Again, I really don't care if someone provides good support because they like their
customers or because they want my money tomorrow. What difference does it make?
But the whole problem is that you have
to trust them.
They sell you the product and they don't tell
you how it works. They assure you that it is
secure/stable/whatever, but they don't show
the internals to anyone.
They say that, in spite of their whole history,
this time they make it in a different way.
That is why you have to trust them,
you don't have anything else you can depand on.
And when you trust them,
you should know their intentions.
What does that have to do with anything? Do you judge products on the motivations of
the creator, or on their actual merit?
From what I see in the post,
Swagr seems to judge the company,
not the product per se.
This means that as soon as secutity
is not a buzz-word of the month,
Microsoft will probably no longer care about it
as much as it cares now.
I think it is quite reasonable.
IBM Linux TV advertising - The apology
on
Alan Cox Interview
·
· Score: 2
First of all, I would like to sincerely apologize
everyone who was offended by my previous post,
which was a childish flamebait.
I posted it in a fury of anger,
but I know that it is not an explanation
for my behavior.
I can assure you that it will not happen again.
Today my karma has reached 50 points and this
is only my own fault, that it came back to 49.
My karma has reached the maximum before I was
able to moderate or even metamoderate by myself,
so it is quite important to me, that is exactly
why it is wise to punish my unacceptable behavior
by decreasing it.
That said, I would like to explain my
intentions.
While commenting the words of Alan Cox
"IBM have already been running Linux TV advertising in the USA.",
I asked
"Is there any place I can download that ad from?".
However vulgar and offensive that may
have sounded,
my intentions were not evil.
I am interested in promotion of my
favorite kernel, i.e. the Linux(tm),
I also liked the Peace, Love & Linux campaign
of the International Business Machines,
ergo I thought that I would like to see
this TV advertising,
which Alan Cox was talking about.
But there is one problem, however.
I do not live in the United States, where
that advertising took place, therefore I could
not have seen it.
That is why I ask you,
where could I download
the pirated version of this advertising from?
Once again, I am sorry if this post
has also hurt anyone's feelings,
like the previous one.
It was not my intention at all,
please believe me.
- Your Shiny Metal S.
IBM Linux TV advertising
on
Alan Cox Interview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
IBM have already been running Linux TV advertising in the USA.
When did the strong spirit of these beautiful ideas become so meaningless?
It's not legally binding. Period. And if it's not legally binding, the courts have the
power to ignore it.
But we have to remember that the courts are
supposed to help people in the first place,
not to fight against people,
which are inconvenient to corporations.
When did we forget about that?
What suprises me the most,
is that people are accepting that.
People vote with their wallets,
and they seem to not understand that
very important fact.
I'm just afraid that
my grandchildren will ask me in 2050:
"Grandpa, what was the freedom of thought?"
and I will tell them
"I can't tell you kids,
it's against the law now."
Please, do not confuse
copyright and patent system.
They have very little in common.
I know why were the patent laws introduced.
I'm asking about the spirit of such great
people like Thomas Jefferson, not
what is the patent system for.
So the government setup this thing where they will protect your idea for x years so you
can make money off it, and in exchange, you give your idea to the world.
Everyone wins.
This is very important
to understand:
When someone gets a patent for obvious
invention
- only this one person wins,
while the rest of the world loses.
It is especially true with
software patents, where I can write a program
and distribute it to millions of people
with zero cost.
The license fee is no longer a small percentage
of my investment. It's the only
cost, which absolutely
stops development of free software.
Sure, you can get rid of copyright and force people to give their ideas up, but
other countries have tried this, and the result is no one makes up new ideas.
Could you provide any examples to illustrate your point?
Wait a minute... I thought we were capitalists. What's this crap about the government
sanctioning monopolies? On ideas non-the-less.
I don't know about you guys, but I feel helpless in this situation. I grew up actually
believing that this civilization was about real prosperiety and the creation of wealth.
These are words of Thomas Jefferson,
the primary author of the
United States Declaration of Independence:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less,
because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as
he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe,
for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed
by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which
we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature,
be a subject of property."
When did the strong spirit
of these beautiful ideas
become so meaningless?
I'm curious how many of
these settlements happen between lawyers while playing golf and charging the client
$300/hr.
$300/h while playing golf?!
God damn it! And I thought that my record of
$100/h while watching
The Simpsons
(when my client thought I was coding)
was impressive!
I guess It's time to change my profession...
On the other hand, I know people who get
much more than $300/h while playing golf.
They're usually professional golf players,
but still it's a lot of money...
"This is the Unix philosophy.
Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams,
because that is a universal interface."
- Doug MacIlroy, the inventor of pipes.
You have to pipe your Base64 data through it
(or similar one)
like this:
so you don't write the inputfile
content to filter's standard input,
but give the "inputfile" file name as
the fist command-line argument.
Every good filter should work like this.
That way you can use input divided into parts
"I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used perform instead of do."
- Larry Wall
(Btw,
you can concatenate strings with undefined $x
so there's no need for $x="",
decode_base64 does tr|A-Za-z0-9+=/||cd so no need for s/\s+//g
and exit is redundand at the end
(0 is also the default exit code for argumentless exit))
32M 4xAGP VooDoo is way to much for me.
It won't generate accelerated 3D graphics,
so the memory for textures would be wasted
anyway.
1024x768@16bpp,
which is more than enough for me,
fits in 2MB of video RAM.
The gigabit ethernet is unfortunately
not an option for me
because of hubs prices, so I'll stick for 100Mb
for some time.
The NIC,
which AC told me about,
is currently the best box of this kind to
my knowledge.
I would prefer, however, if it had no
CD/modem/flashdisk
and was cheaper without any stuff I don't need.
I would love to see a box which is able to
act as an X terminal, booting from network,
without any moving parts, for something like $100.
If the NIC cos
ts $200 with all of the
features, it would be possible to build a
stripped version for $100.
I generally nead exactly
TCSX-1,
but four times cheaper...
If only there was a
TCSX-1
priced as optimally as the NIC, it would cost below $100...
Oh, well... I'll try to find out where
and for how much I can buy parts which they use.
If anyone has any experience with buying
and using such integrated board,
similar to
this board
(I don't know what
exactly it is,
they only say in the spec
what it has, not what model it is),
please let me know. Thanks.
Another related topics,
What are the cheapest stand-alone:
x86 processors (50+ MHz)
mainboards
ethernet adapters (100 Mb/s)
VGAs (1+ MB)
sound cards
available to buy as new today?
How does it compare to the same stuff
integrated on one board?
It's very hard to find a low-end PC parts
today, they don't sell processors
with clock rates not measured in GHz
in computer stores, you know...
After a quick Google search,
I see there are lots of different
single board PCs.
I'll try to read about them
and post the most interesting suff.
If you know any of these boards, especially
if you have used one of them with
Linux Terminal
Server or something similar
(generally the most important is if you can run Linux on them without any problems)
then please post it here.
Btw, are there any cases available for them?
There was once a hard-goods store that I bought lots of stuff at. The store was sold,
and the new owner raised all the prices, then walked around admiring "how much
money I'm making".
Naturally sales plummetted due to the newly-increased prices. The store shortly went
out of business -- apparently I wasn't the only one who quit shopping there.
That's a very good example.
It is like rising the taxes to twice as high,
and wondering why you don't have
two times more money in the new budget.
Yes, it's important to know that people don't
have unlimited amounts of money,
not only talking about copyright law,
but also with all scales of economy.
Well, let's say you have a train ticket, good for unlimited travel for a day on the
London Underground. You finish with it, but it is still valid for several hours, is it
stealing or sharing if you give it away to someone?
Yes, because you are preventing the London Underground from selling a ticket.
When I say to a friend that there's nothing
interesting in todays newspaper,
or when I tell him all of the most interesting
stories,
I also prevent the publisher from selling
the newspaper to my friend.
You have to realize, that it doesn't
automatically
mean that what I do is morally wrong.
You seem to not understand that,
judging from your answer and,
which is even more important here,
your motivation of that aswer, i.e.
"because you are preventing the London Underground from selling a ticket."
What if the person you gave your ticket to,
doesn't have any money in the first place?
I've seen many of such situations.
Where are the "lost"
or "stolen" money then?
Such thinking is a result of
long "intellectual property" propaganda,
we have to understand that,
which also assumes that
people have infinite amount of money.
If you can't afford a car, because of collusion and price fixing, is it OK to steal a car
from the dealer? Not liking price fixing is obvious. Not stealing is also obvious. I'm
clear that when I copy music, I am doing something that is both legally and _morally_
wrong.
Remember that when you steal a car, the
dealer loses one car.
When you copy a book, the publisher doesn't
lose a book, the effect is that he doesn't get
a potential payment.
It's a very subtle, but extremely
important difference.
It seems to be a religious debate at this point. Either you support the idea that people
should be able to share books, musics and other entertainment or you don't.
Read
The Right to Read.
It was first published in February 1997
and was perceived as an exaggeration, but
now after five years it starts to sound
more like a prophecy.
TCSX-1
is the cheapest what I've found,
but still $400 for 66MHz x86 with 16MB RAM
is just too much.
For that money
I can buy a terminal server for them.
On the other hand,
few weeks ago I bought an old
Fujitsu ErgoPro X PC with Pentium 133MHz, 32MB RAM,
PS/2 keyboard & mouse ports,
2MB SVGA,
floppy drive and 100Mb/s
network adapter, all for $25.
It's a great machine, but I need something smaller.
Do you know where to find something smaller
than that Fujitsu
(a compact horizontal desktop case)
but cheaper than that TCSX-1?
Maybe building it from parts is the way to go?
It would be a warhol-like worm if the message sent automatically opened the web page,
making it a purely autonomous worm. I sorta wish it was, because that would be an
interesting validation of the speed of topologically aware active worms. Then again, I
don't use MSN Messenger.
What if that Javascript code
was sent in HTML email?
Would it be run as well?
Outlook uses IE to render HTML, right?
I can't check it by myself
(I don't use Microsoft software),
but I'm curious.
Re:Can't do without either
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 3
The Windows box is still a necessity. I have a 4 year old who likes educational games
and without Windows, they simply don't run.
I don't want to start any OS-wars.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't use
those Windows educational games you have,
but you may want to check out these projects
as well:
Your kid would be in much better
situation when she/he grows up,
than other kids of the same age,
after playing with few different
operating systems and enviroments.
When I was a kid
I used my father's computers,
but he didn't know much about OSes,
he was just buying what they told him
in the computer store.
As a resuld, when I was still a kid,
I used to know
the most important functions
of MS-DOS interrupts 10h and 21h by heart.
When I was about 12,
we were writing programs for
computers class, some simple calculations.
It was boring, so I wrote a TSR,
which after taking over the clock interrupt,
and after few minutes from ending,
was starting some virus-like visual effects
on the screen.
My teacher phoned my home that night,
asking how to turn it of.
My point is that I really mastered the MS-DOS,
and everything I had was a DOS box and
lots of free time.
I often wonder, what if I had Linux
when I was 10 years old,
instead of DOS?
Would I know Bash and Perl,
like I knew Command.com and QBasic?
Would I know low level Unix system calls,
like I new the DOS interrupts?
Would I master Emacs and GCC,
like I mastered Borland IDE?
Unfortunately, I will never know that.
But I would have much
easier start as a Unix sysadmin,
that's for sure.
No, again, you're totally wrong
I referenced your statement:
"Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as
free software"
- which is in fact wrong, even for gnu standards:
``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not *price*.
And you ("even 1/100 of cent...") are talking about the price.
Please read it carefully.
I tried to explain
my previous post
as well as I could.
If you read it carefully
you have to understand.
Also read
radish's comment, it may help you.
This is the same problem as with software patents,
when you ask me to pay $0.01 per copy of my
program, I can pay you $10 and distribute 1000
copies of my program for zero price (like free beer)
and it won't cost me more than $10,
provided it's
not a
free software (like free speech),
in which case
I can't control how many copies people are
going to use, ergo I would take a risk
of paying you a fortune, if my program is used
by millions of people.
But
I have already said that,
just please read it carefully.
they can always offer a fixed number of copies to download, forcing you ro gegister.
I can't believe I wrote "ro gegister"
instead of "to register" and that I didn't
notice that while reading it a couple of times...
Strange, very strange...
I may need more
3,7-Dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dione.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I would like to explain my intentions. While commenting the words of Alan Cox "IBM have already been running Linux TV advertising in the USA.", I asked "Is there any place I can download that ad from?". However vulgar and offensive that may have sounded, my intentions were not evil. I am interested in promotion of my favorite kernel, i.e. the Linux(tm), I also liked the Peace, Love & Linux campaign of the International Business Machines, ergo I thought that I would like to see this TV advertising, which Alan Cox was talking about. But there is one problem, however. I do not live in the United States, where that advertising took place, therefore I could not have seen it. That is why I ask you, where could I download the pirated version of this advertising from?
Once again, I am sorry if this post has also hurt anyone's feelings, like the previous one. It was not my intention at all, please believe me.
I'm just afraid that my grandchildren will ask me in 2050: "Grandpa, what was the freedom of thought?" and I will tell them "I can't tell you kids, it's against the law now."
It's here, on The Red Thread site (which is going to be moved to a new address soon). They have a nice collection of related quotations, sorted by author and by subject.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
When did the strong spirit of these beautiful ideas become so meaningless?
"This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." - Doug MacIlroy, the inventor of pipes.
You have to pipe your Base64 data through it (or similar one) like this:
(it's one line, $ is the shell prompt) or like this: (also one line) or you can omit the "<" so you don't write the inputfile content to filter's standard input, but give the "inputfile" file name as the fist command-line argument. Every good filter should work like this. That way you can use input divided into parts which has the same effect as but internally works totally different, which is however transparent in Perl, thanks to the magical <> diamond operator.(Btw, you can concatenate strings with undefined $x so there's no need for $x="", decode_base64 does tr|A-Za-z0-9+=/||cd so no need for s/\s+//g and exit is redundand at the end (0 is also the default exit code for argumentless exit))
The NIC, which AC told me about, is currently the best box of this kind to my knowledge. I would prefer, however, if it had no CD/modem/flashdisk and was cheaper without any stuff I don't need. I would love to see a box which is able to act as an X terminal, booting from network, without any moving parts, for something like $100. If the NIC cos ts $200 with all of the features, it would be possible to build a stripped version for $100.
I generally nead exactly TCSX-1, but four times cheaper... If only there was a TCSX-1 priced as optimally as the NIC, it would cost below $100... Oh, well... I'll try to find out where and for how much I can buy parts which they use. If anyone has any experience with buying and using such integrated board, similar to this board (I don't know what exactly it is, they only say in the spec what it has, not what model it is), please let me know. Thanks.
Another related topics,
What are the cheapest stand-alone:
- x86 processors (50+ MHz)
- mainboards
- ethernet adapters (100 Mb/s)
- VGAs (1+ MB)
- sound cards
available to buy as new today?How does it compare to the same stuff integrated on one board?
It's very hard to find a low-end PC parts today, they don't sell processors with clock rates not measured in GHz in computer stores, you know...
After a quick Google search, I see there are lots of different single board PCs. I'll try to read about them and post the most interesting suff. If you know any of these boards, especially if you have used one of them with Linux Terminal Server or something similar (generally the most important is if you can run Linux on them without any problems) then please post it here. Btw, are there any cases available for them?
It's a very subtle, but extremely important difference.
TCSX-1 is the cheapest what I've found, but still $400 for 66MHz x86 with 16MB RAM is just too much. For that money I can buy a terminal server for them.
On the other hand, few weeks ago I bought an old Fujitsu ErgoPro X PC with Pentium 133MHz, 32MB RAM, PS/2 keyboard & mouse ports, 2MB SVGA, floppy drive and 100Mb/s network adapter, all for $25. It's a great machine, but I need something smaller.
Do you know where to find something smaller than that Fujitsu (a compact horizontal desktop case) but cheaper than that TCSX-1? Maybe building it from parts is the way to go?
I can't check it by myself (I don't use Microsoft software), but I'm curious.
When I was a kid, I was seeing the United States as the country of freedom.
Now I would be affraid to live there.
It's sad, really sad.
Who will win this endless battle? People or corporations?
- Debian Jr. Project
- GNU and Education
- Schoolforge
- Linux For Kids
- KDE Edutainment Project
- Organization
for Free Software in Education and Teaching
- SEUL/edu
Your kid would be in much better situation when she/he grows up, than other kids of the same age, after playing with few different operating systems and enviroments.When I was a kid I used my father's computers, but he didn't know much about OSes, he was just buying what they told him in the computer store.
As a resuld, when I was still a kid, I used to know the most important functions of MS-DOS interrupts 10h and 21h by heart. When I was about 12, we were writing programs for computers class, some simple calculations. It was boring, so I wrote a TSR, which after taking over the clock interrupt, and after few minutes from ending, was starting some virus-like visual effects on the screen. My teacher phoned my home that night, asking how to turn it of.
My point is that I really mastered the MS-DOS, and everything I had was a DOS box and lots of free time. I often wonder, what if I had Linux when I was 10 years old, instead of DOS? Would I know Bash and Perl, like I knew Command.com and QBasic? Would I know low level Unix system calls, like I new the DOS interrupts? Would I master Emacs and GCC, like I mastered Borland IDE? Unfortunately, I will never know that. But I would have much easier start as a Unix sysadmin, that's for sure.