You and I can't read the license because Microsoft classifies it as a "trade secret." The license specifies that any machine which includes a Microsoft operating system must not also offer a nonMicrosoft operating system as a boot option. In other words, a computer that offers to boot into Windows upon startup cannot also offer to boot into BeOS or Linux. The hardware vendor does not get to choose which OSes to install on the machines they sell -- Microsoft does.
The obvious question here is: why didn't the DoJ use this as part of their anti-trust trial? Isn't this the most blatant example of monopoly leverage in existence?
Most importantly, are there any copies of these "trade secret" OEM license agreements on file somewhere? Without some sort of public record, we pretty much have to take the author's word for it (not that I doubt him).
As much as we'd like to create a technological circumvention for this, we can't. Because the people who are affected by this are the people who don't have enough computer knowledge to even know they have a choice. And Microsoft has, very intelligently, ensured that they never will.
After Lindbergh flew to Paris in 1927, for example, there was a bubble in aviation stocks. People rushed in without even knowing what they were buying. It turned out that one, Seaboard Airlines, was a poetically named railroad. It wasn't an airline at all.
How many companies emulated this paradigm during the dot-com boom? I think we saw ".com" tacked onto the end of every company in existence in the space of 2 years. As I drive down the main drag in town, I see furniture stores with ".com" on their 20-foot-high-letter signs! They define themselves by their Internet presence...
As easy as it is now to sit back and make accurate historical analogies, I didn't see anyone doing it in 2000. All the same, he has a point.
They called their place of existence the "Universe", not the "Great Programmer/Universe".
So now trolling RMS makes front page news? I've always had a question of logic about the logo here. Is it "News for Nerds OR Stuff that matters"? Or is it "News for Nerds AND Stuff that matters"? I'm certainly hoping that no one is assuming the latter. This story is the biggest non-constructive circle-jerk of insides jokes ever posted here. If only it were funny.
Hey, I think I've seen that "bitchslap" thing in use. Once, somebody posted the same message a million times, and somehow they all got a score of -1 immediately.
This is a real issue. I'm amazed what I can find about people on the Web already. Correlating bits of innocent data can give you a surprisingly complete picture.
This is very true. To give a practical example, I looked up this young man and this gentleman and found that they shared the same address! Imagine what inferences someone could draw from that.
The Internet brings a whole new level of accessibility to public records - the ability to mine data using scripts and correlate it in a huge database adds a lot of value to information that used to be isolated.
Personally I've spent a year trying to exterminate my personal information from the Net, and I'm far from succeeding.
/. not displaying news about VA Linux might be hypocritical, but it wouldn't make them Censorware. To my knowledge,/. has put their Censorware days behind them.
If there are any lawyers in reading, we need a magic document that has the following two properties:
1) It is an illegal copy of a copyrighted work
2) Reading the document violates lawyer-client privelege, doctor-patient privelege, or the DMCA, preferably all three.
For instance, the document has a copyrighted non-illegal trailer and the entire document is zipped using the password "password". By detecting the copyrighted payload, we can sue them for accessing the non-illegal trailer which was protected by the "PkZip" anti-circumvention device.
If we can find this piece of data and get an Excite@HOME user terminated for downloading it, we can prosecute Excite for reading it, preferably under the DMCA.
or turn over pharmaceutical research duties to Universities. That way the Uni's can peruse research that leads to *HEALHTY PEOPLE* and not to simple economic-profit.
Yes, let's dump a task with the potential for massive financial gain or loss squarely on the shoulders of the academic researchers we depend on to serve as unbiased and objective observers of commercial science. That way, we'll have no one who can't be bought off by pharmaceutical money, and we'll just have to believe everything they tell us.
AIDS is not a political problem. The refusal of the Brazilian government to allocate the funds required to purchase the drugs necessary to save the lives of their citizens IS a political problem. By choosing instead to steal, Brazil has established itself in the world community as a thief of intellectual property on par with China, but without the manufacturing muscle to get away with it.
"This may set an important example that public needs justify the disregard of patent protection"
It sets a few more examples, too. If you're an AIDS patient, it sets the example that you should fly to Brazil, right away. If you're a drug company, the example is to look into carpet bombing Brazil, and if that fails, stop developing drugs no one will ever pay you for.
Just because software patents are patents on math & therefore stupid doesn't mean all patents are stupid. Pharaceutical R&D is intensely expensive. Screwing the companies that fund research is a bad solution to what is at heart a political problem.
Ahh, I remember seeing the early prototype for 3dwm in the first Jurassic Park movie. Dickie Attenborough's granddaughter sits down, proclaims "It's a Unix System! I know this!", and then navigates through 3dwm in order to restart all the correct processes and, sadly, save everyone from being eaten by raptors, which would have been far more entertaining. I remember watching the movie, hoping she would fail and be eaten in a bloody, gore-filled mess, when I realized I had been thwarted by a heretofore unseen graphical window manager which could be intuitively controlled with a mouse.
One thing that's been in the -ac kernels for quite some time is the ability to post-mortem debug multithreaded processes. That is, under the production kernel, when you core dump, all the threading information is lost. You can't get the call stack of each thread. With the -ac kernels you got one core file per pid, with each LWP (lightweight process) getting its' own core file.
Considering that Solaris has had this (what seems to be BASIC) functionality for years, why do we see the continued insistence on keeping this functionality out of the production kernel? Are we waiting for the gdb team to catch up?
Until this is fixed, multithreaded programming under Linux will remain a black art - only developers willing to apply hordes of -ac patches to a homegrown development kernel have a change of successfully developing a multi-threaded application under Linux. Considering that many commercial software development packages (RogueWave, for instance) won't even support you if you're not using a RedHat released kernel, this puts multi-threaded development "out-of-bounds" for many.
Since Slashdot was down so long, I actually had a chance to read and understand the article before posting. Perhaps there should be a pause between article posting and allowing comments? Anyway, to get on topic:
I disagree wholehartedly with the author's assessment that making the file type part of the name is a "bad thing". I disagree with his statement that the type of a file is immutable data. It is not. I have, many times, created a text file, written some html, and renamed it ".html" to load it in a web browser. Using a Mac has always been infuriating to me because I cannot easily change the application it is loaded with. It's changeable, sure, but not as easily as you can change to a simple, easily remembered mnemonic. Linux has echoed this paradigm for good reason. How hard is it to change a bash script to a different shell? Change the first line. On a Mac, this would require you to change an embedded 32 bit identifier.
The argument is bogus. slashdot.pl and slashdot.txt should NOT collide on my desktop - the type IS part of the name. The mixing of file names & types was neither a hack nor a mistake. To those of us who use computers not as an information appliance but as information builders, the ability to easily manipulate file type data is a way of life.
"In addition, intruders would first need to log in to their own Hotmail accounts, which means they'd leave a clear trail for investigators to follow, experts said."
Bring me these experts. If someone thinks my hotmail account(s) leave a clear trail to me, they're insane. They leave a clear trail to my web proxy, perhaps. Most of my accounts only ever receive one email too... "Slashdot password for user Vladinat0r"
That's nothing. Keep at it and they'll ban your ip.
Don't believe me? I've had it happen before. I had 50 karma and went straight to -25, but I've clawed my way back. My user info contains all the details. But I still have to use proxies to access slashdot.
Quick, someone mirror the PDF Version before the whole site dies under our collective weight.
If no one manages to do so, here's his Abstract:
Abstract
The detection of apparent anomalous forces in the vicinity of high-Tc supercon-
ductors under non equilibrium conditions has stimulated an experimental research in
which the operating parameters of the experiment have been pushed to values higher
than those employed in previous attempts. The results conrm the existence of an
unexpected physical interaction. An apparatus has been constructed and tested in
which the superconductor is subjected to peak currents in excess of 10 4 A, surface
potentials in excess of 1 MV, trapped magnetic eld up to 1 T, and temperature
down to 40 K. In order to produce the required currents a high voltage discharge
technique has been employed. Discharges originating from a superconducting ceramic
electrode are accompanied by the emission of radiation which propagates in a focused
beam without noticeable attenuation through dierent materials and exerts a short
repulsive force on small movable objects along the propagation axis. Within the
measurement error (5 to 7 %) the impulse is proportional to the mass of the objects
and independent on their composition. It therefore resembles a gravitational impulse.
The observed phenomenon appears to be absolutely new and unprecedented in the
literature. It cannot be understood in the framework of general relativity. A theory
is proposed which combines a quantum gravity approach with anomalous vacuum
uctuations.
I think that last sentence says it all. I don't buy it.
This idea is actually pretty clever if you control both sides of the connection and can ensure that the ASN.1 always matches the DTD, but as a general solution it's the wrong idea at the wrong time.
Agreed. You'd need the equivalent of an ASN.1 "session key" - you'd have to compute the grammar and send it first before you sent the text.
Which would be way less effective than using standard lossless compression techniques for ASCII, like, say.... gzip.
The point is that XML wastes bandwidth and storage compared to compressed binary formats, and should never be used as a primary document format except in applications where you have bandwidth and storage to burn.
Translation: Microsoft made another move to buy enough time to release XP. If they can just get that sucker out, they will have leveraged their monopoly into crushing an entire marketplace full of competitors long enough to recover from whatever remedy is applied to them.
Slashdot Mirror
You and I can't read the license because Microsoft classifies it as a "trade secret." The license specifies that any machine which includes a Microsoft operating system must not also offer a nonMicrosoft operating system as a boot option. In other words, a computer that offers to boot into Windows upon startup cannot also offer to boot into BeOS or Linux. The hardware vendor does not get to choose which OSes to install on the machines they sell -- Microsoft does.
The obvious question here is: why didn't the DoJ use this as part of their anti-trust trial? Isn't this the most blatant example of monopoly leverage in existence?
Most importantly, are there any copies of these "trade secret" OEM license agreements on file somewhere? Without some sort of public record, we pretty much have to take the author's word for it (not that I doubt him).
As much as we'd like to create a technological circumvention for this, we can't. Because the people who are affected by this are the people who don't have enough computer knowledge to even know they have a choice. And Microsoft has, very intelligently, ensured that they never will.
Innovation at it's finest.
After Lindbergh flew to Paris in 1927, for example, there was a bubble in aviation stocks. People rushed in without even knowing what they were buying. It turned out that one, Seaboard Airlines, was a poetically named railroad. It wasn't an airline at all.
How many companies emulated this paradigm during the dot-com boom? I think we saw ".com" tacked onto the end of every company in existence in the space of 2 years. As I drive down the main drag in town, I see furniture stores with ".com" on their 20-foot-high-letter signs! They define themselves by their Internet presence...
As easy as it is now to sit back and make accurate historical analogies, I didn't see anyone doing it in 2000. All the same, he has a point.
o o
/ \
| |
\ ______/
/ \
| [@][@] | __________________
| ^^ |_/ \
| VVVVVV <_ I LOVE YOU ALL. |
\_______/ \ HONEST... /
* | | \________________/
/ ___/ \____
|| / \
|| | | *** | |
|| | |* *| |
|| | | *** | |
\\ | | | |
\\ | |_____| |
\\ VVV _[_]_ VVV
\\ / \
\\__/| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
__/ | \__
LAMENESS FILTER
This Martian is Copyright © 2001 keesh. You may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.
They called their place of existence the "Universe", not the "Great Programmer/Universe".
So now trolling RMS makes front page news? I've always had a question of logic about the logo here. Is it "News for Nerds OR Stuff that matters"? Or is it "News for Nerds AND Stuff that matters"? I'm certainly hoping that no one is assuming the latter. This story is the biggest non-constructive circle-jerk of insides jokes ever posted here. If only it were funny.
Hey, I think I've seen that "bitchslap" thing in use. Once, somebody posted the same message a million times, and somehow they all got a score of -1 immediately.
What an asshole!! Who was that guy?
This is a real issue. I'm amazed what I can find about people on the Web already. Correlating bits of innocent data can give you a surprisingly complete picture.
This is very true. To give a practical example, I looked up this young man and this gentleman and found that they shared the same address! Imagine what inferences someone could draw from that.
The Internet brings a whole new level of accessibility to public records - the ability to mine data using scripts and correlate it in a huge database adds a lot of value to information that used to be isolated.
Personally I've spent a year trying to exterminate my personal information from the Net, and I'm far from succeeding.
hundreds of readers would have moaned and griped if it didn't, saying "slashdot is censorware!"...
/. has put their Censorware days behind them.
Jesus, quit ripping off my material.
/. not displaying news about VA Linux might be hypocritical, but it wouldn't make them Censorware. To my knowledge,
Ann Arbor Open's policy isn't unique: Several schools around the country are banning handheld devices.
Damn. Busted for carrying an automatic pencil.
Schools really are getting out of hand.
". The shade of red lipstick you purchased on the Internet and viewed on your LCD monitor will be the exact color red you receive in the mail. "
That's great. Exactly who is this press release for, anyway?
If there are any lawyers in reading, we need a magic document that has the following two properties:
1) It is an illegal copy of a copyrighted work
2) Reading the document violates lawyer-client privelege, doctor-patient privelege, or the DMCA, preferably all three.
For instance, the document has a copyrighted non-illegal trailer and the entire document is zipped using the password "password". By detecting the copyrighted payload, we can sue them for accessing the non-illegal trailer which was protected by the "PkZip" anti-circumvention device.
If we can find this piece of data and get an Excite@HOME user terminated for downloading it, we can prosecute Excite for reading it, preferably under the DMCA.
Suggestions?
or turn over pharmaceutical research duties to Universities. That way the Uni's can peruse research that leads to *HEALHTY PEOPLE* and not to simple economic-profit.
Yes, let's dump a task with the potential for massive financial gain or loss squarely on the shoulders of the academic researchers we depend on to serve as unbiased and objective observers of commercial science. That way, we'll have no one who can't be bought off by pharmaceutical money, and we'll just have to believe everything they tell us.
Great idea.
How is AIDS a political problem?
AIDS is not a political problem. The refusal of the Brazilian government to allocate the funds required to purchase the drugs necessary to save the lives of their citizens IS a political problem. By choosing instead to steal, Brazil has established itself in the world community as a thief of intellectual property on par with China, but without the manufacturing muscle to get away with it.
And they will pay the price.
"This may set an important example that public needs justify the disregard of patent protection"
It sets a few more examples, too. If you're an AIDS patient, it sets the example that you should fly to Brazil, right away. If you're a drug company, the example is to look into carpet bombing Brazil, and if that fails, stop developing drugs no one will ever pay you for.
Just because software patents are patents on math & therefore stupid doesn't mean all patents are stupid. Pharaceutical R&D is intensely expensive. Screwing the companies that fund research is a bad solution to what is at heart a political problem.
Ahh, I remember seeing the early prototype for 3dwm in the first Jurassic Park movie. Dickie Attenborough's granddaughter sits down, proclaims "It's a Unix System! I know this!", and then navigates through 3dwm in order to restart all the correct processes and, sadly, save everyone from being eaten by raptors, which would have been far more entertaining. I remember watching the movie, hoping she would fail and be eaten in a bloody, gore-filled mess, when I realized I had been thwarted by a heretofore unseen graphical window manager which could be intuitively controlled with a mouse.
As long as it doesn't keep saving the lives of actors who really deserve to be chewed into little balls of dripping flesh, I think 3dwm will be "O.K."
One thing that's been in the -ac kernels for quite some time is the ability to post-mortem debug multithreaded processes. That is, under the production kernel, when you core dump, all the threading information is lost. You can't get the call stack of each thread. With the -ac kernels you got one core file per pid, with each LWP (lightweight process) getting its' own core file.
Considering that Solaris has had this (what seems to be BASIC) functionality for years, why do we see the continued insistence on keeping this functionality out of the production kernel? Are we waiting for the gdb team to catch up?
Until this is fixed, multithreaded programming under Linux will remain a black art - only developers willing to apply hordes of -ac patches to a homegrown development kernel have a change of successfully developing a multi-threaded application under Linux. Considering that many commercial software development packages (RogueWave, for instance) won't even support you if you're not using a RedHat released kernel, this puts multi-threaded development "out-of-bounds" for many.
Merge the -ac kernel mods!
Directly from the article:
Lubricating with alcohol
That is the best subject heading ever posted in a Slashdot article, ever.
hof, baby.
Since Slashdot was down so long, I actually had a chance to read and understand the article before posting. Perhaps there should be a pause between article posting and allowing comments? Anyway, to get on topic:
I disagree wholehartedly with the author's assessment that making the file type part of the name is a "bad thing". I disagree with his statement that the type of a file is immutable data. It is not. I have, many times, created a text file, written some html, and renamed it ".html" to load it in a web browser. Using a Mac has always been infuriating to me because I cannot easily change the application it is loaded with. It's changeable, sure, but not as easily as you can change to a simple, easily remembered mnemonic. Linux has echoed this paradigm for good reason. How hard is it to change a bash script to a different shell? Change the first line. On a Mac, this would require you to change an embedded 32 bit identifier.
The argument is bogus. slashdot.pl and slashdot.txt should NOT collide on my desktop - the type IS part of the name. The mixing of file names & types was neither a hack nor a mistake. To those of us who use computers not as an information appliance but as information builders, the ability to easily manipulate file type data is a way of life.
Thought provoking article, nonetheless.
Cool! Maybe someday they'll catch up to the Cleveland Freenet, 8 years of free publicly accessible e-mail!
This is a great step forward to catching up with Cleveland.
"In addition, intruders would first need to log in to their own Hotmail accounts, which means they'd leave a clear trail for investigators to follow, experts said."
Bring me these experts. If someone thinks my hotmail account(s) leave a clear trail to me, they're insane. They leave a clear trail to my web proxy, perhaps. Most of my accounts only ever receive one email too... "Slashdot password for user Vladinat0r"
Sigh. Experts indeed!
Watch Evil Dead.
You can't kill something if it's already dead.
That's nothing. Keep at it and they'll ban your ip.
Don't believe me? I've had it happen before. I had 50 karma and went straight to -25, but I've clawed my way back. My user info contains all the details. But I still have to use proxies to access slashdot.
Enjoy!
"Sometimes I'd have to tell him, `I don't care if you've got a PhD, you don't understand what the hell's going on here,'" Pendray said.
Someone get this man a slashdot account.
Quick, someone mirror the PDF Version before the whole site dies under our collective weight.
If no one manages to do so, here's his Abstract:
Abstract
The detection of apparent anomalous forces in the vicinity of high-Tc supercon-
ductors under non equilibrium conditions has stimulated an experimental research in
which the operating parameters of the experiment have been pushed to values higher
than those employed in previous attempts. The results conrm the existence of an
unexpected physical interaction. An apparatus has been constructed and tested in
which the superconductor is subjected to peak currents in excess of 10 4 A, surface
potentials in excess of 1 MV, trapped magnetic eld up to 1 T, and temperature
down to 40 K. In order to produce the required currents a high voltage discharge
technique has been employed. Discharges originating from a superconducting ceramic
electrode are accompanied by the emission of radiation which propagates in a focused
beam without noticeable attenuation through dierent materials and exerts a short
repulsive force on small movable objects along the propagation axis. Within the
measurement error (5 to 7 %) the impulse is proportional to the mass of the objects
and independent on their composition. It therefore resembles a gravitational impulse.
The observed phenomenon appears to be absolutely new and unprecedented in the
literature. It cannot be understood in the framework of general relativity. A theory
is proposed which combines a quantum gravity approach with anomalous vacuum
uctuations.
I think that last sentence says it all. I don't buy it.
This idea is actually pretty clever if you control both sides of the connection and can ensure that the ASN.1 always matches the DTD, but as a general solution it's the wrong idea at the wrong time.
Agreed. You'd need the equivalent of an ASN.1 "session key" - you'd have to compute the grammar and send it first before you sent the text.
Which would be way less effective than using standard lossless compression techniques for ASCII, like, say.... gzip.
The point is that XML wastes bandwidth and storage compared to compressed binary formats, and should never be used as a primary document format except in applications where you have bandwidth and storage to burn.
Why else would Microsoft use it?
Translation: Microsoft made another move to buy enough time to release XP. If they can just get that sucker out, they will have leveraged their monopoly into crushing an entire marketplace full of competitors long enough to recover from whatever remedy is applied to them.
Quite the Hail Mary, no?