Damn, your post reminded me of another use, securing YOUR Windows YOUR way. I saw it demoed at H2K2 last july. I just can't remember the website addy. It boots debian, then runs vmware automatically and prompts for a secure password. It then loads Windows using a virtual drive. The drive is encrpyted. A USB dongle is also required. Remove the usb dongle, the puppy shuts down automatically. Debian runs without swap to hopefully eliminate any chance of the vmware session being swapped to unencrypted disk.
The guy demoing it is mainly meant to protect laptop data from common thieves, is targeted towards road warriors, and is not meant to keep the government out because if they arrest you and the laptop, they can coerce you into giving them access.
"We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains, the same as going into a CD store and stealing the CD,
Bullshit, it is not. First of all, if you steal the CD from a store, the person who gets hurt is the store owner. He's already bought that CD from the distributor who bought it from the label, who paid the pittance of a royalty to the artist. So if you go in and steal a CD from the store, it isn't hurting the artist, or the distributor, or the label. It's hurting the store owner only.
Now if you download a CD's worth of stuff from the net, it's a theoretical loss only. No real money is lost, just the *possible* opportunity for a sale. One would have to prove that the person would have went out and bought the CD and didn't because they got it off thet net before you could legitimately count it as a realized loss. And even so, it's a loss of income, not a theft loss where property or money was deprived of the owner (as in, their net worth went down by their share of that CD).
Now both cases are "wrong" but they are in no way "the same thing." There is a real victim in one case, and theoretical victims in the other case.
The XT (c. 1983) had a 20 meg hard drive, so we could do a 20 gig hard drive reasonably. Plus modems back then were 300 baud, so a DSL modem with 384K service....
And don't forget, only 10 Fkeys so....
ok, this is getting silly!:-)
Remember the original norton SI benchmark with the PC at 1.00? Wonder what a current generation computer would clock in as. Let me guess, it'd output a "divide by zero error.":-)
Dude, chill!:-) I thought my original post was clearly a flippant response to a silly story, following the other post that had "Duh!" in its subject. I didn't think you expected a serious response.
Like others said, software costs are a combination of the cost to produce it, the number of units expected to sell, and what the maker of the software thinks the market will bear.
Obviously in some areas where there is an effective monopoly (Office suites for example), the price Microsoft can charge and get away with is higher than it would be if there was more competition.
For some software, like an accounting package for a dentist office, the cost of the software will be about the same as a new BMW 3 series. It's mainly that the maker of the software has a small market to sell into, and has to spread its cost across a smaller number of units resulting in a much higher per unit selling cost.
Also, I'm one of those that don't think Windows OS cost is unreasonable. I remember when, for example, you had to shell out about $195 for LWP or some other tcp stack. We used to pay $295 per client to Locus Computing for some client that would allow our windows 3.1 clients to be able to use our Unix systems as a file server. All of that stuff is now part of Windows. Plus, you gotta admit to the value and usefulness of having a free browser, media player, and instant messaging client being a part of the OS on your mission critical back-end servers. It's great being able to watch some porn flick in one window while working in Active Directory Users and Group in another... (hint, being flippant again!:)
The OEM contract prohibits dual boot arrangements too. That's one reason why Be never was able to get a foothold. Vendors refused their offer to give Be to them for free if they pre-installed as a dual-boot option.
At least that was the case, maybe not now, now that the Justice Department had their noses up Microsoft's bum there for a while...
Well, for those who didn't get the three operating system line, the original IBM PC came with your choice of three different OSes, MS/DOS 1.0, CPM/86, or something called p-System, some pascal based OS.
So, when I said two out of three ain't bad, I meant there is no way in hell an anniversary PC would give you a choice of OSes. Microsoft just wouldn't permit it.
p.s. No, it's not that funny. I have no idea why it's easier to get slightly humorous posts modded up to a 5 but posts with serious thought and hopeful insight in them never get modded up or often get modded down by someone who just doesn't agree with you.
Fink is a bit raw still when using OX X 10.2. You have to use the unstable tree and even then there are some problems. It'll be spiffed up soon enough.
Nothing beats having a rootless X server running on your Mac!:)
I also enjoy running microsoft's rdesktop on my Mac to administer my windows servers. There is just some weird satisfaction thing there...
I hope whenever the chip gets there, IBM will sell something like an anniversary IBM PC with same case design as original, rated at 4.77 GHz, 640 megs of RAM, and your choice of three different operating systems -- just like the original!. (er, ok, two out of three ain't bad...)
Excellent points. A name often is accidental, but the brand identity is priceless if it catches on. Look at Federal Express. For ages, people just called it FedEx and it became a common term. That company did the wise thing and formally renamed and trademarked FedEx.
In 1983, I wrote a network OS for CP/M machines. I needed to give it a name, so I just called it K-OS, for Ken's Operating System, pronounced chaos. I put all but 5 minutes of thought into it, but it caught on around the college I worked for where it was used. I replaced the CP/M BIOS and CCP but the BDOS was still there, so maybe I should have called it CP/K-OS/M or something. Thank g-d it didn't catch on!:)
The name Linux was mainly accidental, but now has important name recognition everywhere. Deal with it, use it, capitalize on it, but us geeks should never forget its roots (nor its BSD roots either...)
The BSD license *used* to mandate that everytime any of it was used, the program or derivitive had to give credit, as in "Portions copyright regents of california" or something like that.
Stallman thought that was ridiculous at the time, and predicted if everyone wanted that, whenever an OS booted, it'd be filling the screen with mostly copyright and credit notices. Whenever a press release or advertisement went out, there'd be pages of "portions copyrighted" credits included.
So he worked with the Berkley folks and got them to drop the credit requirement from the license.
So this GNU thing to me sounds kind of like the same thing, although the FAQ does state that they are not going to insist on it by making it part of the GPL.
However, and we should all remember, there would be no Linux today without the GNU software. Maybe you guys are too young to remember, but back about 12 years ago, the only way you could get Unix on a PC was shell out thousands of dollars for Interactive Unix or AT&T or $99 for Mark Williams Unix which used the intel small memory model (ram was limited to 64K, yes 64K). BSD was around, of course, but who could afford the money for a Sun box?
GNUs downfall was they started coding from the top down, as in, all utilities, compilers, and editors, and left the kernel to last. Then Linus comes along, does the kernel, throws a lot of gnu stuff on top, done.
Not to belittle Linus, of course, but all of this was a joint effort and we should not be so quick to forget the efforts of everyone who contributed to the GNU project for the past almost 20 years...
I've discouraged (well, banned actually) any wireless from my area of responsibility due to concerns about security. I admit I need to spend more (precious) time looking into it more. But I just get the creeps when I went to h2k2 and watched how open all those wireless LANs were in the area. Apparently you can crack WEP too, if you listen to enough traffic.
I need to deploy it eventually, but my main concern right now is users hooking up an access point to their PC and using internet connection sharing or some other hack to give access to our network. So far, threat of death is working, but I can't rely on that. (We disabled ICS in AD GPOs but some users have admin rights to their PCs....)
Does 11a or 11g provide any improvements in security? All "advice" I've read about seems useless (like turning off SID advertising, easily gotten around using kismet, for example).
btw, I'm almost tempted to buy Pulp Fiction from them. I think the entire movie would be about 5 minutes long -- the scene where honey bunny is talking about blueberry pankakes.
Nah, scratch that, they aren't married and are in a hotel together. OK, the boring cab scene.
Usually the reason those pages get choppped off is because web designers are stuck in the "must control every pixel" mode, so they set up fixed pixel widths in tables (or use absolute position in css) and don't let the browser resize to fit the display (or printed page).
I really hate going to a site with a fixed 600 pixel width using my 1600x1200 maximized browser window. I get a sea of white space on the right hand of my page (and sometimes a duplicated background pattern...)
First of all, you buy broadband and start using up all of that bandwidth, they consider you a thief. They advertise unlimited access, but don't want you keeping that pipe full all the time. Watch one movie a day and that's what you'll be doing.
Then there's the competition angle. A lot of broadband is provided over cable TV lines. Cable companies do their own Pay-Per-View.
If this takes off, watch broadband providers start placing monthly caps on consumed bandwidth and start charging per gig over it, adding to the cost of the movie download. Hell, they are already wanting to do this...
I'm a Linux geek who recently purchased an iMac and am very happy with it. I'd love to have Linux on it as well, but don't want to trash or reinstall my OS X disk. (My wife would kill me too, since she's now addicted to it and her PC sits unused in the other room now).
Can I plug in an external firewire drive and install Linux onto it, then boot into it without disturbing my internal OS X install? (And for extra credit, while booted into the firewire linux partition, run MOL and boot my internal drive's OS X install?!)
I guess this may be a stupid question for Mac'ers, but I'm a newbie and this world is still pretty new to me. To give you an idea, you can't imagine how excited I was when a friend showed me how to turn on verbose boot messages!:-)
Really? Before AIDS? Wow, AIDS was around since the eary 80's.
The first I heard of AIDS was 1985. I know it was around before then, as evidenced by
this usenet post in December 1982. But it was not well know at all outside the gay community.
When I was a teenager in the late 70s, there was no real fear of casual sex beyond pregnancy, herpes, and the girl's father's rage if he found out.
I remember reading a BBS advice line in a text file where people (fake or whatever, didn't matter) would write in for advice. One particular memorable one was (remember, this was before AIDS):
Q: I met a girl on this BBS and we are going to meet in person. She told me that she had TB or VD, but I can't remember which. What should I do?
Slashdot Mirror
The guy demoing it is mainly meant to protect laptop data from common thieves, is targeted towards road warriors, and is not meant to keep the government out because if they arrest you and the laptop, they can coerce you into giving them access.
Ah yes, google rules. Here's a link to a story about it. Company name is NAH6.
Bullshit, it is not. First of all, if you steal the CD from a store, the person who gets hurt is the store owner. He's already bought that CD from the distributor who bought it from the label, who paid the pittance of a royalty to the artist. So if you go in and steal a CD from the store, it isn't hurting the artist, or the distributor, or the label. It's hurting the store owner only.
Now if you download a CD's worth of stuff from the net, it's a theoretical loss only. No real money is lost, just the *possible* opportunity for a sale. One would have to prove that the person would have went out and bought the CD and didn't because they got it off thet net before you could legitimately count it as a realized loss. And even so, it's a loss of income, not a theft loss where property or money was deprived of the owner (as in, their net worth went down by their share of that CD).
Now both cases are "wrong" but they are in no way "the same thing." There is a real victim in one case, and theoretical victims in the other case.
And don't forget, only 10 Fkeys so....
ok, this is getting silly! :-)
Remember the original norton SI benchmark with the PC at 1.00? Wonder what a current generation computer would clock in as. Let me guess, it'd output a "divide by zero error." :-)
Like others said, software costs are a combination of the cost to produce it, the number of units expected to sell, and what the maker of the software thinks the market will bear.
Obviously in some areas where there is an effective monopoly (Office suites for example), the price Microsoft can charge and get away with is higher than it would be if there was more competition.
For some software, like an accounting package for a dentist office, the cost of the software will be about the same as a new BMW 3 series. It's mainly that the maker of the software has a small market to sell into, and has to spread its cost across a smaller number of units resulting in a much higher per unit selling cost.
Also, I'm one of those that don't think Windows OS cost is unreasonable. I remember when, for example, you had to shell out about $195 for LWP or some other tcp stack. We used to pay $295 per client to Locus Computing for some client that would allow our windows 3.1 clients to be able to use our Unix systems as a file server. All of that stuff is now part of Windows. Plus, you gotta admit to the value and usefulness of having a free browser, media player, and instant messaging client being a part of the OS on your mission critical back-end servers. It's great being able to watch some porn flick in one window while working in Active Directory Users and Group in another... (hint, being flippant again! :)
Microsoft is a monopoly. The courts have ruled it to be one, not me.
At least that was the case, maybe not now, now that the Justice Department had their noses up Microsoft's bum there for a while...
Remove competition, prices rise. Duh...
So, when I said two out of three ain't bad, I meant there is no way in hell an anniversary PC would give you a choice of OSes. Microsoft just wouldn't permit it.
p.s. No, it's not that funny. I have no idea why it's easier to get slightly humorous posts modded up to a 5 but posts with serious thought and hopeful insight in them never get modded up or often get modded down by someone who just doesn't agree with you.
Whatever, not like it all matters anyway...
Nothing beats having a rootless X server running on your Mac! :)
I also enjoy running microsoft's rdesktop on my Mac to administer my windows servers. There is just some weird satisfaction thing there...
I'd hit it.
In 1983, I wrote a network OS for CP/M machines. I needed to give it a name, so I just called it K-OS, for Ken's Operating System, pronounced chaos. I put all but 5 minutes of thought into it, but it caught on around the college I worked for where it was used. I replaced the CP/M BIOS and CCP but the BDOS was still there, so maybe I should have called it CP/K-OS/M or something. Thank g-d it didn't catch on! :)
The name Linux was mainly accidental, but now has important name recognition everywhere. Deal with it, use it, capitalize on it, but us geeks should never forget its roots (nor its BSD roots either...)
Hmm, rings a bell. Not sure if I tried that one or not. I can't remember what state of usability Minux was during that time period.
Stallman thought that was ridiculous at the time, and predicted if everyone wanted that, whenever an OS booted, it'd be filling the screen with mostly copyright and credit notices. Whenever a press release or advertisement went out, there'd be pages of "portions copyrighted" credits included.
So he worked with the Berkley folks and got them to drop the credit requirement from the license.
So this GNU thing to me sounds kind of like the same thing, although the FAQ does state that they are not going to insist on it by making it part of the GPL.
However, and we should all remember, there would be no Linux today without the GNU software. Maybe you guys are too young to remember, but back about 12 years ago, the only way you could get Unix on a PC was shell out thousands of dollars for Interactive Unix or AT&T or $99 for Mark Williams Unix which used the intel small memory model (ram was limited to 64K, yes 64K). BSD was around, of course, but who could afford the money for a Sun box?
GNUs downfall was they started coding from the top down, as in, all utilities, compilers, and editors, and left the kernel to last. Then Linus comes along, does the kernel, throws a lot of gnu stuff on top, done.
Not to belittle Linus, of course, but all of this was a joint effort and we should not be so quick to forget the efforts of everyone who contributed to the GNU project for the past almost 20 years...
I need to deploy it eventually, but my main concern right now is users hooking up an access point to their PC and using internet connection sharing or some other hack to give access to our network. So far, threat of death is working, but I can't rely on that. (We disabled ICS in AD GPOs but some users have admin rights to their PCs....)
Does 11a or 11g provide any improvements in security? All "advice" I've read about seems useless (like turning off SID advertising, easily gotten around using kismet, for example).
btw, I'm almost tempted to buy Pulp Fiction from them. I think the entire movie would be about 5 minutes long -- the scene where honey bunny is talking about blueberry pankakes.
Nah, scratch that, they aren't married and are in a hotel together. OK, the boring cab scene.
"I'm American, our names don't mean bleeep"
www.nextbus.com
Go online, log on, generate a one-time use number, plug that into the web site, only good for one transaction.
Problem Description: User claims that havening a self-pinging machine amounts to incestuous narcissism
Status: CLOSED. Works for me.
I expect next you'll be claiming that sex requires two or more people...
I really hate going to a site with a fixed 600 pixel width using my 1600x1200 maximized browser window. I get a sea of white space on the right hand of my page (and sometimes a duplicated background pattern...)
Sigh...
Then there's the competition angle. A lot of broadband is provided over cable TV lines. Cable companies do their own Pay-Per-View.
If this takes off, watch broadband providers start placing monthly caps on consumed bandwidth and start charging per gig over it, adding to the cost of the movie download. Hell, they are already wanting to do this...
So, did Steve Jobs do any "real" work, or was he mainly the visionairy/leader type? What code or hardware piece did he hack out, any?
Can I plug in an external firewire drive and install Linux onto it, then boot into it without disturbing my internal OS X install? (And for extra credit, while booted into the firewire linux partition, run MOL and boot my internal drive's OS X install?!)
I guess this may be a stupid question for Mac'ers, but I'm a newbie and this world is still pretty new to me. To give you an idea, you can't imagine how excited I was when a friend showed me how to turn on verbose boot messages! :-)
The first I heard of AIDS was 1985. I know it was around before then, as evidenced by this usenet post in December 1982. But it was not well know at all outside the gay community.
When I was a teenager in the late 70s, there was no real fear of casual sex beyond pregnancy, herpes, and the girl's father's rage if he found out.
Q: I met a girl on this BBS and we are going to meet in person. She told me that she had TB or VD, but I can't remember which. What should I do?
A: If she coughs, fuck her.