I still use windows because I don't have a girlfriend. If I had one, I couldn't afford to throw all my disposable income at the latest games every week, and I'd be using linux to ensure that I could customize everything just the way she wanted it, while still have my desktop look the way I want for the 5 minutes a day I got to use it.
But, lacking a girlfriend, I have all these cool games that sadly don't work (or don't work properly) under linux.. and thus I have to stay with bouncy old windows...
Amusingly enough, my email address on yahoo gets incredible amounts of spam (about 100 a day last time I looked), and 90% of it is asian spam. This is despite their vaunted spam filter. Why? Simple... their spam filter lets anything through that it can't recognize as something to block... and it can't block non-US character set headers!
I've suggested to them several times that since it's obvious that my settings are to use the US-ASCII character set, they should block anything which has a character-set that doesn't match. Of course, I may as well suggest that a brick wall consider painting itself blue.
Considering that I'm connecting to the internet via an ISP in the US, would it be too much to ask that mail servers on this network reject messages where the FROM header is blank or contains characters outside the conventional norms for US ASCII? Put whatever you want in the body, but use a header that's decypherable at your destination!
While I applaud the author's work in finding the newest tools to do what he wants, I must point out that he didn't HAVE to do it that way.
Go find yourself an *OLD* slackware distribution. When I first started getting into linux, it was with slackware, and it was running on a then-shiny-new 486/33 with 4 Megs of RAM and a giant 400Meg hard drive. Installation was via floppy, and an NE2000 was added later.
So, it's not that no prime-time distributions can be installed on small hardware.. no CURRENT ones can. In that respect, Linux has (to some degree) forgotten its roots and I applaud those who are trying to find their way back. I'm happy that Microsoft has bloated things so much that I have a 1.5GHz cpu on my desk, but I'd sure love to see what it can really do with the kind of efficient small code we had back when 100MHz was uber-fast!
True, although viewing those pr0n^H^H^H^Hsites might require you to sit back from the monitor a ways (assuming you're using aalib) -- which itself might attract attention.
Of course, if your sysadmin has installed a VNC server, you're hosed anyways.
Seriously, I have (and will likely always have to have) a PC to play games. But that's all I do with it. Every time I start trying to actually USE the machine it ends up leaking memory like a water faucet with no washers, and eventually insists on a reboot (either voluntarily because it's sucking molassas, or pre-emptively via blue-screen-of-death).
I work on a linux desktop at work, and never have stupid problems like that. Why should I accept less at home? Yes, I can run linux on the thing, but then I still have to reboot when I want to play games.... kindof defeats the purpose.
If I could wave a magic wand and make game developers write cross-platform code, maybe I could fully shake the Microsoft Addiction that plagues me and gives my hardware the shakes... but until then, I'd rather have an OS X desktop to do real work on, a linux/BSD server to handle mail and network issues, and a Windoze box to play games that I can't get for the PS2 (Hey Blizzard, why not release Diablo II for the Playstation, now that they have network cards?)
Note that I'm not being super-pro-mac here. The fact is, the underlying BSD core is what makes it so stable (run OS 9 for a bit if you doubt that), but the Aqua desktop is as fine a GUI as I could wish for and seems a bit less bloated than a normal X11 server. My only real gripe is the continued default of one mouse button.:)
Software giant Microsoft has announced that documentation for its Visual Studio family of products will now be available in printed form, using rich jet-black ink on a glossy dark purple paper.
"This is a printing idea we got from old copy protection symbol cards in the 1980's. It worked great for them, so it should keep people from illegally copying or using our documentation too!"
It's just another step back towards the days when an employer was a fancy name for master. Once upon a time, your employer had absolute control over your life, they could do whatever they wanted provided their own lord didn't forbid it. This was called serfdom.
After many centuries, the politicol power of the kings was diminished and the efforts of labor unions brought about the ideas of civil rights, and even the rights of workers to not be fired because they were 5 minutes late for work after their leg was chopped off in an auto accident on the way in.
Many employers would like a return to the Good Old Days of serfdom. No forms to fill out, no pesky civil liberties to deal with. An employee lived to do the bidding of his or her employer, and their own life meant nothing to them. Ahhh, take those pesky instant messanger clients for an example.
Which would YOU prefer? An employee who is content and does his job well, though wasting a few minutes of each hour to talk with other humans, or post things to silly discussion forums? Or one who devotes ALL his time to putting out the minimum level of production to keep from being fired, all the while plotting the death and dismemberment of everyone above him?
There has to be SOME level of trust given by your employer. They have to trust that you'll do your job to the best of your ability, and likewise you have to trust that they'll give you work you can actually do. To micro-manage to the level of spying on email, phone conversations, or instant messanger use is to say "We think of you only as unit #45712 -- do only what we assign you. The spoons are counted nightly." Obviously, such an employer not only doesn't deserve you as an employee, but they also have too much free-time on their hands (or too many middle-management types on the payroll).
Having said that, I never understood why p2p networks of all kinds (messaging, file transfer, etc) don't encrypt ALL the data being sent? Encryption is easy these days people, use it!
I see lots of people here saying how M$ would never give away Windows, and how they make too much money from OEM's. Peanuts. Would you like fries with that?
M$ gave away IE just to gain market share in the browser universe. Why? So that they could be in a position to create their own "standards", and eventually develop.NET. Did they know it would be.NET back then? No. But you can bet they did realize the idea of running applications served via a remote machine was a cash cow waiting to be born. Getting everyone to use IE wasn't to kill Netscape, it was to keep everyone in a position where something like.NET would be easy to do, and thus get them all hooked on it.
M$ would gladly give away their OS (which would REMAIN closed-source, BTW) in exchange for the general public's continued dependance on it for.NET services, applications in general, and DRM in particular. Think about it.
Ok, so you now give the OS away. Now you charge $30/year for the license to a DRM-compliant media player, $50/year for M$-Office 2004 (only availalbe as a.NET service), and $100/year for Visual Studio cross-platform (meaning it will compile apps that can run as a.NET service and might work on an OS X client). You suddenly are getting your original OS cost back four-fold, since most people only bought the new os/computer every 3-4 years anyways.
I won't even mention how much they can charge for enterprise licensing of things like SQL Server... those of you who work with things of that nature already know how much you're being soaked. Triple that and require an always-on T1 connection and you know what to expect.
I'm sure glad the DoJ is there to watch out for us!
I find it highly amusing that we (in most parts of the US) have to pay an income tax when we get the money in the first place, and then a sales tax when we spend it.
Wasn't this kind of double-taxation one of the reasons the colonies broke ties with England and fought a war for independance?
So now, I can buy something overseas and am supposed to pay taxes to my government for... ummm... hmmmm. Well, it can't be for the goods or services, since those come from outside the country. It can't be for me, because I already paid my income tax. It can't be for my internet connection, because my ISP already pays taxes for their earnings (which come from me). I'd say it was for import duties, but oh yeah, those are seperate fees that get levied by the federal government, this is a state tax.
I give up, why do I need to pay this (other than because the state has guys with jackboots and guns telling me to do so)?
Hmmm, which universe are we talking about here? Is that the same one with winged faeries and dragons? Yeah.
Ok, I have ONE (count 'em, O-N-E) access point to the internet. How are you supposed to "move around blockages or outage points" when the blockage is on the single access point you have?
Sure, I could establish an ssh tunnel to another machine and route everything through it... but... that requires that I have access to another machine which is NOT BLOCKED!
Are *YOU* going to give me a proxy? No? Well then, don't be such a smug little know-it-all and try looking at the world without the rose-tinted specs for a while.
I happen to have access to a machine on a fixed network connect that I could use for that purpose, MOST people do not. And as that machine is on a fractional T1, the extra latency induced by the tunnel would make game playing laughable -- which is at least half the reason I have broadband at home to begin with. (If all I cared about was downloading, I'd go back to using removable hard drives and my car).
I agree that the internet (in every way) suffers from the secretary problem... how to find exactly what you want in the huge ocean of media. However, if it weren't for the threats and bullying activities of the RIAA, well known portals and internet radio stations would exist to track these things down.
Imagine a radio station where what's played is really decided by the listeners (votes, rankings, directly viewable data) instead of some marketing numbers dreamed up by people high on crack? Easy to do with icecast, an sql database of music data, and a few php scripts -- once the pesky RIAA people die off.
If you STILL want to buy into the dream that the RIAA helps musicians promote/book/etc... how do I find your album? I'm willing to bet that if I walk down to my local music store, there's at best a 50/50 chance they'll know who you are, and usually only if one of the employees listens to your stuff. OTOH, if you were played on an internet radio station, I would know who you were if I ever heard it (unlike airwave radio, internet radio always provides the data while you're listening), and if I knew your name I could look you up via google (or a more specialized search engine). How is the RIAA going to help me buy your stuff? They'll put up a few posters in places I don't go... great.
The RIAA *could* have been at the forefront of this. They *could* have leapt in with both feet and helped develop and mature the ideas of streaming audio and compressed formats. Instead, they tried to have them declared witchcraft and are being burned by their own fires.
Hence the reason Microsoft is now selling broadband hardware? To ensure that a percentage of their installed userbase won't ever be able to cut them off, even with evil-linux-savvy-friends who come over and try.
Fear the day some joker installs an M$-router in something important (like an ISP, or as a gateway to a bank).
Gee, suddenly all kinds of independant films that have been ignored because they didn't fit a target audience, or because nobody in the theater distribution chain had ever heard of them start being shown.
Of course, the price will have to go up to maybe $7 or $8 to cover the cost... oh wait, it's already that high!
If a security document describing flaws in the kernel is a violation of the DMCA, than surely any coments in the source code of any Open Source product are also in violation (I guess that means my code is safe! *grin*)!
Further, since the DMCA doesn't specify that the language must be English, the source code itself might well be in violation. Say goodbye to utilities like crack (and thus cracklib), or port-scanners. In fact, you might choose to view the contents of a protected file with/bin/cat... HA! It's now a tool to circumvent copy protection, don't let it run with root privs! And don't forget to change chmod so it can't clear bits... the DMCA doesn't specify that *YOU* may circumvent your own protection!!!
Hmmmm, now what big organization hates open-source, and would benefit the most from having it declared illegal.... what giant mega-corp would be happy to have security notifications disallowed.... hmmmmm....
Everyone knows the 10th planet is already called Mondas... and if you want to change it, you're gonna have to go wave some gold at a bunch of Cybermen.
Apple seems to be taking a page from the Amiga legacy. The Amiga people released nice thick volumes of documentation about the inner-workings of every aspect of their system. Some parts of it were labeled as officially sanctioned API's that were guarenteed to always work. Other parts were documented, but you were warned that if you poked things directly in THIS version of the OS, it may or may not work when the next version came out.
Exactly what I'd expect.
If you go rooting around under the hood, you should keep your fingers out of the fanblades, or don't wave your bloody stump at me!
Music "sharing" is another name for FREE ADVERTISING! The real money is in merchandising anyways, concert ticket sales, T-shirts, branded notebooks, action figures...
When are those idiots going to learn that they can never stop the free exchange of data, without changing the country into a police state? Our friends in the White House (courtesy of many big business lobbiests) are trying their best to do this, but we don't YET need tongue tattoos to authenticate our cognitave brain centers. We retain the ability to think for ourselves, for just a little while longer.
MPAA/RIAA! It's really simple. You adapt your business model to become a service industry, which is what you are. Stop trying to treat content as a commodity (which it is not). Make tangible goods and sell those, but stop pretending that a song is something you can put in a box.
You know, as with anything, when you put a common prefix in front of lots of things, it dilutes the value of that prefix. Pretty soon, people just ignore it and stop writing it, as it becomes implied and only beurocrats enjoy writing things out just for the sake of having them written out.
There is a point, often overlooked, where ideals meet reality. I'd suggest the FSF start looking, because wasting resources quibbling over a naming convention which (if adopted) will be abbreviated away everywhere except in legal documents is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
I still use windows because I don't have a girlfriend. If I had one, I couldn't afford to throw all my disposable income at the latest games every week, and I'd be using linux to ensure that I could customize everything just the way she wanted it, while still have my desktop look the way I want for the 5 minutes a day I got to use it.
But, lacking a girlfriend, I have all these cool games that sadly don't work (or don't work properly) under linux.. and thus I have to stay with bouncy old windows...
Amusingly enough, my email address on yahoo gets incredible amounts of spam (about 100 a day last time I looked), and 90% of it is asian spam. This is despite their vaunted spam filter. Why? Simple... their spam filter lets anything through that it can't recognize as something to block... and it can't block non-US character set headers!
I've suggested to them several times that since it's obvious that my settings are to use the US-ASCII character set, they should block anything which has a character-set that doesn't match. Of course, I may as well suggest that a brick wall consider painting itself blue.
Considering that I'm connecting to the internet via an ISP in the US, would it be too much to ask that mail servers on this network reject messages where the FROM header is blank or contains characters outside the conventional norms for US ASCII? Put whatever you want in the body, but use a header that's decypherable at your destination!
While I applaud the author's work in finding the newest tools to do what he wants, I must point out that he didn't HAVE to do it that way.
Go find yourself an *OLD* slackware distribution. When I first started getting into linux, it was with slackware, and it was running on a then-shiny-new 486/33 with 4 Megs of RAM and a giant 400Meg hard drive. Installation was via floppy, and an NE2000 was added later.
So, it's not that no prime-time distributions can be installed on small hardware.. no CURRENT ones can. In that respect, Linux has (to some degree) forgotten its roots and I applaud those who are trying to find their way back. I'm happy that Microsoft has bloated things so much that I have a 1.5GHz cpu on my desk, but I'd sure love to see what it can really do with the kind of efficient small code we had back when 100MHz was uber-fast!
So I take it your site was recently slashdotted by a herd of wolly foragers who seemed particularly nervous when hearing zippers?
True, although viewing those pr0n^H^H^H^Hsites might require you to sit back from the monitor a ways (assuming you're using aalib) -- which itself might attract attention.
Of course, if your sysadmin has installed a VNC server, you're hosed anyways.
"What, buy a video game and hand cream at the same site? That's just TOO WEIRD."
Well, it's better than a video game and KY jelly, or... maybe not?
Simple. They work.
:)
Seriously, I have (and will likely always have to have) a PC to play games. But that's all I do with it. Every time I start trying to actually USE the machine it ends up leaking memory like a water faucet with no washers, and eventually insists on a reboot (either voluntarily because it's sucking molassas, or pre-emptively via blue-screen-of-death).
I work on a linux desktop at work, and never have stupid problems like that. Why should I accept less at home? Yes, I can run linux on the thing, but then I still have to reboot when I want to play games.... kindof defeats the purpose.
If I could wave a magic wand and make game developers write cross-platform code, maybe I could fully shake the Microsoft Addiction that plagues me and gives my hardware the shakes... but until then, I'd rather have an OS X desktop to do real work on, a linux/BSD server to handle mail and network issues, and a Windoze box to play games that I can't get for the PS2 (Hey Blizzard, why not release Diablo II for the Playstation, now that they have network cards?)
Note that I'm not being super-pro-mac here. The fact is, the underlying BSD core is what makes it so stable (run OS 9 for a bit if you doubt that), but the Aqua desktop is as fine a GUI as I could wish for and seems a bit less bloated than a normal X11 server. My only real gripe is the continued default of one mouse button.
Software giant Microsoft has announced that documentation for its Visual Studio family of products will now be available in printed form, using rich jet-black ink on a glossy dark purple paper.
"This is a printing idea we got from old copy protection symbol cards in the 1980's. It worked great for them, so it should keep people from illegally copying or using our documentation too!"
... I still use my old hardcopy terminal then, eh?
It's just another step back towards the days when an employer was a fancy name for master. Once upon a time, your employer had absolute control over your life, they could do whatever they wanted provided their own lord didn't forbid it. This was called serfdom.
After many centuries, the politicol power of the kings was diminished and the efforts of labor unions brought about the ideas of civil rights, and even the rights of workers to not be fired because they were 5 minutes late for work after their leg was chopped off in an auto accident on the way in.
Many employers would like a return to the Good Old Days of serfdom. No forms to fill out, no pesky civil liberties to deal with. An employee lived to do the bidding of his or her employer, and their own life meant nothing to them. Ahhh, take those pesky instant messanger clients for an example.
Which would YOU prefer? An employee who is content and does his job well, though wasting a few minutes of each hour to talk with other humans, or post things to silly discussion forums? Or one who devotes ALL his time to putting out the minimum level of production to keep from being fired, all the while plotting the death and dismemberment of everyone above him?
There has to be SOME level of trust given by your employer. They have to trust that you'll do your job to the best of your ability, and likewise you have to trust that they'll give you work you can actually do. To micro-manage to the level of spying on email, phone conversations, or instant messanger use is to say "We think of you only as unit #45712 -- do only what we assign you. The spoons are counted nightly." Obviously, such an employer not only doesn't deserve you as an employee, but they also have too much free-time on their hands (or too many middle-management types on the payroll).
Having said that, I never understood why p2p networks of all kinds (messaging, file transfer, etc) don't encrypt ALL the data being sent? Encryption is easy these days people, use it!
I see lots of people here saying how M$ would never give away Windows, and how they make too much money from OEM's. Peanuts. Would you like fries with that?
.NET. Did they know it would be .NET back then? No. But you can bet they did realize the idea of running applications served via a remote machine was a cash cow waiting to be born. Getting everyone to use IE wasn't to kill Netscape, it was to keep everyone in a position where something like .NET would be easy to do, and thus get them all hooked on it.
.NET services, applications in general, and DRM in particular. Think about it.
.NET service), and $100/year for Visual Studio cross-platform (meaning it will compile apps that can run as a .NET service and might work on an OS X client). You suddenly are getting your original OS cost back four-fold, since most people only bought the new os/computer every 3-4 years anyways.
M$ gave away IE just to gain market share in the browser universe. Why? So that they could be in a position to create their own "standards", and eventually develop
M$ would gladly give away their OS (which would REMAIN closed-source, BTW) in exchange for the general public's continued dependance on it for
Ok, so you now give the OS away. Now you charge $30/year for the license to a DRM-compliant media player, $50/year for M$-Office 2004 (only availalbe as a
I won't even mention how much they can charge for enterprise licensing of things like SQL Server... those of you who work with things of that nature already know how much you're being soaked. Triple that and require an always-on T1 connection and you know what to expect.
I'm sure glad the DoJ is there to watch out for us!
But aren't DDoS attacks usually based on TOO MUCH data? I'm not sure that would be a problem, other than being very tiring...
I find it highly amusing that we (in most parts of the US) have to pay an income tax when we get the money in the first place, and then a sales tax when we spend it.
Wasn't this kind of double-taxation one of the reasons the colonies broke ties with England and fought a war for independance?
So now, I can buy something overseas and am supposed to pay taxes to my government for... ummm... hmmmm. Well, it can't be for the goods or services, since those come from outside the country. It can't be for me, because I already paid my income tax. It can't be for my internet connection, because my ISP already pays taxes for their earnings (which come from me). I'd say it was for import duties, but oh yeah, those are seperate fees that get levied by the federal government, this is a state tax.
I give up, why do I need to pay this (other than because the state has guys with jackboots and guns telling me to do so)?
Hmmm, which universe are we talking about here? Is that the same one with winged faeries and dragons? Yeah.
Ok, I have ONE (count 'em, O-N-E) access point to the internet. How are you supposed to "move around blockages or outage points" when the blockage is on the single access point you have?
Sure, I could establish an ssh tunnel to another machine and route everything through it... but... that requires that I have access to another machine which is NOT BLOCKED!
Are *YOU* going to give me a proxy? No? Well then, don't be such a smug little know-it-all and try looking at the world without the rose-tinted specs for a while.
I happen to have access to a machine on a fixed network connect that I could use for that purpose, MOST people do not. And as that machine is on a fractional T1, the extra latency induced by the tunnel would make game playing laughable -- which is at least half the reason I have broadband at home to begin with. (If all I cared about was downloading, I'd go back to using removable hard drives and my car).
I agree that the internet (in every way) suffers from the secretary problem... how to find exactly what you want in the huge ocean of media. However, if it weren't for the threats and bullying activities of the RIAA, well known portals and internet radio stations would exist to track these things down.
Imagine a radio station where what's played is really decided by the listeners (votes, rankings, directly viewable data) instead of some marketing numbers dreamed up by people high on crack? Easy to do with icecast, an sql database of music data, and a few php scripts -- once the pesky RIAA people die off.
If you STILL want to buy into the dream that the RIAA helps musicians promote/book/etc... how do I find your album? I'm willing to bet that if I walk down to my local music store, there's at best a 50/50 chance they'll know who you are, and usually only if one of the employees listens to your stuff. OTOH, if you were played on an internet radio station, I would know who you were if I ever heard it (unlike airwave radio, internet radio always provides the data while you're listening), and if I knew your name I could look you up via google (or a more specialized search engine). How is the RIAA going to help me buy your stuff? They'll put up a few posters in places I don't go... great.
The RIAA *could* have been at the forefront of this. They *could* have leapt in with both feet and helped develop and mature the ideas of streaming audio and compressed formats. Instead, they tried to have them declared witchcraft and are being burned by their own fires.
Hence the reason Microsoft is now selling broadband hardware? To ensure that a percentage of their installed userbase won't ever be able to cut them off, even with evil-linux-savvy-friends who come over and try.
Fear the day some joker installs an M$-router in something important (like an ISP, or as a gateway to a bank).
Hmmm, holywood dies.
Gee, suddenly all kinds of independant films that have been ignored because they didn't fit a target audience, or because nobody in the theater distribution chain had ever heard of them start being shown.
Of course, the price will have to go up to maybe $7 or $8 to cover the cost... oh wait, it's already that high!
I guess this is bad news for the Baldwins...
If a security document describing flaws in the kernel is a violation of the DMCA, than surely any coments in the source code of any Open Source product are also in violation (I guess that means my code is safe! *grin*)!
/bin/cat... HA! It's now a tool to circumvent copy protection, don't let it run with root privs! And don't forget to change chmod so it can't clear bits... the DMCA doesn't specify that *YOU* may circumvent your own protection!!!
Further, since the DMCA doesn't specify that the language must be English, the source code itself might well be in violation. Say goodbye to utilities like crack (and thus cracklib), or port-scanners. In fact, you might choose to view the contents of a protected file with
Hmmmm, now what big organization hates open-source, and would benefit the most from having it declared illegal.... what giant mega-corp would be happy to have security notifications disallowed.... hmmmmm....
Everyone knows the 10th planet is already called Mondas... and if you want to change it, you're gonna have to go wave some gold at a bunch of Cybermen.
And you thought even THAT activity would be safe from DRM??? Muahahaha, fool!
can beat a $500 35mm quasi-professional film camera, not using the best film available, and only in terms of pixel resolution (not dynamic range).
Big deal.
I'll put your puny digital toy up against a decent medium format camera any day.
so that certain people in that part of the world don't find out about the redirection of all the surplus government cheese...
I totally agree.
Apple seems to be taking a page from the Amiga legacy. The Amiga people released nice thick volumes of documentation about the inner-workings of every aspect of their system. Some parts of it were labeled as officially sanctioned API's that were guarenteed to always work. Other parts were documented, but you were warned that if you poked things directly in THIS version of the OS, it may or may not work when the next version came out.
Exactly what I'd expect.
If you go rooting around under the hood, you should keep your fingers out of the fanblades, or don't wave your bloody stump at me!
...in the same sentance!
Music "sharing" is another name for FREE ADVERTISING! The real money is in merchandising anyways, concert ticket sales, T-shirts, branded notebooks, action figures...
When are those idiots going to learn that they can never stop the free exchange of data, without changing the country into a police state? Our friends in the White House (courtesy of many big business lobbiests) are trying their best to do this, but we don't YET need tongue tattoos to authenticate our cognitave brain centers. We retain the ability to think for ourselves, for just a little while longer.
MPAA/RIAA! It's really simple. You adapt your business model to become a service industry, which is what you are. Stop trying to treat content as a commodity (which it is not). Make tangible goods and sell those, but stop pretending that a song is something you can put in a box.
You know, as with anything, when you put a common prefix in front of lots of things, it dilutes the value of that prefix. Pretty soon, people just ignore it and stop writing it, as it becomes implied and only beurocrats enjoy writing things out just for the sake of having them written out.
There is a point, often overlooked, where ideals meet reality. I'd suggest the FSF start looking, because wasting resources quibbling over a naming convention which (if adopted) will be abbreviated away everywhere except in legal documents is absurd.
In short, grow up.