General purpose components (processors, memory, storage) without DRM enforcement will be readily available until it is governmentally mandated otherwise, and at that point open hardware without DRM would be illegal. This discussion leads to a dead end.
Indeed. And my understanding is that even with Palladium there isn't really plan to do away with general purpose hardware. If you run an untrusted OS, it will behave precisely like general purpose hardware (with the Palladium chip disabled). Which means that you'll be able to do everything you want -- except of course run DRM systems that require the use of the Palladium chip.
The point is not that they're planning to take away your right to general purpose hardware -- they've been clever enough to design this so that they don't need to. All they'll do is take away your right to play digital media. Of course, sooner or later someone will crack the keys and figure out how to play the stuff on general-purpose hardware, but that software will be illegal under the DMCA and the EUCD.
If the gyroscope idea works so well why does it also have a traditional ball from desktop use? Why not use the gyro all the time?
Because gyros measure changes in orientation, not position. I would imagine that when using it deskless, you control the pointer by changing the direction in which the mouse is pointing, not by moving the mouse (which won't actually be detected by the gyros at all).
"N-series PCs [with FreeDOS] will cost the same as PCs that ship with Windows, a Dell representative said."
What's the point of buying the machine with no OS/FreeDOS if it costs the same as the Windows box? This is just a PR ploy to make Dell look like a hero to the OSS/Anti-MS Community.
It does seem a bit pointless. Corporately, we generally buy PCs without an OS, even if we intend to run Windows on them. We will then license Windows separately through corporate or developer licensing programmes.
But if the cost is the same, why would you ever buy the machine without the Windows license. We would certainly opt for the Windows machine, even if we weren't buying it to run Windows, simply because it would allow us to redeploy the machine as a Windows box at a later date at no cost.
If the report it correct, this seems singularly pointless.
Though if you use the "grandad's axe" method of upgrading the licence is still probably OK
I don't believe it is. The licence very explicitly says that your are only licensed to run the software on the hardware it was supplied with. No where does it say that you may transfer the license to new hardware if the old hardware is destroyed.
If I've already got a windows machine, in theory, why can't I just install the same OS license on the new box and throw away the old one? (I know, scary, but it's what most people do).
Because almost all PC's with Windows preinstalled (whether from Dell or from white box manufacturers) ship with OEM licences. These licence you to run the software on the hardware it was sold on, and no other. They cost about half the price of a full retail licence, but when you replace the machine you have to buy a new license.
At work, we prefer to buy machines without an OS, and then buy full-price Microsoft licenses, so we have the flexibility to upgrade hardware and software independently. Doing it this way the licenses cost more, but you're less likely end up throwing them away...
How effective is DVD region coding? In the U.S., few people care about the region codes -- they can get 99% of what they want first -- and in the rest of the world, multi-region players abound.
Which will, as a result of the Copyright Directive, no longer be legally available.
Given that a very large proportion of players sold are multiregional, European consumers are going to notice this in a way that US consumers haven't necessarily been directly affected by the DMCA.
OK. When you install Windows from your legally-purchased Windows CDROM, that is storing copyrighted material on your computer. Putting aside the fact Windows is an abomination, is installing Windows from a legally purchased and licensed CD a crime?
No, because Microsoft grants you a license to copy the CDROM under limited circumstances (eg installing it on ONE computer). That's why your copy of Windows comes with a license agreement.
I stand corrected. I'm agnostic, not an atheist, and I should have caught that. You're thinking about what you're responding to, and words get caught in your head even if they're not quite right.
No, I'd say you were an atheist. An atheist is simply someone who does not believe in the existence of a god. There are many different kinds of atheism, with varying stengths of conviction and rationales. This ranges from a simple scientific method analysis ('the evidence I have seen to date does not require me to postulate the existence in a god) to a strong, almost religious faith in the non-existence of a god.
On the other hand, an agnostic is, loosely speaking, someone who doesn't know whether god exists, or doesn't have an opinion on the matter -- strictly it's someone who believes that it is impossible to know whether god exists.
I wrote that particular term of the OSD because of an old license agreement used on Berkeley SPICE (a circuit simulator). It prohibited its use by the Police of South Africa. It still prohibited them years after apartheid was over.
On top of that, I didn't want to see pro-choice and pro-life software licenses, pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and so on. And I especially didn't want to see anti-business licenses.
Fair point. If everyone is pushing an agenda, you just end up with a whole host of fundamentally incompatible licences.
Most of the W2K installations *I* consider to be wise have a small boot partition for W2K (~4 Gigs - W2K and Windows apps are bootdisk space hogs [sigh]) which uses FAT, just so that any disk-analyzer can find out what's wrong with it THIS time.
Except that by doing this you
Lose all security on your system as the OS install directory won't support file permissions, and
Make it far more likely that you'll need to use that disk-analyzer, since you've just rejected a modern journalling filesystem in favour of the simplistic design used by DOS twenty years ago
IMHO, all wise Windows 2000 installations are NTFS-only. If I need to recover something from the disk, I'd use a bootable linux distribution.
Personally I use Tom's Root and Boot, a complete linux distribution on a single floppy, but I've been meaning to give Knoppix a try...
I think you'll find that this is due to a change in datum. As other posters have pointed out, the ground moves by milimetres per year. There's no way that the Greenwich observatory has moved by hundreds of metres.
Consider the examples from the article -- one woman lives a mile from her 'old' town center -- the new town and its services (police, ambulance, etc..) are now much further away.
I didn't understand this part of the article. Why is she saying she'd have to move as the local town would now be fifteen miles away?
Surely she could just do day-to-day stuff (like shopping, etc) in the same town she's always visited.
Administrative stuff that requires dealing with county/state authorities could surely be done by post and/or phone.
I don't see quite why this will effect her anywhere near as much as she says it will...
How do you describe the curvature of the earth (you need to do that to tie all those distances to something real)? All the states have localized plane coordinate systems, but they don't use the same ones
And this all works off the first assumption - that there is a magic box that can spit out perfect coordinates, grid or ground. There is no such box.
You may be surprised just how well developed the mathematical basis of cartography has been for a some considerable time.
There are such boxes (GPS), there are coordinate systems (geodetic coordinates) referenced to the earch (geodetic datums), and ways of taking account of the curvature of the earch (map projections). It is perfectly possible to precicely convert a position in one projection and map datum to coordinates in another.
I have no connection with the above, other than that I found them useful and informative sources of information. The author requests that anyone citing or linking to his work credit him, so here goes: The material linked to above is due to Peter H. Dana, The Geographer's Craft Project, Department of Geography, The University of Colorado at Boulder
Do you really believe they even had to ask? This one seems pretty clear to me.
I guess. But if it helps protects some free software from a legal point of view, may be it has merit in eyes of some members of the community. Some of what RMS says I'm unhappy with -- ie his seeming disdain for Linux because of it's failure to inisist on strong copyleft everywhere, and his criticism of Linus for using a commercial source code control system, just because it's the best software for the task at hand. (ie, at least as I see it, for Linus's refusal to compromise on technical excellence just to support RMS's ideological goals).
This so called comminity is really pretty divided -- I don't think it's unreasonable that the OSI really didn't know with any degree of certainty what the comminity consensus was on this issue -- if indeed there was one.
Personally, I have a major problem with the OSD -- namely it effectively prevents writing software with a political agenda. Unless the political agenda is open source itself. I can write a piece of software and prevent people from incorporating it into commercial products. But I can't write a piece of software and prevent it being used for military purposes. Guess which issue I care more strongly about...?
I think all I'm trying to say is that none of this is simple. I really don't accept that there is a community consensus that free software can't persue a pacifist agenda, and yet the OSD (and DFSG) don't accept such software as free.
What's wrong with actually trying to guage comminity opinion, rather than taking it as read... I maintain that it must be a good thing.
And for the record (though not having studied the proposed licence), I'm against the idea of click though OSS licences.
I'm aghast that OSI would even consider click-wrap, and I entirely reject the unsubsantiated scare-mongering that goes along with its proposal.
They've had a request for approval of a licence. Is it not reasonable for them to consult the wider community on this issue?
OSI is probably the biggest mistake I've ever made, and yes it's my mistake. It's time to clean it up. The OSD should be returned to SPI, who can be trusted to administer it sanely.
I'm intrigued by this statement. Some time ago I compared briefly read the Debian Social Contract and the OSD and I didn't notice any substantive differences.
Would you care to elaborate on what you think is wrong with the OSI and why you think that (co?)founding the OSI was a mistake? I'm not trying to defend the OSI here; I no next to nothing about both the OSI and SPI, I'm just trying to understand the issues.
So why doesn't software have regulations that it can't destroy your machine?
For commercial software this would be a good thing. But it would kill free software (unless it was exempt), because the authors would have to pay for public liability insurance or risk bankruptcy.
granted it's cheap but if it crashed and burned it would affect service quite harshly and i'm no sure many coustomers will want to 'wait for the next flight' to get their buisness done
This crazy idea of using geostationary satellites for critical services will never catch on. If it crashed and burned it would affect service quite harshly, and I'm not sure many customers will want to 'wait for the next launch' to get their business done.
Let's stick to transatlantic cables. Oh, wait, these are thousants of feet under the sea, in the middle of nowhere. If they break, you going to have to get a ship out there, and even then they'll be difficult to repair. Never catch on...
Though you do need to be aware of it's security limitations. That's not to say openssh under cygwin isn't a great way to remote admin machines, but you should probably only use it in circumstances where everyone who has access to the machine has legitimate admin privileges. (Of course, if the only person who has access to the machine is you then you needn't worry)
Cygwin is not secure in a multi-user environment. For example if you have a long running daemon such as "inetd" running as admin while ordinary users are logged in, or if you have a user logged in remotely while another user is logged into the console, one cygwin client can trick another into running code for it. In this way one user may gain the priveledge of another cygwin program running on the machine. This is because cygwin has shared state that is accessible by all processes.
Sorry, I should have said remove the elements, not remove the tags. Though, as has now been pointed out to me, this in itself is not enough, certain otherwise safe elements have attributes that are problematic.
Somehow I'm reminded of Millikan's classic expiriment to determine the mass of the electron.
Long after, his experimental notes were found to contain comments like "Good result, therefore publish". ie he only published the results that gave the results he wanted, and discarded those that didn't. Luckily for him, he was right, so history forgave hime...
Slashdot Mirror
General purpose components (processors, memory, storage) without DRM enforcement will be readily available until it is governmentally mandated otherwise, and at that point open hardware without DRM would be illegal. This discussion leads to a dead end.
Indeed. And my understanding is that even with Palladium there isn't really plan to do away with general purpose hardware. If you run an untrusted OS, it will behave precisely like general purpose hardware (with the Palladium chip disabled). Which means that you'll be able to do everything you want -- except of course run DRM systems that require the use of the Palladium chip.
The point is not that they're planning to take away your right to general purpose hardware -- they've been clever enough to design this so that they don't need to. All they'll do is take away your right to play digital media. Of course, sooner or later someone will crack the keys and figure out how to play the stuff on general-purpose hardware, but that software will be illegal under the DMCA and the EUCD.
If the gyroscope idea works so well why does it also have a traditional ball from desktop use? Why not use the gyro all the time?
Because gyros measure changes in orientation, not position. I would imagine that when using it deskless, you control the pointer by changing the direction in which the mouse is pointing, not by moving the mouse (which won't actually be detected by the gyros at all).
Anyone who's used one care to confirm?
But if the cost is the same, why would you ever buy the machine without the Windows license. We would certainly opt for the Windows machine, even if we weren't buying it to run Windows, simply because it would allow us to redeploy the machine as a Windows box at a later date at no cost.
If the report it correct, this seems singularly pointless.
Though if you use the "grandad's axe" method of upgrading the licence is still probably OK
I don't believe it is. The licence very explicitly says that your are only licensed to run the software on the hardware it was supplied with. No where does it say that you may transfer the license to new hardware if the old hardware is destroyed.
If I've already got a windows machine, in theory, why can't I just install the same OS license on the new box and throw away the old one? (I know, scary, but it's what most people do).
Because almost all PC's with Windows preinstalled (whether from Dell or from white box manufacturers) ship with OEM licences. These licence you to run the software on the hardware it was sold on, and no other. They cost about half the price of a full retail licence, but when you replace the machine you have to buy a new license.
At work, we prefer to buy machines without an OS, and then buy full-price Microsoft licenses, so we have the flexibility to upgrade hardware and software independently. Doing it this way the licenses cost more, but you're less likely end up throwing them away...
How effective is DVD region coding? In the U.S., few people care about the region codes -- they can get 99% of what they want first -- and in the rest of the world, multi-region players abound.
Which will, as a result of the Copyright Directive, no longer be legally available.
Given that a very large proportion of players sold are multiregional, European consumers are going to notice this in a way that US consumers haven't necessarily been directly affected by the DMCA.
OK. When you install Windows from your legally-purchased Windows CDROM, that is storing copyrighted material on your computer. Putting aside the fact Windows is an abomination, is installing Windows from a legally purchased and licensed CD a crime?
No, because Microsoft grants you a license to copy the CDROM under limited circumstances (eg installing it on ONE computer). That's why your copy of Windows comes with a license agreement.
I stand corrected. I'm agnostic, not an atheist, and I should have caught that. You're thinking about what you're responding to, and words get caught in your head even if they're not quite right.
No, I'd say you were an atheist. An atheist is simply someone who does not believe in the existence of a god. There are many different kinds of atheism, with varying stengths of conviction and rationales. This ranges from a simple scientific method analysis ('the evidence I have seen to date does not require me to postulate the existence in a god) to a strong, almost religious faith in the non-existence of a god.
On the other hand, an agnostic is, loosely speaking, someone who doesn't know whether god exists, or doesn't have an opinion on the matter -- strictly it's someone who believes that it is impossible to know whether god exists.
I wrote that particular term of the OSD because of an old license agreement used on Berkeley SPICE (a circuit simulator). It prohibited its use by the Police of South Africa. It still prohibited them years after apartheid was over.
On top of that, I didn't want to see pro-choice and pro-life software licenses, pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and so on. And I especially didn't want to see anti-business licenses.
Fair point. If everyone is pushing an agenda, you just end up with a whole host of fundamentally incompatible licences.
Do you also use 85mm floppy disks with the Lehnux operating system?
Actually, I'd be rather surprized if the formal specifications for floppy disks were in anything other than milimetres...
There isn't such thing as a 3 inch CD. CDs come with the diameter of 12 or 8 cm
And 8 cm is approximately 3 in (just over three and one eighth of an inch, in fact).
Except that by doing this you
IMHO, all wise Windows 2000 installations are NTFS-only. If I need to recover something from the disk, I'd use a bootable linux distribution.
Personally I use Tom's Root and Boot, a complete linux distribution on a single floppy, but I've been meaning to give Knoppix a try...
I think you'll find that this is due to a change in datum. As other posters have pointed out, the ground moves by milimetres per year. There's no way that the Greenwich observatory has moved by hundreds of metres.
Consider the examples from the article -- one woman lives a mile from her 'old' town center -- the new town and its services (police, ambulance, etc..) are now much further away.
I didn't understand this part of the article. Why is she saying she'd have to move as the local town would now be fifteen miles away?
Surely she could just do day-to-day stuff (like shopping, etc) in the same town she's always visited.
Administrative stuff that requires dealing with county/state authorities could surely be done by post and/or phone.
I don't see quite why this will effect her anywhere near as much as she says it will...
How do you describe the curvature of the earth (you need to do that to tie all those distances to something real)? All the states have localized plane coordinate systems, but they don't use the same ones
And this all works off the first assumption - that there is a magic box that can spit out perfect coordinates, grid or ground. There is no such box.
You may be surprised just how well developed the mathematical basis of cartography has been for a some considerable time.
There are such boxes (GPS), there are coordinate systems (geodetic coordinates) referenced to the earch (geodetic datums), and ways of taking account of the curvature of the earch (map projections). It is perfectly possible to precicely convert a position in one projection and map datum to coordinates in another.
See: Coordinate Systems Overview Geodetic Datum Overview
Map Projection Overview
Global Positioning System Overview
I have no connection with the above, other than that I found them useful and informative sources of information. The author requests that anyone citing or linking to his work credit him, so here goes: The material linked to above is due to Peter H. Dana, The Geographer's Craft Project, Department of Geography, The University of Colorado at Boulder
Do you really believe they even had to ask? This one seems pretty clear to me.
I guess. But if it helps protects some free software from a legal point of view, may be it has merit in eyes of some members of the community. Some of what RMS says I'm unhappy with -- ie his seeming disdain for Linux because of it's failure to inisist on strong copyleft everywhere, and his criticism of Linus for using a commercial source code control system, just because it's the best software for the task at hand. (ie, at least as I see it, for Linus's refusal to compromise on technical excellence just to support RMS's ideological goals).
This so called comminity is really pretty divided -- I don't think it's unreasonable that the OSI really didn't know with any degree of certainty what the comminity consensus was on this issue -- if indeed there was one.
Personally, I have a major problem with the OSD -- namely it effectively prevents writing software with a political agenda. Unless the political agenda is open source itself. I can write a piece of software and prevent people from incorporating it into commercial products. But I can't write a piece of software and prevent it being used for military purposes. Guess which issue I care more strongly about...?
I think all I'm trying to say is that none of this is simple. I really don't accept that there is a community consensus that free software can't persue a pacifist agenda, and yet the OSD (and DFSG) don't accept such software as free.
What's wrong with actually trying to guage comminity opinion, rather than taking it as read... I maintain that it must be a good thing.
And for the record (though not having studied the proposed licence), I'm against the idea of click though OSS licences.
CD containing genuine postal addressed of over 10,000 spammers. High quality addresses only, good for law suit.
Send $20 to...
I'm aghast that OSI would even consider click-wrap, and I entirely reject the unsubsantiated scare-mongering that goes along with its proposal.
They've had a request for approval of a licence. Is it not reasonable for them to consult the wider community on this issue?
OSI is probably the biggest mistake I've ever made, and yes it's my mistake. It's time to clean it up. The OSD should be returned to SPI, who can be trusted to administer it sanely.
I'm intrigued by this statement. Some time ago I compared briefly read the Debian Social Contract and the OSD and I didn't notice any substantive differences.
Would you care to elaborate on what you think is wrong with the OSI and why you think that (co?)founding the OSI was a mistake? I'm not trying to defend the OSI here; I no next to nothing about both the OSI and SPI, I'm just trying to understand the issues.
So why doesn't software have regulations that it can't destroy your machine?
For commercial software this would be a good thing. But it would kill free software (unless it was exempt), because the authors would have to pay for public liability insurance or risk bankruptcy.
That's like saying if bank robbers decided to escape from the scene of a crime by using a getaway car, the government should make driving illegal!
No, but if the bank robbers change the number on their licence plate so that they can't be traced, that should be illegal. Oh, wait, it already is.
granted it's cheap but if it crashed and burned it would affect service quite harshly and i'm no sure many coustomers will want to 'wait for the next flight' to get their buisness done
This crazy idea of using geostationary satellites for critical services will never catch on. If it crashed and burned it would affect service quite harshly, and I'm not sure many customers will want to 'wait for the next launch' to get their business done.
Let's stick to transatlantic cables. Oh, wait, these are thousants of feet under the sea, in the middle of nowhere. If they break, you going to have to get a ship out there, and even then they'll be difficult to repair. Never catch on...
Though you do need to be aware of it's security limitations. That's not to say openssh under cygwin isn't a great way to remote admin machines, but you should probably only use it in circumstances where everyone who has access to the machine has legitimate admin privileges. (Of course, if the only person who has access to the machine is you then you needn't worry)
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq_4.html#SEC80
How secure is Cygwin in a multi-user environment?
Cygwin is not secure in a multi-user environment. For example if you have a long running daemon such as "inetd" running as admin while ordinary users are logged in, or if you have a user logged in remotely while another user is logged into the console, one cygwin client can trick another into running code for it. In this way one user may gain the priveledge of another cygwin program running on the machine. This is because cygwin has shared state that is accessible by all processes.
Sorry, I should have said remove the elements, not remove the tags. Though, as has now been pointed out to me, this in itself is not enough, certain otherwise safe elements have attributes that are problematic.
Somehow I'm reminded of Millikan's classic expiriment to determine the mass of the electron.
Long after, his experimental notes were found to contain comments like "Good result, therefore publish". ie he only published the results that gave the results he wanted, and discarded those that didn't. Luckily for him, he was right, so history forgave hime...
Damn, I guess that means you need to nuke a bunch of attributes, too. Looks like you need a proper HTML parser.
Probably better just to nuke all HTML mail...