Good story. And if you think a short aside on slashdot icons is OT, and if you are offended by value judgements, then by all means skip and mod down.
I wonder why the editors, in their infinite wisdom, elected to use an Xbox controller to represent 'games'. I think we can all agree that Microsoft is on our various shitlists, for one reason or another. And indeed the reasons are as varied as the people who read slashdot and the markets they (MS) have muscled their way into. Putting that aside, though, wouldn't it make more sense to have an icon that typified the category of games? Something universal, like Pac-Man(tm) or Pong paddles, or similar. And if the motivation is to pick something current, perhaps something GameCube-related would be more relevant? After all, Nintendo is the only pure-games company among the top three. And besides, it does have a long and storied history - how many of us spent countless hours playing The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers on the NES when our colleagues (co-belligerents, more like) were outside playing football? I know I did. So, unless there is some kind of corporate reason for having an Xbox-related category logo (which is doubtful... although I have seen a few Microsoft.NET banners on./ - tsk tsk:), I respectfully submit that a picture of some Nintendo peraphernalia would represent the essence of the category 'games' far better than an Xbox-related one would. A candidate that comes to mind, immediately, is the GameCube itself. It is a beautiful piece of machinery: it evokes memories of the beloved Apple G4 cube, another engineering marvel.
The amount of pirated material available online today is staggering. In the course of prosecuting piracy we have found servers containing over 20,000 titles of pirated software, movies, music and games. The value of the copyrighted material on servers like this is frequently in the millions of dollars. Factor in the number of times those titles are distributed over the Internet, and the damage amounts skyrocket. The sentencing structure reflects this harm.
Wrong. You are assuming a damages model which looks like this:
damages = number of products * number of thefts
This seems inviting at first but it is in fact not the right way to look at it, because this model assumes that every time a product is stolen, damage is caused to the company in an amount equal to the product's current sale price. The rationale for this is that the model assumes that were the thief not able to steal the product, he/she would in fact buy it at full retail price. Obviously, this is not true for everyone. Just how large a percentage of the thiefs in question would do that becomes a variable in this improved model:
damages = K(number of products * number of thefts)
Of course, determining (or at least approximating) K then becomes an issue. However, I think we can all agree that it is certainly less than its current value of 1.
you need to have a way of knowing where the device at ip 53:68:102:59:04:90 (assuming ip6 or similar) is. making the network ad-hoc is much more complicated... how do you know what's where? you don't, unless you're clever about it. maybe you have to maintain some sort of central dbase with ip addresses and gps locations (introduces privacy concerns, and has latency problems). any thoughts on this?
If you really want to get the most out of your college experience, you'll leave all your gadgets at home. Those commercials you see on television in which people buy new mobile phones and suddenly get beautiful friends - that's a lie. I just finished my first year of college. I have a TI-89, a PDA, a mobile phone (with camera), an mp3 player, a minidisc player, a laptop, and two desktops. Although I am a computer science major, I can truthfully say that most of these gadgets serve one purpose - to annoy me - and have actively played a role in preventing me from socializing with other people, which is a HUGE reason (if not the only reason) to actually go to college instead of staying home and reading textbooks. Are you really going to keep an electronic calendar? If so, do you realize that everytime you have to schedule an 'appointment', you'll be fishing one of the above gadgets out of your rucksack and messing about with it? As for a laptop in the classroom - don't do it! All it does is distract you. The best thing to do is to take a notebook and a pen, and NOTHING else. Trust me on this. Your fellow classmates do NOT want to be interrupted because you forgot to turn your mobile phone off. Besides, anything you take in there, you'll be playing with. You may not believe this, but consider: On a recent day in one of my CS classes, about 30% of the students brought a laptop to class. I casually took a visual survey of what they were doing - only one was actually typing something that looked like notes. The others were surfing the web, chatting on IM (severe affliction - the prime reason NOT to bring a gadget to class), and several were even playing Counterstrike! The electronic classroom is a myth, folks - don't believe the hardware companies when they tell you it's the future. It's not, if you want to learn anything. So, as I've said - if you want to make the most of your college experience, leave the gadgets at home. They aren't worth it.
Straight out of a Neal Stephenson book
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 1
SCO knows that IBM is just going to get real pissed off and annihilate them...
"I'm not quite sure... but I think IBM and Novell are real pissed at SCO"
from the MSDN download page for the Passport SDK 1.4 for Linux:
Hardware requirements
- Server machine
- 64 megabytes (MB) random access memory (RAM)
- Unique, fixed Internet Protocol (IP) address
Software requirements
- Linux version 6.1 or 6.2
- Web server software: Apache HTTP Server version 1.3.12 or later, built for multithreading
- Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
I still use an hp deskjet 500. actually had it since i had a pc running win3.1 way back in the day. i get cheap knockoff cartridges, like $15/each. compusa has them. using under linux now... having soem problems with printing pdf files. other than that, works great. and yeah, i think it's immortal, i've banged it around, several dorms/apartments, competitions, etc. i love it.
you can f**k around with some DVD players to disable the region-locking. Some come with it disabled. Presumably someone will figure out how to do that for this player.
no. why encode the DVD onto DivX, and then burn it onto a DVD-rom? Good DVD rips that fit onto 700mb CDs look great... you almost can't tell the difference. The reason to have a DVD burner is so that you can copy DVDs, not burn DivX rips of DVD movies onto DVD-r.
if i use a redhat box as a router/gateway with ipmasq, then they can't see that i've got several computers connected to the dsl line, right? in the contract that i signed with earthlink, they specified that only one computer may connect at one time. of course, they sell some sort of kit that allows you to network all your pcs and share your connection... basically the same thing i am doing already, but it costs like $20/month extra. i thuoght the whole point of ipmasq was that it looks like all the traffic is coming from one computer? is this true/viable?
There is something to be said for getting away and just seeing what's out there. The scenery can be boring; however, if you're going somewhere that you've never been before you should at least give it a look, and even go out and do something, like go swimming at the beach, for example. I mean, come on... how much can you know about yourself if you've never just done something to see what it's what like, instead of relying on modern technology to mediate your experiences? The thing to keep in mind is, there is always something to be learned no matter where you go - so go! and figure out what it is!
SCO owns the rights to Unix. They licensed these rights to HP (HP-UX), Sun (Solaris), and IBM (AIX) among others. The license agreement that IBM signed specifically prevents them from disclosing Unix's source code. Now, consider:
"...In a news article issued by e-Business Developer on or about August 10, 2001, the following conduct was attributed to IBM regarding participation in the open source software movement:
' IBM's AIX contributions were integrated into the standard Linux source tree, a win for open source.' "
That's a license infringement, clearly. Consider:
December 20, 2000, IBM Vice President Robert LeBlanc:
"We're willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community considers valuable. We have open-sourced the journal filesystem, print driver for the Omniprint. AIX is 1.5 million lines of code. If we dump that on the open source community then are people going to understand it? You're better off taking bits and pieces and the expertise that we bring along with it. We have made a conscious decision to keep contributing."
Again, clearly a license infringement - SCO's license agreement, which IBM signed when they licensed Unix, in fact explicitly prevents IBM from open sourcing any of SCO's IP, which AIX is clearly a derivative of.
Although I agree that unix/linux should be open, it looks like SCO has some solid legal footing here. I'm just surprised that it took them this long to file the lawsuit...
Well, you have to spend money to make money. While it is true that the cost of living in Europe is higher, you have to understand that you need different things to live in Europe vs. living in America. In Europe, you probably don't need a car - public transportation is basically ubiquitous. Also if you're moving overseas, it's a better idea to maybe stay with some friends, or just go by yourself and then send for your wife or whatever, once you're all set up.
The best deal for DSL seems to be from Deutsche Telekom. They have several different rate plans, so make sure you pick the flate rate one. It's like 25E/month. You'll probably get screwed anyway, b/c Telekom is basically the worst company on Earth. Instead of help and courtesy, you get insults and insolence. So be prepared. Also, if you want to get a mobile phone, make sure you get service from Vodafone, (aka D2/Arcor/Mannesman) not Telekom. Vodafone's cheaper, has better coverage, and is a multinational carrier, although you usually don't have any problems with that in Europe. Cheers!
On the hardware checker, only MacOS and Windows are listed. I chose other and typed in Red Hat Linux 8.0. Hopefully people who use other OS's typed those in, instead of closing the survey or choosing a Windows that they have on their 2nd partition:)
Windows Networking is based on the SMB protocol. I have been using it for years, first in my home network, then at my university. I have had lukewarm results, at best.
My primary complaint against SMB is that it doesn't really work all that well. When I tried to look at the list of computers in Network Neighborhood, I often saw only a partial list (some computers that I knew were connected did not show up). The only way I could connect to these was by specifying their IP address. Other times, I could not access them at all (even though in some cases they could still access my machine!). I switched to Linux a while ago, and I have had similar results using SAMBA.
This leads me to believe that the fault for bad Windows Network performance lies not in the implementation (whether SMB on Windows, SAMBA on Linux, or the Apple implementation) but in the protocol itself.
Two summers ago, one of my friends in University here asked me to come outside with her and look at something which she described as 'cool'. Thinking I might get some:) I went with her, and we set up a tripod and telescope and ended up watching the stars all night long. For a time we focused on Jupiter, and though I couldn't see Almathea, I did see Jupiter, Callisto, Io, Europa, and Ganymede. The thought that there was nothing (well, almost nothing) in between me and those huge, huge objects that were so very far away still sends tingling down my spine whenever I think about it. It reminds me, when I think that there is pretty much nothing left to do or discover, that there is indeed a whole universe out there, waiting for (or perhaps indifferent to) us.
GSM is technically superior for two reasons. The first is that it is modular. You can stick a SIM card in anything that has a GSM slot - your mobile phone, your PDA, your laptop, your anything, and then that device becomes your communication tool, with your address book and account information. If you want, you can even copy your SIM card, so that you can have two or more devices sharing the same account information - I did this for my Dad so he could use the same account for his mobile phone and the phone we put in his car. GSM's modularity is also nice in that when your current phone breaks, you can take it into the repair shop, and they'll lend you a replacement phone. If you used CDMA you wouldn't be able to use the replacement phone without calling the mobile company and going through loads of red tape. If you use GSM, you just stick in your SIM card, and that's the end of it. Likewise, buying new phones is just as painless. In most countries in Europe you just walk into a store and buy a new phone - the mobile company isn't involved at all. The second reason GSM is superior is that the entire world uses it, outside of the USA and parts of Korea. If you get a triple band phone, you can use it here in the US as well as in Europe and Asia just by switching out SIM cards. This is what I do with my Ericsson T68.
Incidentally, as far as I know, only providers that use GSM (in the US, Voicestream/Deutsche Telekom) offer prepaid accounts - like a debit card, you load them up with credit. This has two advantages: 1) You can't run up a huge phone bill, because after you run out of credit no outgoing calls are allowed (with the exception of emergency calls) until you buy more credit, and 2) the mobile company has no information about who you are. Because you buy the SIM card in a brick and mortar store, you can pay for it in cash and the mobile company will never know who you are. Just food for thought.
It seems like these kind of things happen all the time and all we ever do is talk about how bad it is. We talk about abstract concepts like freedom and liberty, but what do we do to put those things into action? This is it, folks. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Stand up and say something. I'll see you later, I have a letter to write.
I attend the University of Texas @ Austin, and one of the reasons I decided to stay in a private dorm was the bandwidth situation. University bandwidth is subject to all kinds of restrictions and whatever - and while they may be fair (as in the case of UCI) they do sometimes get annoying. I just gotta have my music, y'know? So I picked a private dorm (and there are tons of them) that is close to campus and has a fairly fast connection. Also it is wireless, which the University Housing dorms don't offer. They (my private dorm) shape their traffic so that each user gets about 500kbps, which is pretty much comparable to my home DSL connection. They don't prioritize, nor do they block p2p traffic. So all in all it is a pretty good deal.
One of my friends decided to go a different route and is sharing the cost of Roadrunner cable with his 3 suitemates - which costs slightly more than signing up for a ResNet account but he says the speed increase (100kbps avg vs. 700kbps avg) is definately worth it.
Moral of the story: check out the options - because usually there are better ones than the University throws at you:)
I get tons of shit in my inbox right now, and I can't trace most of it. BNCs, forged headers, anonymous proxies. It is basically impossible to determine where an email really came from if the sender is knowledgeable and doesn't want you to know. So, like the the laws in Virginia that make porn illegal if it passes through any pipe or computer in the state, these new laws are technically uunenforceable. So while it is a step in the right direction, it is still not really effective.
Also included in the filing is the testimony of several expert witnesses, including Leonard Kleinrock, widely regarded as one of the original founders of the Internet. Kleinrock describes how the defendant?s file sharing system works and how they could easily control and prevent the massive copyright infringement from occurring.
Really? This is interesting. Consider: Many thousands of gigabytes of files are shared in my gnutella network. I assume that Kazaa would have similar numbers. Now, in order to
easily control and prevent
malicious hacker assholes like you and me from trading copyrighted music and movies, they would need to figure out which music is, in fact, copyrighted. The average song in my xmms playlist (346 songs) has a length of 4 minutes and 1 second. Assuming 128kbps encoding, this is about 4mb per file. Now, considering the sheer volume of files traded, as well as the fact that there are many different versions of any given song, as well as the fact that the system is dynamic (people are logging on and off all the time), it is basically impossible for them to start filtering songs out. They could build a CRC dbase, but it would take an unbelievable amount of time to CRC every single version of every single song. And even when they did, you could just open your mp3 in vi and truncate off the last 50 bytes or so - thus taking your song off the CRC list. Make that into a cron job and you have a constantly mutating mp3 playlist - but still playable. And I won't even get into movies, which are usually 700mb or so for a quality rip and would take quite a while to CRC a bunch of them. Moral of the story: just because the RIAA says they have some dude who says he knows all the answers, don't trip over your dragging lower lip.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder why the editors, in their infinite wisdom, elected to use an Xbox controller to represent 'games'. I think we can all agree that Microsoft is on our various shitlists, for one reason or another. And indeed the reasons are as varied as the people who read slashdot and the markets they (MS) have muscled their way into. Putting that aside, though, wouldn't it make more sense to have an icon that typified the category of games? Something universal, like Pac-Man(tm) or Pong paddles, or similar. And if the motivation is to pick something current, perhaps something GameCube-related would be more relevant? After all, Nintendo is the only pure-games company among the top three. And besides, it does have a long and storied history - how many of us spent countless hours playing The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers on the NES when our colleagues (co-belligerents, more like) were outside playing football? I know I did. So, unless there is some kind of corporate reason for having an Xbox-related category logo (which is doubtful... although I have seen a few Microsoft .NET banners on ./ - tsk tsk :), I respectfully submit that a picture of some Nintendo peraphernalia would represent the essence of the category 'games' far better than an Xbox-related one would. A candidate that comes to mind, immediately, is the GameCube itself. It is a beautiful piece of machinery: it evokes memories of the beloved Apple G4 cube, another engineering marvel.
That's how I feel about it. What say you?
Wrong. You are assuming a damages model which looks like this: This seems inviting at first but it is in fact not the right way to look at it, because this model assumes that every time a product is stolen, damage is caused to the company in an amount equal to the product's current sale price. The rationale for this is that the model assumes that were the thief not able to steal the product, he/she would in fact buy it at full retail price. Obviously, this is not true for everyone. Just how large a percentage of the thiefs in question would do that becomes a variable in this improved model:
Of course, determining (or at least approximating) K then becomes an issue. However, I think we can all agree that it is certainly less than its current value of 1.
you need to have a way of knowing where the device at ip 53:68:102:59:04:90 (assuming ip6 or similar) is. making the network ad-hoc is much more complicated... how do you know what's where? you don't, unless you're clever about it. maybe you have to maintain some sort of central dbase with ip addresses and gps locations (introduces privacy concerns, and has latency problems). any thoughts on this?
If you really want to get the most out of your college experience, you'll leave all your gadgets at home. Those commercials you see on television in which people buy new mobile phones and suddenly get beautiful friends - that's a lie. I just finished my first year of college. I have a TI-89, a PDA, a mobile phone (with camera), an mp3 player, a minidisc player, a laptop, and two desktops. Although I am a computer science major, I can truthfully say that most of these gadgets serve one purpose - to annoy me - and have actively played a role in preventing me from socializing with other people, which is a HUGE reason (if not the only reason) to actually go to college instead of staying home and reading textbooks. Are you really going to keep an electronic calendar? If so, do you realize that everytime you have to schedule an 'appointment', you'll be fishing one of the above gadgets out of your rucksack and messing about with it? As for a laptop in the classroom - don't do it! All it does is distract you. The best thing to do is to take a notebook and a pen, and NOTHING else. Trust me on this. Your fellow classmates do NOT want to be interrupted because you forgot to turn your mobile phone off. Besides, anything you take in there, you'll be playing with. You may not believe this, but consider: On a recent day in one of my CS classes, about 30% of the students brought a laptop to class. I casually took a visual survey of what they were doing - only one was actually typing something that looked like notes. The others were surfing the web, chatting on IM (severe affliction - the prime reason NOT to bring a gadget to class), and several were even playing Counterstrike! The electronic classroom is a myth, folks - don't believe the hardware companies when they tell you it's the future. It's not, if you want to learn anything. So, as I've said - if you want to make the most of your college experience, leave the gadgets at home. They aren't worth it.
SCO knows that IBM is just going to get real pissed off and annihilate them... "I'm not quite sure... but I think IBM and Novell are real pissed at SCO"
I wish I could use Linux 6.1 or 6.2.
I still use an hp deskjet 500. actually had it since i had a pc running win3.1 way back in the day. i get cheap knockoff cartridges, like $15/each. compusa has them. using under linux now... having soem problems with printing pdf files. other than that, works great. and yeah, i think it's immortal, i've banged it around, several dorms/apartments, competitions, etc. i love it.
you can f**k around with some DVD players to disable the region-locking. Some come with it disabled. Presumably someone will figure out how to do that for this player.
No. You'll download movies in DivX format, burn them onto CDR, and play those on this uber-player.
no. why encode the DVD onto DivX, and then burn it onto a DVD-rom? Good DVD rips that fit onto 700mb CDs look great... you almost can't tell the difference. The reason to have a DVD burner is so that you can copy DVDs, not burn DivX rips of DVD movies onto DVD-r.
good thing that it's not coming out in US, too, or the company that produces it (KiSS Technologies) would be sued out of existence.
if i use a redhat box as a router/gateway with ipmasq, then they can't see that i've got several computers connected to the dsl line, right? in the contract that i signed with earthlink, they specified that only one computer may connect at one time. of course, they sell some sort of kit that allows you to network all your pcs and share your connection... basically the same thing i am doing already, but it costs like $20/month extra. i thuoght the whole point of ipmasq was that it looks like all the traffic is coming from one computer? is this true/viable?
There is something to be said for getting away and just seeing what's out there. The scenery can be boring; however, if you're going somewhere that you've never been before you should at least give it a look, and even go out and do something, like go swimming at the beach, for example. I mean, come on... how much can you know about yourself if you've never just done something to see what it's what like, instead of relying on modern technology to mediate your experiences? The thing to keep in mind is, there is always something to be learned no matter where you go - so go! and figure out what it is!
SCO owns the rights to Unix. They licensed these rights to HP (HP-UX), Sun (Solaris), and IBM (AIX) among others. The license agreement that IBM signed specifically prevents them from disclosing Unix's source code. Now, consider:
That's a license infringement, clearly. Consider:December 20, 2000, IBM Vice President Robert LeBlanc:
Again, clearly a license infringement - SCO's license agreement, which IBM signed when they licensed Unix, in fact explicitly prevents IBM from open sourcing any of SCO's IP, which AIX is clearly a derivative of.Although I agree that unix/linux should be open, it looks like SCO has some solid legal footing here. I'm just surprised that it took them this long to file the lawsuit...
Well, you have to spend money to make money. While it is true that the cost of living in Europe is higher, you have to understand that you need different things to live in Europe vs. living in America. In Europe, you probably don't need a car - public transportation is basically ubiquitous. Also if you're moving overseas, it's a better idea to maybe stay with some friends, or just go by yourself and then send for your wife or whatever, once you're all set up.
The best deal for DSL seems to be from Deutsche Telekom. They have several different rate plans, so make sure you pick the flate rate one. It's like 25E/month. You'll probably get screwed anyway, b/c Telekom is basically the worst company on Earth. Instead of help and courtesy, you get insults and insolence. So be prepared. Also, if you want to get a mobile phone, make sure you get service from Vodafone, (aka D2/Arcor/Mannesman) not Telekom. Vodafone's cheaper, has better coverage, and is a multinational carrier, although you usually don't have any problems with that in Europe. Cheers!
On the hardware checker, only MacOS and Windows are listed. I chose other and typed in Red Hat Linux 8.0. Hopefully people who use other OS's typed those in, instead of closing the survey or choosing a Windows that they have on their 2nd partition :)
My primary complaint against SMB is that it doesn't really work all that well. When I tried to look at the list of computers in Network Neighborhood, I often saw only a partial list (some computers that I knew were connected did not show up). The only way I could connect to these was by specifying their IP address. Other times, I could not access them at all (even though in some cases they could still access my machine!). I switched to Linux a while ago, and I have had similar results using SAMBA.
This leads me to believe that the fault for bad Windows Network performance lies not in the implementation (whether SMB on Windows, SAMBA on Linux, or the Apple implementation) but in the protocol itself.
Cheers!
Incidentally, as far as I know, only providers that use GSM (in the US, Voicestream/Deutsche Telekom) offer prepaid accounts - like a debit card, you load them up with credit. This has two advantages: 1) You can't run up a huge phone bill, because after you run out of credit no outgoing calls are allowed (with the exception of emergency calls) until you buy more credit, and 2) the mobile company has no information about who you are. Because you buy the SIM card in a brick and mortar store, you can pay for it in cash and the mobile company will never know who you are. Just food for thought.
It seems like these kind of things happen all the time and all we ever do is talk about how bad it is. We talk about abstract concepts like freedom and liberty, but what do we do to put those things into action? This is it, folks. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Stand up and say something. I'll see you later, I have a letter to write.
One of my friends decided to go a different route and is sharing the cost of Roadrunner cable with his 3 suitemates - which costs slightly more than signing up for a ResNet account but he says the speed increase (100kbps avg vs. 700kbps avg) is definately worth it.
Moral of the story: check out the options - because usually there are better ones than the University throws at you :)
I get tons of shit in my inbox right now, and I can't trace most of it. BNCs, forged headers, anonymous proxies. It is basically impossible to determine where an email really came from if the sender is knowledgeable and doesn't want you to know. So, like the the laws in Virginia that make porn illegal if it passes through any pipe or computer in the state, these new laws are technically uunenforceable. So while it is a step in the right direction, it is still not really effective.
As always, security in strength, not obscurity :)