themselves in any way (including email) and go through some length to ensure the address is not known to that site.