How can you and your cohorts look yourselves in the mirror knowing that you've worked at and succeeded in making bad engineering acceptable and a common occurrance?
More Torrents == Faster Fedora12 Downloads
on
Fedora 12 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah, tried several--same problem. Finally found one that worked via FTP.
Once you get it, help others get Fedora. Bandwidth schedulers can help if you're concerned about that. The demand will be there for a few days as people get it for work. Home users will try on the weekend, so if you can, help out by leaving your torrent up for a week or so.
It looks like someone is still confused there about copyright treaties like the Berne Convention.
It is perfectly legal to download and re-distribute the copyrighted material when the copyright owner gives permission. MPAA, RIAA, Disney / Microsoft don't want that discussed. And when formerly copyrighted material has its copyright revoked, either by the rights holder or by the passage of time. For example, the early Elvis recordings are now in the public domain in many countries because the copyright on that particular edition has expired.
Further, in some countries, fair use extends to copies for personal use. So while it may give you the warm and fuzzies to Repeat After Bill his every word, consider that the Internet is a global network and not just limited to your block.
What is likely at the heart of the matter is the issue of whether decentralized communications networks shall be allowed by control-freaks in various companies or their subservient governments. If it's not centralized, it's hard to track or censor.
I recall from an interview from the tv program 'Real People' with a fellow who had built a passenger rocket out of spare government parts. It was a torpedo-like tube with a very small window. There was passenger space for a lean person and a parachute.
I don't recall if it had been test fired. It was also unclear how high it would go. What I do remember well was when the builder was asked if he would fly in it, the answer was along the lines of "hell no".
A side effect of buying into the so-simple a monkey could run it sales pitch from Microsoft: You end up with monkeys that can only stroke the big boss telling him or her to sit tight till the next free t-shirt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H service pack. As these monkeys are able to bullshit their way into training positions, they will do what any other weak or insecure monkey will do: bogart their already limited knowledge. Thus with each iteration you get progressively more ignorant monkeys, that have to rely and specialize more and more in social engineering and keeping the managers away from real it staff to keep their jobs. That same level of skill and knowledge permeate that one vendor's products and services. When the products or services get enough bad press, they just rename them. Enough of that though.
There are some good interviews about the DNS flaw, like the one at
Black Hat. For the details of the 2008 flaw, not the x.509 cert flaw, Steve Friedl has An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability. If you played with DNS during 2006 or 2007 you probably at least spotted symptoms of the flaw as it seemed to be in growing use.
Frustratingly, the solution has been there in front of us for many years and most systems have been more than capable of deploying DNSSEC, either as part of IPv4 or IPv6, for many years. Except for one vendor that can't. Take a guess which one. Take a guess how much it has cost us to let them hold back the net.
I dunno man, living on an entirely different continent, I am very concerned over my IP being logged by viewing a few damn YouTube videos from Russia. I better install Tor as well and go down to Starbucks with a brand new netbook, just in case.
No Script and Flashblock don't help if you're running flash anyway.
It's potentially more than the video, watching that using flash puts for all practical purposes a backdoor on the computers of an interesting group, especially those within Russia. Idiots that use flash and javascript are almost as bad as the ones that set up sites to depend on them for operation. Again, this is a case where using open standards would not just help get the message out but help protect the identities, interests, and machine integrity of those receiving the message.
Not if they're just posers from Microsoft using the classroom as a captive audience for marketeering. That and smearing the school's name through the mud by claiming affiliation.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 709 F.Supp. 925 (N.D.Cal.1989) (Apple I); Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 717 F.Supp. 1428 (N.D.Cal.1989) (Apple II); Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 759 F.Supp. 1444 (N.D.Cal.1991) (Apple III); Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 779 F.Supp. 133 (N.D.Cal.1991) (Apple IV); Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 799 F.Supp. 1006 (N.D.Cal.1992) (Apple V); Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 821 F.Supp. 616 (N.D.Cal.1993) (Apple VI).
And in 2003:
8. In 1995, Microsoft introduced a software package called Windows 95, which announced itself as the first operating system for Intel-compatible PCs that exhibited the same sort of integrated features as the Mac OS running PCs manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple"). Windows 95 enjoyed unprecedented popularity with consumers, and in June 1998, Microsoft released its successor, Windows 98. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff, vs. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, Defendant. COURT'S FINDINGS OF FACT
And in 2005:
"They can't even copy fast,"
It is truly bizarre that average people allow the shills to make noise promoting such incompetence. Look at their search engine payment bug and you are reminded yet again what kind of people they must scrape the bottom of the barrel to get. Not just known-nothings, but fresh-out-of-school ones at that. Sadly that scam has gone on for a generation. What happens if they get into schools or colleges and start posing as staff or faculty??
"The nature of our business is both IT and media related and we are developing software solutions based on the Microsoft platform. "
No news here. It's just the RIAA / MPAA getting a free slashvertisement for their buddy, bill.
If you want video, go to the video bay. If you want the net locked down in proprietary, DRM'd formats, go to viddler, vaudler, or whatever it was called. If you want to send a big F-U to European and American business, then go to viddler, vaudler, or whatever it was called. If you want to give a boost to European and American business, then go video bay or any other site specializing in open technology.
Thanks to the electrical manufacturers, "shuttering" is no longer optional for residential installations that follow NEC 2008 or later (406.11).
Using two hands to push the shutters open makes it more likely the current goes across the heart when the kid does succeed in pushing in the nail, wire, screwdriver, pen or whatnot.
Other services, like moneybookers, have had public APIs for years. IIRC the moneybooker's one has been around since 2004. There are even development accounts that can be set up for testing and several levels of detail or complexity.
I'm not sure what the slashdot editors' fascination with paypal is about. A quota to peddle 'news' about M$ partners?
It's almost like M$ keeps moving the holes around and re-hiding them, but never fixing them. That would certainly permit the known holes and backdoors to be available for exploit but make it harder for 'unauthorized' (you did read the EULA, right?) entities to use them.
That is, however, only when M$ can be assed to patch in the first place. Not like they've dropped patches for versions they still claim to support.
So, another way to look at the data is that Windows malware outbreaks cause a corresponding surge in migration away from Windows and towards systems like Linux or OpenSolaris.
It is perfectly legal to torrent copyrighted material when the rights holder grants permission. In fact, I'm seeding quite a few gigabytes of copyrighted material right now, legally:
M$ and RIAA can stop right now with their bullshit about Linux == Piracy. For that matter they can stop with that Solaris == Linux, OS X == Linux, HaikuOS == Linux, BSD == Linux, Java == Linux, Perl == Linux, Ruby == Linux, !MS == Linux and so on.
Useless is the wrong word. It took 15 lines of python wrapping xpdf for me to get a working system for dumping the transactions out of the last 6 years of my credit card statements.
It's ugly, but it works just fin
That would be because that particular PDF happened to accidentally be wrapping ASCII or ISO-8859 or UTF-8 or UTF-16 instead of some image format. Even then, that was just screen-scraping like can be done with old terminal sessions. It can be done, sometimes.
Keep the data in machine readable formats, not a terminal format like PDF or paper.
"Steve Jobs belonged to the Homebrew Computer Club."
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
PDF/A is already open. However, that doesn't mean that anyone knows how to produce it, especially some R.O.A.D. staffer or random hourly GS1.
Open or not, PDF/A is a display format and, in most cases, useless for information retrieval or automated data processing. PDF/A is a useful alternative to paper. However, the open government initiative is not talking about paper. It's about 'born digital', machine readable data.
The summary does not do a good job of reflecting the original blog post's point. The point was that the government should make data available in a machine-parseable and generic format. PDF is a great format for storing typeset pages, but it is a terrible format for publishing data. It's easy to generate beautiful PDFs from well-structured data but it's much harder to go the other way. Would you rather have budget figures (for example) as a CSV file in a well-defined format or as a PDF of tables and graphs? If the data is available in the former format, it's easy for you or a third party to produce the latter format. If it's only available in the PDF form then it's much harder to create the CSV.
If the goal is to make the data available, then even CSV would be a better option than PDF. PDF, while pretty, is a terminal format and is the digital equivalent of a mayfly. It's paper that hasn't happened yet and when it does it will exist for a few short hours before finding its way to the circular file.
Much of the government data consists of tables and tables of data. gzipped csv would be readable by anyone, so would ODF. Adobe appears to be looking for a handout at the expense of creating a useful and open data system.
Put it in context: open government requires data formats that are independent of campaign donors.
Next time the town should be more careful about granting exclusive contracts.
Exclusive deals usually go sour before the ink is dry. It's not a new problem and if it were easily solved, it would be solved by now.
Here's the obligatory quote summing up the problem:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country
the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit
out of the public for a number of years, the government and the
courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the
future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary
public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute
nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right
to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or
turned back, for their private benefit."
--Robert A. Heinlein
It's tenacity probably owes something to shortcomings in human nature and the inability of society to self-correct in those areas.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you and your cohorts look yourselves in the mirror knowing that you've worked at and succeeded in making bad engineering acceptable and a common occurrance?
Yeah, tried several--same problem. Finally found one that worked via FTP.
Once you get it, help others get Fedora. Bandwidth schedulers can help if you're concerned about that. The demand will be there for a few days as people get it for work. Home users will try on the weekend, so if you can, help out by leaving your torrent up for a week or so.
64 bit x86:
Others:
Sources:
Fedora 12 source CDs
Fedora 12 source DVD
It looks like someone is still confused there about copyright treaties like the Berne Convention.
It is perfectly legal to download and re-distribute the copyrighted material when the copyright owner gives permission. MPAA, RIAA, Disney / Microsoft don't want that discussed. And when formerly copyrighted material has its copyright revoked, either by the rights holder or by the passage of time. For example, the early Elvis recordings are now in the public domain in many countries because the copyright on that particular edition has expired.
Further, in some countries, fair use extends to copies for personal use. So while it may give you the warm and fuzzies to Repeat After Bill his every word, consider that the Internet is a global network and not just limited to your block.
What is likely at the heart of the matter is the issue of whether decentralized communications networks shall be allowed by control-freaks in various companies or their subservient governments. If it's not centralized, it's hard to track or censor.
I recall from an interview from the tv program 'Real People' with a fellow who had built a passenger rocket out of spare government parts. It was a torpedo-like tube with a very small window. There was passenger space for a lean person and a parachute.
I don't recall if it had been test fired. It was also unclear how high it would go. What I do remember well was when the builder was asked if he would fly in it, the answer was along the lines of "hell no".
Unable or unwilling admins is more like it.
A side effect of buying into the so-simple a monkey could run it sales pitch from Microsoft: You end up with monkeys that can only stroke the big boss telling him or her to sit tight till the next free t-shirt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H service pack. As these monkeys are able to bullshit their way into training positions, they will do what any other weak or insecure monkey will do: bogart their already limited knowledge. Thus with each iteration you get progressively more ignorant monkeys, that have to rely and specialize more and more in social engineering and keeping the managers away from real it staff to keep their jobs. That same level of skill and knowledge permeate that one vendor's products and services. When the products or services get enough bad press, they just rename them. Enough of that though.
There are some good interviews about the DNS flaw, like the one at Black Hat. For the details of the 2008 flaw, not the x.509 cert flaw, Steve Friedl has An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability. If you played with DNS during 2006 or 2007 you probably at least spotted symptoms of the flaw as it seemed to be in growing use.
Frustratingly, the solution has been there in front of us for many years and most systems have been more than capable of deploying DNSSEC, either as part of IPv4 or IPv6, for many years. Except for one vendor that can't. Take a guess which one. Take a guess how much it has cost us to let them hold back the net.
Anyone remember Quark, a space garbage scow show from the 70's? :D
It's nice to see it's time...
Quark was the first thing I thought of when I saw the heading. Life imitating art.
I dunno man, living on an entirely different continent, I am very concerned over my IP being logged by viewing a few damn YouTube videos from Russia. I better install Tor as well and go down to Starbucks with a brand new netbook, just in case.
No Script and Flashblock don't help if you're running flash anyway.
It's potentially more than the video, watching that using flash puts for all practical purposes a backdoor on the computers of an interesting group, especially those within Russia. Idiots that use flash and javascript are almost as bad as the ones that set up sites to depend on them for operation. Again, this is a case where using open standards would not just help get the message out but help protect the identities, interests, and machine integrity of those receiving the message.
Basically there is a severe show-stopper every few weeks. Here's a 1 minute search, taking longer to post here than to find in Google:
2009: Flash Origin Policy Issues
2009 also: New attacks exploit vuln in (fully-patched) Adobe Flash: Browse and get owned
2008: Adobe Flash exploit raises concern
2007: Serious Flash vulns menace at least 10,000 websites
There's plenty more where that came from. Again, it was 1 minute of searching.
Not if they're just posers from Microsoft using the classroom as a captive audience for marketeering. That and smearing the school's name through the mud by claiming affiliation.
And in 2003:
And in 2005:
It is truly bizarre that average people allow the shills to make noise promoting such incompetence. Look at their search engine payment bug and you are reminded yet again what kind of people they must scrape the bottom of the barrel to get. Not just known-nothings, but fresh-out-of-school ones at that. Sadly that scam has gone on for a generation. What happens if they get into schools or colleges and start posing as staff or faculty??
No news here. It's just the RIAA / MPAA getting a free slashvertisement for their buddy, bill.
If you want video, go to the video bay. If you want the net locked down in proprietary, DRM'd formats, go to viddler, vaudler, or whatever it was called. If you want to send a big F-U to European and American business, then go to viddler, vaudler, or whatever it was called. If you want to give a boost to European and American business, then go video bay or any other site specializing in open technology.
If we banned cars we could save thousands of people from being killed or severely injured every year,
Wrong. You'd save many tens of thousands from being killed. Many hundreds of thousands would be save from injury: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/road_traffic/world_report/en/
Good luck getting everyone join your root servers instead.
Isn't that what the 'OpenDNS', which isn't open, about? It looks like viral marketing for a parallel name service.
There's more remote parts that have a horrid selection.
Speaking of horrid, what's that last item on the list below? I don't dare try it. It's all chopped up so as to be unrecognizable. ;)
Thanks to the electrical manufacturers, "shuttering" is no longer optional for residential installations that follow NEC 2008 or later (406.11).
Using two hands to push the shutters open makes it more likely the current goes across the heart when the kid does succeed in pushing in the nail, wire, screwdriver, pen or whatnot.
Other services, like moneybookers, have had public APIs for years. IIRC the moneybooker's one has been around since 2004. There are even development accounts that can be set up for testing and several levels of detail or complexity.
I'm not sure what the slashdot editors' fascination with paypal is about. A quota to peddle 'news' about M$ partners?
Not to mention the second amendment. Its kind of part of the bill of rights.
If you look at the role of guns in the formation of the US as a democracy, you might see that computers are the modern-day equivalent.
It's almost like M$ keeps moving the holes around and re-hiding them, but never fixing them. That would certainly permit the known holes and backdoors to be available for exploit but make it harder for 'unauthorized' (you did read the EULA, right?) entities to use them.
That is, however, only when M$ can be assed to patch in the first place. Not like they've dropped patches for versions they still claim to support.
So, another way to look at the data is that Windows malware outbreaks cause a corresponding surge in migration away from Windows and towards systems like Linux or OpenSolaris.
M$ and RIAA can stop right now with their bullshit about Linux == Piracy. For that matter they can stop with that Solaris == Linux, OS X == Linux, HaikuOS == Linux, BSD == Linux, Java == Linux, Perl == Linux, Ruby == Linux, !MS == Linux and so on.
Useless is the wrong word. It took 15 lines of python wrapping xpdf for me to get a working system for dumping the transactions out of the last 6 years of my credit card statements.
It's ugly, but it works just fin
That would be because that particular PDF happened to accidentally be wrapping ASCII or ISO-8859 or UTF-8 or UTF-16 instead of some image format. Even then, that was just screen-scraping like can be done with old terminal sessions. It can be done, sometimes.
Keep the data in machine readable formats, not a terminal format like PDF or paper.
"Steve Jobs belonged to the Homebrew Computer Club."
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
PDF/A is already open. However, that doesn't mean that anyone knows how to produce it, especially some R.O.A.D. staffer or random hourly GS1.
Open or not, PDF/A is a display format and, in most cases, useless for information retrieval or automated data processing. PDF/A is a useful alternative to paper. However, the open government initiative is not talking about paper. It's about 'born digital', machine readable data.
The summary does not do a good job of reflecting the original blog post's point. The point was that the government should make data available in a machine-parseable and generic format. PDF is a great format for storing typeset pages, but it is a terrible format for publishing data. It's easy to generate beautiful PDFs from well-structured data but it's much harder to go the other way. Would you rather have budget figures (for example) as a CSV file in a well-defined format or as a PDF of tables and graphs? If the data is available in the former format, it's easy for you or a third party to produce the latter format. If it's only available in the PDF form then it's much harder to create the CSV.
If the goal is to make the data available, then even CSV would be a better option than PDF. PDF, while pretty, is a terminal format and is the digital equivalent of a mayfly. It's paper that hasn't happened yet and when it does it will exist for a few short hours before finding its way to the circular file.
Much of the government data consists of tables and tables of data. gzipped csv would be readable by anyone, so would ODF. Adobe appears to be looking for a handout at the expense of creating a useful and open data system.
Put it in context: open government requires data formats that are independent of campaign donors.
Next time the town should be more careful about granting exclusive contracts.
Exclusive deals usually go sour before the ink is dry. It's not a new problem and if it were easily solved, it would be solved by now. Here's the obligatory quote summing up the problem:
It's tenacity probably owes something to shortcomings in human nature and the inability of society to self-correct in those areas.
Depends. Do they run M$ products in a hospital? That counts.