The article says that the music companies and retailers will "distribute $75.7 million in CDs to public and non-profit groups...".
Doesn't even matter if it's wholesale. It's similar to Microsoft being sentenced to give away software. The first copy of a product (music cd, software) might cost millions to produce. Every copy after that costs about four cents for the plastic and pretty packaging.
If I could propose a settlement, it would be for the companies to be fined about $600 mil or whatever the damages were determined to be, to be payable to the states, with a certain percentage going towards consumer advocasy programs. Also, make them pay for, out of the record companies own fat pockets, ad's that clearly explain consumer fair-use (like the tobacco giants paying for the stand commercials, and other anti-smoking spots). Then, just for good measure, disband the riaa.
Oh well, I have too many skeletons in the closet to be a politician, and too many morals to be a lawyer.
(An on-topic shameless plug) We offer custom configured linux servers at Backwatcher. We're really a security company, but we sell preconfigured boxes and do sysadmin work as well.
Re:Desktop MVS is dead too.
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 1
At any rate there a few things Linux is not good at:
AOLIM
Huh? AOL's Linux AIM client sucks, but other linux clients like gaim and everybuddy work flawlessly. Gaim has an advantage over the Windows AOL AIM client in that you can run multiple copies of gaim at the same time.
Burning CD's
Tougher to set up than Windows, but I've never buffer underruned while burning under Linux. Even on a K6-450 running X, running a shoutcast stream, and browsing with Mozilla (back in the 0.8 days, when it _really_ sucked resources;)
Back when I had windows boxes as well, I didn't even dare move the mouse while they were burning for fear of creating more coasters.
Supporting MS office email attachments
Oh, the ones that violate RFC's? Yeah, sorry about that.
Getting broadbad ISP support - AOL. Earthlink (oh you have Lunix? click.)
Broadband support people read answers from a script. If you use linux, and you're having a problem with your broadband, you can probably bluff enough to get escalated up to someone with a little clue, and let them know that their dhcp server is broken or something.
Re:linux and the slow advance
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Finally, it hasn't helped that the last milestone release, 2.4, was a colossal mess. My 2.0.x and 2.2.x boxes were totally, utterly rock solid as servers. I upgraded one to 2.4 -- and it is now an unreliable piece of crap. It fails with kernel panics at any time (albeit infrequently), and almost always dies ~45 days into uptime.
[root@linux/root]# uname -a Linux linux 2.4.2-SGI_XFS_1.0 #1 Fri Apr 27 18:15:49 CDT 2001 i586 unknown [root@linux/root]# uptime
10:56am up 365 days, 11:57, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Jason Scott rules. He's making a documentary on BBS's (the URL he gave in the parent, www.bbsdocumentary.com). I met him at Rubi-con a few months ago, and he was possibly one of the most interesting people there (no small feat;). I know I'll certainly watch the finished piece. I don't know that it'll be interesting to John Q. TVviewer, but what the hell. Computers are cool now.
The BSA isn't all bad. First, haggles over license increase the total cost of ownership for commercial software, which makes free (as in speech) software more attractive.
Second, I used them to shut down a competing software retail store once. The place was selling Microsoft OEM software off the shelf. A call each to the BSA and to Microsofts Piracy line and the place was out of business in 4 months.:)
Think about who you need to protect yourself from. If you're a one person shop, you probably don't need to pretect yourself from internal threats. If you have very limited public facing systems, then scripts kiddiez might not be too important.
Next, find an auditing company that can think like each of the attackers you need to protect against. Let them social engineer. Give them non-privileged internal user accounts. Let them see your assets from the view of the attacker.
When the audit is complete, let them present the results to both management and techs, and let them do it separately.:) Techs are more likely to understand what is wrong when their management is not looking over their shoulder asking why it wasn't correct in the first place. Management is also more likely to understand when the auditor can talk solely in management-speek.
Look for auditors that can (and will) devote people with the proper skills for your audit. Smaller companies may not have skills in every area, larger companies might not devote all their senior experts to your account. Find that balance to ensure you're getting the best auditors you can get.
<plug type="shameless">That all said, Backwatcher is an awesome company.</plug>
Netcraft says that www.wininformant.com, the site which holds this report, which got promptly slashdotted, runs IIS4 on NT4.
I'll refrain from making jokes about Win boxes not being up long enough to be exploited, or something like that.
Anyone remember Code Red? Nimda? I sure do. I still get 300+ scans a day from infected Windows boxen.
Also, most linux vendor security announcements posted to Bugtraq are for add-on software not enabled by default. They are also announced by each vendor individually, and the author of the package. Most Windows announcements are about vulnerabilities in the OS (IE) or widely deployed packages (IIS, Outlook) from the author of the exploit (after secure@microsoft.com has ignored them).
The entire article needs to be modded -1 flamebait.
We contacted the AOL Instant Messenger group but never received a response. Normally we would be inclined to provide a fix, but it is illegal to reverse engineer the AIM executable (DMCA and AIM's license agreement to thank), so we are unable to provide a patch which will modify it. Instead, we recommend Robbie Saunder's AIM Filter (http://www.ssnbc.com/wiz/) to protect yourselves.
w00w00 found it, contacted AOL, waited, and released after AOL never said w00 about it.
Sorry. For clarification, the development branch UI is changing nightly. The stable branch UI is (descriptively enough) stable.
I very much agree with you that accounting users should not be presented with a changing interface each time they use the software. The newer UI fits very nicely into the NOLA modular architecture, and will easily allow future installations to customize the look and feel to how their employees work, and to keep their existing UI across major functionality changes.
Disclaimer: I work for Noguska, the main company behind NOLA.
Installing solely from the source tarball is currently much more difficult than need be. We do however provide an iso image file in our downloads section with a complete installer for Apache/PHP/MySQL for both Windows and Linux/Unix servers.
Also, our UI is currently undergoing extensive changes, and things are changing nightly.
NOLA (http://nola.noguska.com/) is a GPL'd web based business accounting/inventory system built on PHP and MySQL, and should support other db's with only minor porting.
Disclaimer: I work for them.
I downloaded the 6.0 patch, ran it, and it exited with the message "This program requires Internet Explorer 6.0 to be installed.". I'm running IE6 on Windows NT Server 4 in vmware.
Boy am I glad that no MS bugs can hurt my linux box. Even if I get owned by a malicious web page, I can just restore my vmware Windows system image.:)
The BSA is _the_ anti-piracy front for Microsoft and other large software corporations. Don't you remember them from the ending splash screen on shareware Doom?:)
It's very much in there interest to inflate the problem in an effort to increase public opinion.
IMO, the argument that piracy hurts american companies doesn't hold water. I would say that the current state of piracy in fact helps the ecomomy, as the software that is pirated doesn't cost the makers anything (they make their money on the percentage of people that pay, and still turn profits), and helps increase the productivity of people who do pirate the software. Not to mention make the software more popular, so more people pay for it.
Most opponents of this (especially in this forum) are not against intellectual property rights. (In fact, many of us here are creators of such work). However, legislation like this can easily lead to uninformed courts incorrectly weighing other, more important rights against the rights of IP holders and reaching the wrong decisions. In the Skylarov case for example, Dimiri Skylarov is charged with violating the DMCA by designing and distributing software that circumvents Adobe E-book security. Dimitri is automatically in violation such as as this, and the DMCA, whether or not Adobe is using ROT13 encryption, and is clearly fradulent about claims of their products security.
Do not confuse laws such as this with an International Copyright Law. We already have those. What this, and the DMCA are, are simply encroachments onto fair use rights.
If you want to be able to produce flash from code, php has an excellent libswf module written by Paul Haeberli. The docs are located here. Of course, this doesn't give you a fancy gui to develop from, but it is flexible:)
I hope you returned the software to your place of purchase for a full refund, under the terms of not agreeing to the EULA. Hate to give those bastard MS people 1 more cent than you have to.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says that the music companies and retailers will "distribute $75.7 million in CDs to public and non-profit groups...".
Doesn't even matter if it's wholesale. It's similar to Microsoft being sentenced to give away software. The first copy of a product (music cd, software) might cost millions to produce. Every copy after that costs about four cents for the plastic and pretty packaging.
If I could propose a settlement, it would be for the companies to be fined about $600 mil or whatever the damages were determined to be, to be payable to the states, with a certain percentage going towards consumer advocasy programs. Also, make them pay for, out of the record companies own fat pockets, ad's that clearly explain consumer fair-use (like the tobacco giants paying for the stand commercials, and other anti-smoking spots). Then, just for good measure, disband the riaa.
Oh well, I have too many skeletons in the closet to be a politician, and too many morals to be a lawyer.
(An on-topic shameless plug)
We offer custom configured linux servers at Backwatcher. We're really a security company, but we sell preconfigured boxes and do sysadmin work as well.
At any rate there a few things Linux is not good at:
;)
AOLIM
Huh? AOL's Linux AIM client sucks, but other linux clients like gaim and everybuddy work flawlessly. Gaim has an advantage over the Windows AOL AIM client in that you can run multiple copies of gaim at the same time.
Burning CD's
Tougher to set up than Windows, but I've never buffer underruned while burning under Linux. Even on a K6-450 running X, running a shoutcast stream, and browsing with Mozilla (back in the 0.8 days, when it _really_ sucked resources
Back when I had windows boxes as well, I didn't even dare move the mouse while they were burning for fear of creating more coasters.
Supporting MS office email attachments
Oh, the ones that violate RFC's? Yeah, sorry about that.
Getting broadbad ISP support - AOL. Earthlink (oh you have Lunix? click.)
Broadband support people read answers from a script. If you use linux, and you're having a problem with your broadband, you can probably bluff enough to get escalated up to someone with a little clue, and let them know that their dhcp server is broken or something.
Finally, it hasn't helped that the last milestone release, 2.4, was a colossal mess. My 2.0.x and 2.2.x boxes were totally, utterly rock solid as servers. I upgraded one to 2.4 -- and it is now an unreliable piece of crap. It fails with kernel panics at any time (albeit infrequently), and almost always dies ~45 days into uptime.
/root]# uname -a /root]# uptime
[root@linux
Linux linux 2.4.2-SGI_XFS_1.0 #1 Fri Apr 27 18:15:49 CDT 2001 i586 unknown
[root@linux
10:56am up 365 days, 11:57, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Jason Scott rules. He's making a documentary on BBS's (the URL he gave in the parent, www.bbsdocumentary.com). I met him at Rubi-con a few months ago, and he was possibly one of the most interesting people there (no small feat ;). I know I'll certainly watch the finished piece. I don't know that it'll be interesting to John Q. TVviewer, but what the hell. Computers are cool now.
The BSA isn't all bad. First, haggles over license increase the total cost of ownership for commercial software, which makes free (as in speech) software more attractive.
:)
Second, I used them to shut down a competing software retail store once. The place was selling Microsoft OEM software off the shelf. A call each to the BSA and to Microsofts Piracy line and the place was out of business in 4 months.
Think about who you need to protect yourself from. If you're a one person shop, you probably don't need to pretect yourself from internal threats. If you have very limited public facing systems, then scripts kiddiez might not be too important.
:) Techs are more likely to understand what is wrong when their management is not looking over their shoulder asking why it wasn't correct in the first place. Management is also more likely to understand when the auditor can talk solely in management-speek.
Next, find an auditing company that can think like each of the attackers you need to protect against. Let them social engineer. Give them non-privileged internal user accounts. Let them see your assets from the view of the attacker.
When the audit is complete, let them present the results to both management and techs, and let them do it separately.
Look for auditors that can (and will) devote people with the proper skills for your audit. Smaller companies may not have skills in every area, larger companies might not devote all their senior experts to your account. Find that balance to ensure you're getting the best auditors you can get.
<plug type="shameless">That all said, Backwatcher is an awesome company.</plug>
Netcraft says that www.wininformant.com, the site which holds this report, which got promptly slashdotted, runs IIS4 on NT4.
I'll refrain from making jokes about Win boxes not being up long enough to be exploited, or something like that.
Anyone remember Code Red? Nimda? I sure do. I still get 300+ scans a day from infected Windows boxen.
Also, most linux vendor security announcements posted to Bugtraq are for add-on software not enabled by default. They are also announced by each vendor individually, and the author of the package. Most Windows announcements are about vulnerabilities in the OS (IE) or widely deployed packages (IIS, Outlook) from the author of the exploit (after secure@microsoft.com has ignored them).
The entire article needs to be modded -1 flamebait.
If anyone wanted to slashdot a ZDNet 'Will you install Linux on a computer in 2002' poll... the address is http://polls.zdnet.co.uk/zdnuk/?p=26&m=1.
w00w00 found it, contacted AOL, waited, and released after AOL never said w00 about it.
You may directly mount an iso file in most unix's. In Linux, Try /mnt/cdrom
mount -o loop nola.iso
Sorry. For clarification, the development branch UI is changing nightly. The stable branch UI is (descriptively enough) stable.
I very much agree with you that accounting users should not be presented with a changing interface each time they use the software. The newer UI fits very nicely into the NOLA modular architecture, and will easily allow future installations to customize the look and feel to how their employees work, and to keep their existing UI across major functionality changes.
Disclaimer: I work for Noguska, the main company behind NOLA.
Installing solely from the source tarball is currently much more difficult than need be. We do however provide an iso image file in our downloads section with a complete installer for Apache/PHP/MySQL for both Windows and Linux/Unix servers.
Also, our UI is currently undergoing extensive changes, and things are changing nightly.
Thanks for checking it out!
NOLA (http://nola.noguska.com/) is a GPL'd web based business accounting/inventory system built on PHP and MySQL, and should support other db's with only minor porting.
Disclaimer: I work for them.
I downloaded the 6.0 patch, ran it, and it exited with the message "This program requires Internet Explorer 6.0 to be installed.". I'm running IE6 on Windows NT Server 4 in vmware.
:)
Boy am I glad that no MS bugs can hurt my linux box. Even if I get owned by a malicious web page, I can just restore my vmware Windows system image.
The BSA is _the_ anti-piracy front for Microsoft and other large software corporations. Don't you remember them from the ending splash screen on shareware Doom? :)
It's very much in there interest to inflate the problem in an effort to increase public opinion.
IMO, the argument that piracy hurts american companies doesn't hold water. I would say that the current state of piracy in fact helps the ecomomy, as the software that is pirated doesn't cost the makers anything (they make their money on the percentage of people that pay, and still turn profits), and helps increase the productivity of people who do pirate the software. Not to mention make the software more popular, so more people pay for it.
Most opponents of this (especially in this forum) are not against intellectual property rights. (In fact, many of us here are creators of such work). However, legislation like this can easily lead to uninformed courts incorrectly weighing other, more important rights against the rights of IP holders and reaching the wrong decisions. In the Skylarov case for example, Dimiri Skylarov is charged with violating the DMCA by designing and distributing software that circumvents Adobe E-book security. Dimitri is automatically in violation such as as this, and the DMCA, whether or not Adobe is using ROT13 encryption, and is clearly fradulent about claims of their products security.
Do not confuse laws such as this with an International Copyright Law. We already have those. What this, and the DMCA are, are simply encroachments onto fair use rights.
This particular legislation was proposed by the Appropriate Standards Subcommitee of the World Intellectual Property Organization, also know as
ASS-WIPO
If you want to be able to produce flash from code, php has an excellent libswf module written by Paul Haeberli. The docs are located here. Of course, this doesn't give you a fancy gui to develop from, but it is flexible :)
I hope you returned the software to your place of purchase for a full refund, under the terms of not agreeing to the EULA. Hate to give those bastard MS people 1 more cent than you have to.