The LUG I occaisionally attend also takes a dim view of stealing software. They basically tore a mailing list poster a new poop chute for defending some warezing he was doing. Ditto on the typical LUG reaction to copyright infringement.
LUGs are largely polpulated by sysadmins, programmers, technical managers and highly computer literate users. I don't think the higher respect for software licensing comes from greater intelligence. It comes from a higher awareness of the issues around licensing. A sysadmin who doesn't want warez showing up on HIS network is going to take a dim view of stolen software. Ditto for anyone who has spent more than an hour worrying about licensing.
It is also the flip side of the outrage these people feel when a high profile GPL violater is outed. How can we expect the likes of MS and Adobe to respect (phobic paranoia in MS' case) our licences if we don't respect theirs? Linux users also often feel that draconian licensing terms are Linux' best advocates. If users can just steal software for whatever reason then why try out the free stuff?
Assuming that you have at least a few seconds to react when they come knocking then planning takes care of a lot of this. The system in question which I'll I call the Naughty Super Secret System or NSSS for short needs to be specially configured. It should have no swap files or swap partitions of any sort. The/tmp directory or any equivalent should be a ramdisk formatted with an encrypted filesystem. Any permanent datastores should also be on encrypted filesystems. The best part is that the NSSS also has a "panic script" thats triggered with a hotkey combination. There will be no time to actually type a command. The panic script will lock the terminal, unmount any ramdisks, change the filesystem password to a random collection of characters if possible and clobber the control structures of the encrypted filesystems with random data (superblocks, fat tables, etc). This is not a lot of data and won't need more than a few seconds to royally bollix. Actually, random data sprayed across an encrypted filesystem will do far more damage than a conventional filesystem. If the clobber script has enough time to hit those control structures with seven passes it should then spray random bytes across the remainder of the partition as long as it's permitted to run. In any case, the clobber script will run until some quick thinking MIB pulls the power cord. That can be made a pisser as well. Remove any obvious way to quickly power off the machine and make it necessary to spend a few more seconds getting at the power cord or UPS. Hmmmm....how's this? Put the UPS inside the machine and rig the physical power switch well inside the case. The machine can be powered up or down by sticking a screwdriver into a hole to operate the switch. LOL, put lots of extra screws in the case too.... That should buy more than enougn time for the panic script to do it's work.
I suppose what remains of those filesystems will be subject to cryptanalyis but it should be a bit more difficult at least. The only other option would be coming up with something to physically destroy the hard drive in a hurry that won't physically destroy the operator as well. I like the idea of digging a fire pit in the basement and having the system rigged to be burned by a panic trigger. The shotgun would work too but it needs to be permanently mounted on the machine. You won't have time to aim. You'll be lucky if you have time to reach over and pull the trigger.
In all though, if the MIBs bust your door down you have much larger problems than what they are going to find on your computer.
Maybe, but under the current conditions the entertainment cartels will benefit from your scheme more than anyone else. It amounts to unilateral disarmament. I don't think expiration is the right idea. I think it's falling under a GPL style license after a period of exclusive control is a better idea. The condition that would be attached at that point is that derivative works fall under the same license eg. a period of exclusive control followed by MANDATORY release under the same terms once the (rigidly defined) period of exclusive control ends.
Come to think of it, this sound more like BSD+GPL terms. One can market and sell the derivate work anyway he wants during the reasonable period of exclusive ownership but MUST release it once it ends. If it's still making money that's just too bad. Pity it won't work for music though. See my other post in this discussion.
It's absolutely impossible to write music without paying off various American guilds for the rights to your own works. Western music is based on twelve-note scale (counting sharps and flats here...). There's already a court case that says a unique sequence of four notes is sufficient to claim that a given work is derivative of another. The entertainment cartels in this country have eternal rights (thanks supremes!) to enough works to have a copyright on EVERY possible sequence of four notes. That means every new song written is legally a derivative work of another. Lyrics aren't quite as bad but the set of all possible lyrics in English is strewn with mines too.
There are limits to how much corruption an economy can effectively function with. We have widespread corruption built into the foundations of both legislation and court law making the current winners in our system forever protected until the system collapses. Expect the 21st century to be interesting....in the Chinese curse sense.
Assuming that the RIAA has created a p2p worm wouldn't it be the height of stupidity to announce it's existence? On the one hand they can generate some fear among p2p users and get a slight decrease in trading. On the other hand, if it really exists it is going to be found in very short order. If it's found by the wrong people (to them) then this is going to backfire in very short order. Once the details are known, I don't imagine it would be very hard to inject loads of spurious info into their violator database.
The SecurityFocus posting has lots of bragging about how network security tools won't find their exploit. I beg to differ. They aren't going to dodge tcpdump running on a machine that is a gateway for an infected machine. The way gnutella is supposed to work is known. To a trained eye, their "cleverly crafted" network requests are going to stick out like a sore thumb. In any case, just knowing a thing exists greatly simplifies finding it. We'll know in short order if they're hoaxing or not.
Firewire has one other point in it's favor aside from speed. USB requires a PC to arbitrate the bus while Firewire does not. It is possible to transfer video from DV camera to DV camera with a Firewire cable for instance. If the camera in question understands the partition and filesystem formats, it can even be downloaded directly onto a Firewire hard drive. I also remember reading somewhere that USB is bursty compared to Firewire. That is, properly designed Firewire devices have higher sustained data rates than any form of USB. This is more shades of IDE vs. SCSI I suppose.
Basically, USB is intended to interface devices to PCs. Intel likes it that way. Firewire is meant to interconnect devices to each other as well as PCs.
Re:Hmmm. Anyone want to trade plans for a railgun?
on
More 3D Printer News
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· Score: 2
Open source hardware is sorta here already. Check it out. You have to supply your own FPGAs and the equipment to deal with them but Open Source hardware design is here now.
Hydrogen is only an energy storage mechanism. It is an attractive one to be sure but it is not itself an energy source. What to you propose to generate Hydrogen with once the hydrocarbon tap is turned off? To be sure, Hydrogen's role as an energy transport and storage mechanism will be important whenever oil does run out but that isn't what I'm asking. What fills the large petroleum shaped hole in energy production once it's depleted?
I suspect that once we have employed solar, wind, geothermal and etc to limits of any forseeable technology there will still be shortfall. Once it sinks in that the 15 minute hot showers and the SUV will are out, a new energy supply debate will ensue: When is the uranium going to run out?
The engineer definition of standard is different from the business/joe user idea of standard. To an engineer, a standard specifies everything that is needed to implement the widget in question. To business/joe user, standard just means "what everybody uses". Well, 12 years ago the standard in office documents by that definition was WordPerfect. Reading those documents could be difficult since there wasn't an engineer's standard to go along with the vernacular standard. It can be reverse engineered but the devil is in the details. Anything can happen and it is possible that Office could become what WordPerfect is today. Since there is no engineer's standard for Office, that data will decay faster than newsprint in a compost heap.
To us, it just isn't a standard unless we can implement it. The fact that enough clueless people use it to make it a defacto standard of sorts is absolutely of no help when trying to archive data or communicate with someone.
Needless to say, we also don't like it when someone takes an engineer's standard like an RFC and Embrace 'n' Extends it into a hairball non-engineer's standard. Defacto standards shift like quicksand. There is a reason why say weights and measures are defined precisely and reproducibly. You can never tell when you may implement them on your own and same applies to data interchange and communication.
That won't work for any application that uses self generated SSL certificates. IE on the Mac can only use certificates that have been hard baked into the app itself. It does not offer a user a dialog to accept an arbitrary certificate. We use such an app internally in our district and I have to have a non-IE browser on the Macs to use it.
This IMHO is a severe shortcoming of IE for Macintosh.
That makes it only slightly harder. Point a digital camera at the ebook and rig a timer to push the next page button and then the shutter. It would be a VERY trivial hardware hack. Oh and anything designed to screw up cameras will impact readability.
It could be a little fancier. The button pusher device could also trigger a download of the camera right back to the DRMed computer every x pages. Even better, have the button pusher BE the DRMed computer. I rather like that. Let's award bonus points if it'll automatically OCR it too.....ah man! Have the computer control a device that does the button pushing and then OCR's each page as it comes out. I absolutely love the idea of a DRM machine not knowing what it 's left hand is doing.
Why should the owner of a piece of equipment have to prove to the equipment that he has the right to use it? You've only further proved my point. How will anybody other than the entertainment cartels be able to use A/V production equipment if they get all of the draconian things that they want?
The SCMS protection on Minidiscs have stopped bands and other content creators from legitimately making digital copies of their own work. It has been one of the strikes against the format at the outset. Non-professional (read affordable) Digital Audio Tape has the same problem. This is the real reason for DRM. "Piracy" is a red herring. Making it almost impossible for non-cartel members to create and distribute content is their true agenda.
This is the whole problem with the "calling a GPL library means you have to GPL the calling program's code" definition of derivative work. Any program that now calls these GPLed libraries must also be GPLed even if they were originally written to call the proprietary Microsoft originated VB libraries. I would most definitely call this "viral" licensing.
That would only be the case for binaries that have been linked to the GPL libraries. Binaries linked to the MS libraries would be governed by the terms and conditions attached to those.
The fact the source in question can be linked to either is irrelevant. The GPL is intended to prevent the distribution of closed binaries that need GPLed components to run. The GPL would only cover a binary from that code that is linked to the GPL library. It would not cover a binary linked to the MS library. However, If it was the other way around and the code in question was GPLed at the outset and linked to the MS library the resulting binary would probably be illegal to distribute. The license to the MS library is probably incompatible with the GPL.
The GPL has no legal ability to "capture" code that has not been licensed or derived from GPL licenced code in the first place. The FSF can NOT steal MS or anybody's else code by developing a workalike to proprietary vendor's library then using that to claim ownership of source that vendor licensed under his own terms. If your scenario is true, then why couldn't MS develop say a readline workalike; license it under the most draconian terms possible and then claim ownership of every shred of code that is linked to GPL readline 99.99 percent of the time? The answer is they can't. I don't doubt that MS is looking for ways to lawyer OSS out of existence but this isn't one of them.
It is the deliberate act of putting code through a linker that makes it a derivative work of the code being linked to. The GPL has no ability to miracle code in an MS vault through a linker running on a Linux system in Stallman's office. I seriously doubt vendors of proprietary development libraries and tools are gung ho to cut the ground from under their own feet.
The article posting said, "in what could be the biggest battle for the most worthless market sector (Tablet PCs)." It goes on to say something like, "it would at least be nicer than a Newton or a Palm".
This is hardly a ringing denunciation of MS while at the same time praising Apple. None of the posts as of the time I'm writing this are heaping praise on Apple either.
The alternatives are their problem. Their right to protect their works ends at my equipment. I will be more than happy to pound their lobbying and legal teams up their asses with a rubber mallet if they can't handle that reality.
The entire point of public key encryption is that the recipient of an encoded message does not have the private key. In this case, the recipient is any one who has an Xbox. The key that is being sought is nowhere inside the Xbox itself. The Xbox carries the PUBLIC key which is of extremely limited utility in figuring out the PRIVATE key which only MS has. The project is attempting to (futilely IMHO) derive that private MS key from the public key which is already known...possibly from the scenario you envisioned.
Um...I use MOL and have found it to be far from pointless. I use MOL mostly to run a FirstClass groupware client. The reason why I run Linux on a Pismo Powerbook is that I have an environment mostly identical to my x86 Linux machine at home. This means Linux largely frees me from worrying about underlying architecture (Wine and so forth aside). I have not found OSX to be so insanely great that I should blow away my Linux partition. Believe it or not there are good reasons to prefer Linux over OSX.
I have also found MOL to be far more reliable than Classic on OSX. Classic is much slicker in that OS 9 apps run directly on the Quartz desktop and one can cut and paste between apps. This also means it is more complex and therefore failure prone. My boss has no end of trouble with it. Classic icons go missing or change themselves into another apps icons. Some Classic apps will lock and won't release control to the Aqua UI. This means the machine is locked up for end user intents and purposes. Classic inflicts HFS metadata problems and some instability on OS X and kills much of OS X advantages if one has to make heavy use of OS <=9 apps. On the other hand if the OS 9 in my MOL sessions screws up then I can kill it and restart without affecting my Linux session. Since I boot my MOL session from an image I have an advantage normally only associated with virtual PC. If that boot image gets messed up, I can replace it from a backup quickly. Incidentally, MOL is very close to running OS X acceptably...eye candy and all.
MOL is can also be used as a user mode Linux. One can boot another acceptably fast Linux inside a virtual machine. This is useful for things like kernel development. MOL is far from pointless.
Re:You're company is probably screwed regardless.
on
Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 2
How Windows suits me was not my main point. My point is that the company in question makes important infrastructure decisions on the basis of hype. People who are engaged in marketing should know it when they see it and not be taken in by it. It implies gullibility and that trait is not limited to software partisons.
As for my biases, yes I prefer Linux or even a non-semi-closed BSD over Windows. But I have also advised my boss not to do a massive Linux rollout. (a slow one - yes...to replace SOME Windows machines sure) That would continue to be me advice short of MS or another vendor doing something massively more draconian to date. I'm well aware of IT realities and am well aware of Windows capabilities compared to Linux...not a "zealous advocate".
My other point was that people who have spent years learning Windows can deal with it's ideosyncracies so that it's not as painful or hardly painful at all. If they mass deployed Linux without evaluating it or having a few peopl e learn it well then OF COURSE they had a bad experience. I was simply stating that I don't believe that anyone can start using a complex product like an OS and have nothing but positive experiences. I don't believe it from astroturfers with smiles plastered on their faces and I don't buy it from some guru-wannabe who just figured out how to burn a Mandrake iso.
A corollary of this is that Linux may have to be insanely better in all aspects than Windows if is to catch on more. But I wasn't trying to make that point either.
Like when Ginger tries to seduce Gilligan, or when Gilligan drops something on the Skipper's feet. Every episode...
He never got any of that either. Gilligan must have been really gay . Well, you know how he sleeps in the same hooch with Skipper and minces around him......
You're company is probably screwed regardless.
on
Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Linux is worthless, I'm saying that this zealousy over it won't solve anybody's problems. As a matter of fact, it'll probably cause problems. Most of my company frequents Slashdot. Let's say they were taken in by the hype and adopted Linux. Guess what? Expectations are high, which means that every little problem will be blown out of proportion. Before you know it, everybody's anti-Linux.
We're already having that happen today. Some of the engineers have been moved to Linux, and they're fussing over every idiotic problem that Windows just doesn't have. The worst part is having to look up badly spelt commands in order to figure out what to do. They're having to make compromises in order to get through their day.
If your company tried Linux on the basis of hype, it probably means they initially got hooked on MS hype too. I doubt either decision was made objectively or wisely. Did it occur to your Slashbot bosses that maybe they should have only tried Linux out on a few machines first? That way it needn't have caused any significant pain. Also, a newly deployed Windows system isn't that hot either. You're co-workers are comparing something that's probably had months or years of bug-fixes, tweaking, and workarounds to something they just adopted. NEWSFLASH! Everything sucks just in different ways. Like any tool, Linux can do the job wonderfully once it is learned. Of course, you'll mash your thumb a few times on the way. Here's another newsflash: You've had years to forget how much it hurt when you first started using it. Don't bs me otherwise. I cut my PC teeth on 3.1 and have cursed at every version up to and including XP.
Linux doesn't sound like a problem here. Quit believing hype and maybe you'll have better new product experiences.
Incidentally, Slashdot is not a monolith. We have 15 year old young minds who think every piece of OSS software is GPLed and anyone who makes money with it is a thief as well as 15 year old Young Republicans who think OSS is communism. I'm sure others can think of even more savory types who hang out here. Remember, the IQ of a mob equals the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the size of the mob. It's pretty useless to give it advice.
Not much. The opensource community is the proverbial herd of cats. Miguel de Icaza and a few others would probably bend over backwards for them. Others will question MS' motives in extremely uncertain terms and most everybody else will ignore them.
I only use SpamAssassin to tag suspect emails. I have a filter rule in KMail that sends tagged mail directly to it's Trash folder. A quick scan of the subjects and froms suffices to weed out the (rare) false positives. Note that I don't have to read the spam bodies to verify them and I've already been spared the trouble of weeding them from my legitimate mail.
Use a little imagination; it isn't necessary for a spam filter to immediately trash suspect mails. By default, all SpamAssassin does is TAG the emails in their subject lines and add a scoring report to the body. It suffices for me to have probable spams all collected together so that it is only one quick scan and a button click away from destruction.
Come to think of it, if my quick from/subject scan method doesn't suffice, that attached scoring report does. A mail with a score of 33 with a web bug is certainly bogus. I'll cheerfully trash that without reading the rest of the body and those reports can be quickly parsed as well. Not that I usually bother. Simply having your signal not interleaved with the probable noise is useful and SpamAssassin can certainly be trusted for that.
The reason why scofflaws are proliferating in this regard is that the law you venerate is a fucking joke. There is a particular brand of Grape Flavor Aid that tastes something like this: "Yeah, that law is pretty bad alright but if we all just obeyed the laws we wanted to then the world would go to hell in a handbasket." If those who make and enforce the laws are honest and upright then that sentiment works. The problem is that the people who make and enforce the laws are for sale. Why the hell should ANYONE respect a law that has been bought and paid for? Knowing what we know about that splattered son of a bitch Sonny Bono, why should anyone respect the copyright on Steamboat Willie for instance?
When the laws in this country aren't paid for by corporate plutocrats then you'll see some more respect for them. Since those who obstensibly serve the people serve their lucre supply, fuck 'em.
Linux developers should concentrate, at least in the short term, on recreating the look and feel of the MS Windows desktop.
That takes care of the the group of people who say "Linux is too different from Windows". Unfortunately, it draws a whole crowd of these other whingers from the woodwork : "Linux isn't innovative at all. They're just trying to look like Windows."
Then we had that dillhead Dvorak who does both: Whine and complain that Linux needs to be like Windows and then when something like KDE provides this he then complains that Linux will never succeed as long as it is copying windows.
I'm starting to understand why OSS coders just build whatever the hell they want and ignore the whingers. How else are they going to keep their sanity?
Slashdot Mirror
The LUG I occaisionally attend also takes a dim view of stealing software. They basically tore a mailing list poster a new poop chute for defending some warezing he was doing. Ditto on the typical LUG reaction to copyright infringement.
LUGs are largely polpulated by sysadmins, programmers, technical managers and highly computer literate users. I don't think the higher respect for software licensing comes from greater intelligence. It comes from a higher awareness of the issues around licensing. A sysadmin who doesn't want warez showing up on HIS network is going to take a dim view of stolen software. Ditto for anyone who has spent more than an hour worrying about licensing.
It is also the flip side of the outrage these people feel when a high profile GPL violater is outed. How can we expect the likes of MS and Adobe to respect (phobic paranoia in MS' case) our licences if we don't respect theirs? Linux users also often feel that draconian licensing terms are Linux' best advocates. If users can just steal software for whatever reason then why try out the free stuff?
Assuming that you have at least a few seconds to react when they come knocking then planning takes care of a lot of this. The system in question which I'll I call the Naughty Super Secret System or NSSS for short needs to be specially configured. It should have no swap files or swap partitions of any sort. The /tmp directory or any equivalent should be a ramdisk formatted with an encrypted filesystem. Any permanent datastores should also be on encrypted filesystems. The best part is that the NSSS also has a "panic script" thats triggered with a hotkey combination. There will be no time to actually type a command. The panic script will lock the terminal, unmount any ramdisks, change the filesystem password to a random collection of characters if possible and clobber the control structures of the encrypted filesystems with random data (superblocks, fat tables, etc). This is not a lot of data and won't need more than a few seconds to royally bollix. Actually, random data sprayed across an encrypted filesystem will do far more damage than a conventional filesystem. If the clobber script has enough time to hit those control structures with seven passes it should then spray random bytes across the remainder of the partition as long as it's permitted to run. In any case, the clobber script will run until some quick thinking MIB pulls the power cord. That can be made a pisser as well. Remove any obvious way to quickly power off the machine and make it necessary to spend a few more seconds getting at the power cord or UPS. Hmmmm....how's this? Put the UPS inside the machine and rig the physical power switch well inside the case. The machine can be powered up or down by sticking a screwdriver into a hole to operate the switch. LOL, put lots of extra screws in the case too.... That should buy more than enougn time for the panic script to do it's work.
I suppose what remains of those filesystems will be subject to cryptanalyis but it should be a bit more difficult at least. The only other option would be coming up with something to physically destroy the hard drive in a hurry that won't physically destroy the operator as well.
I like the idea of digging a fire pit in the basement and having the system rigged to be burned by a panic trigger. The shotgun would work too but it needs to be permanently mounted on the machine. You won't have time to aim. You'll be lucky if you have time to reach over and pull the trigger.
In all though, if the MIBs bust your door down you have much larger problems than what they are going to find on your computer.
Maybe, but under the current conditions the entertainment cartels will benefit from your scheme more than anyone else. It amounts to unilateral disarmament. I don't think expiration is the right idea. I think it's falling under a GPL style license after a period of exclusive control is a better idea. The condition that would be attached at that point is that derivative works fall under the same license eg. a period of exclusive control followed by MANDATORY release under the same terms once the (rigidly defined) period of exclusive control ends.
Come to think of it, this sound more like BSD+GPL terms. One can market and sell the derivate work anyway he wants during the reasonable period of exclusive ownership but MUST release it once it ends. If it's still making money that's just too bad. Pity it won't work for music though. See my other post in this discussion.
It's absolutely impossible to write music without paying off various American guilds for the rights to your own works. Western music is based on twelve-note scale (counting sharps and flats here...). There's already a court case that says a unique sequence of four notes is sufficient to claim that a given work is derivative of another. The entertainment cartels in this country have eternal rights (thanks supremes!) to enough works to have a copyright on EVERY possible sequence of four notes. That means every new song written is legally a derivative work of another. Lyrics aren't quite as bad but the set of all possible lyrics in English is strewn with mines too.
There are limits to how much corruption an economy can effectively function with. We have widespread corruption built into the foundations of both legislation and court law making the current winners in our system forever protected until the system collapses. Expect the 21st century to be interesting....in the Chinese curse sense.
Assuming that the RIAA has created a p2p worm wouldn't it be the height of stupidity to announce it's existence? On the one hand they can generate some fear among p2p users and get a slight decrease in trading. On the other hand, if it really exists it is going to be found in very short order. If it's found by the wrong people (to them) then this is going to backfire in very short order. Once the details are known, I don't imagine it would be very hard to inject loads of spurious info into their violator database.
The SecurityFocus posting has lots of bragging about how network security tools won't find their exploit. I beg to differ. They aren't going to dodge tcpdump running on a machine that is a gateway for an infected machine. The way gnutella is supposed to work is known. To a trained eye, their "cleverly crafted" network requests are going to stick out like a sore thumb. In any case, just knowing a thing exists greatly simplifies finding it. We'll know in short order if they're hoaxing or not.
Firewire has one other point in it's favor aside from speed. USB requires a PC to arbitrate the bus while Firewire does not. It is possible to transfer video from DV camera to DV camera with a Firewire cable for instance. If the camera in question understands the partition and filesystem formats, it can even be downloaded directly onto a Firewire hard drive. I also remember reading somewhere that USB is bursty compared to Firewire. That is, properly designed Firewire devices have higher sustained data rates than any form of USB. This is more shades of IDE vs. SCSI I suppose.
Basically, USB is intended to interface devices to PCs. Intel likes it that way. Firewire is meant to interconnect devices to each other as well as PCs.
Open source hardware is sorta here already. Check it out. You have to supply your own FPGAs and the equipment to deal with them but Open Source hardware design is here now.
Hydrogen is only an energy storage mechanism. It is an attractive one to be sure but it is not itself an energy source. What to you propose to generate Hydrogen with once the hydrocarbon tap is turned off? To be sure, Hydrogen's role as an energy transport and storage mechanism will be important whenever oil does run out but that isn't what I'm asking. What fills the large petroleum shaped hole in energy production once it's depleted?
I suspect that once we have employed solar, wind, geothermal and etc to limits of any forseeable technology there will still be shortfall. Once it sinks in that the 15 minute hot showers and the SUV will are out, a new energy supply debate will ensue: When is the uranium going to run out?
The engineer definition of standard is different from the business/joe user idea of standard. To an engineer, a standard specifies everything that is needed to implement the widget in question. To business/joe user, standard just means "what everybody uses". Well, 12 years ago the standard in office documents by that definition was WordPerfect. Reading those documents could be difficult since there wasn't an engineer's standard to go along with the vernacular standard. It can be reverse engineered but the devil is in the details. Anything can happen and it is possible that Office could become what WordPerfect is today. Since there is no engineer's standard for Office, that data will decay faster than newsprint in a compost heap.
To us, it just isn't a standard unless we can implement it. The fact that enough clueless people use it to make it a defacto standard of sorts is absolutely of no help when trying to archive data or communicate with someone.
Needless to say, we also don't like it when someone takes an engineer's standard like an RFC and Embrace 'n' Extends it into a hairball non-engineer's standard. Defacto standards shift like quicksand. There is a reason why say weights and measures are defined precisely and reproducibly. You can never tell when you may implement them on your own and same applies to data interchange and communication.
That won't work for any application that uses self generated SSL certificates. IE on the Mac can only use certificates that have been hard baked into the app itself. It does not offer a user a dialog to accept an arbitrary certificate. We use such an app internally in our district and I have to have a non-IE browser on the Macs to use it.
This IMHO is a severe shortcoming of IE for Macintosh.
That makes it only slightly harder. Point a digital camera at the ebook and rig a timer to push the next page button and then the shutter. It would be a VERY trivial hardware hack. Oh and anything designed to screw up cameras will impact readability.
It could be a little fancier. The button pusher device could also trigger a download of the camera right back to the DRMed computer every x pages. Even better, have the button pusher BE the DRMed computer. I rather like that. Let's award bonus points if it'll automatically OCR it too.....ah man! Have the computer control a device that does the button pushing and then OCR's each page as it comes out. I absolutely love the idea of a DRM machine not knowing what it
's left hand is doing.
Why should the owner of a piece of equipment have to prove to the equipment that he has the right to use it? You've only further proved my point. How will anybody other than the entertainment cartels be able to use A/V production equipment if they get all of the draconian things that they want?
The SCMS protection on Minidiscs have stopped bands and other content creators from legitimately making digital copies of their own work. It has been one of the strikes against the format at the outset. Non-professional (read affordable) Digital Audio Tape has the same problem. This is the real reason for DRM. "Piracy" is a red herring. Making it almost impossible for non-cartel members to create and distribute content is their true agenda.
That would only be the case for binaries that have been linked to the GPL libraries. Binaries linked to the MS libraries would be governed by the terms and conditions attached to those.
The fact the source in question can be linked to either is irrelevant. The GPL is intended to prevent the distribution of closed binaries that need GPLed components to run. The GPL would only cover a binary from that code that is linked to the GPL library. It would not cover a binary linked to the MS library. However, If it was the other way around and the code in question was GPLed at the outset and linked to the MS library the resulting binary would probably be illegal to distribute. The license to the MS library is probably incompatible with the GPL.
The GPL has no legal ability to "capture" code that has not been licensed or derived from GPL licenced code in the first place. The FSF can NOT steal MS or anybody's else code by developing a workalike to proprietary vendor's library then using that to claim ownership of source that vendor licensed under his own terms. If your scenario is true, then why couldn't MS develop say a readline workalike; license it under the most draconian terms possible and then claim ownership of every shred of code that is linked to GPL readline 99.99 percent of the time? The answer is they can't. I don't doubt that MS is looking for ways to lawyer OSS out of existence but this isn't one of them.
It is the deliberate act of putting code through a linker that makes it a derivative work of the code being linked to. The GPL has no ability to miracle code in an MS vault through a linker running on a Linux system in Stallman's office. I seriously doubt vendors of proprietary development libraries and tools are gung ho to cut the ground from under their own feet.
The article posting said, "in what could be the biggest battle for the most worthless market sector (Tablet PCs)." It goes on to say something like, "it would at least be nicer than a Newton or a Palm".
This is hardly a ringing denunciation of MS while at the same time praising Apple. None of the posts as of the time I'm writing this are heaping praise on Apple either.
The alternatives are their problem. Their right to protect their works ends at my equipment. I will be more than happy to pound their lobbying and legal teams up their asses with a rubber mallet if they can't handle that reality.
The entire point of public key encryption is that the recipient of an encoded message does not have the private key. In this case, the recipient is any one who has an Xbox. The key that is being sought is nowhere inside the Xbox itself. The Xbox carries the PUBLIC key which is of extremely limited utility in figuring out the PRIVATE key which only MS has. The project is attempting to (futilely IMHO) derive that private MS key from the public key which is already known...possibly from the scenario you envisioned.
Um...I use MOL and have found it to be far from pointless. I use MOL mostly to run a FirstClass groupware client. The reason why I run Linux on a Pismo Powerbook is that I have an environment mostly identical to my x86 Linux machine at home. This means Linux largely frees me from worrying about underlying architecture (Wine and so forth aside). I have not found OSX to be so insanely great that I should blow away my Linux partition. Believe it or not there are good reasons to prefer Linux over OSX.
I have also found MOL to be far more reliable than Classic on OSX. Classic is much slicker in that OS 9 apps run directly on the Quartz desktop and one can cut and paste between apps. This also means it is more complex and therefore failure prone. My boss has no end of trouble with it. Classic icons go missing or change themselves into another apps icons. Some Classic apps will lock and won't release control to the Aqua UI. This means the machine is locked up for end user intents and purposes. Classic inflicts HFS metadata problems and some instability on OS X and kills much of OS X advantages if one has to make heavy use of OS <=9 apps. On the other hand if the OS 9 in my MOL sessions screws up then I can kill it and restart without affecting my Linux session. Since I boot my MOL session from an image I have an advantage normally only associated with virtual PC. If that boot image gets messed up, I can replace it from a backup quickly. Incidentally, MOL is very close to running OS X acceptably...eye candy and all.
MOL is can also be used as a user mode Linux. One can boot another acceptably fast Linux inside a virtual machine. This is useful for things like kernel development. MOL is far from pointless.
How Windows suits me was not my main point. My point is that the company in question makes important infrastructure decisions on the basis of hype. People who are engaged in marketing should know it when they see it and not be taken in by it. It implies gullibility and that trait is not limited to software partisons.
As for my biases, yes I prefer Linux or even a non-semi-closed BSD over Windows. But I have also advised my boss not to do a massive Linux rollout. (a slow one - yes...to replace SOME Windows machines sure) That would continue to be me advice short of MS or another vendor doing something massively more draconian to date. I'm well aware of IT realities and am well aware of Windows capabilities compared to Linux...not a "zealous advocate".
My other point was that people who have spent years learning Windows can deal with it's ideosyncracies so that it's not as painful or hardly painful at all. If they mass deployed Linux without evaluating it or having a few peopl e learn it well then OF COURSE they had a bad experience. I was simply stating that I don't believe that anyone can start using a complex product like an OS and have nothing but positive experiences. I don't believe it from astroturfers with smiles plastered on their faces and I don't buy it from some guru-wannabe who just figured out how to burn a Mandrake iso.
A corollary of this is that Linux may have to be insanely better in all aspects than Windows if is to catch on more. But I wasn't trying to make that point either.
Like when Ginger tries to seduce Gilligan, or when Gilligan drops something on the Skipper's feet. Every episode...
He never got any of that either. Gilligan must have been really gay . Well, you know how he sleeps in the same hooch with Skipper and minces around him......
If your company tried Linux on the basis of hype, it probably means they initially got hooked on MS hype too. I doubt either decision was made objectively or wisely. Did it occur to your Slashbot bosses that maybe they should have only tried Linux out on a few machines first? That way it needn't have caused any significant pain. Also, a newly deployed Windows system isn't that hot either. You're co-workers are comparing something that's probably had months or years of bug-fixes, tweaking, and workarounds to something they just adopted. NEWSFLASH! Everything sucks just in different ways. Like any tool, Linux can do the job wonderfully once it is learned. Of course, you'll mash your thumb a few times on the way. Here's another newsflash: You've had years to forget how much it hurt when you first started using it. Don't bs me otherwise. I cut my PC teeth on 3.1 and have cursed at every version up to and including XP.
Linux doesn't sound like a problem here. Quit believing hype and maybe you'll have better new product experiences.
Incidentally, Slashdot is not a monolith. We have 15 year old young minds who think every piece of OSS software is GPLed and anyone who makes money with it is a thief as well as 15 year old Young Republicans who think OSS is communism. I'm sure others can think of even more savory types who hang out here. Remember, the IQ of a mob equals the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the size of the mob. It's pretty useless to give it advice.
Not much. The opensource community is the proverbial herd of cats. Miguel de Icaza and a few others would probably bend over backwards for them. Others will question MS' motives in extremely uncertain terms and most everybody else will ignore them.
I only use SpamAssassin to tag suspect emails. I have a filter rule in KMail that sends tagged mail directly to it's Trash folder. A quick scan of the subjects and froms suffices to weed out the (rare) false positives. Note that I don't have to read the spam bodies to verify them and I've already been spared the trouble of weeding them from my legitimate mail.
Use a little imagination; it isn't necessary for a spam filter to immediately trash suspect mails. By default, all SpamAssassin does is TAG the emails in their subject lines and add a scoring report to the body. It suffices for me to have probable spams all collected together so that it is only one quick scan and a button click away from destruction.
Come to think of it, if my quick from/subject scan method doesn't suffice, that attached scoring report does. A mail with a score of 33 with a web bug is certainly bogus. I'll cheerfully trash that without reading the rest of the body and those reports can be quickly parsed as well. Not that I usually bother. Simply having your signal not interleaved with the probable noise is useful and SpamAssassin can certainly be trusted for that.
The reason why scofflaws are proliferating in this regard is that the law you venerate is a fucking joke. There is a particular brand of Grape Flavor Aid that tastes something like this: "Yeah, that law is pretty bad alright but if we all just obeyed the laws we wanted to then the world would go to hell in a handbasket." If those who make and enforce the laws are honest and upright then that sentiment works. The problem is that the people who make and enforce the laws are for sale. Why the hell should ANYONE respect a law that has been bought and paid for? Knowing what we know about that splattered son of a bitch Sonny Bono, why should anyone respect the copyright on Steamboat Willie for instance?
When the laws in this country aren't paid for by corporate plutocrats then you'll see some more respect for them. Since those who obstensibly serve the people serve their lucre supply, fuck 'em.
That takes care of the the group of people who say "Linux is too different from Windows". Unfortunately, it draws a whole crowd of these other whingers from the woodwork : "Linux isn't innovative at all. They're just trying to look like Windows."
Then we had that dillhead Dvorak who does both: Whine and complain that Linux needs to be like Windows and then when something like KDE provides this he then complains that Linux will never succeed as long as it is copying windows.
I'm starting to understand why OSS coders just build whatever the hell they want and ignore the whingers. How else are they going to keep their sanity?