Can't believe they'd ever ship without an OS - the average consumer would never buy it. It depends a LOT on what you consider an "Average Consumer". I suspect a fair few business users could manage quite nicely with Ghost installs of $OS_OF_CHOICE (We do this already; rather than install many-many company-standard packages, we install ONE machine, take a Ghost of it, and then impress that image onto the remaining machines in the batch. To be honest, I can see this simplifying the job of $HELLDESK_PHONE_GUY - ship a single, bootable disk (possibly even a floppy!) that tests all the hardware shipped as standard and/or as options - all the user has to do is reboot+disk, and click a "test item xxx" button when told to. Any or all OS problems would then be the users', not the support guys - other than to ship out patches if needed. --
How bout this... Why does this site encourage posting in plaintext? Why dont we all start posting encrypted feedback?
<Snip Stuff that isn't Rot13ed:+)>
It's mainly because it is a forum - what would be the point of you posting to a discussion if no-one but you could understand it?
ps. seriously though, why isn't slashdot a secure web server? There isn't a point - Slashdot Accounts are practically valueless (Ok, you might get a extra mod point or two by default over an Anonymous post, but that's not enough to go to the time and effort of trying to "steal" a Slashdot account) and SSL adds a fair processing overhead per connection. --
Dude, are you nuts? Do you seriously expect me not ot view every attractive woman in site as a potential mate, watch her with appreciation, and fantasize about her? I thought all men did this all the time. On the other hand, you could INVEST in a few platonic relationships with girls you haven't got much chance of getting into bed with (due to physical distance, for example), for some genuine info on what you should be doing to get the other 98% to think about saying yes when you ask them out:+) --
Actually I always find it vaguely distastefull when people suggest how somebody should change to attract a man/woman. Yep, general sweeping statements never apply to everyone - not even this one:+)
I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not for anybody, and quite frankly even if I could I'd be feeling guilty the whole time knowing that I'd pulled under false pretenses.. A lot depends on what you want out of your relationship - we are not talking about pretending to do/like/feel 'X' when you don't - we are talking about *learning* to do/like/feel 'X', which is a different matter. I don't believe in trying to make changes to make you more appealing to MOTOS in general - but if you are attracted to an individual MOTOS, and she dislikes something you do, wouldn't you be willing to give it up to please him/her? I can't imagine a definition of love that doesn't involve wanting to make the target of your affections as happy as possible:+)
Mind you, if you are talking about 'pulling', that's not really the same, is it - he/she is probably doing exactly the same, if not worse:+) --
>Obviously, if you find entire subroutines copied from the GPLed product and just pasted in, But what if they sit with 2 monitors and re-type the GPL code from one monitor to the other? Is that still GPLed code? Yes, it is - the question here is, how much of a block of code can be reasonably considered to be "common discovery", "common progenitor" or simply "read it once, and forgot where you got it". If it is a technique you read, and later on think "Ah, I *know* how to do this" are you a monster for forgetting where you learnt it? Block copying (by whatever method) of other people's code is theft.
And exactly HOW will the GPL help you if you never see the closed source product sourcecode? It won't - but then, that wasn't the question asked. The question I replied to stated it as "if someone steals their source".
>This means they are wrong, but does not prove they are the Bad Guys. If they are wrong, arn't they 'bad guys'? Nope - you are wrong occasionally, and that doesn't make you a bad guy. People make mistakes, misunderstand instructions (particularly those in foreign languages) or make assumptions without reading the manual, based on what other people have told them. To be wrong isn't bad - to LEAVE things wrong after they have been gently pointed out to you is.
What I see it boiling down to is this: The GPL falls under the same concept of 'locks keep honest people honest'. If you are going to STEAL source, consider it gone. Because, to date, nothing is being done to 'stop' the 'thiefs'. (because there is nothing that anyone is willing TO do.) And if people can take GPL code and do what they want with it, what good is the GPL? The GPL is enforcable (I hate to think how much money it would take in the US courts though) but that isn't the point. The point is, taking ANYONE else's source code is a crime - even the GPLed source, so a firm must balance the risk of doing so with the financial and possibly criminal penalties if someone with a little integrity or an axe to grind in their company, at ANY time in the future, decides to leak the information to the world - Quite possibly the entire profit of the product would be forfeit to the Licence holder, and I can't see the GPL being an exception to this. --
Obviously haven't been in Vegas recently.:-) Nope, I am in the UK - Vagas is a little far for me:+)
Most people gamble with coins, not chips, and they gamble at slot machines, not tables. Slot machines can be the traditional one-armed bandit. Hmm. well, they may not be casino-issued chips, but they are still effectively chips - if you took $1K to a casino, would it be a big bag of coins, or would it be notes / ecash and you change it there? But don't forget the computer poker machines. These are mostly very low-tech, but there are some great touch-screen video-poker games with sophisticated graphics. I don't usually enjoy gambling, but I play them for the pretty graphics and the sound effects, no joke. I'll take your word for that - I don't actually visit Vegas that often:+) so, you presumably feed in coinage, and press buttons, like a glorified fruit-machine? --
Are you sure? I thought it was asymptotic... the size of the key wouldn't make much difference between say a 10 char key versus one twice its size, because once you get into the huge range, the end result would only be slightly more secure. There are two major forms of encryption currently in use - one is Public key (or asymmetric) encryption, the other classic(or Symmetric). The types differ in the number of keys - PK uses a different key to encrypt than to decrypt - you can give the encryption key to whoever you chose, or even post it to the web, and only your decryption key can extract the message again. Creating a copy of the decryption key, even given the Encryption key, involves solving a "hard" mathematical problem - usually factoring a large number into two primes, or a similar problem in the area of discrete logs. This is difficult, computationally,but doesn't increase as a strict multiple - each five or six extra binary digits doubles the time taken to crack one key, on the average - current estimates are that 1024 bit keys are unbreakable in any realistic time (yes, a major government agency may be able to break *one* a year, if their computer technology is vastly greater than ours, and they devote their entire budget to it. Experts in cryptography believe even one a year is unrealistic, and even one a *century* might be an understatement, but suggest you use 2048 bit keys anyhow:+) Symmetric encryption uses the same key to decrypt as encrypt, and if it is well designed, the only attack is to try each possible key, one after the other. for 56bit DES, this takes about three days (on the average) for even a modest-sized company; but in this case, adding a single bit to the length DOES double the time taken, so a 57 bit key would take six days, a 58 would take twelve and so forth. The most common length of key in use for symmetric encryption is 128 bits - again, it is barely possible that a major government could break one by brute force *per year* but I doubt I am important enough to be that one:+)
Passwords are a different thing again, and often much easier to crack. A "dictionary attack" is an attempt to try passphrases from a list to see if a real word or two have been used as a password - this works more often than you would expect, as people tend to use normal, english words - not a good idea.
One point that is worth remembering though is that many UNIX based systems limit you to a maximum password length of only eight characters - 56 bits.... and your key is therefore limited similarly.
PGP is probably the best known example of dedicated, unbreakable encryption. You may wish to check it out, or the Gnu varient Gnu Privacy Guard - they both use the same basic file formats and methods, and for a decent key size, unrealistic to break into by pure cryptography - but if you are paranoid, they are relatively easy to break if they break into your house and modify the copy installed on your PC:+) --
This event is a showcase of the general malaise of this country. If you blew 70 grand in VEGAS you would get no forgiveness. However, some crackpot blows the same amount ONLINE and is immediately forgiven by an equally incompetent judge. Calling the credit card a "loan" doesnt quite work. not to sure about the reasoning on this one - if you blew $70K in Vegas, you would be sitting in a big hotel, having gone to the trouble of travelling there; you would have gone and exchanged your cash for chips (and you would have had to obtain that money in advance, as I doubt casinos would give most people much credit); you would have sat at a table, putting piles of chips onto a board (or whatever) and watched them pulled away from it as you lost. This is all physical, understandable, and there. Ok, now we cut to online gambling. A user sits and plays what is in effect a video game - just like they have been playing since they were kids. they click buttons, they toggle lights, and when they click the right or wrong button, numbers appear on the screen (do they casinos even display a running total of how far ahead or behind you are? or just how much you have won or lost on the current throw?). Problem is, rather than saying "out of lives, insert coin" it says "out of credit card, insert a further $70K! I imagine suddenly realising she had spent more than she could earn in a year came as a bit of a shock....
This event sets a rather unfortunate precident for the future, meaning that I wouldnt want to get into the online casino business any time soon. Not too sure about that one - you would need a lot of money to set up (online servers, automatic VISA, Mastercard, American Express and so forth validation are all expensive) and would have to make a fair profit in the first year or so - but I am not sure the casino will be expected to eat all the loss on this one - normally, if a given transaction turns out to be fraudulent on the buyers part, the CC company has to eat the loss - provided the transaction was verified with them. They may end up splitting the loss between them in this case, if only to avoid the Casino insisting on re-verifying every transaction they have ever made in the light of this ruling. --
I mean, VISA loans her money for gambling, she looses, she sues, VISA doesn't charge her (duh). Suppose she won. Could the 'gambling establishment' refuse to give her the winnings on the grounds that she used an illegal loan? Unless I am very much mistaken, then this means ALL online gambling by credit card from california is invalid - possibly from this moment on (for convenience's sake) but possibly also rectroactively - in which case, ALL transactions (both wins and loses) would need backing out, an accounting nightmare.
Still trying to get my head around this ridiculous judging. I suspect it is more an attempt to "send a message" to the online casino businesses than genuine compassion for this woman - many government organisations (and not just in the states) don't like the idea of a casino, used by their citizens, that they can't regulate, licence and get their cut from:+)
Now I'm not a lawyer, but when you apply for a loan, you usually are asked to specify the reason - if you put "Gambling" then the bank should refuse it if its illegal... if you however put "general expenditure" and go about gambling, why on earth would the bank be held liable for that? They shouldn't, and wouldn't - but then the USER would be guilty of making a false declaration to the bank. To be honest, I am surprised the agreement she signed for the card in the first place didn't constrain her not to use the card to purchase goods or services illegally.
Besides VISA accounts are not really loans, they're more like a general expenditure overdrafts. VISA had knowledge of where the money was going, but stop and think for a while: VISA is international, there are god knows how many weird or even contradicting laws, hence its not only ridiculous, its impossible for them to filter transactions. It's far from impossible - certain goods and services (drugs, gambling, alcohol, animals) could be flagged for the vendors, and yet another section of checkboxes (with these fields) added to the initial form, stating that you declare purchase of these goods is legal for you. This would add one byte per client record, and a trivial bitwise AND check. I can't see the fact that a company being international in scope exempting them from the laws in each country they have a branch office - it should be the job of the lawyers FOR each country's office to keep at least the Declarations on the straight and narrow
Oh well. I guess they could just add another disclaimer in their next version of the contract. Yet another proof that the US legal system needs a healthy dose of common sense. Not sure about that - the credit card company was clearly in the wrong, although they didn't know it at the time - they obviously overlooked a law in a single state, but - what are their lawyers for, if not to keep current on each state's new laws? there can't be THAT many each year that relate directly to credit or credit cards. --
After 3-5 years of non-payment, the credit card company will forgive the debt owed to them by their delinquent customer. The customer at this point usually thinks that they are off the hook, scott free. BUT, an unpaid loan turns into *tada* INCOME! This income becomes TAXABLE! So, once the debt is forgiven, the credit card company turns in their customer to the IRS, and the customer suddenly finds themselves with a tiger on their tail. A much bigger tiger than a credit card company. I'm not sure if this is applies to this case - The debt hasn't been "forgiven", the original transaction has been found to be illegal and therefore didn't happen - legally, VISA should have turned down the application for credit, and are therefore responsible for their "mistake". I doubt they will let this stop them blacklisting her, though - but $70K is probably worth that to her, especially as she would have been black-listed for the debt anyhow. --
Here on Slashdot, in one of the discussions of CodeWarrior, someone made a claim that they used GPL code in their closed-source product. It depends on the licence (LGPL, for example, is a lot more lenient on closed-source packages, as are things like OS compilers - would you use GCC to compile your code if it automatically became Open Source by doing so? Making or not making a project Open Source should be a decision available to the company - along with encouragement to make the right choice, of course:+)
Are they a bad guy? Are they a bad guy if someone steals their source and shows GPL code? It depends on the code - if you look in the source , and here are a few lines that remind you of lines that do a similar job in a GPLed product you have seen - then the programmer may well have seen how the process was done in that product, or even both projects may have drawn on a common methodology (I can remember when four students were pulled up for "cheating" by a lecturer, because two subroutines were identical in each submisson. Turns out they were supplied as standard "example" routines with the compiler the students used, and as it was just a GUI routine (rather than fundimental to the problem) the students had just cut-and-pasted it from the helpfiles...) Obviously, if you find entire subroutines copied from the GPLed product and just pasted in, they should be hung from the yardarm.
That chinese Linux release that was claimed to not follow the GPL, are they a bad guy? It still hasn't been shown they are intentionally violating the GPL - iirc, this is their first distro and it is almost entirely unmodified OS software, but with Kernel Patches for chinese localisation. Yes, they should have supplied and / or placed on their website the source (or diff files) of the modifications; Certainly, they should be sending out to each user a letter telling them how to obtain the source for themselves. This means they are wrong, but does not prove they are the Bad Guys. If they continue to be wrong because being wrong is profitable for them, then they should be joining the previous offender on the yardarm:+)
Or, are they un-touchable because of international copywite issues? No idea - but here in the UK, you can claim back all the profits from the violating products - a fairly effective remedy:+)
Or, is the only bad guy Microsoft? No, just the usual target - Mostly because as it IS so big, it's lawyers should be better able to check that a given event (like the Stak Technologies thing) is well beyond the pale before it ever makes it to the door. Of course, those PERFORMING those acts may well not bother asking the lawyers first.... --
Okay, is ANYONE else out there sick of/.'s lovely point-by-point rebuttals? If we're going to have an argument, at least do it in such a format to use your own words. Not really (and this is a point-by-point rebuttal <Grin>). One of the things most complained about in responses from companies with Marketing Divisions is that they DON'T ANSWER THE QUESTIONS. They make up their own questions, biased towards the things their product or service is good at, and blandly ignore the ones that make them look bad. The only way to correctly answer a set of statements is to go down each and say "yes, this is correct" or "no, this is wrong, for these reasons". the "for these reasons" bit is important, though:+)
Having said that: < Schnipp > You go on to say that when a company tries to test limits we push them back onto the "straight and narrow" - If a company isn't willing to cooperate then the only way to do that is through legal action. I am not suggesting that the OSS should've taken legal action against Corel. What I am saying is that we might have been better off if legal action had been necessary. Corel did the right thing - good for them. The GPL still hasn't been tested in court and that's something that needs to be done. Yes, I'm willing to set fire to my house - if only to keep the town from burning down. I half-agree - It does no-one any good if we jump into legal action when a newcomer to the OS arena makes a newbie-style mistake - This will get the Lawyers rich, and just maybe a few legal precedents set (and if the case is borderline, maybe even the wrong ones). The correct response is to start with a switch, and work your way up to the heavy grenades - Start with a polite letter, then a polite letter in legalese, then... well, you get the idea. at least then, if it does make it all the way to court, you can show intent to break the GPL, not just a technical breach. I think it would be a really bad idea to come down hard on firms that are making mistakes, in order to try and prove your weapon works - particularly with one as expensive and inefficient as the courts - this is "send a message" philosophy, not correct treatment of the case in hand. --
What really amuses me is everyone saying that "Linux never crashes" and "Linux is stable", and claiming that NT crashes all the time, when in fact it's the same scenario as when the NT GUI goes down; the kernel is still going, it's just that you can't do anything from the GUI. Odd, whenever an NT box I have the misfortune to need BSODs out, I seem to lose drives mapped to it, and the webserver stops responding. I wasn't aware those were normally considered parts of the GUI.....
You know this wasn't too bright for the folks over at Xi. Let's look at who would buy this stuff. Anyone dealing with X servers HAS to know quite a bit by the nature of X windows; that has always been the case and from what I've seen in Xfree 4 will continue to remain the case. So let's establish one thing, that anyone who deals with 30 workstations all running X knows their stuff. It's something no amateur could do, period. Problem is, the knowledgable Techie isn't the target audience of this sort of ad - it has exactly two targets:
Senior (read PHB) Management - people who make purchasing decisions without consulting the Tech people expected to impliment them
"Home Admin" people - those that are not technically clued, but have bought a commercial distro because it was the same price as a game, and they thought it would make them look cool to their friends. Where before, they would have seen an XFree86 crash and phoned DeadRat or Choosy's tech support lines for advice, a percentage will think "ah, it's that lousy free Xwindows at fault, I need the shiny, BETTER version."
Both of the above groups probably consider the commerical distros "boughtware", and can't see the problem of buying another "boughtware" package to fix problems with the first - just look at sales for MS's win98>win98SE "upgrade".......
You know this wasn't too bright for the folks over at Xi. Let's look at who would buy this stuff. Anyone dealing with X servers HAS to know quite a bit by the nature of X windows; that has always been the case and from what I've seen in Xfree 4 will continue to remain the case. So let's establish one thing, that anyone who deals with 30 workstations all running X knows their stuff. It's something no amateur could do, period. problem is, the knowledgable Techie isn't the target audience of this sort of ad - it has exactly two targets:
Senior (read PHB) Management - people who make purchasing decisions without consulting the Tech people expected to impliment them
"Home Admin" people - those that are not technically clued, but have bought a commercial distro because it was the same price as a game, and they thought it would make them look cool to their friends. Where before, they would have seen an XFree86 crash and phoned DeadRat or Choosy's tech support lines for advice, a percentage will think "ah, it's that lousy free Xwindows at fault, I need the shiny, BETTER version."
Both of the above groups probably consider the commerical distros "boughtware", and can't see the problem of buying another "boughtware" package to fix problems with the first - just look at sales for MS's win98>win98SE "upgrade".......
I find it hard to beleive that Sega wouldn't provide some sort of support for this type of setup because it's so common and technically pretty trivial. I suspect the real problem won't be the communications, but that the Dreamcast games will not come with Server software - that will be sold separately to ISPs (at a vastly inflated price) or bundled with a contract agreement that entitles the ISP to support Dreamcast connections. Of course, this could well be NT or UNIX server software, as those machines are more likely to be efficent running as a server than a Dreamcast is (I can't see many ISPs setting up racks of Dreamcasts to run their game servers, for some reason) --
RedHat does have a patch repository, but has anyone actually had to LOOK for a particular security patch on Microsoft's site (ex. not followed a link directly to a particular patch)? Good luck. sounds about right to me:+) I have currently been on hold to M$oft tech support for thirty minutes ("We are sorry to keep you waiting, your call will be answered by the next available operator"). This was after ten minutes of tracking down MS Q document Q182671, following the link to Novell's site, following the link BACK to Q182671, finding the section marked "patch available, but not tested, contact MS pay-support for the patch". First guy cut me off after giving me a telephone number (after a mere 10 minutes on hold) which turned out to be for a Sales guy tasked to send out SP2 and nothing else. Got put back to first guy, who finally figured out that it might not be something I could download from the web (or else why would I be phoning?), gave me a "case id" and put me on hold. that was half an hour ago.......... now this is for a minor patch to a spreadsheet - what would it be like for a major security loophole in NT? --
The patent specificaly states the usage of HTML documents. Yep.
This in and of itself indicates that the patent is useless. Nope, sorry
Java, Javascript, VBScript, ASP, Perl, CGI, etc are all NOT HTML. Therefore it is fairly easy to argue that any document containing these things (AKA every dynamicaly generated web page) does not fall under the patent, regardless of the use of cookies. Yep, all of the above are NON-HTML - so? from the above, the ONLY one sent to the user as part of the response is Javascript - and that is imbedded in HTML. All the rest either generate HTML on-the-fly and send it, or in the case of Java, are linked to by the HTML document and are helpfully downloaded by your browser for you, and inserted into the screen display. For this to invalidate the patent, you would have to assume that including IMAGES on the page (which are non-html, and downloaded by the browser during it's parsing of the document) invalidated the patent too.....
Assuming the patent itself could hold up in court (which is a big leap of faith), any decent lawyer can simply walk in, say "Our sales process uses scripting documents, not HTML documents" and that will be the end of the suit. That would be nice, yes - problem is, the nasty, bubble-bursting techie from Amazon would telnet to port 80 on your webserver, issue the request for the page, and guess what he would get back (and the answer isn't your ASP script). Amazon is stating what the user receives, not how the server made it. --
What exactly is it that the coders are afraid of? Bundled-in games? Rapid adoption of linux? The article said nothing about coders fearing the adoption of Linux. In case you haven't noticed, most programmers actually *like* it when people use software that they have worked on -- an awful lot of us are proud of the things that we put our time and effort into. Personally, I am glad to see more LINUX games out there - but would be more worried about some of these games coming WITH linux on the game CDs, rather than the other way round. I can imagine the marketing spin on this "We need to standardise the Linux environment this game runs on, and have added to support the latest and greatest " - but what it would come down to is Linux becoming just a bootstrap for the game, and fragmenting as the different games implimentors drag it in different directions to suit their game engines. However, this WILL give an incentive for hardware manufacturers to release kernel module drivers for their newest and fastest, rather than the Linux community having to roll their own from unavailable specs and reverse-engineering of Dx6 drivers..... --
I am by no means familiar (aside from reading occasional user documentation) with distributed programing frameworks, but i am fairly familiar with C/C++. one thing i think should be noted is that while C/C++ syntax and semantics are well standaradized, as operating systems and architectures differ vastly, they are apt to have different implimentations of certain system calls (eg network sockets, file system calls (beyond things like open/close), etc). afaik, interpretted languages like java and perl should be able to avoid this problem since its all handled by the interpreter. Hmm. While not directly relating to the original question (as far as I know, there is no Corba support or similar) there is an attempt to make a "common" Cross-Platform C++ Library at the WxWindows Project Which may be of interest. --
You guys crack me up. You can't even see the validity in the post, since it attacks linux (heaven forbid). Spot on - we can't see the validity of the post, as it attacks Linux - it doesn't make any points, throw up questions or answers, or indeed consist of anything but "It talked about Linux, I gave up at that point because I don't want to hear it" The author would like to see a discussion of Open Source software that doesn't mention Linux. No doubt there would be people who would like a discussion of Webservers that doesn't mention Apatche, or of Operating Systems that doesn't mention Sun, Microsoft or HP - but they would be trolling as well. Yes there is open source software out there that not only isn't Linux, but without which Linux itself couldn't have been created - GCC for example; but it has to be accepted that Linux, particularly in the eyes of the media, is the Flagship of the Open Source community, and that a piece without any mention of it at all is likely to be flamed for that omission and it's otherwise valid points overlooked. --
Actually, you can get Mathematica for Linux. But there's no free (GNU) equivalent, as the original message pointed out.. Personally, I can't see the problem with this - If there are Commercial versions of the software for Linux, as well as Commercial versions for Mac, Wintel and the commercial unixen, why is this a problem? While free, open copies of software are nice, as far as I can tell, Mathematica is a proprietary language owned by Wolfram Research, Inc, for which they hold the trademark - I am not too sure to what extent a Open Source compiler for this language would be possible, as I don't know how much and/or which parts of the language are copyrighted - but I was unable to find ANY other implimentation of this language but the "offical" one by Wolfram in a websearch.... --
Powerpoint and Word both convert Well. Excell spreadsheets loose all their graphic objects though (this is NOT good when your entire network map was done in this:+) --
If I am reading this correctly, you have to go request a key for message X from a server (presumably the sender's, unless HE has to request the key in the first place from the company) I don't know about the rest of the Slashdotters, but I don't spend all that much time actually connected to the internet - I am much more likely to link, download email and news, then unlink and have phone line available (and not running up my phone bill, which is per-minute in the UK) while I read offline. To have to connect to the Net *again* if I wish to read my inbound mail would be discouraging, to say the least.  : Odds would be very high someone would "hack" a version of their reader to get all the keys as the mail comes in, and store them for later use (possibly ignoring expiry data) simply to keep from having to reconnect once per message --
PGP (at least in version 2.x) uses RSA only to encode the session key, and then uses IDEA (a symmetric-key algorithm, which is also patented) to encode the message. Yes, later versions of PGP do almost exactly the same thing (there is a choice of what method you use, so the old "fixed" choices of RSA/IDEA/MD5 are now just possible, supported options, but the structure remains the same)
I don't know when this second patent expires According to the IDEA owner's site (www.Ascom.com) the US patent runs out in 2010, the european one a year after. Apparently, the Japanese one is Still Pending - after eight years????
...or if it is licensed for free software use. Licence hangs off the same page; basically, it is free for the Special Case of use by two individuals, using it for personal reasons, who have not paid anything for the software. Writing software that brings in money (even shareware, although there is a initial exception of the first 10,000usd in this case) requires a product licence, and "commercial use" includes the non-profit organisations normally excluded from that description (although they say they special-case such organisations, no details of what a charity might expect to pay are available on that site) --
Slashdot Mirror
Can't believe they'd ever ship without an OS - the average consumer would never buy it.
It depends a LOT on what you consider an "Average Consumer". I suspect a fair few business users could manage quite nicely with Ghost installs of $OS_OF_CHOICE (We do this already; rather than install many-many company-standard packages, we install ONE machine, take a Ghost of it, and then impress that image onto the remaining machines in the batch.
To be honest, I can see this simplifying the job of $HELLDESK_PHONE_GUY - ship a single, bootable disk (possibly even a floppy!) that tests all the hardware shipped as standard and/or as options - all the user has to do is reboot+disk, and click a "test item xxx" button when told to. Any or all OS problems would then be the users', not the support guys - other than to ship out patches if needed.
--
Why does this site encourage posting in plaintext?
Why dont we all start posting encrypted feedback?
<Snip Stuff that isn't Rot13ed :+)>
It's mainly because it is a forum - what would be the point of you posting to a discussion if no-one but you could understand it?
ps. seriously though, why isn't slashdot a secure web server?
There isn't a point - Slashdot Accounts are practically valueless (Ok, you might get a extra mod point or two by default over an Anonymous post, but that's not enough to go to the time and effort of trying to "steal" a Slashdot account) and SSL adds a fair processing overhead per connection.
--
Dude, are you nuts? Do you seriously expect me not ot view every attractive woman in site as a potential mate, watch her with appreciation, and fantasize about her? I thought all men did this all the time. :+)
On the other hand, you could INVEST in a few platonic relationships with girls you haven't got much chance of getting into bed with (due to physical distance, for example), for some genuine info on what you should be doing to get the other 98% to think about saying yes when you ask them out
--
Yep, general sweeping statements never apply to everyone - not even this one
I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not for anybody, and quite frankly even if I could I'd be feeling guilty the whole time knowing that I'd pulled under false pretenses.. :+)
A lot depends on what you want out of your relationship - we are not talking about pretending to do/like/feel 'X' when you don't - we are talking about *learning* to do/like/feel 'X', which is a different matter.
I don't believe in trying to make changes to make you more appealing to MOTOS in general - but if you are attracted to an individual MOTOS, and she dislikes something you do, wouldn't you be willing to give it up to please him/her? I can't imagine a definition of love that doesn't involve wanting to make the target of your affections as happy as possible
Mind you, if you are talking about 'pulling', that's not really the same, is it - he/she is probably doing exactly the same, if not worse :+)
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But what if they sit with 2 monitors and re-type the GPL code from one monitor to the other? Is that still GPLed code?
Yes, it is - the question here is, how much of a block of code can be reasonably considered to be "common discovery", "common progenitor" or simply "read it once, and forgot where you got it". If it is a technique you read, and later on think "Ah, I *know* how to do this" are you a monster for forgetting where you learnt it? Block copying (by whatever method) of other people's code is theft.
And exactly HOW will the GPL help you if you never see the closed source product sourcecode?
It won't - but then, that wasn't the question asked. The question I replied to stated it as "if someone steals their source".
>This means they are wrong, but does not prove they are the Bad Guys.
If they are wrong, arn't they 'bad guys'?
Nope - you are wrong occasionally, and that doesn't make you a bad guy. People make mistakes, misunderstand instructions (particularly those in foreign languages) or make assumptions without reading the manual, based on what other people have told them. To be wrong isn't bad - to LEAVE things wrong after they have been gently pointed out to you is.
What I see it boiling down to is this: The GPL falls under the same concept of 'locks keep honest people honest'. If you are going to STEAL source, consider it gone. Because, to date, nothing is being done to 'stop' the 'thiefs'. (because there is nothing that anyone is willing TO do.)
And if people can take GPL code and do what they want with it, what good is the GPL?
The GPL is enforcable (I hate to think how much money it would take in the US courts though) but that isn't the point. The point is, taking ANYONE else's source code is a crime - even the GPLed source, so a firm must balance the risk of doing so with the financial and possibly criminal penalties if someone with a little integrity or an axe to grind in their company, at ANY time in the future, decides to leak the information to the world - Quite possibly the entire profit of the product would be forfeit to the Licence holder, and I can't see the GPL being an exception to this.
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Nope, I am in the UK - Vagas is a little far for me
Most people gamble with coins, not chips, and they gamble at slot machines, not tables. Slot machines can be the traditional one-armed bandit. :+)
Hmm. well, they may not be casino-issued chips, but they are still effectively chips - if you took $1K to a casino, would it be a big bag of coins, or would it be notes / ecash and you change it there?
But don't forget the computer poker machines. These are mostly very low-tech, but there are some great touch-screen video-poker games with sophisticated graphics. I don't usually enjoy gambling, but I play them for the pretty graphics and the sound effects, no joke.
I'll take your word for that - I don't actually visit Vegas that often
so, you presumably feed in coinage, and press buttons, like a glorified fruit-machine?
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There are two major forms of encryption currently in use - one is Public key (or asymmetric) encryption, the other classic(or Symmetric). The types differ in the number of keys - PK uses a different key to encrypt than to decrypt - you can give the encryption key to whoever you chose, or even post it to the web, and only your decryption key can extract the message again.
Creating a copy of the decryption key, even given the Encryption key, involves solving a "hard" mathematical problem - usually factoring a large number into two primes, or a similar problem in the area of discrete logs. This is difficult, computationally,but doesn't increase as a strict multiple - each five or six extra binary digits doubles the time taken to crack one key, on the average - current estimates are that 1024 bit keys are unbreakable in any realistic time (yes, a major government agency may be able to break *one* a year, if their computer technology is vastly greater than ours, and they devote their entire budget to it. Experts in cryptography believe even one a year is unrealistic, and even one a *century* might be an understatement, but suggest you use 2048 bit keys anyhow
Symmetric encryption uses the same key to decrypt as encrypt, and if it is well designed, the only attack is to try each possible key, one after the other. for 56bit DES, this takes about three days (on the average) for even a modest-sized company; but in this case, adding a single bit to the length DOES double the time taken, so a 57 bit key would take six days, a 58 would take twelve and so forth. The most common length of key in use for symmetric encryption is 128 bits - again, it is barely possible that a major government could break one by brute force *per year* but I doubt I am important enough to be that one
Passwords are a different thing again, and often much easier to crack. A "dictionary attack" is an attempt to try passphrases from a list to see if a real word or two have been used as a password - this works more often than you would expect, as people tend to use normal, english words - not a good idea.
One point that is worth remembering though is that many UNIX based systems limit you to a maximum password length of only eight characters - 56 bits .... and your key is therefore limited similarly.
PGP is probably the best known example of dedicated, unbreakable encryption. You may wish to check it out, or the Gnu varient Gnu Privacy Guard - they both use the same basic file formats and methods, and for a decent key size, unrealistic to break into by pure cryptography - but if you are paranoid, they are relatively easy to break if they break into your house and modify the copy installed on your PC :+)
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not to sure about the reasoning on this one - if you blew $70K in Vegas, you would be sitting in a big hotel, having gone to the trouble of travelling there; you would have gone and exchanged your cash for chips (and you would have had to obtain that money in advance, as I doubt casinos would give most people much credit); you would have sat at a table, putting piles of chips onto a board (or whatever) and watched them pulled away from it as you lost. This is all physical, understandable, and there.
Ok, now we cut to online gambling. A user sits and plays what is in effect a video game - just like they have been playing since they were kids. they click buttons, they toggle lights, and when they click the right or wrong button, numbers appear on the screen (do they casinos even display a running total of how far ahead or behind you are? or just how much you have won or lost on the current throw?). Problem is, rather than saying "out of lives, insert coin" it says "out of credit card, insert a further $70K! I imagine suddenly realising she had spent more than she could earn in a year came as a bit of a shock....
This event sets a rather unfortunate precident for the future, meaning that I wouldnt want to get into the online casino business any time soon.
Not too sure about that one - you would need a lot of money to set up (online servers, automatic VISA, Mastercard, American Express and so forth validation are all expensive) and would have to make a fair profit in the first year or so - but I am not sure the casino will be expected to eat all the loss on this one - normally, if a given transaction turns out to be fraudulent on the buyers part, the CC company has to eat the loss - provided the transaction was verified with them. They may end up splitting the loss between them in this case, if only to avoid the Casino insisting on re-verifying every transaction they have ever made in the light of this ruling.
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Suppose she won. Could the 'gambling establishment' refuse to give her the winnings on the grounds that she used an illegal loan?
Unless I am very much mistaken, then this means ALL online gambling by credit card from california is invalid - possibly from this moment on (for convenience's sake) but possibly also rectroactively - in which case, ALL transactions (both wins and loses) would need backing out, an accounting nightmare.
Still trying to get my head around this ridiculous judging. :+)
I suspect it is more an attempt to "send a message" to the online casino businesses than genuine compassion for this woman - many government organisations (and not just in the states) don't like the idea of a casino, used by their citizens, that they can't regulate, licence and get their cut from
Now I'm not a lawyer, but when you apply for a loan, you usually are asked to specify the reason - if you put "Gambling" then the bank should refuse it if its illegal... if you however put "general expenditure" and go about gambling, why on earth would the bank be held liable for that?
They shouldn't, and wouldn't - but then the USER would be guilty of making a false declaration to the bank. To be honest, I am surprised the agreement she signed for the card in the first place didn't constrain her not to use the card to purchase goods or services illegally.
Besides VISA accounts are not really loans, they're more like a general expenditure overdrafts.
VISA had knowledge of where the money was going, but stop and think for a while: VISA is international, there are god knows how many weird or even contradicting laws, hence its not only ridiculous, its impossible for them to filter transactions.
It's far from impossible - certain goods and services (drugs, gambling, alcohol, animals) could be flagged for the vendors, and yet another section of checkboxes (with these fields) added to the initial form, stating that you declare purchase of these goods is legal for you. This would add one byte per client record, and a trivial bitwise AND check. I can't see the fact that a company being international in scope exempting them from the laws in each country they have a branch office - it should be the job of the lawyers FOR each country's office to keep at least the Declarations on the straight and narrow
Oh well. I guess they could just add another disclaimer in their next version of the contract. Yet another proof that the US legal system needs a healthy dose of common sense.
Not sure about that - the credit card company was clearly in the wrong, although they didn't know it at the time - they obviously overlooked a law in a single state, but - what are their lawyers for, if not to keep current on each state's new laws? there can't be THAT many each year that relate directly to credit or credit cards.
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After 3-5 years of non-payment, the credit card company will forgive the debt owed to them by their delinquent customer. The customer at this point usually thinks that they are off the hook, scott free.
BUT, an unpaid loan turns into *tada* INCOME! This income becomes TAXABLE! So, once the debt is forgiven, the credit card company turns in their customer to the IRS, and the customer suddenly finds themselves with a tiger on their tail. A much bigger tiger than a credit card company.
I'm not sure if this is applies to this case - The debt hasn't been "forgiven", the original transaction has been found to be illegal and therefore didn't happen - legally, VISA should have turned down the application for credit, and are therefore responsible for their "mistake". I doubt they will let this stop them blacklisting her, though - but $70K is probably worth that to her, especially as she would have been black-listed for the debt anyhow.
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It depends on the licence (LGPL, for example, is a lot more lenient on closed-source packages, as are things like OS compilers - would you use GCC to compile your code if it automatically became Open Source by doing so? Making or not making a project Open Source should be a decision available to the company - along with encouragement to make the right choice, of course
Are they a bad guy? Are they a bad guy if someone steals their source and shows GPL code?
It depends on the code - if you look in the source , and here are a few lines that remind you of lines that do a similar job in a GPLed product you have seen - then the programmer may well have seen how the process was done in that product, or even both projects may have drawn on a common methodology (I can remember when four students were pulled up for "cheating" by a lecturer, because two subroutines were identical in each submisson. Turns out they were supplied as standard "example" routines with the compiler the students used, and as it was just a GUI routine (rather than fundimental to the problem) the students had just cut-and-pasted it from the helpfiles...) Obviously, if you find entire subroutines copied from the GPLed product and just pasted in, they should be hung from the yardarm.
That chinese Linux release that was claimed to not follow the GPL, are they a bad guy? :+)
It still hasn't been shown they are intentionally violating the GPL - iirc, this is their first distro and it is almost entirely unmodified OS software, but with Kernel Patches for chinese localisation. Yes, they should have supplied and / or placed on their website the source (or diff files) of the modifications; Certainly, they should be sending out to each user a letter telling them how to obtain the source for themselves. This means they are wrong, but does not prove they are the Bad Guys. If they continue to be wrong because being wrong is profitable for them, then they should be joining the previous offender on the yardarm
Or, are they un-touchable because of international copywite issues? :+)
No idea - but here in the UK, you can claim back all the profits from the violating products - a fairly effective remedy
Or, is the only bad guy Microsoft?
No, just the usual target - Mostly because as it IS so big, it's lawyers should be better able to check that a given event (like the Stak Technologies thing) is well beyond the pale before it ever makes it to the door. Of course, those PERFORMING those acts may well not bother asking the lawyers first....
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Not really (and this is a point-by-point rebuttal <Grin>). One of the things most complained about in responses from companies with Marketing Divisions is that they DON'T ANSWER THE QUESTIONS. They make up their own questions, biased towards the things their product or service is good at, and blandly ignore the ones that make them look bad. The only way to correctly answer a set of statements is to go down each and say "yes, this is correct" or "no, this is wrong, for these reasons". the "for these reasons" bit is important, though
Having said that: < Schnipp > You go on to say that when a company tries to test limits we push them back onto the "straight and narrow" - If a company isn't willing to cooperate then the only way to do that is through legal action. I am not suggesting that the OSS should've taken legal action against Corel. What I am saying is that we might have been better off if legal action had been necessary. Corel did the right thing - good for them. The GPL still hasn't been tested in court and that's something that needs to be done. Yes, I'm willing to set fire to my house - if only to keep the town from burning down.
I half-agree - It does no-one any good if we jump into legal action when a newcomer to the OS arena makes a newbie-style mistake - This will get the Lawyers rich, and just maybe a few legal precedents set (and if the case is borderline, maybe even the wrong ones). The correct response is to start with a switch, and work your way up to the heavy grenades - Start with a polite letter, then a polite letter in legalese, then... well, you get the idea. at least then, if it does make it all the way to court, you can show intent to break the GPL, not just a technical breach. I think it would be a really bad idea to come down hard on firms that are making mistakes, in order to try and prove your weapon works - particularly with one as expensive and inefficient as the courts - this is "send a message" philosophy, not correct treatment of the case in hand.
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Odd, whenever an NT box I have the misfortune to need BSODs out, I seem to lose drives mapped to it, and the webserver stops responding. I wasn't aware those were normally considered parts of the GUI.....
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Problem is, the knowledgable Techie isn't the target audience of this sort of ad - it has exactly two targets:
- Senior (read PHB) Management - people who make purchasing decisions without consulting the Tech people expected to impliment them
- "Home Admin" people - those that are not technically clued, but have bought a commercial distro because it was the same price as a game, and they thought it would make them look cool to their friends. Where before, they would have seen an XFree86 crash and phoned DeadRat or Choosy's tech support lines for advice, a percentage will think "ah, it's that lousy free Xwindows at fault, I need the shiny, BETTER version."
Both of the above groups probably consider the commerical distros "boughtware", and can't see the problem of buying another "boughtware" package to fix problems with the first - just look at sales for MS's win98>win98SE "upgrade".......(that'll teach me to preview before I post :+)
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problem is, the knowledgable Techie isn't the target audience of this sort of ad - it has exactly two targets:
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I find it hard to beleive that Sega wouldn't provide some sort of support for this type of setup because it's so common and technically pretty trivial.
I suspect the real problem won't be the communications, but that the Dreamcast games will not come with Server software - that will be sold separately to ISPs (at a vastly inflated price) or bundled with a contract agreement that entitles the ISP to support Dreamcast connections. Of course, this could well be NT or UNIX server software, as those machines are more likely to be efficent running as a server than a Dreamcast is (I can't see many ISPs setting up racks of Dreamcasts to run their game servers, for some reason)
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RedHat does have a patch repository, but has anyone actually had to LOOK for a particular security patch on Microsoft's site (ex. not followed a link directly to a particular patch)? Good luck. :+)
sounds about right to me
I have currently been on hold to M$oft tech support for thirty minutes ("We are sorry to keep you waiting, your call will be answered by the next available operator"). This was after ten minutes of tracking down MS Q document Q182671, following the link to Novell's site, following the link BACK to Q182671, finding the section marked "patch available, but not tested, contact MS pay-support for the patch". First guy cut me off after giving me a telephone number (after a mere 10 minutes on hold) which turned out to be for a Sales guy tasked to send out SP2 and nothing else. Got put back to first guy, who finally figured out that it might not be something I could download from the web (or else why would I be phoning?), gave me a "case id" and put me on hold. that was half an hour ago..........
now this is for a minor patch to a spreadsheet - what would it be like for a major security loophole in NT?
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Yep.
This in and of itself indicates that the patent is useless.
Nope, sorry
Java, Javascript, VBScript, ASP, Perl, CGI, etc are all NOT HTML. Therefore it is fairly easy to argue that any document containing these things (AKA every dynamicaly generated web page) does not fall under the patent, regardless of the use of cookies.
Yep, all of the above are NON-HTML - so? from the above, the ONLY one sent to the user as part of the response is Javascript - and that is imbedded in HTML. All the rest either generate HTML on-the-fly and send it, or in the case of Java, are linked to by the HTML document and are helpfully downloaded by your browser for you, and inserted into the screen display. For this to invalidate the patent, you would have to assume that including IMAGES on the page (which are non-html, and downloaded by the browser during it's parsing of the document) invalidated the patent too.....
Assuming the patent itself could hold up in court (which is a big leap of faith), any decent lawyer can simply walk in, say "Our sales process uses scripting documents, not HTML documents" and that will be the end of the suit.
That would be nice, yes - problem is, the nasty, bubble-bursting techie from Amazon would telnet to port 80 on your webserver, issue the request for the page, and guess what he would get back (and the answer isn't your ASP script). Amazon is stating what the user receives, not how the server made it.
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What exactly is it that the coders are afraid of? Bundled-in games? Rapid adoption of linux? The article said nothing about coders fearing the adoption of Linux. In case you haven't noticed, most programmers actually *like* it when people use software that they have worked on -- an awful lot of us are proud of the things that we put our time and effort into.
Personally, I am glad to see more LINUX games out there - but would be more worried about some of these games coming WITH linux on the game CDs, rather than the other way round. I can imagine the marketing spin on this "We need to standardise the Linux environment this game runs on, and have added to support the latest and greatest " - but what it would come down to is Linux becoming just a bootstrap for the game, and fragmenting as the different games implimentors drag it in different directions to suit their game engines.
However, this WILL give an incentive for hardware manufacturers to release kernel module drivers for their newest and fastest, rather than the Linux community having to roll their own from unavailable specs and reverse-engineering of Dx6 drivers.....
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I am by no means familiar (aside from reading occasional user documentation) with distributed programing frameworks, but i am fairly familiar with C/C++. one thing i think should be noted is that while C/C++ syntax and semantics are well standaradized, as operating systems and architectures differ vastly, they are apt to have different implimentations of certain system calls (eg network sockets, file system calls (beyond things like open/close), etc). afaik, interpretted languages like java and perl should be able to avoid this problem since its all handled by the interpreter.
Hmm. While not directly relating to the original question (as far as I know, there is no Corba support or similar) there is an attempt to make a "common" Cross-Platform C++ Library at the WxWindows Project Which may be of interest.
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You guys crack me up. You can't even see the validity in the post, since it attacks linux (heaven forbid).
Spot on - we can't see the validity of the post, as it attacks Linux - it doesn't make any points, throw up questions or answers, or indeed consist of anything but "It talked about Linux, I gave up at that point because I don't want to hear it"
The author would like to see a discussion of Open Source software that doesn't mention Linux. No doubt there would be people who would like a discussion of Webservers that doesn't mention Apatche, or of Operating Systems that doesn't mention Sun, Microsoft or HP - but they would be trolling as well.
Yes there is open source software out there that not only isn't Linux, but without which Linux itself couldn't have been created - GCC for example; but it has to be accepted that Linux, particularly in the eyes of the media, is the Flagship of the Open Source community, and that a piece without any mention of it at all is likely to be flamed for that omission and it's otherwise valid points overlooked.
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Actually, you can get Mathematica for Linux.
But there's no free (GNU) equivalent, as the original message pointed out..
Personally, I can't see the problem with this - If there are Commercial versions of the software for Linux, as well as Commercial versions for Mac, Wintel and the commercial unixen, why is this a problem?
While free, open copies of software are nice, as far as I can tell, Mathematica is a proprietary language owned by Wolfram Research, Inc, for which they hold the trademark - I am not too sure to what extent a Open Source compiler for this language would be possible, as I don't know how much and/or which parts of the language are copyrighted - but I was unable to find ANY other implimentation of this language but the "offical" one by Wolfram in a websearch....
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Powerpoint and Word both convert Well. :+)
Excell spreadsheets loose all their graphic objects though (this is NOT good when your entire network map was done in this
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If I am reading this correctly, you have to go request a key for message X from a server (presumably the sender's, unless HE has to request the key in the first place from the company)
I don't know about the rest of the Slashdotters, but I don't spend all that much time actually connected to the internet - I am much more likely to link, download email and news, then unlink and have phone line available (and not running up my phone bill, which is per-minute in the UK) while I read offline. To have to connect to the Net *again* if I wish to read my inbound mail would be discouraging, to say the least.
 : Odds would be very high someone would "hack" a version of their reader to get all the keys as the mail comes in, and store them for later use (possibly ignoring expiry data) simply to keep from having to reconnect once per message
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Yes, later versions of PGP do almost exactly the same thing (there is a choice of what method you use, so the old "fixed" choices of RSA/IDEA/MD5 are now just possible, supported options, but the structure remains the same)
I don't know when this second patent expires
According to the IDEA owner's site (www.Ascom.com) the US patent runs out in 2010, the european one a year after. Apparently, the Japanese one is Still Pending - after eight years????
Licence hangs off the same page; basically, it is free for the Special Case of use by two individuals, using it for personal reasons, who have not paid anything for the software.
Writing software that brings in money (even shareware, although there is a initial exception of the first 10,000usd in this case) requires a product licence, and "commercial use" includes the non-profit organisations normally excluded from that description (although they say they special-case such organisations, no details of what a charity might expect to pay are available on that site)
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