> How the fuck would you do streaming media without plugins?
Howsabout a URL that gets picked up by XMMS or Xine or Real or Quicktime or MediaPlayer or... well, you get the idea. If you want to run an app, get the user to run that app. Don't make the web-page auto-launch that app.
Open Source is like automobiles 100 years ago. Approximately a century ago, the horse-and-buggy industry saw that automobiles were being adopted by a much wider segment than merely a handful of hobbyists. The horse-and-buggy industry tried its best to pay legislators to pass restrictive laws, and used all sorts of FUD to scare people away from that thar new-fangled horseless carriage. Sound familiar ?
Open Source is no longer the province of a bunch of hobbyist geeks. It is becoming a commercial success. That has made it enemies, because it is a "disruptive technology" that is depriving established companies of profits. Indeed, it is threatening to destroy some old-line companies altogether. With their backs to the wall, those companies have no choice but to save themselves in the only way possible, i.e. by destroying Open Source.
The natural enemies of Open Source software are proprietary software companies. SCO's expensive Unix is being wiped off the map by linux. Microsoft is having relatively minor problems with Open Source competition at present, but the potential for disaster is there. They are losing not only OS profits to linux, but Office sales to Open Office. Look at Netcraft and note what's happened to their share of the web-server market since March 2002. Repeat that trend for Windows and Office, and MS is toast.
Open Source needs allies that are just as big and powerful as its enemies. The natural allies of Open Source are non-software companies, whose core products aren't threatened by free software, indeed, benefit from it.
Those of you old enough to remember IBM's anti-trust problems will find it amusing that one of the charges against IBM was that it gave away allegedly free software with their computers, and the proprietary software companies complained that they couldn't compete. IBM prospered in that environment before, and they can prosper in it again. IBM's hardware side sees Open Source as a chance to boost profits by not paying "Microsoft Tax" on every PC they sell. And as far as IBM's consulting arm is concerned, they don't care if they get paid to manage Windows, linux, OS/2, heck they'd even manage Commodore Vic-20's if you could make it worth their while.
Other potential allies are small/medium/large businesses that are now saving money thanks to Open Source, and face the prospect of those savings being legislated away from them.
This isn't merely a question of whether or not your city hall will give Open Source a fair chance. It's also a question of whether your national legislators will outlaw Open Source altogether. "Turn the other cheek" doesn't defend you against the schoolyard bully. You must get involved in the political process in your respective countries. Like it or not, Open Source supporters will have to get involved in politics in your respective countries. You will have to identify candidates who will allow Open Source to survive, and work for their election.
> They should have most of the major MTA's by now. However we don't > have a complete list of all MTA's on campus, so it is certainly > possible that in the future some might be cut off. If that happens, > we will find out about it after the fact. In some cases, the abuse > staff may recognize it as an MTA, and ask them to add it to the list.
You don't have a complete list of all MTA's on campus; not really confidence inspiring. Oh, and while you're at it, can you guys *PLEASE* set your "virus filter machine" 128.6.72.254 (nbcs-av.ruthers.edu) to stop sending "virus notifications" ? Some infected bozo machine on Comcast in New Jersey was spewing Sobig.F all over the place a few days ago, and occasionally forging my email address as the "From:". Any computer-literate person (MCSE's don't count) knows that viruses forge the "From:" header. Yet your system was identifying virus-laden emails and sending me bogus "virus notifications"... until I blocked your domain to protect myself from your harassment. I have a personal domain for my own use, but I can see other people, even ISPs blocking outfits that use dumb auto-mailbombers.
Here's a few sites that'll be maybe at the very limits of the kids' grasp and understanding. But that's good. They should be challenged to learn "the next step up", rather than being fed dumbed-down Barney crud. There's nothing in these pages that a parent can object to (unless they happen to be diehard creationists).
The Tree of Life is a collaborative web project, produced by biologists from around the world. On more than 2600 World Wide Web pages, the Tree of Life provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their history, and characteristics.
The Nine Planets is an overview of the history, mythology, and current scientific knowledge of each of the planets and moons in our solar system. Each page has text and images, some have sounds and movies, most provide references to additional related information.
http://parallel.park.org/Canada/Museum/extinctio n/ tablecont.html Extinctions: Cycles of Life and Death Through Time (more than just the dinosaurs 65 million years ago)
> And, remember -- every laptop has a plug in the back where you can connect > as large a monitor as you can afford, a keyboard jack, a mouse jack...
> USB, Firewire, and etc let you put any kind of CD Burner you want on a laptop, > and you can use flash cards as a second hard disk with a PCMCIA adapter > (something that is more difficult albeit still possible with a PC). You > can also get an external 20GB hard disk and hook it up to the firewire port.
Let me get this straight... instead of a $700 PC, I buy a $1400 laptop... *PLUS* an external harddrive... *PLUS* an external DVD... *PLUS* an external monitor... *PLUS* an external keyboard and mouse. No wonder the marketers are promoting this... the accountants at hardware manufacturers must be having wet dreams about all the money they'll rake in.
I don't need a laptop. But if I did, I'd get a laptop *AND* a regular desktop unit. Syncing data is not a problem. Hook up the two computers with a crossover CAT-5 network cable between their ethernet ports, and you can crank data across at 100 megabits/sec. And if you have a home network, it becomes even simpler.
*nix RPC runs on port 111. If I don't intend to have outside computers log in and run apps on my linux machine remotely, I shut down RPC, and uninstall it too, as well as blocking *ALL* privileged ports (0..1023) with iptables. It's bad enough that Windows comes with unnecessary stuff enabled. But when *YOU CAN'T TURN IT OFF*, something is drastically wrong.
So they check the packet ID's on incoming packets. Basically, they count the number of external connections. These ivory-tower academics amaze me with their lack of consideration of the real world.
1) I have one machine online now. I'm listening to an oldies station on live365 whilst reading Slashdot. And if Redhat had a new distro out, I could be downloading it in the background. How do they differentiate between me doing 3 things on one machine simultaneously, versus doing one thing on each of 3 machines simultaneously ?
2) Tabbed browsing to multiple sites that do HTTP refreshes bumps up the connection count. What gets *REALLY* hysterical is a typical luser running Windows with half-a-dozen spyware applets calling home all the time. It'll easily pass off as a home network.
...go to their websites, and search on the keyword "Hamidi". Ken Hamidi is a former Intel employee who claims to have a grievance against Intel. If he put up an "Intel-sucks" website, and Intel tried to shut him down, I'd be on his side. That's not what's happening.
Hamidi claims some "electronic pamphleteering right" to spew his grievances to Intel's current employees via Intel's email system. He sent 6 spams, between 8,000 to 35,000 employees each time before Intel got an injunction against him.
OK, so one nutcase gets to harass a "bigcorp" that you don't like, so what. Now imagine every political, religious, etc, nutcase in the country claiming the *RIGHT* to spam everybody at your ISP with their "important message".
It's about consent not content. I don't care if someone is spamming porn, or religion to save my soul, or a "sale" to save a few bucks, or a political party to save my country. If the nutcases get a "right" to bombard you with their garbage, you can kiss email as we know it goodbye.
OK, I may as well admit that I turned 51 last October. As a kid growing up during the 1950's and 1960's, I watched "The Twentieth Century", narrated by Walter Cronkite. The series ran 1957..1967. It was a popular science show.
The intro to the program every week was... a filmclip taken from the side of a rocket as it was launched. The film was a bit grainy. The rocket was stabilized by spinning around the long axis. You could get dizzy watching it. I'd love to be able to get my hands on one of those broadcasts today.
> The people I know in the security business agree that the problem is > impossible to solve without hardware support. If you haven't noticed, > there is a huge demand for digital content, and there is a lack of > supply of that content because the media companies fear piracy.
Hello! My PC is a powerful general purpose computer. It is *NOT*, repeat *NOT*, a f***ing "entertainment delivery device". If that was what I wanted, I would've gotten XBox and/or WEB-TV. You're missing the *REALLY* important objection to Palladium. I wouldn't mind if songs by scantily-clad-seventeen-year-old-screeching-sluts could only be played on dedicated special-purpose boxes. What I *DO* object to is the castration of PC's to the point where they're useful for *NOTHING BUT* playing songs by scantily-clad-seventeen-year-old-screeching-sluts.
MS and Intel both know that given the option of buying similar machines with/without DRM, the public will go for the version without DRM. Why do you think they want to ram it down our throats by making it impossible to buy PC's without Palladium ? If MSN and AOL could both only be accessed via special dedicated terminals, I'd have no objection. Just leave my PC alone.
> There are zero modems that require MS. However, There are modems that > require a software driver, but thats far from requiring MS. All you need > to do is make a driver for whatever platform you want, and it works fine.
Wrong. My old USR X2, flashed to v90, regularly connected at 50666 bits/sec under Windows 98SE, and today does so under Redhat 8.0. Have you ever seen a "software modem" do that outside of a test lab? Neither have I.
There is a basic technological problem with "software modems". Communications is a real-time app. The system *MUST* respond to data I/O in a small time window. Ditto for your harddrive. If the modem has its own hardware doing this, then your cpu can look after harddrive I/O. However, if the modem manufacturer cheaps out and skimps on a chip or two to save $10, your CPU must handle *EVERYTHING SIMULTANEOUSLY*. Buffering helps provide a bit of safety margin, but overal throughput still slows down.
Try *SIMULTANEOUSLY* downloading a large file *AND* writing a CD *AND* doing a large compile/build. Even a 2.4 ghz Intel CPU will fall behind servicing I/O requests.
Block all inbound TCP and UDP traffic on ports 0..1023 to desktop machines at the firewall. The average desktop/home-user has no business whatsoever listening to the internet on those ports. ftpd / sshd / telnetd / smtpd / NETBIOS, etc, etc. Only servers need to listen to the outside world on those ports. Of course, if you're an advanced hobbyist running a web server, or mailserver, or sshd on your home machine, you'll need to poke a hole in the filters.
MS has made much hype about how Palladium will improve end-user security against email viruses.
Q1) What will Palladium accomplish for end-user security that couldn't be accomplished by turning off auto-execution and refusing to execute email attachments ? I.e. an audio/x-midi attachment should be *PASSED AS A DATA FILE TO MPLAYER*, rather than executed directly. This would've stopped KLEZ dead in its tracks.
Q2) A couple of names... "Aldrich Ames and Jonathon Pollard". Given that the CIA can't keep secrets, how does Microsoft expect to ? All it takes is one mole in MS, or one disgruntled employee to give out Microsoft's authentication signature. And every virus will show up as a "properly signed app". *WHY DON'T YOU GUYS TURN OFF AUTO-EXECUTION FER-CRYIN-OUT-LOUD* ???
Q3) Microsoft has Palladium patented like crazy. How much will MS charge to allow allow Open Source apps/OS's to run under Palladium ?
Q4) What restrictions/conditions, if any, will Microsoft place on Open Source or any 3rd-party apps/OS's to run under Palladium ?
It's all about money. Microsoft sells the XBox hardware at a loss. It gets a royalty for each licenced game sold by 3rd-party game developers. The XBox BIOS checks that a game is "properly signed" before allowing it to run.
If not for this check, any developer could write and sell XBox games without Bill Gates seeing a single penny. And Bill wouldn't like that.
Think of it as Palladium v0.9.
Partitioning to make upgrades easy
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> excuse me? you are obviousally some kind of wacked newbie... > a clean fdisk/format/install is ALWAYS better than any upgrade. > anyone saying differently is an idiot.
hda1 (primary) / (4 gigs)
hda5 (logical) swap (256 megs)
hda6 (logical)/var (256 megs)
hda7 (logical)/misc (the rest of the bleeping harddrive)
Virgin install
==============
Immediately after install
- log on as root
- mv/home/misc/home
- ln -s/misc/home/home
- mv/usr/local/misc/local
- ln -s/misc/local/usr/local
Upgrade
=======
- cp -R/etc/misc/etc
- blow away hda5
- install new version
Immediately after install
- log on as root
- rm/home
- ln -s/misc/home/home
- rm/usr/local
- ln -s/misc/local/usr/local
And you're back to your old user setup. Look at/misc/etc for config settings. There; isn't it easy ?
> With this amazing new technology we would be able to > do tousnds of new and exciting thing with our television.
Such as... broadcast 4 or 5 crappy compressed below-NTSC-quality signals in the same amount of bandwidth as we currently use to broadcast 1 NTSC signal ? Any other bright ideas ?
> The EU, Japan and soon China, too, are ahead of the US with their high quality GSM system for > mobile communications and will switch over to the extremely powerful UMTS asap. We have already > lost this competition, all important mobile phone technology leaders being non-american. > And because of such stupid argumentation we will loose our lead of entertainment, too.
And do you know why 2nd and 3rd-world countries are so advanced in wireless ? It's because their landline networks are such absolute crap that people are willing to pay proportionately way more than you or I pay for basic phone service. A land line can take literally *YEARS* to get installed in those countries. Given a choice between paying through the nose for wireless, or going without phone service, or at best crappy service, people who could pay, paid.
In North America, with the world's best landline systems, the same wireless tech that the 3rd world viewed as a gift from the gods was considered an overpriced joke with crummy reception in rural areas and inside buildings. In plain English
- wireless is much better than 3rd-world landline phone systems
- but North American landline systems, having over a century of buildout, are *MUCH* better than your average cellular. Deal with it.
If the adoption of cellular was any worse, you'd see companies lobbying Tauzin to introduce legislation to scrap our current landline system, and replace it with an all-cellular system.
"Pandora" is a codeword for the doomsday weapon to be unleashed when spam is legalized and filtering is outlawed. The idea is that email will be destroyed for commercial, as well as personal purposes. The reaction from commercial interests will be to go back to the previous status quo as soon as possible, just to get their email abilities back.
I'm not a US resident, although that won't necessarily protect me from American political spam. A few questions...
- What is the law on write-in candidates ?
- Are they considered equal under the law ?
- Is every adult US citizen allowed to run in their state ?
Now for the killer question... what would happen if several thousand "fringe candidates" started *MASSIVE* email campaigns, and concentrated on just the mailservers used by the main candidates ? How long before they waved the white flag ?
> Spam also changes the way that you read email. I use HTML mail, which makes it even worse > -- did you know that some spammers use CGI image generation (with a unique ID encoded in > the URL) so that even viewing an HTML mail spam will confirm your email address?
1) Use a *REAL* mail client fer-cryin-out-loud, not a browser-posing-as-an-email-client.
2) Failing 1), download your email, and log off (if on dialup) or disconnect the modem (if on broadband).
*NOW* you can read email without web-bugs working.
> This little naming issue gets worse as sizes get bigger too. I built several multiterabyte > RAIDs and it really becomes apparent then. 1TB in hard disks are really only 931 GiB.
You're flat out wrong on this one as far as official standards are concerned. Check out the UK Metrication website. And I quote...
On 7 April 1795 (18 Germinal, year III) the Convention decreed that the new "Republican Measures" were to be henceforth legal measures in France
* mètre (length), are (surface), litre (volume), gram (mass), bar (pressure). The prefixes were Greek words for multiples
* déca- (x 10), hecto- (x 100), kilo- (x 1 000), myria- (x 10 000) and latin prefixes for fractions
* déci- (1/10), centi- (1/100), milli- (1/1 000)
Last I heard, there were still 1,000 metres in a kilometre and 1,000 grams in a kilogram. For the official US standards, check out the NIST website for official prefixes. In Canada check out The WEIGHTS AND MEASURES ACT and click on PART V "Prefixes* for Multiples and Submultiples of Basic, Supplementary and Derived Units of Measurement". They use a weird "folio" system for maintining the webpage, so deep links aren't stable.
> HiThere/Charleshixn, why are you and many others so paranoid about DRM? > If you don't like the terms of the content, you don't have to abide by it.
If that was true, there wouldn't be all this yelling and screaming. Having *SOME* machines running Palladium won't work. The only way to really guarantee Palladium's effectiveness is to ram it down everybody's throat. Ever heard of Fritz Hollings, Disney-crat from South Carolina and his SSSCA or CBTPDA (or whatever alphabet-soup-du-jour he's calling it today)? His bills would *MANDATE* that *EVERY DIGITAL DEVICE* have *DRM HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE*.
That's what people are "paranoid" about. Note that MS has already got Intel and AMD on board for the "Fritz" chip. Linux can be compiled on a variety of cpu's, so geeks might be able to avoid the DRM... *IF IT ISN'T MADE A LEGAL REQUIREMENT*.
> You as the user, get to make the choice. What could be more fair than that?
In that case, Palladium would die a quick death along the lines of DIVX and everything would be status quo. The MPAA/RIAA do *NOT* like the status quo, and they've got the best senators that money can buy on their side. I think that everybody realizes that people will not *WILLINGLY* allow their computers to be castrated. That's why MPAA/RIAA are buying the US Senate.
Better yet, make it a chick-flick. Sensitive geek is the leading man, but all the action/fighting scenes involve his wife who just happens to be a national karate champion.
The Intel i686 is a RISC core, with a legacy X86 emulation layer on top. Transmeta is another CPU that can morph its instruction set to emulate other CPUs. Why not scrap the emulation under an OS, and simply execute Java bytecode directly by the CPU ?
And if we really want to get fancy, maybe Transmeta could be set up to directly run the Emacs OS, from which you could run vim when you wanted to do serious editing.
Slashdot Mirror
> How the fuck would you do streaming media without plugins?
Howsabout a URL that gets picked up by XMMS or Xine or Real or Quicktime or MediaPlayer or... well, you get the idea. If you want to run an app, get the user to run that app. Don't make the web-page auto-launch that app.
Oh my Darl
Oh my Darl
Oh my Da-a-a-arl Clementine
My money is lost and gone forever
SCO closed at five ninety ni-i-i-ine
(If you "get" this, you're probably over 50)
Open Source is like automobiles 100 years ago. Approximately a century ago, the horse-and-buggy industry saw that automobiles were being adopted by a much wider segment than merely a handful of hobbyists. The horse-and-buggy industry tried its best to pay legislators to pass restrictive laws, and used all sorts of FUD to scare people away from that thar new-fangled horseless carriage. Sound familiar ?
Open Source is no longer the province of a bunch of hobbyist geeks. It is becoming a commercial success. That has made it enemies, because it is a "disruptive technology" that is depriving established companies of profits. Indeed, it is threatening to destroy some old-line companies altogether. With their backs to the wall, those companies have no choice but to save themselves in the only way possible, i.e. by destroying Open Source.
The natural enemies of Open Source software are proprietary software companies. SCO's expensive Unix is being wiped off the map by linux. Microsoft is having relatively minor problems with Open Source competition at present, but the potential for disaster is there. They are losing not only OS profits to linux, but Office sales to Open Office. Look at Netcraft and note what's happened to their share of the web-server market since March 2002. Repeat that trend for Windows and Office, and MS is toast.
Open Source needs allies that are just as big and powerful as its enemies. The natural allies of Open Source are non-software companies, whose core products aren't threatened by free software, indeed, benefit from it.
Those of you old enough to remember IBM's anti-trust problems will find it amusing that one of the charges against IBM was that it gave away allegedly free software with their computers, and the proprietary software companies complained that they couldn't compete. IBM prospered in that environment before, and they can prosper in it again. IBM's hardware side sees Open Source as a chance to boost profits by not paying "Microsoft Tax" on every PC they sell. And as far as IBM's consulting arm is concerned, they don't care if they get paid to manage Windows, linux, OS/2, heck they'd even manage Commodore Vic-20's if you could make it worth their while.
Other potential allies are small/medium/large businesses that are now saving money thanks to Open Source, and face the prospect of those savings being legislated away from them.
This isn't merely a question of whether or not your city hall will give Open Source a fair chance. It's also a question of whether your national legislators will outlaw Open Source altogether. "Turn the other cheek" doesn't defend you against the schoolyard bully. You must get involved in the political process in your respective countries. Like it or not, Open Source supporters will have to get involved in politics in your respective countries. You will have to identify candidates who will allow Open Source to survive, and work for their election.
> They should have most of the major MTA's by now. However we don't
> have a complete list of all MTA's on campus, so it is certainly
> possible that in the future some might be cut off. If that happens,
> we will find out about it after the fact. In some cases, the abuse
> staff may recognize it as an MTA, and ask them to add it to the list.
You don't have a complete list of all MTA's on campus; not really confidence inspiring. Oh, and while you're at it, can you guys *PLEASE* set your "virus filter machine" 128.6.72.254 (nbcs-av.ruthers.edu) to stop sending "virus notifications" ? Some infected bozo machine on Comcast in New Jersey was spewing Sobig.F all over the place a few days ago, and occasionally forging my email address as the "From:". Any computer-literate person (MCSE's don't count) knows that viruses forge the "From:" header. Yet your system was identifying virus-laden emails and sending me bogus "virus notifications"... until I blocked your domain to protect myself from your harassment. I have a personal domain for my own use, but I can see other people, even ISPs blocking outfits that use dumb auto-mailbombers.
Here's a few sites that'll be maybe at the very limits of the kids' grasp and understanding. But that's good. They should be challenged to learn "the next step up", rather than being fed dumbed-down Barney crud. There's nothing in these pages that a parent can object to (unless they happen to be diehard creationists).
o n/ tablecont.html
http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html
The Tree of Life is a collaborative web project, produced by biologists from around the world. On more than 2600 World Wide Web pages, the Tree of Life provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their history, and characteristics.
http://whyfiles.org/
"Science behind the news"
http://www.seds.org/billa/tnp/
The Nine Planets is an overview of the history, mythology, and current scientific knowledge of each of the planets and moons in our solar system. Each page has text and images, some have sounds and movies, most provide references to additional related information.
http://parallel.park.org/Canada/Museum/extincti
Extinctions: Cycles of Life and Death Through Time (more than just the dinosaurs 65 million years ago)
> And, remember -- every laptop has a plug in the back where you can connect
> as large a monitor as you can afford, a keyboard jack, a mouse jack...
> USB, Firewire, and etc let you put any kind of CD Burner you want on a laptop,
> and you can use flash cards as a second hard disk with a PCMCIA adapter
> (something that is more difficult albeit still possible with a PC). You
> can also get an external 20GB hard disk and hook it up to the firewire port.
Let me get this straight... instead of a $700 PC, I buy a $1400 laptop... *PLUS* an external harddrive... *PLUS* an external DVD... *PLUS* an external monitor... *PLUS* an external keyboard and mouse. No wonder the marketers are promoting this... the accountants at hardware manufacturers must be having wet dreams about all the money they'll rake in.
I don't need a laptop. But if I did, I'd get a laptop *AND* a regular desktop unit. Syncing data is not a problem. Hook up the two computers with a crossover CAT-5 network cable between their ethernet ports, and you can crank data across at 100 megabits/sec. And if you have a home network, it becomes even simpler.
*nix RPC runs on port 111. If I don't intend to have outside computers log in and run apps on my linux machine remotely, I shut down RPC, and uninstall it too, as well as blocking *ALL* privileged ports (0..1023) with iptables. It's bad enough that Windows comes with unnecessary stuff enabled. But when *YOU CAN'T TURN IT OFF*, something is drastically wrong.
So they check the packet ID's on incoming packets. Basically, they count the number of external connections. These ivory-tower academics amaze me with their lack of consideration of the real world.
1) I have one machine online now. I'm listening to an oldies station on live365 whilst reading Slashdot. And if Redhat had a new distro out, I could be downloading it in the background. How do they differentiate between me doing 3 things on one machine simultaneously, versus doing one thing on each of 3 machines simultaneously ?
2) Tabbed browsing to multiple sites that do HTTP refreshes bumps up the connection count. What gets *REALLY* hysterical is a typical luser running Windows with half-a-dozen spyware applets calling home all the time. It'll easily pass off as a home network.
...go to their websites, and search on the keyword "Hamidi". Ken Hamidi is a former Intel employee who claims to have a grievance against Intel. If he put up an "Intel-sucks" website, and Intel tried to shut him down, I'd be on his side. That's not what's happening.
Hamidi claims some "electronic pamphleteering right" to spew his grievances to Intel's current employees via Intel's email system. He sent 6 spams, between 8,000 to 35,000 employees each time before Intel got an injunction against him.
EFF supports him and the ACLU supports him.
OK, so one nutcase gets to harass a "bigcorp" that you don't like, so what. Now imagine every political, religious, etc, nutcase in the country claiming the *RIGHT* to spam everybody at your ISP with their "important message".
It's about consent not content. I don't care if someone is spamming porn, or religion to save my soul, or a "sale" to save a few bucks, or a political party to save my country. If the nutcases get a "right" to bombard you with their garbage, you can kiss email as we know it goodbye.
OK, I may as well admit that I turned 51 last October. As a kid growing up during the 1950's and 1960's, I watched "The Twentieth Century", narrated by Walter Cronkite. The series ran 1957..1967. It was a popular science show.
The intro to the program every week was... a filmclip taken from the side of a rocket as it was launched. The film was a bit grainy. The rocket was stabilized by spinning around the long axis. You could get dizzy watching it. I'd love to be able to get my hands on one of those broadcasts today.
> The people I know in the security business agree that the problem is
.
> impossible to solve without hardware support. If you haven't noticed,
> there is a huge demand for digital content, and there is a lack of
> supply of that content because the media companies fear piracy.
Hello! My PC is a powerful general purpose computer. It is *NOT*, repeat *NOT*, a f***ing "entertainment delivery device". If that was what I wanted, I would've gotten XBox and/or WEB-TV. You're missing the *REALLY* important objection to Palladium. I wouldn't mind if songs by scantily-clad-seventeen-year-old-screeching-sluts could only be played on dedicated special-purpose boxes. What I *DO* object to is the castration of PC's to the point where they're useful for *NOTHING BUT* playing songs by scantily-clad-seventeen-year-old-screeching-sluts
MS and Intel both know that given the option of buying similar machines with/without DRM, the public will go for the version without DRM. Why do you think they want to ram it down our throats by making it impossible to buy PC's without Palladium ? If MSN and AOL could both only be accessed via special dedicated terminals, I'd have no objection. Just leave my PC alone.
> Hint: you will be able to turn it off,
Really ? You seem to trust MS/Intel a lot more than I do.
> since it would break backward compatibility if you couldn't.
Just like MS worries so much about MS Office 11 being backwards-compatible to Windows before 2K?
And don't forget to ask a few bitter Visual Basic programmers about having to re-write the vast portion of their code to move it to dot-NET.
> There are zero modems that require MS. However, There are modems that
> require a software driver, but thats far from requiring MS. All you need
> to do is make a driver for whatever platform you want, and it works fine.
Wrong. My old USR X2, flashed to v90, regularly connected at 50666 bits/sec under Windows 98SE, and today does so under Redhat 8.0. Have you ever seen a "software modem" do that outside of a test lab? Neither have I.
There is a basic technological problem with "software modems". Communications is a real-time app. The system *MUST* respond to data I/O in a small time window. Ditto for your harddrive. If the modem has its own hardware doing this, then your cpu can look after harddrive I/O. However, if the modem manufacturer cheaps out and skimps on a chip or two to save $10, your CPU must handle *EVERYTHING SIMULTANEOUSLY*. Buffering helps provide a bit of safety margin, but overal throughput still slows down.
Try *SIMULTANEOUSLY* downloading a large file *AND* writing a CD *AND* doing a large compile/build. Even a 2.4 ghz Intel CPU will fall behind servicing I/O requests.
Block all inbound TCP and UDP traffic on ports 0..1023 to desktop machines at the firewall. The average desktop/home-user has no business whatsoever listening to the internet on those ports. ftpd / sshd / telnetd / smtpd / NETBIOS, etc, etc. Only servers need to listen to the outside world on those ports. Of course, if you're an advanced hobbyist running a web server, or mailserver, or sshd on your home machine, you'll need to poke a hole in the filters.
MS has made much hype about how Palladium will improve end-user security against email viruses.
Q1) What will Palladium accomplish for end-user security that couldn't be accomplished by turning off auto-execution and refusing to execute email attachments ? I.e. an audio/x-midi attachment should be *PASSED AS A DATA FILE TO MPLAYER*, rather than executed directly. This would've stopped KLEZ dead in its tracks.
Q2) A couple of names... "Aldrich Ames and Jonathon Pollard". Given that the CIA can't keep secrets, how does Microsoft expect to ? All it takes is one mole in MS, or one disgruntled employee to give out Microsoft's authentication signature. And every virus will show up as a "properly signed app". *WHY DON'T YOU GUYS TURN OFF AUTO-EXECUTION FER-CRYIN-OUT-LOUD* ???
Q3) Microsoft has Palladium patented like crazy. How much will MS charge to allow allow Open Source apps/OS's to run under Palladium ?
Q4) What restrictions/conditions, if any, will Microsoft place on Open Source or any 3rd-party apps/OS's to run under Palladium ?
It's all about money. Microsoft sells the XBox hardware at a loss. It gets a royalty for each licenced game sold by 3rd-party game developers. The XBox BIOS checks that a game is "properly signed" before allowing it to run.
If not for this check, any developer could write and sell XBox games without Bill Gates seeing a single penny. And Bill wouldn't like that.
Think of it as Palladium v0.9.
> excuse me? you are obviousally some kind of wacked newbie...
/var (256 megs) /misc (the rest of the bleeping harddrive)
/home /misc/home /misc/home /home /usr/local /misc/local /misc/local /usr/local
/etc /misc/etc
/home /misc/home /home /usr/local /misc/local /usr/local
/misc/etc for config settings. There; isn't it easy ?
> a clean fdisk/format/install is ALWAYS better than any upgrade.
> anyone saying differently is an idiot.
hda1 (primary) / (4 gigs)
hda5 (logical) swap (256 megs)
hda6 (logical)
hda7 (logical)
Virgin install
==============
Immediately after install
- log on as root
- mv
- ln -s
- mv
- ln -s
Upgrade
=======
- cp -R
- blow away hda5
- install new version
Immediately after install
- log on as root
- rm
- ln -s
- rm
- ln -s
And you're back to your old user setup. Look at
> With this amazing new technology we would be able to
> do tousnds of new and exciting thing with our television.
Such as... broadcast 4 or 5 crappy compressed below-NTSC-quality signals in the same amount of bandwidth as we currently use to broadcast 1 NTSC signal ? Any other bright ideas ?
> The EU, Japan and soon China, too, are ahead of the US with their high quality GSM system for
> mobile communications and will switch over to the extremely powerful UMTS asap. We have already
> lost this competition, all important mobile phone technology leaders being non-american.
> And because of such stupid argumentation we will loose our lead of entertainment, too.
And do you know why 2nd and 3rd-world countries are so advanced in wireless ? It's because their landline networks are such absolute crap that people are willing to pay proportionately way more than you or I pay for basic phone service. A land line can take literally *YEARS* to get installed in those countries. Given a choice between paying through the nose for wireless, or going without phone service, or at best crappy service, people who could pay, paid.
In North America, with the world's best landline systems, the same wireless tech that the 3rd world viewed as a gift from the gods was considered an overpriced joke with crummy reception in rural areas and inside buildings. In plain English
- wireless is much better than 3rd-world landline phone systems
- but North American landline systems, having over a century of buildout, are *MUCH* better than your average cellular. Deal with it.
If the adoption of cellular was any worse, you'd see companies lobbying Tauzin to introduce legislation to scrap our current landline system, and replace it with an all-cellular system.
> Don't let DRM == absolute evil, but instead, let the
> "one company to rule them all" mentality be attributed to evil.
Neither the MPAA nor the RIAA consist of "one company", yet they're thoroughly evil.
"Pandora" is a codeword for the doomsday weapon to be unleashed when spam is legalized and filtering is outlawed. The idea is that email will be destroyed for commercial, as well as personal purposes. The reaction from commercial interests will be to go back to the previous status quo as soon as possible, just to get their email abilities back.
I'm not a US resident, although that won't necessarily protect me from American political spam. A few questions...
- What is the law on write-in candidates ?
- Are they considered equal under the law ?
- Is every adult US citizen allowed to run in their state ?
Now for the killer question... what would happen if several thousand "fringe candidates" started *MASSIVE* email campaigns, and concentrated on just the mailservers used by the main candidates ? How long before they waved the white flag ?
> Spam also changes the way that you read email. I use HTML mail, which makes it even worse
> -- did you know that some spammers use CGI image generation (with a unique ID encoded in
> the URL) so that even viewing an HTML mail spam will confirm your email address?
1) Use a *REAL* mail client fer-cryin-out-loud, not a browser-posing-as-an-email-client.
2) Failing 1), download your email, and log off (if on dialup) or disconnect the modem (if on broadband).
*NOW* you can read email without web-bugs working.
> This little naming issue gets worse as sizes get bigger too. I built several multiterabyte
> RAIDs and it really becomes apparent then. 1TB in hard disks are really only 931 GiB.
You're flat out wrong on this one as far as official standards are concerned. Check out the UK Metrication website. And I quote...
On 7 April 1795 (18 Germinal, year III) the Convention decreed that the new "Republican Measures" were to be henceforth legal measures in France
* mètre (length), are (surface), litre (volume), gram (mass), bar (pressure). The prefixes were Greek words for multiples
* déca- (x 10), hecto- (x 100), kilo- (x 1 000), myria- (x 10 000) and latin prefixes for fractions
* déci- (1/10), centi- (1/100), milli- (1/1 000)
Last I heard, there were still 1,000 metres in a kilometre and 1,000 grams in a kilogram. For the official US standards, check out the NIST website for official prefixes. In Canada check out The WEIGHTS AND MEASURES ACT and click on PART V
"Prefixes* for Multiples and Submultiples of Basic, Supplementary and Derived Units of Measurement". They use a weird "folio" system for maintining the webpage, so deep links aren't stable.
> HiThere/Charleshixn, why are you and many others so paranoid about DRM?
> If you don't like the terms of the content, you don't have to abide by it.
If that was true, there wouldn't be all this yelling and screaming. Having *SOME* machines running Palladium won't work. The only way to really guarantee Palladium's effectiveness is to ram it down everybody's throat. Ever heard of Fritz Hollings, Disney-crat from South Carolina and his SSSCA or CBTPDA (or whatever alphabet-soup-du-jour he's calling it today)? His bills would *MANDATE* that *EVERY DIGITAL DEVICE* have *DRM HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE*.
That's what people are "paranoid" about. Note that MS has already got Intel and AMD on board for the "Fritz" chip. Linux can be compiled on a variety of cpu's, so geeks might be able to avoid the DRM... *IF IT ISN'T MADE A LEGAL REQUIREMENT*.
> You as the user, get to make the choice. What could be more fair than that?
In that case, Palladium would die a quick death along the lines of DIVX and everything would be status quo. The MPAA/RIAA do *NOT* like the status quo, and they've got the best senators that money can buy on their side. I think that everybody realizes that people will not *WILLINGLY* allow their computers to be castrated. That's why MPAA/RIAA are buying the US Senate.
Better yet, make it a chick-flick. Sensitive geek is the leading man, but all the action/fighting scenes involve his wife who just happens to be a
national karate champion.
The Intel i686 is a RISC core, with a legacy X86 emulation layer on top. Transmeta is another CPU that can morph its instruction set to emulate other CPUs. Why not scrap the emulation under an OS, and simply execute Java bytecode directly by the CPU ?
And if we really want to get fancy, maybe Transmeta could be set up to directly run the Emacs OS, from which you could run vim when you wanted to do serious editing.