I'm always amazed at how quickly and completely bad guys cave-in. Past a certain level of opposition, those who know they are doing wrong totally give up. A clear sign their motivation was opportunism and not principle.
Unfortunately, I don't believe anyone at MS understands they have done wrong.
Any sysadmin will tell you it is sometimes necessary to monitor usage of the system to ensure continuing good performance. Resources such
as bandwidth, modemtime, disk space, CPU and memory are finite and can be hogged by a user (perhaps inadvertantly) to the detriment of all. Automatic limits save the tiresome personal intervention.
But honest and competant sysadmins will also tell you that usage monitoring never needs to pry into the content of the excessive usage. Merely reporting the amount to the user usually suffices. If not, reporting it to the user's boss by definition suffices.
Unix sysadmins have evolved certain privacy ethics over the decades. Never pry into user files, email or other traffic even though it is trivially easy to do. There is no justifiable need. Record and store email headers (addressees & subject) in the event of a complaint of email non-delivery. Remind users of excessive resource usage, preferably by automated email. At the limit,
publicly post a list of the top10 resource hogs.
But never any mention of content.
Sorry for the confusion. I don't mean boxes, I meant Personal Computers. "Box" is a term-of-art
[jargon] meaning a computer. I used the germanic plural -en to try to reduce confusion with real boxes of something like MS-WinXP software.
Well, I'll agree that MS-Win95 isn't stable the way Linux or *BSD are stable. MS-WinNT I really don't have enough experience on, but I assume it's somewhere inbetween.
But given correct (heavy) maintenance, my experience is that MS-Win95b _can_ be sufficiently stable. MS-Win95b on my work machine only crashes about once a year. My home machine is about the same. My wife's home machine is much worse, but she doesn't let me near her box until she's desparate. It starts crashing daily after about one month without mtce. I have never needed to reinstall MS-Win95b in 20+ machine-years of running (excepting HD failure).
I just don't see any compelling reason. I have plenty of MS Win95 licences, and really see no need to upgrade those boxen. Just like my Linux & FreeBSD boxen who almost always are a few versions behind.
MS-Win95b is acceptably stable given enough RAM, HD and maintenance. The only thing that has caused me to upgrade a few to Win98 is USB cameras not installing on 95.
MS-WinNT may be more stable, but some hardware and software still refuses to run under it. I believe XP is an NT descendant, so I'd worry about this.
Upgrading is fine for journalists who have stories to write, and for other software reviewers. I just don't know why the rest of us should upgrade. To get a bunch of bugfixes & security patches? Feh! If I need'em, I'll get them separately.
This reminds me of Y2K. The estimates look calculated to give a "high side number". How many of user trouble calls were really due to a virus? I've only ever seen precisely one confirmed infection in many years of looking after ~20 PCs. But lots of calls are falsely blamed on viruses when the true cause is user error, application incompatibility or MS-Windows instability.
Including patching or AV software costs is rather dubious -- OSes need maintenance and their bugs/vulnerabilities fixed.
Granted aerodrag is important. But the atmosphere is relatively thin and the drag reduces very quickly. For each 3.7 miles (6 km, 20kft) it's roughly halfed. So the high aerodrag is a fairly short portion of the trip.
I can see how this short test worked, and how they can get some scramjet performace data in the 30 ms of free flight. Ain't microelectronics wonderful?
But frankly, I'm more interested in that super cannon. Mach 7.1 is 7,500 ft/s (2,300 m/s) which is extremely high. It would have a max range (neglecting aerodrag) of 300 miles! Did they use a gas-gun?
Re:How long can the US DoJ go on?
on
Sklyarov Update
·
· Score: 1
I realize about the spouse battering cases. But I also know that it's _alot_ tougher to convict the abuser when the victim gives no or cooperating testamony. "Reasonable doubt".
I also think a number of places in the US have had to pass special laws to be able to persue these cases at all.
Re:How long can the US DoJ go on?
on
Sklyarov Update
·
· Score: 1
Well, imagine you hit me and I call the cops and get you arrested for assault & battery. Later I
change my mind and say, "No, I was mistaken, it was a consensual contact", then how can you be convicted of assault? On the basis of what witnesses say? IANAL. [I might get charged with making a false complaint, or you might sue me for same.]
Murder is a slighly special case since it is presumed the deceased didn't want to die. So the State carries the complaint forward.
Will you guys please shut up?:) I spend _alot_ time arguing with penny-pinching purchasing managers who want to save a few bucks.
In a corporate environment, hardware costs are negligible. Even saving $500 on 10,000 PCs (5 M$) should be looked at with great skepticism. The problem is most of the PC costs are in support, not hardware. The PC users are paid $15-50/hr. The PC techs are paid ~$25/hr. Everybody costs 2-3x their salary to the company once benefits and overheads are figured in.
Since it takes at least an hour to migrate a user to a new box, the migration alone costs $100-200 right there.
If the cheap hardware breaks or causes the user to otherwise lose productivity (by griping about how slow the box is, or how they have a faster one at home), then the purchase savings quickly evaporate.
But these economics only apply for corporations with reasonable managers. For non-profits, or entities with budgetitis (govts?), then this productivity argument is moot.
How long can the US DoJ go on?
on
Sklyarov Update
·
· Score: 2
Strange things happen under law, but since Adobe has withdrawn it's complaint, how long can the US Department of [in]Justice continue to persue the case? It's going to be real hard to convict Dmitry if Adobe says on the stand "No, of course Rot13 is not encryption. We mistakenly thought so at one time, but the computing community rather dramatically pointed out our error."
AFAIK, UK law allows prosecutions to proceed in the face of reluctant or hostile complaintants. US law is far more complaint dependant.
Before anyone goes out and tries to get a tax on CD-R [like Canada], we should know:
What percent of CD-R are burnt with data or other non-music content;
What percent of CD-R are burnt with music content owned by the burnt disk owner? AKA "Fair Use" transcribing media.
I have a feeling the RIAA is just trying to kill fair use. Why am I not surprised? Anything for a $.
OK -- so how about a Test suite ?
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
IBM is prepared to drop AIX iff Linux can handle the job. Great. My question is: How will they know?
I'm sure IBM does a great deal of validation testing. Why not tell the kernel developers where things come up short? One of the most valuable development prerequisites are good bug reports. IBM could unleash their testing team.
Or does politics get in the way -- the testing team manager doesn't approve of the Linux takeover?
As a condition for their meeting with Adobe, the EFF probably had to agree to request the protests be put on hold. Of course, they do not expect everyone to honor their requests. But they have to be seen by Adobe to try.
It's very hard to see inside Adobe's mind because I cannot understand their motivation for prosecuting Dmitry. As I've written elsewhere, it doesn't make them any money. They may expect the EFF to be able to stop all demos. That won't happen. But the more protests that don't happen should be seen as strengthening the EFF because it will indicate their influence.
Adobe matters a great deal because if they withdraw their complaint, I would expect Dmitry to be freed very quickly. I don't think there is a fast way of getting him free.
IANAL. The legality of one-party recordings varies by state. In some states (Maryland & Massachusetts apparently), all parties must know of the recording. In some others (Texas), only one party need consent to a recording. Check with a lawyer.
Of course, this cuts both ways: the police may or may not need to inform you of their recordings. In all states and Federally AFAIK, evesdropping without either party's consent is illegal.
They were building conrete canoes in a civil engineering competition at the University of Toronto in 1979. Not even hard -- concrete is half the density of steel, and steel ships are everywhere.
More insteresting is the resonant part of it, but I would think that steel is better because it's elastic limit is higher and the modulus is lower to give more elastic deformation.
IIRC, US Patent Applications require inventor's signatures saying they invented the thing. Making mods after discussions in JEDEC meetings seems to indicate otherwise.
Who in their right mind relies exclusively on gatekeepers? Journalists', producers', and academics' biases are harder to correct than the obvious crass commercial interests.
I know enough to put reliability ratings on everything I read. The traditional print and broadcast media are not usually blatantly biased, but they are biased almost all the time.
What I like is The Internet with it's open, uncensored, up-to-date and wide participation. It's a very rich information source if you're willing to work. Some would rather others filter it for them. Not me. Tradutore, traditore . Filters always lose information and gain bias.
Who in their right mind relies exclusively on gatekeepers? Journalists', producers', and academics' biases are harder to correct than the obvious crass commercial interests.
I know enough to put reliability ratings on everything I read. The traditional print and broadcast media are not usually blatantly biased, but they are biased almost all the time.
What I like is The Internet with it's open, uncensored, up-to-date and wide participation. It's a very rich information source if you're willing to work. Some would rather others filter it for them. Not me. Tradutore, tradittore . Filters always lose information and gain bias.
Since the user _insists_ on having his favorite tools and installs them himself:) Mine are not cygwin (or mingw which I prefer) but Win16 downloaded from some BBS in '94. For those without these handy tools, you can just try:
C:\WINDOWS>debug ftp.exe
-s 0 l 0 "Calif"
152A:5A29
-d 5a00
152A:5A00 63 29 20 31 39 38 33 20-54 68 65 20 52 65 67 65 c) 1983 The Rege
152A:5A10 6E 74 73 20 6F 66 20 74-68 65 20 55 6E 69 76 65 nts of the Unive
152A:5A20 72 73 69 74 79 20 6F 66-20 43 61 6C 69 66 6F 72 rsity of Califor
152A:5A30 6E 69 61 2E 0A 20 41 6C-6C 20 72 69 67 68 74 73 nia.. All rights
152A:5A40 20 72 65 73 65 72 76 65-64 2E 0A 00 2E 00 00 00 reserved.......
152A:5A50 38 00 00 00 61 73 63 69-69 00 00 00 72 00 00 00 8...ascii...r...
C:\WIN95B>strings ftp.exe | grep alif
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I suspect there's alot more BSD code in MS-Windows[*|NT], but either compressed to hide the UC copyright or licenced more recently without the "obnoxious advertising" BSD clause.
Hague is a dead letter under US Constitution
on
Harm From The Hague
·
· Score: 2
RMS needs to chill. I very much doubt his legal buddy Eben Mogeln agrees with his "Harm from the Hague" screed. This is another alarmist polemic along the lines of RMS's "Right to Read".
Not that's he's entirely wrong. Extraterritoriality is a very scary thing. The Hague Convention _is_ seriously flawed. But as things stand now in the US, it is very unlikely to be enforcable in the US. IANAL.
The priority in US law is the US Constitution overrides treaties which overrides Congress. If the Hague were presented as a Treaty (it is) and ratified by 2/3rds of the Senate (unlikely) still it would have trouble: Free Speech is protected under the First Amendment. The power to make Patents and Copyright laws is granted to Congress under the USConst Article I Section 8. Not some foreign entity or even the US President/Senate.
US Courts (especially the USSC) have had little qualm about ruling US and State Laws unconstitutional and invalid. They will have even less hesitation with foreign laws.
For many years the US wasn't even a member of the "Berne Convention" on Copyright for this reason. I think finally Congress passed enabling (word-for-word) legislation.
Now this argument applies only for the US. The UK, Canada and Australia have "Sovereignty of Parlement" without strong Constitutional safeguards. You could say they are elected dictatorships.
Agreed future profits increases the amount of money received. And IANAL but "future profits" are an unusual part of any settlement. Lump sum is more customary. But percent is percent, whether now or in the future. The lawyers could have asked and often get 40% from their clients. The Courts have no say.
The US legal practice around contingency cases is unusual in the Western world. AFAIK, In other common-law jurisdictions, a lawyer would be disbarred for such usurious agreements. The usual rule is that contingency fees cannot exceed normal "pay as you go" [taxed] fees. This makes the US more litigious than otherwise, but it is not the only reason. And perhaps the litigation is needed from a wider social perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always amazed at how quickly and completely bad guys cave-in. Past a certain level of opposition, those who know they are doing wrong totally give up. A clear sign their motivation was opportunism and not principle.
Unfortunately, I don't believe anyone at MS understands they have done wrong.
But honest and competant sysadmins will also tell you that usage monitoring never needs to pry into the content of the excessive usage. Merely reporting the amount to the user usually suffices. If not, reporting it to the user's boss by definition suffices.
Unix sysadmins have evolved certain privacy ethics over the decades. Never pry into user files, email or other traffic even though it is trivially easy to do. There is no justifiable need. Record and store email headers (addressees & subject) in the event of a complaint of email non-delivery. Remind users of excessive resource usage, preferably by automated email. At the limit, publicly post a list of the top10 resource hogs. But never any mention of content.
Perhaps NT admins need a lesson?
No reinstall for 20+ machine-years is actually in my case 3 machines for 5 years plus 2 machines for 3 years.
Sorry for the confusion. I don't mean boxes, I meant Personal Computers. "Box" is a term-of-art
[jargon] meaning a computer. I used the germanic plural -en to try to reduce confusion with real boxes of something like MS-WinXP software.
But given correct (heavy) maintenance, my experience is that MS-Win95b _can_ be sufficiently stable. MS-Win95b on my work machine only crashes about once a year. My home machine is about the same. My wife's home machine is much worse, but she doesn't let me near her box until she's desparate. It starts crashing daily after about one month without mtce. I have never needed to reinstall MS-Win95b in 20+ machine-years of running (excepting HD failure).
MS-Win95b is acceptably stable given enough RAM, HD and maintenance. The only thing that has caused me to upgrade a few to Win98 is USB cameras not installing on 95.
MS-WinNT may be more stable, but some hardware and software still refuses to run under it. I believe XP is an NT descendant, so I'd worry about this.
Upgrading is fine for journalists who have stories to write, and for other software reviewers. I just don't know why the rest of us should upgrade. To get a bunch of bugfixes & security patches? Feh! If I need'em, I'll get them separately.
Including patching or AV software costs is rather dubious -- OSes need maintenance and their bugs/vulnerabilities fixed.
Granted aerodrag is important. But the atmosphere is relatively thin and the drag reduces very quickly. For each 3.7 miles (6 km, 20kft) it's roughly halfed. So the high aerodrag is a fairly short portion of the trip.
But frankly, I'm more interested in that super cannon. Mach 7.1 is 7,500 ft/s (2,300 m/s) which is extremely high. It would have a max range (neglecting aerodrag) of 300 miles! Did they use a gas-gun?
I also think a number of places in the US have had to pass special laws to be able to persue these cases at all.
change my mind and say, "No, I was mistaken, it was a consensual contact", then how can you be convicted of assault? On the basis of what witnesses say? IANAL. [I might get charged with making a false complaint, or you might sue me for same.]
Murder is a slighly special case since it is presumed the deceased didn't want to die. So the State carries the complaint forward.
In a corporate environment, hardware costs are negligible. Even saving $500 on 10,000 PCs (5 M$) should be looked at with great skepticism. The problem is most of the PC costs are in support, not hardware. The PC users are paid $15-50/hr. The PC techs are paid ~$25/hr. Everybody costs 2-3x their salary to the company once benefits and overheads are figured in.
Since it takes at least an hour to migrate a user to a new box, the migration alone costs $100-200 right there.
If the cheap hardware breaks or causes the user to otherwise lose productivity (by griping about how slow the box is, or how they have a faster one at home), then the purchase savings quickly evaporate.
But these economics only apply for corporations with reasonable managers. For non-profits, or entities with budgetitis (govts?), then this productivity argument is moot.
AFAIK, UK law allows prosecutions to proceed in the face of reluctant or hostile complaintants. US law is far more complaint dependant.
What percent of CD-R are burnt with data or other non-music content;
What percent of CD-R are burnt with music content owned by the burnt disk owner? AKA "Fair Use" transcribing media.
I have a feeling the RIAA is just trying to kill fair use. Why am I not surprised? Anything for a $.
I'm sure IBM does a great deal of validation testing. Why not tell the kernel developers where things come up short? One of the most valuable development prerequisites are good bug reports. IBM could unleash their testing team. Or does politics get in the way -- the testing team manager doesn't approve of the Linux takeover?
It's very hard to see inside Adobe's mind because I cannot understand their motivation for prosecuting Dmitry. As I've written elsewhere, it doesn't make them any money. They may expect the EFF to be able to stop all demos. That won't happen. But the more protests that don't happen should be seen as strengthening the EFF because it will indicate their influence.
Adobe matters a great deal because if they withdraw their complaint, I would expect Dmitry to be freed very quickly. I don't think there is a fast way of getting him free.
Of course, this cuts both ways: the police may or may not need to inform you of their recordings. In all states and Federally AFAIK, evesdropping without either party's consent is illegal.
More insteresting is the resonant part of it, but I would think that steel is better because it's elastic limit is higher and the modulus is lower to give more elastic deformation.
Don't fraudulent patent applications carry penalties? Perjury?
I know enough to put reliability ratings on everything I read. The traditional print and broadcast media are not usually blatantly biased, but they are biased almost all the time.
What I like is The Internet with it's open, uncensored, up-to-date and wide participation. It's a very rich information source if you're willing to work. Some would rather others filter it for them. Not me. Tradutore, traditore . Filters always lose information and gain bias.
I know enough to put reliability ratings on everything I read. The traditional print and broadcast media are not usually blatantly biased, but they are biased almost all the time.
What I like is The Internet with it's open, uncensored, up-to-date and wide participation. It's a very rich information source if you're willing to work. Some would rather others filter it for them. Not me. Tradutore, tradittore . Filters always lose information and gain bias.
Since the user _insists_ on having his favorite tools and installs them himself :) Mine are not cygwin (or mingw which I prefer) but Win16 downloaded from some BBS in '94. For those without these handy tools, you can just try:
C:\WINDOWS>debug ftp.exe
-s 0 l 0 "Calif"
152A:5A29
-d 5a00
152A:5A00 63 29 20 31 39 38 33 20-54 68 65 20 52 65 67 65 c) 1983 The Rege
152A:5A10 6E 74 73 20 6F 66 20 74-68 65 20 55 6E 69 76 65 nts of the Unive
152A:5A20 72 73 69 74 79 20 6F 66-20 43 61 6C 69 66 6F 72 rsity of Califor
152A:5A30 6E 69 61 2E 0A 20 41 6C-6C 20 72 69 67 68 74 73 nia.. All rights
152A:5A40 20 72 65 73 65 72 76 65-64 2E 0A 00 2E 00 00 00 reserved.......
152A:5A50 38 00 00 00 61 73 63 69-69 00 00 00 72 00 00 00 8...ascii...r...
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I suspect there's alot more BSD code in MS-Windows[*|NT], but either compressed to hide the UC copyright or licenced more recently without the "obnoxious advertising" BSD clause.
Not that's he's entirely wrong. Extraterritoriality is a very scary thing. The Hague Convention _is_ seriously flawed. But as things stand now in the US, it is very unlikely to be enforcable in the US. IANAL.
The priority in US law is the US Constitution overrides treaties which overrides Congress. If the Hague were presented as a Treaty (it is) and ratified by 2/3rds of the Senate (unlikely) still it would have trouble: Free Speech is protected under the First Amendment. The power to make Patents and Copyright laws is granted to Congress under the USConst Article I Section 8. Not some foreign entity or even the US President/Senate.
US Courts (especially the USSC) have had little qualm about ruling US and State Laws unconstitutional and invalid. They will have even less hesitation with foreign laws.
For many years the US wasn't even a member of the "Berne Convention" on Copyright for this reason. I think finally Congress passed enabling (word-for-word) legislation.
Now this argument applies only for the US. The UK, Canada and Australia have "Sovereignty of Parlement" without strong Constitutional safeguards. You could say they are elected dictatorships.
The US legal practice around contingency cases is unusual in the Western world. AFAIK, In other common-law jurisdictions, a lawyer would be disbarred for such usurious agreements. The usual rule is that contingency fees cannot exceed normal "pay as you go" [taxed] fees. This makes the US more litigious than otherwise, but it is not the only reason. And perhaps the litigation is needed from a wider social perspective.