I dont' agree with you at all on a number of your points.
1) Yes we DO need to have every little command line utility. While you may not directly use them - the underlying scripts very well might. Besides they are small... and some of us actually DO use them.
2) Yes we DO need to see those 50,000,000,000 kernel messages on startup. I would NEVER have been able to get my soundcard working without them. I don't like being stuffed in a closet and treated like a Mushroom the way M$ does it.
Suppose your boot hangs. Where would you be then?
3) Linux will NEVER pick one thing and stick with it. No operating system ever did. Look at M$. NT contains the OS/2 character mode libraries. That means I can run the OS/2 version of Breif. It has since been removed from w2k or XP thus - I will NEVER upgrade.
NT, w2k and XP still contain DOS and win16. Talk about crap eh? But people need it.
The thing is - were we to ask 100 people in a room what they needed - we'd get close to 100 different answers.
4) I agree with the man comments. Man needs to be re-written. We maybe need to look at a wikiman.
5) so how would you elimiate the 30 programming languages? Would you discard the perl stuff? how about bash or csh? Maybe discard tcl or gtk eh? What about python?
Each of these languages is there for a reason. Each is doing a job and removing any one of them would leave a rather big hole.
I do agree mind you that the learning curve is rather horendous. We can do a much better job of documentation I think. That would really help matters.
DOS was the cut down version of linux that only did some things one way. So if you suggest going in that direction - then the question comes down to what parts you'd like to throw away.
Maybe you should look at OpenBSD. For servers it is lean mean and clean. I love OpenBSD on my servers. But on my desktop - I like Linux.
I think the artical speaks for itself... if he made that distro available I would not touch it and I doubt many others would either.
1) I am quite happy with the present directory structure. I do not want a bunch of symlinks - they are confusing and utterly unnecessary.
2) His idea of what apps to include probably will not coincide with mine. For instance - is he planning on including emacs? How about gcc and g77?
I'm sure he thought about gcc but I'll bet he forgot about g77.
3) He never mentioned the most important aspect of a distro - that is its upgradeability. This is the reason I switched to Debian... Debian can be painlessly upgraded.
I have an old machine with RedHat 6.1 in it. I bought a copy of Mandrake 8.0 Mandrake is NOT installed (does anybody want it?). The reason is the question of doing an upgrade. I _KNOW_ that the moment I try to upgrade that redhat box that it will break all over the place. If I wipe the drive I lose 3 years of work. In fact - if I were to take it out from behind the firewall - it would be hacked within the hour!
For me it was cheaper to go buy ANOTHER computer and leave the old one as it was.
4) He made no mention of security.
5) He has missed the most important areas where Linux needs work. I'd like to offer My Humbol Opinion. The work needs to be in the area of the functionality of a loopback mount. We need to be able to stuff a directory tree into a single file and have the OS mount it automatically - similar to the loopback but with the following difference.
When you do a loopback mount - the whole file system sees it. I want a mount where ONLY a single process tree sees it. This allows one to EASILY create a chroot jail for a user.
Several years ago I tried with Kurt Seifried to create a true chroot jail in linux - we failed.
This automatic mount to a single application could be say bash mounting into a given file or it could be a daemon mounting into a file or it could be an application mounting into a given file. This would make it possible to stuff a complete app into a single file which can be unzipped and pointed too. By doing this, different versions of an app could be simultaneously present in the machine and a user could switch back and forth with a simple pointer change. The pointer could be a symlink.
We are already partway there with the loopback and chroot. Where the problem is stems from the apps that are NOT chrooted. As an admin when I install say something like wxWindows - I would prefer to see only one file. As a user I prefer to see all the files in the package.
This is one step away from a true Virtual Machine for Linux - which we also need. Probably it can be done using User Mode Linux. But I think it should be supported right in the distro.
IMHO - the present filesystem was designed to be lightweight. When disks were 40MB it probably made sense. Now that disks are past 40GB I don't think it makes sense. When they pass the TB mark in a couple years - well - IMHO they are almost unmanagable now.
The underlying reason that this author cannot un-install the apps is because the apps are allowed to spew files all over the system. Most sysadmins don't even know where the files go and they simply trust the developers came up with a reasonable organization. If we go to a filesystem that allows us to force an app to live within a single file - then we can easily remove any old app - we simply delete the file it lives in. People can easily deal with a single file - where the problems come from is when we have 1000's of files and the make clean doesn't work right.
IBM had this concept fully developed years ago under VM/TSO. It was called a Partition DataSet back then.
If we had this concept in linux then for instance X-Windows might live in a file called XFree86_4.1.0.1.PDS and we might use something like ln -s XFree86_4.1.0.1.PDS startx
If so - then when startx is run - the PDS is mounted and the
parts of the internet run over dry copper. With this system you can have the telephone company install a twisted pair at a cost of about $30 bux per link between any _resonable_ pair of locations and then you can hook up whatever you want also _within reason_. This allows one to run say DSL or MVL or whatever you want.
AFAIK there is not equivalent offering for fibre and one really needs fiber to be able to do anything interesting.
Now - if dry fiber did exist then it would make a great deal of sense to rent it and drop in some 100baseT to fiber drivers. These cost under $1000 bux for many models and can drive oh up to say 75 KM's.
Fibre costs about as much as copper anyway - to buy and install. If the phone company can make a bux renting dry copper at say $25 per month - then they should be able to make the same bux renting dry fiber. Imagine - 100MB/sec ethernet across town for say 50 bux/month. Attractive? I think so!
Actually, there is a more than decent possibility that Big Rock will be donating a KEG to the event... so they probably will have free beer - at least at the BBQ.
I think you are mistaken. They have put in "canary" values in the call. The function prologue and epilog code has been modified. What happens is that there is a random value placed essentually as an "extra" parameter in the call. When the function does a return this value is tested and if the value has changed then the function stops instead of returning. Yes a DOS is still possible but you cannot smash the stack and expect to succeed.
The reason you cannot smash the stack is that when you overflow it you have no way of knowing what the canary value is, so the function will stop before it even executes the altered return.
Its a very good and painless feature and one that adds a MINIMAL amount of overhead.
IMHO the explaination that is quoted is misleading or just plain rong. I have never heard of a crash being able to cause an operating system to "execute the second". Well - perhaps in a debugger... but in the case of a debugger we are not in a normal environment.
In canada it is perfectly legal to pirate any music you want. The copyright act was changed so that the right to copy is removed from the artist and transfered to the consummer. Its section 80.
With spamd just around the corner their days are numbered. Spamd will be in the next base install of OpenBSD and it WILL shut down most if not all of the spammers.
Well - it will shut it down for people who run OpenBDS firewalls and servers. For everyone else... well perhaps an openBSD firewall is in your future.
There should be more information found at www.openbsd.org
Your point is well taken, however consider that litigation is very expensive and time consumming.
This means that you as the little guy can have your rights to use your own ideas stomped on and you probably cannot afford to defend yourself.
Meanwhile, even if the patent is invalid, some will pay licensing fees which serve to finance their litigation... not yours. In the end, even if the patent is ruled invalid, they still get to keep the money they collected.
Tom.. This is the 3rd time I've replied... due to bugs.
The cracker did you a favour. You clearly are an intelligent an competant person. But you missed something and a cracker popped in and did no real damage.
Because he popped in you found out about your oversite and fixed it. If the cracker had not dome this then you would have never known.
Suppose an enemy like Iraq chooses to undertake a cyber attack.
Would you rather be sitting where you are with a secure server that is invulnerable or one with the sploit your cracker found?
I feel I like the idea that pranksters come in because then I can fix it. If a terroist comes in through a hole the pranksters didn't find. then I have serious problems.
So I vote that Kevin Mitnick is ok and if I have a chance to hire him or promote his career I will do so. Kevin never did any harm. He was just curious and this is something that our society needs to promote.
Well, even if its wordy, you did read it. For your information I CAN install oracle 8i in Red Hat 6.1. I have done it and dropped it because there were other problems. But it was not easy and you need a paid for tech support contract to do it - which I have.
On the other hand postgreSQL installed perfectly. Futhermore I haven't encountered any problems yet that require tech support. Go figure.
You don't need tech support for stuff that works you know. So how big is Oracle's tech support group?
To be frank, I think you missed the point. You can spend huge amounts of money on closed source software, and when you are done you will be owned by it. You will be owned because you need to walk away from your investment and your experiance and start all over unless you pay for the next upgrade.
So when you get to be say 45 years old how will you feel about having walked away from most of the work you did in your career and most of your experiance because this work is locked into closed source that a) no longer exists or b) has new licencing provisions that you can't live with or c) fell into disuse because the company that owns it went bankrupt or d) became obsolete because it wasn't maintained... just milked..? Should I go on?
How do you feel about paying a tech support contract for a product where the vendor has not allocated a single person for maintenance? And your company is investing over a million bux for development?
Re:I hope you PAID for the VC++ compiler
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Compiling Under Wine
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I paid for lots of operating systems too. I have 2 versions of OS/2, 2 versions of DOS, windows 95 and 98, 3 copies of NT 4.0 and a copy of 3.51 and a copy of w2k that I got stuck with because it didn't work and I had to refund the client's money. Microsoft would not refund what I paid them. Microsoft would not allow me to either return or exchange the unopened copies of Windows NT 4.0 either. I was a Microsoft dealer at the time and bought a 3 pack - which was about a month before w2k was announced. So I got stuck... then stuck again with w2k.
I have only one computer that runs windows NT so only one of these operating systems is in use.
I have red hat linux 6.1 server edition, OpenBSD 3.0 and Mandrake 8.1. I paid for all these too even though they are free.
Now, my desktop runs Debian and it is just great and I did a net install. Guess what, I don't know how to upgrade that RH 6.1 machine. Sure I can reformat the hard drive - but it contains a LOT of my work and I don't want to lose it. With Debian, an upgrade is easy.
In addition to this I bought 2 copies of Brief and I can't use it even though it is my favorite editor. I did a trial d/l of CRiSP and it is a wonderful editor, fully Brief compatible. I contacted them about licencing. I run 8 machines in my home and am a member of the local Unix users group and do consulting work. The CRiSP people told me I would need a "Licence Manager"! I decided to learn Emacs. It has a CRiSP mode and is looking better every day.
I bought 3 versions of M$ FTN and copies of M$ C as well. The last version of M$ FTN was such a botch that I could not use it. I have the Borland OS/2 C/C++ compiler. It was so broken I didn't use it.... but I paid for it. I have Borland C++ professional builder 4. I want to do C/C++ cross platform development.
I phoned Borland. I think they told me that I can buy Delphi for Linux. I think they told me that the language is supported on both platforms but that the API is different. The person on the other end of the phone didn't seem too knowledgable. So I am going into wxWIndows or gtk because these people actually SAY they are cross platform. Thus, I do not have any C++ builder code and didn't get my money's worth.
I have 4 versions of Oracle - paid for by the taxpayer (because I am one of their developers). The DOS versions were so bad we couldn't use them on that platform. The OS/2 versions were better but still not good enouf. It is not possible to install 8i for red hat 6.1 (even though that is the version oracle says 8I is for) unless you CAN STAND ON YOUR HEAD and read the paper What you need to knwo before you even THINK of installing oracle 8i . Imagine having to backdate the glibC and install an old version of Java from blackstrap just so you can get the installer to work. Why couldn't Oracle have put their developers into a room with 2 cd sets. One set - an off the shelf shrink wrapped copy of Red Hat 6.1, and the other set - a copy of the 8i source tree. And then make sure they don't have INTERNET access so they can't cheat and create a version that you can't install. Leave them there until they solve the problem or rot to death trying!!! Damit. I have lost MONTHS of my life solving other people's problems.
Guess what, I am porting the client's apps over to PostgreSQL. See ya Oracle!!! Goodbye!
So, of all the software I bought most of it did the job for a precious short time or didn't do the job at all - with the exception of Brief - which was just excellent. And what happened to Brief? Borland bought the rights, put it on the shelf and AFAIK I can't buy it any more.
So frankly I really don't care if that copy of VB ++ was paid for. Even if it wasn't, I do not feel M$ was ripped off . I feel I was ripped off.
I have been ripped off Over and Over and Over because I bought these products in good faith and paid for them with my hard earned money. Now I can't use them. Some never did what they were advertised to do. Others were discontinued and I lost out.
Let me tell you about the 2nd last copy of M$ FTN that I purchased. I found a bug where the conpiler just eliminated an "IF" statement. No errors, no warnings, and no machine instructions either. I filed a bug report with M$ with sample code. Months went by. I re-filed the bug. Months went by. Finally I phoned them and sat on wait for like an hour - and paid for this too. The rep told me the bug was fixed in the new version. So I bought it.
When the new version arrived I tried out the sample code from the bug report. The problem was still there. Oh, and the last version I bought couldn't be used it was so bad. The client dropped PC development ideas and switched to SUN.
What the Open Source movment has done is a refreshing breath of fresh air and IMHO it is the ONLY way that the programmers of the future are going to stand any chance of avoiding the endentured servant trap that closed source software creates. Anyone questioning this should realise that in order to use closed source software they have to agree to the licence terms and these are arbitrary and non-negotiable. If you find the terms unacceptable then you can't be a programmer. That is unless you can find the tools and the infrastructure you need elsewhere.
Well, we programmers are being attacked another way now.... patent law. If this gets too well established we won't be allowed to be independant. We'll have to work for a big company that has managed to negotiate cross licensing. Either that or pay the piper each time we want to go to the can.
Water flows down hill and the infrasructure required to build some of the closed source tools, like Windows NT/2K/XP, or Oracle or JAVA or say a compiler suite like Visual C++ or Borland Professional Builder is so great that it looks like an ocean. Oceans are hard to move. Oceans are also hard to re-create. There is no way that any company could recreate from scratch an operating system like XP. The environment that XP grew out of no longer exists. IBM tried and failed.
Over the years all computer companies with the exception of perhaps IBM,HP,M$ have failed. Who here thinks Microsoft will survive into the year 2050? Gates won't be in charge then. Who here thinks that another company is going to loom up that can invest the BILLIONS in infrastructure required to create an alternative?
The future of software has to be opensource because that is the only way for us programmers to ensure that we will have the tools we need and the right to use them.
If I add up the THOUSANDS I have spent on software over the years it illustrates to me that I should have been looking for better solutions a long time ago.
Maybe you better re-start reading then. Gondwana was pretty much broken up by the end of the cretaceous.
If you think the ice ages of the last few million years are all there have ever been, then how do you explain the Stuartian Tillies for instance?
Tillites are glacial deposits, and the Stuartian tillites in the Flinders mountains in Australia are pre-cambrian, over 600 feet thick in areas and buried 1000's of feet below the Cambrian which started about 650 million years ago.
First of all.. if we were to take the encylopeadia Britannica and stack all the books up.. then the thickness of each page would represent more than 100,000 years of the earth's history. This means that the last ice age which ended about 10,000 years ago and was at peak 18,000 years ago would be within 1/5 of the thickness of the last page.
There were 8 ice ages in the last 2 million years and that is within the last 20 pages.
Within the last 2,000 years (2% of the thichness of the last page) there have been several warming and cooling periods denoted by such names as the little ice age and the medieval warm period . Crocs were in the themes during Roman times... (little warmer).
look here to see a chart showing global temperature over the last billion or so years. This is the paleomap project an they have done increadible work.
Check out the university of Carleton, Tim Patterson has an excellent course on climate change and this is being broadcast on TLC as well.
On Chris Scotese's web site you will see that for 90% of the history of the planet for the last 650 million years or so, the earth was about 20 degrees warmer than now. If you look at the miocene maps you will see that 14 Million years ago the planet was warmer.. and a lot wetter..
BTW... the time scale on Chris's chart is not linear. If the chart is re-scaled it tells the same story but is even more dramatic. (We leave the re-scalling to the student as an excersize).
Look here if you want to know why Britian is so keen on renewable energy and specifically look at these charts which show the decline rate of North Sea oil production. Britain will become an oil importer within 2 years. The decline rate of North Sea oil production is more than 15% per year. The chart shows how feilds deplete. You can see how the big plays are drilled first and last the longest... and thereafter smaller and smaller fields are brought online until they give up and stop drilling. This is where Britian is now. One of the stats is that Britian has about 250 barrels of oil per capita. That is it! On to renewable because the oil resource is gone.
The real issue of climate change is this. Water in the atmosphere is far more significant than CO2. Firstly H2O is at a far greater level so the question becomes... how would we express the level of H2O in the atmosphere? Secondly there is uncertainty in the measurements. Thirdly, irrigation and agriculture increase the H2O levels. Most of that water pumped onto the fields will evaporate and plants do transpire!
CO2 levels are in the range of 0.036% and this of course is a plant nutrient.
So we are left with adding 2 numbers for instance.
H2O = 0%-4.0% +/- what? a percent? CO2 = 0.036% +/- 0.0005
Since the warming response is most likely due to the weighted "sum" of the CO2 and H2O and all the other green house gasses of course, then we need to "add" the H2O levels to the CO2 levels. Well - the numbers are in the preceeding paragraph and I don't know how to add them. We don't even have a good handle on the uncertainty of the H2O levels... but, My guess is that irrigation and agriculture have increased the H2O substancially.
So - we end up with the anaolgy to the encyclopeadia. Almost all of the data for climate modeling has been collected in the last 100 years and this represents 1/1000'th of the thickenss of the last page of the stack of books. Meanwhile all the other pages are basically ignored. The geological history of the planet shows that the planet is usually (90% of the time) about 20 degrees warmer than now. So most likely the planet will warm back up. But we don't know when and we might get another ice age or several before this happens. Anyone for 10,000 feet of ice over Toronto? Who votes for palm trees in the artic circle?
using this logic, if posting in slashdot were to really increase my exposure to theives I would (a) not post to slashdot or (b) really beef up the physical security so that the crowbars were no longer a threat.
I really don't think that psoting in slashdot entails much of a security threat to my home, however hooking your PC to the net certainly does entail an increased probability that it will be hacked.
That is IF you believe the evidence in front of your eyes.
While where at it, consider the LIABILITY you encounter when you do not employ adequate security and you can read about it here in the section on "Downstream liability". Please note that this is not written by me so if you disagree go argue with the writer. I happen to agree with him and I'm sure that one of my friend s who is a crown prosecutor will agree as well.
"Downstream liability: Persons who are dialed on to the Internet continuously through (DSL or RoadRunner, for example) with a connection that does not change IP address continually, should use firewalls to keep out intruders and hackers. This would apply especially to people who run their own web servers. Otherwise they could bear a "downstream liability" (because of lack of "due diligence") to other sites should their machines be "hijacked' for denial of service attacks.
In Twin Cities Computer User, July 2002, Roger Hughes (from the St. Paul Companies's Data Security Advisors) writes that McCafee and Norton cannot detect all hacking tools or "zombie" programs even if properly used, and that most businesses should hire security professionals for routine audits as a due diligence protection. He writes, "Under the new Patriot Act, if your company is hijacked by a terrorist--your network, your Web site, whatever--and that terrorist uses it somehow to attack a government agency or critical infrastructure" (ed- maybe in the spirit of the 1983 film War Games) "you personally can be charged with a crime of aiding and abetting a terrorist act. You can go to jail and get up to a $100000 fine, or you can just get nailed with an injunction that shuts down your company for 90 days....If somebody's credit information get hacked because you didn't do your due diligence for data security, you personally can be sued for that."
IMHO you must match the level of security to the threat. Where I grew up it was common practice to not bother putting a lock on the door. By the time I was an adult, my father had broken down to my mother's request and the door was locked - sometimes. Whether the doors in that community were locked or not (and usually not) I have never heard of a theift from inside the house.
Well - that with the exception of the pies I stole out of my neighbour's deepfreeze (again - no locks). My mother's response to Lyn's pies was to place them in our deepfreeze and then invite them over for dinner that weekend where see served Lyn her own pie. Lyn commented on how good the pies were and after that everyone had a really good laugh over it. Turns out Lyn had made so many pies that I had only found a few and she hadn't even missed them. Guess I should have been more through. LOL
The first mistake you make is the assumption of harm. Sure the cracker is not known to you so you can't "just assume" it is a prank. But the truth is that most hacks that I've seen amount to little more than a prank and I have had servers cracked twice - and just like you I had to fix them.
In my case it costs me money because I use professional consultants.
This comes back to the idea of matching the security to the level of the threat. In the case of your door - if you lived where I grew up in 50 years there has probably never been breakins. Where I live now - I can leave my door unlocked and likely no-one in the neighbourhood would know the door is unlocked. Nevertheless I would NEVER leave my door unlocked and I did pay for a security system.
In other areas a dead bolt is prudent and in still other situations, guards are warrented..
When it comes to servers... well - we run servers too. We use the latest patches and hire consultants to keep them crack proof because we know that with millions of invisible people on the net that these servers will be cracked within minutes if they are insecure.
This is just a cost of doing business. If one guy is disuaded through overly harsh sentencing - it is a drop in the bucket because there will be a 1000 more behnd him. And many of these people will be from countries that may well be our enemies.
So yes... fixing your machine cost you some time. But the reason you got hacked is because YOU did not have it secure enough and that is YOUR fault. You can blame the hacker if you like - just as you can blame a germ for making you ill. Problem is that blame won't make a difference, precaution will.
To close this off - let me use an analogy. Suppose a bank were to take the money you deposit and store it in a broom closet with access to a dark back alley and then place a sign over the door that says "Money is stored in here - please don't break in".
Suppose when you went to fetch your deposit the bank said your money had been stolen. Would you walk away from the teller proclaiming "Damn Theves!!! We need more police damit!" or would you go down to your lawyer and lay a civil suit againt the bank for neglegance?
I know I personally would not be blaming the theif because the world is full of them. Even normally law abiding citizens might be tempted into stealing if it is made too easy.
In the same way - when you put a computer on the net you attracted people who like to play with them. That is just a fact of life. So I don't blame the crackers. In fact, I feel they collectively do us all a favour because were it not for them, our systems would be even more pathetically insecure than the generally are.
The free world is very vulnerable to a cyber attack by our ememies. If someone in Iraq for instance desides to take a run at all the open windows machines and say reprogram the CRTC registers so the monitors catch on fire, and polute the hard drives and erase the bioses so the motherboards are effectivly destroyed - what should we do about it?
Attack Iraq? Probably they will be attacked anyway.
In many situations backup tapes are no longer practical for 160GB drives. It is cheaper to duplicate the disk (mirror it) and if you need archival - pull out the old drive and put it on a shelf.
What we need to consider developing (IMHO) is "net" based backups of critical data. This is where we may mirror critical files in another machine that is at a sister site. Thus a fire at the primary site would for instance not result in the loss of critical data. Many (most?) small businesses never consern themselves with organising a "proper" backup system. right?
I felt so inspired by your comment about how nice the model M is that I grabbed mine and plugged it in. I find that the left arrow and up arrow keys do not do anything. The arrows on the numerica keypad work if I turn off num-lock
On most of the keyboards I use you can move them around. In fact last time I cleaned this NEC keyboard I mistakenly swapped * and -.
remapping the software is not difficult either.
LCD's on the keys could make sence but they would really increase the price I think. Nevertheless - maybe people woulf probably be willing to pay the extra.
I know I piad extra for this nec - $150 bux extra - and I bought 2 of them. The investment was worth it. It is over 15 years old now and still works fine even though I dropped a glass of wine on it. That was why I had to take it apart and clean it... and why I got a pair of keys mixed up.
The only keyboards I have which are better than the NEC is the PS/2 keyboards from IBM. These could not be purchased without an IBM PC and I didn't want the PC but I did want the keyboard.
Fortunatly there are people with different tastes and the IBM Keybaords eventually came into the market and I snapped them up at a bargain price.
Only issue now seems to be USB and the bottom line is that if the MB can't support my keyboards then I'm not interested in the MB.
Robert Jungk and richard Rhodes both say that the Nazi's were not working on an atomic bomb. Read "Brighter than a 1000 suns" by Jungk and "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes.
Copyright is literally the right to copy and it applies to anything that an author writes. It also applies to signators of the Berne copyright convention.
There is no need for a working model. How could a peom for instance be shown to be working? The only issue here is who wrote it and if it was published. Laws in the USA include the idea of registration. In Canada to contrast - there is no requirement of registration.
The idea of a working model applies to patent law. This is the exclusive right granted to an inventor to manufacture something. Patent law rights are meant to be granted only to novel inventions. Clearly the idea of novel is sort of fucked up in the US PTO! Hense - there is a huge abuse taking place right now in the good old USA.
It may interest you that the DMCA transfers the right to copy from the author to the distributor for anything posted on the internet.
Additionally it may interest you that the Candian copyright act removes the right to copy from the authors and performers of any music. I believe this is section 83 but I'll have to look it up.
In Canada anyone can rip off any music recordings and copy it to any media normally used for recording music (Like your hard drive I suppose).
I don't know the legal interpretation of the word "normal" mind you. Perhaps 27 million people will do this and a judge will rule that it isn't "normal".
IMHO the real issue here is that there is a lot of value in IP and the laws are being "adjusted" to benefit the distributors and not the creators.
When it comes to computer software - the ideas of Richard Stallman are the ones I adhere to. Everyone wants to have an advantage and a really good programmer does have an advantage. If said programmer can control what he creates then he can provide for himself and his family and so forth.
The problem is that computer software is very complex and it is usually impossible for a programmer to do it all by himself. So programmers end up working for employers and when programmers quit they end up leaving their work behind and sort of have to start over.
Nobody like to re-invent the wheel for the 3rd time. Stallman realised this and invented the idea of open source. By putting it in the public domain at least you get to use it.
What a perverse idea. A programmer must give his work to the world in order to slavage the right to use what he creates! Meanwhile in Canada musicians can be legally ripped off at will and in the USA anything posted on the net can be ripped off too.
IP laws have been perverted to the point where the creators of intellectual property are considered irrelavant and it is only the interests of the distributors that count.
There is no money in it. Other companies like Fujitsu also pulled out of part of the industry - IE. IDE hard drives.
If you look at the HP line of laser printers I think you'll see they cheapened and cheapened them from the Laserjet III to the present models.
Then look at your consumer PC's and we see the same thing... cheaper and cheaper - but a few years ago they had 5 or more PCI slots - now we see 3 slots - but in a mini tower. haha.
Power supplies also are compromised.
How about warrenties on hard drives? The drives we bought 10 years ago would run for 150,000 hours MTBF = 17 years. I have hard drives that have been in use for 17 years. Seriously! I got a pair of maxtor 350 MB ESDI drives that started out in a VAX. They are still running.
Does anyone think that the drive they buy next year with a 1 year warrenty is going to still be functioning past 2015?
How about 2010?
If people want cheap I guess they get cheap. If they want quality I don't know where they need to go. Personally I'd rather pay more and get better quality.
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I dont' agree with you at all on a number of your points.
1) Yes we DO need to have every little command line utility. While you may not directly use them - the underlying scripts very well might. Besides they are small... and some of us actually DO use them.
2) Yes we DO need to see those 50,000,000,000 kernel messages on startup. I would NEVER have been able to get my soundcard working without them. I don't like being stuffed in a closet and treated like a Mushroom the way M$ does it.
Suppose your boot hangs. Where would you be then?
3) Linux will NEVER pick one thing and stick with it. No operating system ever did. Look at M$. NT contains the OS/2 character mode libraries. That means I can run the OS/2 version of Breif. It has since been removed from w2k or XP thus - I will NEVER upgrade.
NT, w2k and XP still contain DOS and win16. Talk about crap eh? But people need it.
The thing is - were we to ask 100 people in a room what they needed - we'd get close to 100 different answers.
4) I agree with the man comments. Man needs to be re-written. We maybe need to look at a wikiman.
5) so how would you elimiate the 30 programming languages? Would you discard the perl stuff? how about bash or csh? Maybe discard tcl or gtk eh? What about python?
Each of these languages is there for a reason. Each is doing a job and removing any one of them would leave a rather big hole.
I do agree mind you that the learning curve is rather horendous. We can do a much better job of documentation I think. That would really help matters.
DOS was the cut down version of linux that only did some things one way. So if you suggest going in that direction - then the question comes down to what parts you'd like to throw away.
Maybe you should look at OpenBSD. For servers it is lean mean and clean. I love OpenBSD on my servers. But on my desktop - I like Linux.
I think the artical speaks for itself... if he made that distro available I would not touch it and I doubt many others would either.
1) I am quite happy with the present directory structure. I do not want a bunch of symlinks - they are confusing and utterly unnecessary.
2) His idea of what apps to include probably will not coincide with mine. For instance - is he planning on including emacs? How about gcc and g77?
I'm sure he thought about gcc but I'll bet he forgot about g77.
3) He never mentioned the most important aspect of a distro - that is its upgradeability. This is the reason I switched to Debian... Debian can be painlessly upgraded.
I have an old machine with RedHat 6.1 in it. I bought a copy of Mandrake 8.0 Mandrake is NOT installed (does anybody want it?). The reason is the question of doing an upgrade. I _KNOW_ that the moment I try to upgrade that redhat box that it will break all over the place. If I wipe the drive I lose 3 years of work. In fact - if I were to take it out from behind the firewall - it would be hacked within the hour!
For me it was cheaper to go buy ANOTHER computer and leave the old one as it was.
4) He made no mention of security.
5) He has missed the most important areas where Linux needs work. I'd like to offer My Humbol Opinion. The work needs to be in the area of the functionality of a loopback mount. We need to be able to stuff a directory tree into a single file and have the OS mount it automatically - similar to the loopback but with the following difference.
When you do a loopback mount - the whole file system sees it. I want a mount where ONLY a single process tree sees it. This allows one to EASILY create a chroot jail for a user.
Several years ago I tried with Kurt Seifried to create a true chroot jail in linux - we failed.
This automatic mount to a single application could be say bash mounting into a given file or it could be a daemon mounting into a file or it could be an application mounting into a given file. This would make it possible to stuff a complete app into a single file which can be unzipped and pointed too. By doing this, different versions of an app could be simultaneously present in the machine and a user could switch back and forth with a simple pointer change. The pointer could be a symlink.
We are already partway there with the loopback and chroot. Where the problem is stems from the apps that are NOT chrooted. As an admin when I install say something like wxWindows - I would prefer to see only one file. As a user I prefer to see all the files in the package.
This is one step away from a true Virtual Machine for Linux - which we also need. Probably it can be done using User Mode Linux. But I think it should be supported right in the distro.
IMHO - the present filesystem was designed to be lightweight. When disks were 40MB it probably made sense. Now that disks are past 40GB I don't think it makes sense. When they pass the TB mark in a couple years - well - IMHO they are almost unmanagable now.
The underlying reason that this author cannot un-install the apps is because the apps are allowed to spew files all over the system. Most sysadmins don't even know where the files go and they simply trust the developers came up with a reasonable organization. If we go to a filesystem that allows us to force an app to live within a single file - then we can easily remove any old app - we simply delete the file it lives in. People can easily deal with a single file - where the problems come from is when we have 1000's of files and the make clean doesn't work right.
IBM had this concept fully developed years ago under VM/TSO. It was called a Partition DataSet back then.
If we had this concept in linux then for instance X-Windows might live in a file called XFree86_4.1.0.1.PDS and we might use something like ln -s XFree86_4.1.0.1.PDS startx
If so - then when startx is run - the PDS is mounted and the
parts of the internet run over dry copper. With this system you can have the telephone company install a twisted pair at a cost of about $30 bux per link between any _resonable_ pair of locations and then you can hook up whatever you want also _within reason_. This allows one to run say DSL or MVL or whatever you want.
AFAIK there is not equivalent offering for fibre and one really needs fiber to be able to do anything interesting.
Now - if dry fiber did exist then it would make a great deal of sense to rent it and drop in some 100baseT to fiber drivers. These cost under $1000 bux for many models and can drive oh up to say 75 KM's.
Fibre costs about as much as copper anyway - to buy and install. If the phone company can make a bux renting dry copper at say $25 per month - then they should be able to make the same bux renting dry fiber. Imagine - 100MB/sec ethernet across town for say 50 bux/month. Attractive? I think so!
Actually, there is a more than decent possibility that Big Rock will be donating a KEG to the event... so they probably will have free beer - at least at the BBQ.
I think you are mistaken. They have put in "canary" values in the call. The function prologue and epilog code has been modified. What happens is that there is a random value placed essentually as an "extra" parameter in the call. When the function does a return this value is tested and if the value has changed then the function stops instead of returning. Yes a DOS is still possible but you cannot smash the stack and expect to succeed.
The reason you cannot smash the stack is that when you overflow it you have no way of knowing what the canary value is, so the function will stop before it even executes the altered return.
Its a very good and painless feature and one that adds a MINIMAL amount of overhead.
IMHO the explaination that is quoted is misleading or just plain rong. I have never heard of a crash being able to cause an operating system to "execute the second". Well - perhaps in a debugger... but in the case of a debugger we are not in a normal environment.
You may note thst DoCoMo was quite happy to deliver this spam to their end users and profit from it.
:-(
Had the spammer used valid email addresses I'm sure this would not have ended up in court.
In canada it is perfectly legal to pirate any music you want. The copyright act was changed so that the right to copy is removed from the artist and transfered to the consummer. Its section 80.
I posted the links to this before.
With spamd just around the corner their days are numbered. Spamd will be in the next base install of OpenBSD and it WILL shut down most if not all of the spammers.
Well - it will shut it down for people who run OpenBDS firewalls and servers. For everyone else... well perhaps an openBSD firewall is in your future.
There should be more information found at www.openbsd.org
Your point is well taken, however consider that litigation is very expensive and time consumming.
This means that you as the little guy can have your rights to use your own ideas stomped on and you probably cannot afford to defend yourself.
Meanwhile, even if the patent is invalid, some will pay licensing fees which serve to finance their litigation... not yours. In the end, even if the patent is ruled invalid, they still get to keep the money they collected.
Tom.. This is the 3rd time I've replied... due to bugs.
The cracker did you a favour. You clearly are an intelligent an competant person. But you missed something and a cracker popped in and did no real damage.
Because he popped in you found out about your oversite and fixed it. If the cracker had not dome this then you would have never known.
Suppose an enemy like Iraq chooses to undertake a cyber attack.
Would you rather be sitting where you are with a secure server that is invulnerable or one with the sploit your cracker found?
I feel I like the idea that pranksters come in because then I can fix it. If a terroist comes in through a hole the pranksters didn't find. then I have serious problems.
So I vote that Kevin Mitnick is ok and if I have a chance to hire him or promote his career I will do so. Kevin never did any harm. He was just curious and this is something that our society needs to promote.
This is funny
Well, even if its wordy, you did read it. For your information I CAN install oracle 8i in Red Hat 6.1. I have done it and dropped it because there were other problems. But it was not easy and you need a paid for tech support contract to do it - which I have.
On the other hand postgreSQL installed perfectly. Futhermore I haven't encountered any problems yet that require tech support. Go figure.
You don't need tech support for stuff that works you know. So how big is Oracle's tech support group?
To be frank, I think you missed the point. You can spend huge amounts of money on closed source software, and when you are done you will be owned by it. You will be owned because you need to walk away from your investment and your experiance and start all over unless you pay for the next upgrade.
So when you get to be say 45 years old how will you feel about having walked away from most of the work you did in your career and most of your experiance because this work is locked into closed source that a) no longer exists or b) has new licencing provisions that you can't live with or c) fell into disuse because the company that owns it went bankrupt or d) became obsolete because it wasn't maintained... just milked..? Should I go on?
How do you feel about paying a tech support contract for a product where the vendor has not allocated a single person for maintenance? And your company is investing over a million bux for development?
I paid for lots of operating systems too. I have 2 versions of OS/2, 2 versions of DOS, windows 95 and 98, 3 copies of NT 4.0 and a copy of 3.51 and a copy of w2k that I got stuck with because it didn't work and I had to refund the client's money. Microsoft would not refund what I paid them. Microsoft would not allow me to either return or exchange the unopened copies of Windows NT 4.0 either. I was a Microsoft dealer at the time and bought a 3 pack - which was about a month before w2k was announced. So I got stuck... then stuck again with w2k.
I have only one computer that runs windows NT so only one of these operating systems is in use.
I have red hat linux 6.1 server edition, OpenBSD 3.0 and Mandrake 8.1. I paid for all these too even though they are free.
Now, my desktop runs Debian and it is just great and I did a net install. Guess what, I don't know how to upgrade that RH 6.1 machine. Sure I can reformat the hard drive - but it contains a LOT of my work and I don't want to lose it. With Debian, an upgrade is easy.
In addition to this I bought 2 copies of Brief and I can't use it even though it is my favorite editor. I did a trial d/l of CRiSP and it is a wonderful editor, fully Brief compatible. I contacted them about licencing. I run 8 machines in my home and am a member of the local Unix users group and do consulting work. The CRiSP people told me I would need a "Licence Manager"! I decided to learn Emacs. It has a CRiSP mode and is looking better every day.
I bought 3 versions of M$ FTN and copies of M$ C as well. The last version of M$ FTN was such a botch that I could not use it. I have the Borland OS/2 C/C++ compiler. It was so broken I didn't use it.... but I paid for it. I have Borland C++ professional builder 4. I want to do C/C++ cross platform development.
I phoned Borland. I think they told me that I can buy Delphi for Linux. I think they told me that the language is supported on both platforms but that the API is different. The person on the other end of the phone didn't seem too knowledgable. So I am going into wxWIndows or gtk because these people actually SAY they are cross platform. Thus, I do not have any C++ builder code and didn't get my money's worth.
I have 4 versions of Oracle - paid for by the taxpayer (because I am one of their developers). The DOS versions were so bad we couldn't use them on that platform. The OS/2 versions were better but still not good enouf. It is not possible to install 8i for red hat 6.1 (even though that is the version oracle says 8I is for) unless you CAN STAND ON YOUR HEAD and read the paper What you need to knwo before you even THINK of installing oracle 8i . Imagine having to backdate the glibC and install an old version of Java from blackstrap just so you can get the installer to work. Why couldn't Oracle have put their developers into a room with 2 cd sets. One set - an off the shelf shrink wrapped copy of Red Hat 6.1, and the other set - a copy of the 8i source tree. And then make sure they don't have INTERNET access so they can't cheat and create a version that you can't install. Leave them there until they solve the problem or rot to death trying!!! Damit. I have lost MONTHS of my life solving other people's problems.
Guess what, I am porting the client's apps over to PostgreSQL. See ya Oracle!!! Goodbye!
So, of all the software I bought most of it did the job for a precious short time or didn't do the job at all - with the exception of Brief - which was just excellent. And what happened to Brief? Borland bought the rights, put it on the shelf and AFAIK I can't buy it any more.
So frankly I really don't care if that copy of VB ++ was paid for. Even if it wasn't, I do not feel M$ was ripped off . I feel I was ripped off.
I have been ripped off Over and Over and Over because I bought these products in good faith and paid for them with my hard earned money. Now I can't use them. Some never did what they were advertised to do. Others were discontinued and I lost out.
Let me tell you about the 2nd last copy of M$ FTN that I purchased. I found a bug where the conpiler just eliminated an "IF" statement. No errors, no warnings, and no machine instructions either. I filed a bug report with M$ with sample code. Months went by. I re-filed the bug. Months went by. Finally I phoned them and sat on wait for like an hour - and paid for this too. The rep told me the bug was fixed in the new version. So I bought it.
When the new version arrived I tried out the sample code from the bug report. The problem was still there. Oh, and the last version I bought couldn't be used it was so bad. The client dropped PC development ideas and switched to SUN.
What the Open Source movment has done is a refreshing breath of fresh air and IMHO it is the ONLY way that the programmers of the future are going to stand any chance of avoiding the endentured servant trap that closed source software creates. Anyone questioning this should realise that in order to use closed source software they have to agree to the licence terms and these are arbitrary and non-negotiable. If you find the terms unacceptable then you can't be a programmer. That is unless you can find the tools and the infrastructure you need elsewhere.
Well, we programmers are being attacked another way now.... patent law. If this gets too well established we won't be allowed to be independant. We'll have to work for a big company that has managed to negotiate cross licensing. Either that or pay the piper each time we want to go to the can.
Water flows down hill and the infrasructure required to build some of the closed source tools, like Windows NT/2K/XP, or Oracle or JAVA or say a compiler suite like Visual C++ or Borland Professional Builder is so great that it looks like an ocean. Oceans are hard to move. Oceans are also hard to re-create. There is no way that any company could recreate from scratch an operating system like XP. The environment that XP grew out of no longer exists. IBM tried and failed.
Over the years all computer companies with the exception of perhaps IBM,HP,M$ have failed. Who here thinks Microsoft will survive into the year 2050? Gates won't be in charge then. Who here thinks that another company is going to loom up that can invest the BILLIONS in infrastructure required to create an alternative?
The future of software has to be opensource because that is the only way for us programmers to ensure that we will have the tools we need and the right to use them.
If I add up the THOUSANDS I have spent on software over the years it illustrates to me that I should have been looking for better solutions a long time ago.
Maybe you better re-start reading then. Gondwana was pretty much broken up by the end of the cretaceous.
If you think the ice ages of the last few million years are all there have ever been, then how do you explain the Stuartian Tillies for instance?
Tillites are glacial deposits, and the Stuartian tillites in the Flinders mountains in Australia are pre-cambrian, over 600 feet thick in areas and buried 1000's of feet below the Cambrian which started about 650 million years ago.
this is such a bunch of tripe!
First of all.. if we were to take the encylopeadia Britannica and stack all the books up.. then the thickness of each page would represent more than 100,000 years of the earth's history. This means that the last ice age which ended about 10,000 years ago and was at peak 18,000 years ago would be within 1/5 of the thickness of the last page.
There were 8 ice ages in the last 2 million years and that is within the last 20 pages.
Within the last 2,000 years (2% of the thichness of the last page) there have been several warming and cooling periods denoted by such names as the little ice age and the medieval warm period . Crocs were in the themes during Roman times... (little warmer).
look here to see a chart showing global temperature over the last billion or so years. This is the paleomap project an they have done increadible work.
Check out the university of Carleton, Tim Patterson has an excellent course on climate change and this is being broadcast on TLC as well.
On Chris Scotese's web site you will see that for 90% of the history of the planet for the last 650 million years or so, the earth was about 20 degrees warmer than now. If you look at the miocene maps you will see that 14 Million years ago the planet was warmer.. and a lot wetter..
BTW... the time scale on Chris's chart is not linear. If the chart is re-scaled it tells the same story but is even more dramatic. (We leave the re-scalling to the student as an excersize).
Look here if you want to know why Britian is so keen on renewable energy and specifically look at these charts which show the decline rate of North Sea oil production. Britain will become an oil importer within 2 years. The decline rate of North Sea oil production is more than 15% per year. The chart shows how feilds deplete. You can see how the big plays are drilled first and last the longest... and thereafter smaller and smaller fields are brought online until they give up and stop drilling. This is where Britian is now. One of the stats is that Britian has about 250 barrels of oil per capita. That is it! On to renewable because the oil resource is gone.
The real issue of climate change is this. Water in the atmosphere is far more significant than CO2. Firstly H2O is at a far greater level so the question becomes... how would we express the level of H2O in the atmosphere? Secondly there is uncertainty in the measurements. Thirdly, irrigation and agriculture increase the H2O levels. Most of that water pumped onto the fields will evaporate and plants do transpire!
CO2 levels are in the range of 0.036% and this of course is a plant nutrient.
So we are left with adding 2 numbers for instance.
H2O = 0%-4.0% +/- what? a percent?
CO2 = 0.036% +/- 0.0005
You can see these numbers here in table 7a-1.
Since the warming response is most likely due to the weighted "sum" of the CO2 and H2O and all the other green house gasses of course, then we need to "add" the H2O levels to the CO2 levels. Well - the numbers are in the preceeding paragraph and I don't know how to add them. We don't even have a good handle on the uncertainty of the H2O levels... but, My guess is that irrigation and agriculture have increased the H2O substancially.
So - we end up with the anaolgy to the encyclopeadia. Almost all of the data for climate modeling has been collected in the last 100 years and this represents 1/1000'th of the thickenss of the last page of the stack of books. Meanwhile all the other pages are basically ignored. The geological history of the planet shows that the planet is usually (90% of the time) about 20 degrees warmer than now. So most likely the planet will warm back up. But we don't know when and we might get another ice age or several before this happens. Anyone for 10,000 feet of ice over Toronto? Who votes for palm trees in the artic circle?
using this logic, if posting in slashdot were to really increase my exposure to theives I would (a) not post to slashdot or (b) really beef up the physical security so that the crowbars were no longer a threat.
I really don't think that psoting in slashdot entails much of a security threat to my home, however hooking your PC to the net certainly does entail an increased probability that it will be hacked.
That is IF you believe the evidence in front of your eyes.
While where at it, consider the LIABILITY you encounter when you do not employ adequate security and you can read about it here in the section on "Downstream liability". Please note that this is not written by me so if you disagree go argue with the writer. I happen to agree with him and I'm sure that one of my friend s who is a crown prosecutor will agree as well.
"Downstream liability: Persons who are dialed on to the Internet continuously through (DSL or RoadRunner, for example) with a connection that does not change IP address continually, should use firewalls to keep out intruders and hackers. This would apply especially to people who run their own web servers. Otherwise they could bear a "downstream liability" (because of lack of "due diligence") to other sites should their machines be "hijacked' for denial of service attacks.
In Twin Cities Computer User, July 2002, Roger Hughes (from the St. Paul Companies's Data Security Advisors) writes that McCafee and Norton cannot detect all hacking tools or "zombie" programs even if properly used, and that most businesses should hire security professionals for routine audits as a due diligence protection. He writes, "Under the new Patriot Act, if your company is hijacked by a terrorist--your network, your Web site, whatever--and that terrorist uses it somehow to attack a government agency or critical infrastructure" (ed- maybe in the spirit of the 1983 film War Games) "you personally can be charged with a crime of aiding and abetting a terrorist act. You can go to jail and get up to a $100000 fine, or you can just get nailed with an injunction that shuts down your company for 90 days....If somebody's credit information get hacked because you didn't do your due diligence for data security, you personally can be sued for that."
I don't agree with you.
IMHO you must match the level of security to the threat. Where I grew up it was common practice to not bother putting a lock on the door. By the time I was an adult, my father had broken down to my mother's request and the door was locked - sometimes. Whether the doors in that community were locked or not (and usually not) I have never heard of a theift from inside the house.
Well - that with the exception of the pies I stole out of my neighbour's deepfreeze (again - no locks). My mother's response to Lyn's pies was to place them in our deepfreeze and then invite them over for dinner that weekend where see served Lyn her own pie. Lyn commented on how good the pies were and after that everyone had a really good laugh over it. Turns out Lyn had made so many pies that I had only found a few and she hadn't even missed them. Guess I should have been more through. LOL
The first mistake you make is the assumption of harm. Sure the cracker is not known to you so you can't "just assume" it is a prank. But the truth is that most hacks that I've seen amount to little more than a prank and I have had servers cracked twice - and just like you I had to fix them.
In my case it costs me money because I use professional consultants.
This comes back to the idea of matching the security to the level of the threat. In the case of your door - if you lived where I grew up in 50 years there has probably never been breakins. Where I live now - I can leave my door unlocked and likely no-one in the neighbourhood would know the door is unlocked. Nevertheless I would NEVER leave my door unlocked and I did pay for a security system.
In other areas a dead bolt is prudent and in still other situations, guards are warrented..
When it comes to servers... well - we run servers too. We use the latest patches and hire consultants to keep them crack proof because we know that with millions of invisible people on the net that these servers will be cracked within minutes if they are insecure.
This is just a cost of doing business. If one guy is disuaded through overly harsh sentencing - it is a drop in the bucket because there will be a 1000 more behnd him. And many of these people will be from countries that may well be our enemies.
So yes... fixing your machine cost you some time. But the reason you got hacked is because YOU did not have it secure enough and that is YOUR fault. You can blame the hacker if you like - just as you can blame a germ for making you ill. Problem is that blame won't make a difference, precaution will.
To close this off - let me use an analogy. Suppose a bank were to take the money you deposit and store it in a broom closet with access to a dark back alley and then place a sign over the door that says "Money is stored in here - please don't break in".
Suppose when you went to fetch your deposit the bank said your money had been stolen. Would you walk away from the teller proclaiming "Damn Theves!!! We need more police damit!" or would you go down to your lawyer and lay a civil suit againt the bank for neglegance?
I know I personally would not be blaming the theif because the world is full of them. Even normally law abiding citizens might be tempted into stealing if it is made too easy.
In the same way - when you put a computer on the net you attracted people who like to play with them. That is just a fact of life. So I don't blame the crackers. In fact, I feel they collectively do us all a favour because were it not for them, our systems would be even more pathetically insecure than the generally are.
The free world is very vulnerable to a cyber attack by our ememies. If someone in Iraq for instance desides to take a run at all the open windows machines and say reprogram the CRTC registers so the monitors catch on fire, and polute the hard drives and erase the bioses so the motherboards are effectivly destroyed - what should we do about it?
Attack Iraq? Probably they will be attacked anyway.
In many situations backup tapes are no longer practical for 160GB drives. It is cheaper to duplicate the disk (mirror it) and if you need archival - pull out the old drive and put it on a shelf.
What we need to consider developing (IMHO) is "net" based backups of critical data. This is where we may mirror critical files in another machine that is at a sister site. Thus a fire at the primary site would for instance not result in the loss of critical data. Many (most?) small businesses never consern themselves with organising a "proper" backup system. right?
Please elaborate.
Distributes addresses to whom? FOr what purpose?
I felt so inspired by your comment about how nice the model M is that I grabbed mine and plugged it in. I find that the left arrow and up arrow keys do not do anything. The arrows on the numerica keypad work if I turn off num-lock
This is debian woody - but that shouldn't matter.
Has anyone else experianced problems? Solutions?
WHere to look for help?
On most of the keyboards I use you can move them around. In fact last time I cleaned this NEC keyboard I mistakenly swapped * and -.
remapping the software is not difficult either.
LCD's on the keys could make sence but they would really increase the price I think. Nevertheless - maybe people woulf probably be willing to pay the extra.
I know I piad extra for this nec - $150 bux extra - and I bought 2 of them. The investment was worth it. It is over 15 years old now and still works fine even though I dropped a glass of wine on it. That was why I had to take it apart and clean it... and why I got a pair of keys mixed up.
The only keyboards I have which are better than the NEC is the PS/2 keyboards from IBM. These could not be purchased without an IBM PC and I didn't want the PC but I did want the keyboard.
Fortunatly there are people with different tastes and the IBM Keybaords eventually came into the market and I snapped them up at a bargain price.
Only issue now seems to be USB and the bottom line is that if the MB can't support my keyboards then I'm not interested in the MB.
You got it bassackwards. Its is the U235 that fissions and it is about 1/140th of natural uranium.
The U238 can be added around a U235 core in order to increase the yeild.
Robert Jungk and richard Rhodes both say that the Nazi's were not working on an atomic bomb. Read "Brighter than a 1000 suns" by Jungk and "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes.
Copyright is literally the right to copy and it applies to anything that an author writes. It also applies to signators of the Berne copyright convention.
There is no need for a working model. How could a peom for instance be shown to be working? The only issue here is who wrote it and if it was published. Laws in the USA include the idea of registration. In Canada to contrast - there is no requirement of registration.
The idea of a working model applies to patent law. This is the exclusive right granted to an inventor to manufacture something. Patent law rights are meant to be granted only to novel inventions. Clearly the idea of novel is sort of fucked up in the US PTO! Hense - there is a huge abuse taking place right now in the good old USA.
It may interest you that the DMCA transfers the right to copy from the author to the distributor for anything posted on the internet.
Additionally it may interest you that the Candian copyright act removes the right to copy from the authors and performers of any music. I believe this is section 83 but I'll have to look it up.
In Canada anyone can rip off any music recordings and copy it to any media normally used for recording music (Like your hard drive I suppose).
I don't know the legal interpretation of the word "normal" mind you. Perhaps 27 million people will do this and a judge will rule that it isn't "normal".
IMHO the real issue here is that there is a lot of value in IP and the laws are being "adjusted" to benefit the distributors and not the creators.
When it comes to computer software - the ideas of Richard Stallman are the ones I adhere to. Everyone wants to have an advantage and a really good programmer does have an advantage. If said programmer can control what he creates then he can provide for himself and his family and so forth.
The problem is that computer software is very complex and it is usually impossible for a programmer to do it all by himself. So programmers end up working for employers and when programmers quit they end up leaving their work behind and sort of have to start over.
Nobody like to re-invent the wheel for the 3rd time. Stallman realised this and invented the idea of open source. By putting it in the public domain at least you get to use it.
What a perverse idea. A programmer must give his work to the world in order to slavage the right to use what he creates! Meanwhile in Canada musicians can be legally ripped off at will and in the USA anything posted on the net can be ripped off too.
IP laws have been perverted to the point where the creators of intellectual property are considered irrelavant and it is only the interests of the distributors that count.
Just my 2 cents here...
There is no money in it. Other companies like Fujitsu also pulled out of part of the industry - IE. IDE hard drives.
If you look at the HP line of laser printers I think you'll see they cheapened and cheapened them from the Laserjet III to the present models.
Then look at your consumer PC's and we see the same thing... cheaper and cheaper - but a few years ago they had 5 or more PCI slots - now we see 3 slots - but in a mini tower. haha.
Power supplies also are compromised.
How about warrenties on hard drives? The drives we bought 10 years ago would run for 150,000 hours MTBF = 17 years. I have hard drives that have been in use for 17 years. Seriously! I got a pair of maxtor 350 MB ESDI drives that started out in a VAX. They are still running.
Does anyone think that the drive they buy next year with a 1 year warrenty is going to still be functioning past 2015?
How about 2010?
If people want cheap I guess they get cheap. If they want quality I don't know where they need to go. Personally I'd rather pay more and get better quality.