In theory, they're not trying to cash in on the legal system. They're buying because of recently-revealed assets. These assets make the company worth a lot, so the stock is undervalued.
The legal system is just a recourse for those assets to be realized after they had been misappropriated.
That's the theory, of course. We know that SCO is full of it, but the new shareholders may not be.
Every FreeBSD admin should know about portupgrade.
It's in ports. It has several tools. One of them, portupgrade, upgrades ports. Another, pkgdb, fixes your ports db by updating out-of-date deps, merging multiple versions of the same port, etc. A third, pkg_version, is like port_version but much faster. A fourth, portsclean, cleans any debris from using ports, such as outdated shared libs.
You also have to be careful, because Fry's will take an item in as a return from a customer, and will shrink-wrap it and put it back on the shelf.
IANA Fry's employee, but I have asked about their policy. Apparently, if something is returned once, they put it on the shelf. If it's returned again, they RMA it (or whatever). (My inquiry was made at the Sunnyvale Fry's, but I assume the policy is the same at others.)
Given the number of clueless users, and the number of clueful users, maybe that's a good thing-- see the reply about the router. Maybe the first customer was an idiot. But if I didn't live so close to Fry's, I'd probably be singing a different tune.
As a customer of Fry's I have had to return about 50% of the computer components I have purchased from them.
I only shop at Fry's if I'm prepared to return the item. I'd say about 50% correlates to my experiences too. I'd never buy anything with subtle or catastrophic failure modes from them-- RAM, CPUs, tactical nuclear weapons, never from Fry's.
I've worked at three different jobs that involved tech support. I've gotten some idiot users, alright. I've also been a real idiot myself. I thought I'd share a few stories here. All of these happened to me personally. These are NOT FOAF stories, and they have not been embellished.
Now, my first computer job was at a mom-and-pop computer store. Like many slashdotters, I had taught myself from a young age, so I came into this job on my feet.
We had one customer I had given a nickname to: "Profit Margin". He kept screwing up his computer, but was always happy to pay for us to fix it, or buy new parts. He came in for repairs at least six times as often as any other customer. (I later found out he had also been visiting two other computer stores for repairs!)
One day in (I think) 1994, he came in and said that his box wouldn't power up. "What did you do?" "I added a CD-ROM." (I knew this was beyond his skills.) First thing I did was to open the box. Cables misplaced everywhere. The customer assured me that he did this for transport, to keep loose cables from flopping around, and they were not like this for operation. I fixed all the cables, and noticed there were two sound cards.
"You got this from a multimedia upgrade kit, didn't you?" Sure enough, he had, and added a second sound card. I pulled the new addition, and then plugged the box into a test station (kb, monitor, etc). Sure enough, nothing.
So, with the box still open, I set it on its side to get better light into it. Since it was a Packard Bell, I asked Ed to come over; he has more experience with PBs. We looked at it for a moment, and I walked around to think.
"Say, Ed?" I asked, noting an unusually placed bolt hole. "Do you remember this hole?"
"No, I don't," he said, examining it closely. "It looks almost like a... drill... hole..." We shared a horrified glance. A quick examination verified that, indeed, there was a drill hole going right through the RAM controller lines.
As it turns out, the user had needed to move the hard drive to mount the CD-ROM in place. This hard drive had unusual bolt placement. Rather than use the normal way (keyhole bolts), he had drilled clean through the case and motherboard.
I keep the motherboard in my closet as proof, for when I tell this story to people who say they're "the stupidest person in the world on computers".
Here's another one. Same store.
A regular comes in. This guy knows computers well, but he comes to us for parts, and the occassional second opinion when he's stumped. One day, he came in with a 5-1/4" drive that he couldn't get working. These days, 3-1/2" drives reigned, but he needed one at the job.
Ed and I take it in the back and load some diagnostics. Ed starts to put in the scratch disk.
"Oh, Ed," I say as he starts to put the disk in. "Flip it over, the drive is upside down."
There was a moment of astonished silence.
Sure enough, that was the only problem.
Even though it was over in 2 minutes, the user insisted on paying for the full hour. I think this was to keep us from telling anybody what he'd done.
Later in life, I was working at a very small software company. In the mornings, I was a programmer, and in the afternoons, I did tech support. My work partner, Bill, was new to the game, but caught on fast. Still, he usually came to me for advice on unusual problems.
Of course, we gave each other a hard time as a matter of course. Practical jokes, transferring each other troublesome customers, and suggesting (to each other, not the customers) outrageous troubleshooting ideas; it was how we coped with the hideous jobs we had. (Well, that and lots of beer after work.)
He came over to my desk, telling me that he had a very impatient customer on the line, and the software wouldn't install. I listened carefully to the symptoms, then told him what to do.
"Tell the customer to take out the disk. Hold it vertically. Then tap it against
I worked in a computer store. One day, we got in a new, top-of-the-line MumbleCo joystick. We wanted to put it on our display box, so I took it out of the package, and the stick flopped over to one side.
Joysticks aren't supposed to do that. They're supposed to stand upright from their base. We all know this. So I called MumbleCo to get it RMAd.
I explained the problem. Very clearly, and plainly. I explained that the joystick will not stand upright, and drops to one side, as if a spring was broken.
The tech's first question: "Did you plug it into another computer?"
I figured I must have not made the problem clear. "No, it's a mechanical defect. The problem is obvious by looking at it. I never plugged it into a computer."
I'm not arguing that the DMCA is a Good or Bad Thing, but it is law and it allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas without going through a court. Verizon was the test case and the RIAA won, hence there's a precedent ruling that their behaviour is "legally correct".
The way I understand it, the DMCA allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas without going through a judge. They still have to go through a court.
This just clarified which court they had to go through.
Re:NOT a privacy victory
on
RIAA Quashed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
1) the RIAA can't choose it's favorite legal district anymore. They can't buy influence in one state and then apply that to the entire country.
I'm not convinced that it won't continue to use its improper practices, and just hope that most people are too ignorant of the law to dispute it. That seems to be the most common play for this sort.
Which means that maybe this article should have been on the front page.
Make it unable to stabilize its descent before it's fallen 200 feet, allowing the pilot to impact the ground at a catastrophic aspect.
Make the canopy have explosive bolts to detach, with nothing to move it away from the cockpit but wind.
Make it have insufficient thrust to clear the pilot of whatever debris the plane is throwing off.
Make the pilot fall near the front of the plane (which hasn't gone far in a 0-0 scenario), to get hit by a wing or tail fin, or sucked into a fan.
The point of an ejection seat is to get the pilot away from the plane. If you can't count on drag and scattering during descent to do that, then the ejection seat needs to be designed to do it, and do it (more or less) safely.
I see a lot of people saying that they steal the motherboard then they can crack it, which while possible isn't entirely true. If you would read the information about the board you'd see it's a hardware dongle that stores the key information.
I'm not convinced yet. I realize that the key is stored on a dongle. But the processing is done on the ASIC that's in the computer. With the same key constantly. Probably in registers. And they're being refreshed.
I seem to recall something about electrons etching out their pathways. (I don't remember the name of that phenomenon... can somebody help me out here?) With the same data in the registers constantly, I'd imagine that the refresh pathways for charged memory cells are getting worn. And the uncharged cells aren't. So a good DIC microscope may be all you need to recover the key.
My argument is that finding a way to retrieve the key in question will prove to be rather trivial, certainly more trivial than trying to brute-force the encryption.
Brute-forcing is one way to retrieve the key. The key is stored in the (removable) dongle. Without the dongle, how do you expect that the key would be retrieved?
I'll take the flames for reading the article before posting,
later...
If it is secure, post more information about "Secure" ATA and prove me wrong - if you want to hide details and claim it is secure,
Okay, you don't get to play the "post your crypto" card unless you've actually looked at what they posted.
Re:WRONG! POSIX does some really dumb things!!
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 1
That's not how char[] types work. You're confusing pointers and arrays, which are not equivilent (despite hype to the contrary; RTFAQ).
It's a common mistake, but can lead to problems.
If you try the code you gave, you'll see that it doesn't actually compile; you can't assign to arrays. But the char buffer[100 + 1] = ""; does. That's because it's not an assignment, but an initializer. It sets the initial contents of the buffer that's allocated on the stack; it doesn't move the buffer.
Don't believe me? Make some stack guards! Try this on an x86 Unix (it will probably work on other boxes). It's not legal C, but it should illustrate the point.
Compile this and run it. The exact output will, of course, depend on your box. gcc, at least on my architecture (x86/FreeBSD), will generally allocate variables in the order they're declared, if you don't use -O. So you should have the lowguard and highguard immediately around the spot on the stack where the buffer is allocated. Check the first line of output to make sure. The three numbers should be either in order (either increasing or decreasing), and each one four bytes from its neighbor. The string table is probably far-removed from the items on the stack.
Now, let's examine the consequences.
Lines 14-16: Note that buf as an int is 0x78757571, which is "quux" in hex. (Remember, this example is for x86 only, although the point it illustrates is applicable to any ANSI C system.) Now, if we read the words directly above and below lowguard, one of those will be buf. This indicates that the string "quux" is allocated on the stack, alongside lowguard.
Line 17: We didn't compile with -fwritable-strings, so if you're using gcc, this would generate a runtime error (writing to a read-only segment) if buf pointed at a constant in the string segment.
Line 20: By overflowing the array, we changed one of the guards. Were buf pointing into the string table, then we wouldn't have changed the contents of the stack. (Note the output of line 12: the string table is far away from the stack.)
This should make it clear that what the AC wrote was an initialized array, not buggy code.
I have a disk with a program on it. My program can look at any program and the input you want to give it. It will then tell you whether that program will ever terminate, or if it will run forever.
Turing proved that the above paragraph is a fabrication. Such a disk cannot exist; Google for "halting problem". This is an example of proving non-existence.
I'm seeing a lot of talk about good burners, bad burners, but nobody mentioned SCSI burners. Optical drives used to be available in SCSI before they were out in IDE. Did SCSI DVD+-RW fall by the wayside, or what?
I don't want to discuss the relative merits of SCSI vs IDE. I'm just wondering what people like in the SCSI arena.
I think that if you bought better cables to hook the VCR up to your TV you'd agree with me that VHS is better.
I do use high-quality cables. My VHS connection uses a thick 75-ohm cable with a solid dielectric to the reciever, and of course my video feed to the TV is equally solid. My DVD connection, at the time I performed the evaulations, was an average consumer-grade S-Video cable, with TOS for the audio. (I've since changed the DVD connection to Monster MV2CV component cables direct to the TV.)
Obviously, cheap equipment isn't going to perform well. But the HF loss I described isn't specific to the cabling; it's endemic to the format. Since you were discussing HF loss, that was what I concentrated on. Also see the site I linked to with the sillyscope pics showing HF loss on the multiburst patterns on VHS tapes.
I disagree. I find DVDs to be considerably better picture quality than analog cable or VHS. (Some sample source material: For broadcast comparison, Buffy/Angel and Stargate SG-1 each have hours of material that's easy to compare. For VHS comparison specifics, offhand, I can only think of Stargate and X-Files (the movies), but I switched to DVD so long ago I forget most of what I checked out when I first switched.)
I do agree that digital cable is overcompressed, causing lots of artifacting.
A good VHS recording, played back on a 6-head VCR, displayed on a nice TV actually does look better than the same recording done on DVD, played on the same TV.
What source material have you used for this comparison?
Slashdot Mirror
Some people will wipe their feet on anything that says "Welcome".
I'd think the ones named in this article would hold enough stock to keep the lawsuit from happening.
In theory, they're not trying to cash in on the legal system. They're buying because of recently-revealed assets. These assets make the company worth a lot, so the stock is undervalued.
The legal system is just a recourse for those assets to be realized after they had been misappropriated.
That's the theory, of course. We know that SCO is full of it, but the new shareholders may not be.
Every FreeBSD admin should know about portupgrade.
It's in ports. It has several tools. One of them, portupgrade, upgrades ports. Another, pkgdb, fixes your ports db by updating out-of-date deps, merging multiple versions of the same port, etc. A third, pkg_version, is like port_version but much faster. A fourth, portsclean, cleans any debris from using ports, such as outdated shared libs.
Get it. Learn it. Love it.
You also have to be careful, because Fry's will take an item in as a return from a customer, and will shrink-wrap it and put it back on the shelf.
IANA Fry's employee, but I have asked about their policy. Apparently, if something is returned once, they put it on the shelf. If it's returned again, they RMA it (or whatever). (My inquiry was made at the Sunnyvale Fry's, but I assume the policy is the same at others.)
Given the number of clueless users, and the number of clueful users, maybe that's a good thing-- see the reply about the router. Maybe the first customer was an idiot. But if I didn't live so close to Fry's, I'd probably be singing a different tune.
As a customer of Fry's I have had to return about 50% of the computer components I have purchased from them.
I only shop at Fry's if I'm prepared to return the item. I'd say about 50% correlates to my experiences too. I'd never buy anything with subtle or catastrophic failure modes from them-- RAM, CPUs, tactical nuclear weapons, never from Fry's.
If you are going to sell something, it needs to be a quality product.
You're new to Fry's, aren't you?
I've worked at three different jobs that involved tech support. I've gotten some idiot users, alright. I've also been a real idiot myself. I thought I'd share a few stories here. All of these happened to me personally. These are NOT FOAF stories, and they have not been embellished.
Now, my first computer job was at a mom-and-pop computer store. Like many slashdotters, I had taught myself from a young age, so I came into this job on my feet.
We had one customer I had given a nickname to: "Profit Margin". He kept screwing up his computer, but was always happy to pay for us to fix it, or buy new parts. He came in for repairs at least six times as often as any other customer. (I later found out he had also been visiting two other computer stores for repairs!)
One day in (I think) 1994, he came in and said that his box wouldn't power up. "What did you do?" "I added a CD-ROM." (I knew this was beyond his skills.) First thing I did was to open the box. Cables misplaced everywhere. The customer assured me that he did this for transport, to keep loose cables from flopping around, and they were not like this for operation. I fixed all the cables, and noticed there were two sound cards.
"You got this from a multimedia upgrade kit, didn't you?" Sure enough, he had, and added a second sound card. I pulled the new addition, and then plugged the box into a test station (kb, monitor, etc). Sure enough, nothing.
So, with the box still open, I set it on its side to get better light into it. Since it was a Packard Bell, I asked Ed to come over; he has more experience with PBs. We looked at it for a moment, and I walked around to think.
"Say, Ed?" I asked, noting an unusually placed bolt hole. "Do you remember this hole?"
"No, I don't," he said, examining it closely. "It looks almost like a... drill... hole..." We shared a horrified glance. A quick examination verified that, indeed, there was a drill hole going right through the RAM controller lines.
As it turns out, the user had needed to move the hard drive to mount the CD-ROM in place. This hard drive had unusual bolt placement. Rather than use the normal way (keyhole bolts), he had drilled clean through the case and motherboard.
I keep the motherboard in my closet as proof, for when I tell this story to people who say they're "the stupidest person in the world on computers".
Here's another one. Same store.
A regular comes in. This guy knows computers well, but he comes to us for parts, and the occassional second opinion when he's stumped. One day, he came in with a 5-1/4" drive that he couldn't get working. These days, 3-1/2" drives reigned, but he needed one at the job.
Ed and I take it in the back and load some diagnostics. Ed starts to put in the scratch disk.
"Oh, Ed," I say as he starts to put the disk in. "Flip it over, the drive is upside down."
There was a moment of astonished silence.
Sure enough, that was the only problem.
Even though it was over in 2 minutes, the user insisted on paying for the full hour. I think this was to keep us from telling anybody what he'd done.
Later in life, I was working at a very small software company. In the mornings, I was a programmer, and in the afternoons, I did tech support. My work partner, Bill, was new to the game, but caught on fast. Still, he usually came to me for advice on unusual problems.
Of course, we gave each other a hard time as a matter of course. Practical jokes, transferring each other troublesome customers, and suggesting (to each other, not the customers) outrageous troubleshooting ideas; it was how we coped with the hideous jobs we had. (Well, that and lots of beer after work.)
He came over to my desk, telling me that he had a very impatient customer on the line, and the software wouldn't install. I listened carefully to the symptoms, then told him what to do.
"Tell the customer to take out the disk. Hold it vertically. Then tap it against
Interesting idea! But no, this was before force-feedbacks hit the market.
Or, sometimes it's clueless tech support.
I worked in a computer store. One day, we got in a new, top-of-the-line MumbleCo joystick. We wanted to put it on our display box, so I took it out of the package, and the stick flopped over to one side.
Joysticks aren't supposed to do that. They're supposed to stand upright from their base. We all know this. So I called MumbleCo to get it RMAd.
I explained the problem. Very clearly, and plainly. I explained that the joystick will not stand upright, and drops to one side, as if a spring was broken.
The tech's first question: "Did you plug it into another computer?"
I figured I must have not made the problem clear. "No, it's a mechanical defect. The problem is obvious by looking at it. I never plugged it into a computer."
"Are you refusing to cooperate?"
And so on.
I work from home. My coworker just IM'd me this link. You think they're trying to tell me something?
I'm not arguing that the DMCA is a Good or Bad Thing, but it is law and it allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas without going through a court. Verizon was the test case and the RIAA won, hence there's a precedent ruling that their behaviour is "legally correct".
The way I understand it, the DMCA allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas without going through a judge. They still have to go through a court.
This just clarified which court they had to go through.
1) the RIAA can't choose it's favorite legal district anymore. They can't buy influence in one state and then apply that to the entire country.
I'm not convinced that it won't continue to use its improper practices, and just hope that most people are too ignorant of the law to dispute it. That seems to be the most common play for this sort.
Which means that maybe this article should have been on the front page.
Make it unable to stabilize its descent before it's fallen 200 feet, allowing the pilot to impact the ground at a catastrophic aspect.
Make the canopy have explosive bolts to detach, with nothing to move it away from the cockpit but wind.
Make it have insufficient thrust to clear the pilot of whatever debris the plane is throwing off.
Make the pilot fall near the front of the plane (which hasn't gone far in a 0-0 scenario), to get hit by a wing or tail fin, or sucked into a fan.
The point of an ejection seat is to get the pilot away from the plane. If you can't count on drag and scattering during descent to do that, then the ejection seat needs to be designed to do it, and do it (more or less) safely.
I see a lot of people saying that they steal the motherboard then they can crack it, which while possible isn't entirely true. If you would read the information about the board you'd see it's a hardware dongle that stores the key information.
I'm not convinced yet. I realize that the key is stored on a dongle. But the processing is done on the ASIC that's in the computer. With the same key constantly. Probably in registers. And they're being refreshed.
I seem to recall something about electrons etching out their pathways. (I don't remember the name of that phenomenon... can somebody help me out here?) With the same data in the registers constantly, I'd imagine that the refresh pathways for charged memory cells are getting worn. And the uncharged cells aren't. So a good DIC microscope may be all you need to recover the key.
My argument is that finding a way to retrieve the key in question will prove to be rather trivial, certainly more trivial than trying to brute-force the encryption.
Brute-forcing is one way to retrieve the key. The key is stored in the (removable) dongle. Without the dongle, how do you expect that the key would be retrieved?
I'll take the flames for reading the article before posting,
later...
If it is secure, post more information about "Secure" ATA and prove me wrong - if you want to hide details and claim it is secure,
Okay, you don't get to play the "post your crypto" card unless you've actually looked at what they posted.
That's not how char[] types work. You're confusing pointers and arrays, which are not equivilent (despite hype to the contrary; RTFAQ). It's a common mistake, but can lead to problems.
If you try the code you gave, you'll see that it doesn't actually compile; you can't assign to arrays. But the char buffer[100 + 1] = ""; does. That's because it's not an assignment, but an initializer. It sets the initial contents of the buffer that's allocated on the stack; it doesn't move the buffer.
Don't believe me? Make some stack guards! Try this on an x86 Unix (it will probably work on other boxes). It's not legal C, but it should illustrate the point.
Compile this and run it. The exact output will, of course, depend on your box. gcc, at least on my architecture (x86/FreeBSD), will generally allocate variables in the order they're declared, if you don't use -O. So you should have the lowguard and highguard immediately around the spot on the stack where the buffer is allocated. Check the first line of output to make sure. The three numbers should be either in order (either increasing or decreasing), and each one four bytes from its neighbor. The string table is probably far-removed from the items on the stack.
Now, let's examine the consequences.
Lines 14-16: Note that buf as an int is 0x78757571, which is "quux" in hex. (Remember, this example is for x86 only, although the point it illustrates is applicable to any ANSI C system.) Now, if we read the words directly above and below lowguard, one of those will be buf. This indicates that the string "quux" is allocated on the stack, alongside lowguard.
Line 17: We didn't compile with -fwritable-strings, so if you're using gcc, this would generate a runtime error (writing to a read-only segment) if buf pointed at a constant in the string segment.
Line 20: By overflowing the array, we changed one of the guards. Were buf pointing into the string table, then we wouldn't have changed the contents of the stack. (Note the output of line 12: the string table is far away from the stack.)
This should make it clear that what the AC wrote was an initialized array, not buggy code.
I don't know how well GNOME and KDE handle this, but there is a way to tell the X server your real display resolution.
KDE handles it well. The most notable change is the fonts; the icons tend to be the same.
'The P.W.B. Quantum Clip
Is it just me, or does "P.W.B. Quantum" sound a lot like "P.T. Barnum"?
Then the serial #s don't match what Kmart has in stock, so it's not a sale (or theft).
Turing proved that the above paragraph is a fabrication. Such a disk cannot exist; Google for "halting problem". This is an example of proving non-existence.
My-my-my-my (U can't touch us)
SCO tries to bill me so hard
Makes me say, "Oh my Lord, thank you for blessing me
With a mind to think about the O from SC"
It feels good
When you know you're right
A superdope winner in a court fight
And SCO knows as much
And they'd just get beat-uh!
U can't touch us
I told you homeboys
U can't touch us
Yeah, that's how we livin' and you know
U can't touch us
Look in the GPL, man
U can't touch us
Yo, let me bust the funky code
U can't touch us
Stop! RICO time!
(With some apologies to MC Hammer, but mostly to the people who read this.)
I'm seeing a lot of talk about good burners, bad burners, but nobody mentioned SCSI burners. Optical drives used to be available in SCSI before they were out in IDE. Did SCSI DVD+-RW fall by the wayside, or what?
I don't want to discuss the relative merits of SCSI vs IDE. I'm just wondering what people like in the SCSI arena.
I think that if you bought better cables to hook the VCR up to your TV you'd agree with me that VHS is better.
I do use high-quality cables. My VHS connection uses a thick 75-ohm cable with a solid dielectric to the reciever, and of course my video feed to the TV is equally solid. My DVD connection, at the time I performed the evaulations, was an average consumer-grade S-Video cable, with TOS for the audio. (I've since changed the DVD connection to Monster MV2CV component cables direct to the TV.)
Obviously, cheap equipment isn't going to perform well. But the HF loss I described isn't specific to the cabling; it's endemic to the format. Since you were discussing HF loss, that was what I concentrated on. Also see the site I linked to with the sillyscope pics showing HF loss on the multiburst patterns on VHS tapes.
I disagree. I find DVDs to be considerably better picture quality than analog cable or VHS. (Some sample source material: For broadcast comparison, Buffy/Angel and Stargate SG-1 each have hours of material that's easy to compare. For VHS comparison specifics, offhand, I can only think of Stargate and X-Files (the movies), but I switched to DVD so long ago I forget most of what I checked out when I first switched.)
I do agree that digital cable is overcompressed, causing lots of artifacting.
A good VHS recording, played back on a 6-head VCR, displayed on a nice TV actually does look better than the same recording done on DVD, played on the same TV.
What source material have you used for this comparison?