All countries regulate use of the wireless spectrum. It's just that in Britain the exemptions for low-power devices don't happen to cover this kind of device, unlike the USA apparently. Nothing to do with the music industry at all.
Copyright exists from the moment that the document is made. All that's happened is that SCO have registered the copyright, which may make it easier for them to claim damages (in the U.S.) if any infrigement is found.
Of course, it's really just a share-price boosting move. It doesn't increase their chances of winning their case against IBM at all.
There have been several references to jokes in the alleged identical comments. Maybe the person who saw the code can remember one or two... If the code isn't SCO's, whoever wrote the jokes will probably remember doing it.
The description of the BSDI suit in the "Comedy of Errors" article is not quite accurate: there was no ruling on 32V. The judge refused USL a preliminary injunction on the grounds that they had not shown a likelihood of winning the case; as part of this the judge accepted that there were doubts about the validity of USL's copyright in 32V. But because the case was settled out of court, no legal determination was made on the issue.
Of all the components of unix systems that I've used, X has been one of the most stable and reliably backward-compatible. I'd never had a program stop working because of an X upgrade until Xft came along. And I'm very dubious about releasing components of X independently (apart from new hardware drivers) - it looks like a recipe for the version-number hell that X has avoided until now.
You're saying that Apple needs to choose a different CPU architecture because you can't write a decent multithreaded XML parser?
No, I don't think I said that at all. But I'd definitely be interested to see a multithreaded XML parser, because I certainly have no idea how to write one. Do you have one by any chance?
Of course Apple will reject claims that their machines are slow, but sooner or later they're going to have to do something about it. I run straightforward CPU intensive programs such as XML processors, and for them Macs are roughly 20% slower *per MHz* than Intel and AMD processors. Given that the clock speeds of the fastest x86s are more than twice those of the fastest Macs, I can run three times as fast on a Linux or BSD machine costing the same as a Mac.
No amount of tweeking to use special purpose instructions or multiple processors is going to beat that in the long term, so if the PPC people don't do something about it soon, Apple will have to switch. Of course that would be a very expensive move, but fortunately Apple can hope that just the threat of it will be enough to make Motorola and IBM pull their fingers out.
As I stood at the window, gazing through the swirling fog, I observed a figure hesitating on the other side of the road. "A client, Holmes!" I exclaimed. "I have been expecting him," my friend replied, "tell me what you make of him".
"From his hooded cloak I deduce that he belongs to some religious order," I began, applying the deductive methods that I had seen Holmes so often display. "Evidently he is of great age, from the way he stoops almost to the ground as he crosses the street, almost as if he were sniffing a trail." But as he reached the house, he stood up with surprising vigour, and we immediately heard the ring of the bell. Moments later, the door to our room sprang open, and in strode the dark figure, his face completely hidden by his hood.
"Forgive me if I do not introduce myself," he said. "I have a task for you, Mr Holmes. A simple matter, no doubt, for one with your abilities. My master - a foreign potentate, his name need not concern you - is the owner of an ancient piece of jewelry, which has been stolen. It has no intrinsic value - it is a simple gold ring - but it has great sentimental value to him. Find it, and you can name your price."
"Both your errand and your master are already known to me," said Holmes. He wrote a name on a sheet of paper and passed it to the visitor. "I have a number of other cases on hand at present, but I will look into the matter if I have time."
The details of US TV schedules are hardly appropriate for the Slashdot front page. Why not make a separate category for these purely local discussions?
An obvious solution - suggested in other comments - is to configure your firewall to prevent your computer from connecting to Microsoft. But Microsoft have a plan for that: UPnP. Universal Plug'n'Play is a protocol supported by an increasing number of "broadband routers" that allows applications to punch holes in your firewall by installing NAT rules. This is attractive for things like chat and video conferencing programs, but it will also allow Microsoft to override any rules you have to prevent unauthorized connections.
Though UPnP works by sending SOAP messages to a small web-server in the router (also used for user configuration), on my router (Alcatel ST510 v4) it bypasses the password protection that you can set for user access to the web server.
Flat-screen IMacs have a warning on the box about disposing properly of the mercury backlights in the display, so they're unlikely to be worse than that.
My iMac certainly feels slow, but I don't think it's disk DMA. "dd bs=8k count=100000 >ttt/dev/zero" gives a speed of 30MB/s which would be impossible without DMA.
Anyone know a way to check whether ATA write caching is enabled? The FreeBSD ATA sysctls don't work, presumably it's not using the FreeBSD ATA drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
As with smart cards, just swap them with someone else every now and then.
All countries regulate use of the wireless spectrum. It's just that in Britain the exemptions for low-power devices don't happen to cover this kind of device, unlike the USA apparently. Nothing to do with the music industry at all.
No-one's ever going to be prosecuted for using one, any more than if you use wi-fi channel 12 in the USA. They just won't be for sale here.
Copyright exists from the moment that the document is made. All that's happened is that SCO have registered the copyright, which may make it easier for them to claim damages (in the U.S.) if any infrigement is found.
Of course, it's really just a share-price boosting move. It doesn't increase their chances of winning their case against IBM at all.
There have been several references to jokes in the alleged identical comments. Maybe the person who saw the code can remember one or two... If the code isn't SCO's, whoever wrote the jokes will probably remember doing it.
Not legally speaking, no. Because the case was settled, that ruling has no status as a precedent
(so I am told: I am not a lawyer).
... but the URL really is mis-spelt.
The USL/BSD case was settled out of court. No legal judgment was made.
The description of the BSDI suit in the "Comedy of Errors" article is not quite accurate: there was no ruling on 32V. The judge refused USL a preliminary injunction on the grounds that they had not shown a likelihood of winning the case; as part of this the judge accepted that there were doubts about the validity of USL's copyright in 32V. But because the case was settled out of court, no legal determination was made on the issue.
... "axis of evil" North Korea, or our good buddies South Korea?
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/billion-laughs .xml
Don't try it unless you really want to.
That's "late" as in "the late Arthur Dent".
Of all the components of unix systems that I've used, X has been one of the most stable and reliably backward-compatible. I'd never had a program stop working because of an X upgrade until Xft came along. And I'm very dubious about releasing components of X independently (apart from new hardware drivers) - it looks like a recipe for the version-number hell that X has avoided until now.
You're saying that Apple needs to choose a different CPU architecture because you can't write a decent multithreaded XML parser?
No, I don't think I said that at all. But I'd definitely be interested to see a multithreaded XML parser, because I certainly have no idea how to write one. Do you have one by any chance?
Of course Apple will reject claims that their machines are slow, but sooner or later they're going to have to do something about it. I run straightforward CPU intensive programs such as XML processors, and for them Macs are roughly 20% slower *per MHz* than Intel and AMD processors. Given that the clock speeds of the fastest x86s are more than twice those of the fastest Macs, I can run three times as fast on a Linux or BSD machine costing the same as a Mac.
No amount of tweeking to use special purpose instructions or multiple processors is going to beat that in the long term, so if the PPC people don't do something about it soon, Apple will have to switch. Of course that would be a very expensive move, but fortunately Apple can hope that just the threat of it will be enough to make Motorola and IBM pull their fingers out.
.. was a language only something you can "program"?
If it was called it a programming language that would be wrong, but it's certainly a language.
The Schema WG decided on "schemas" so as not to add unexpected obscurity to the specification.
See this message.
Expected obscurity is of course just fine.
If they sold a hand-held version, we could use it to neutralize these.
As I stood at the window, gazing through the swirling fog, I observed a figure hesitating on the other side of the road. "A client, Holmes!" I exclaimed. "I have been expecting him," my friend replied, "tell me what you make of him".
"From his hooded cloak I deduce that he belongs to some religious order," I began, applying the deductive methods that I had seen Holmes so often display. "Evidently he is of great age, from the way he stoops almost to the ground as he crosses the street, almost as if he were sniffing a trail." But as he reached the house, he stood up with surprising vigour, and we immediately heard the ring of the bell. Moments later, the door to our room sprang open, and in strode the dark figure, his face completely hidden by his hood.
"Forgive me if I do not introduce myself," he said. "I have a task for you, Mr Holmes. A simple matter, no doubt, for one with your
abilities. My master - a foreign potentate, his name need not concern you - is the owner of an ancient piece of jewelry, which has been stolen. It has no intrinsic value - it is a simple gold ring - but it has great sentimental value to him. Find it, and you can name your price."
"Both your errand and your master are already known to me," said Holmes. He wrote a name on a sheet of paper and passed it to the visitor. "I have a number of other cases on hand at present, but I will look into the matter if I have time."
... (which seems quite unlikely), it would be possible to introduce random masked sounds during playback to counter the effect.
I used to read Philip K Dick novels and think "this is absurd". Now it seems excessively optimistic.
The details of US TV schedules are hardly appropriate for the Slashdot front page. Why not make a separate category for these purely local discussions?
An obvious solution - suggested in other comments - is to configure your firewall to prevent your computer from connecting to Microsoft. But Microsoft have a plan for that: UPnP. Universal Plug'n'Play is a protocol supported by an increasing number of "broadband routers" that allows applications to punch holes in your firewall by installing NAT rules. This is attractive for things like chat and video conferencing programs, but it will also allow Microsoft to override any rules you have to prevent unauthorized connections.
Though UPnP works by sending SOAP messages to a small web-server in the router (also used for user configuration), on my router (Alcatel ST510 v4) it bypasses the password protection that you can set for user access to the web server.
Flat-screen IMacs have a warning on the box about disposing properly of the mercury backlights in the display, so they're unlikely to be worse than that.
My iMac certainly feels slow, but I don't think it's disk DMA. "dd bs=8k count=100000 >ttt /dev/zero" gives a speed of 30MB/s which would be impossible without DMA.
Anyone know a way to check whether ATA write caching is enabled? The FreeBSD ATA sysctls don't work, presumably it's not using the FreeBSD ATA drivers.