Eh, chances are that site's either in Mass or the UK now. Niagra Mohawk's owned by National Grid USA (in Mass), which is a subsidiary of National Grid in the UK.
> For those dumping on ham radio as being obsolete or feel broadband is more important, consider that this will interfere with many other services including international ship distress frequencies, government (including military) allocations, shortwave broadcasts, and most likely aviation and public safety frequencies. Is your ability to get high speed pr0n more important than all this ?
I pointed this out above somewhere too, but 80MHz is well below all the marine frequencies that I know of. Additionally there are few to no powerlines on the water, so I think ships in distress will likely be fine (or at least no more in trouble than they would be otherwise).
> This implementation of BPL would be disastrous for ham radio and anyone else using HF frequencies, like shortwave broadcasters, coast guard, government, marine, and so on.
Minor point, but afaik marine and coast guard channels are all around 155-165MHz. Sure this implementation is eating a lot of bandwidth so to speak, but its not quite as disastrous as you say. More to the point, if it were eating Coast Guard channels, there's no way in hell Washington or the FCC or anybody would let it fly.
Mod parent up... I tried that powertoy, praying it would be useful, but it was absolutely pointless. If anything, it slowed me down and made me less productive, and I'm a guy who uses virtual desktops regularly in Gnome.
> God forbid we should worry about the important things, like who is going to pay for our parent's medical care, our environment, our rights as individual citizens, our massively corrupt politicians, overpopulation, corporate greed...
Point well taken, but I'd say a few of these important things do apply to the whole music sharing fiasco. At the very least corporate greed, and arguably our rights as individual citizens and our massively corrupt politicians as well.
>The typical interpretation I read is "if you put GPL code in your software that you release as a binary, you have to release the source, no exceptions."
This is true... in order to use the GPL'ed code. If something like this went to court, under no circumstances would the judge force the offending product to be GPL'd. Thats not how it works. The charge in court would be that because MS didn't GPL the product, the had no license to use the GPL'd code, and therefore they are in violation of somebody's copyright. Then it becomes a matter of somebody (FSF maybe) collecting damages from MS, and MS removing the GPL'd code. This whole idea of the GPL magically opening closed-source programs is ridiculous. Which is not to say that MS shouldn't fear the GPL. Nobody likes being sued for copyright infringement. But the penalties they would face would be along the same lines as if they stole somebody's proprietary code, nothing more drastic.
Solaris is neat and all, and I don't think I ever crashed it... but IMO its really nothing special either (barring when its used by crazy people who need 50 processors and 1000% uptime). At least on x86 its obnoxious to configure and use for anything, and hardware support is marginal at best. Don't even get me started on Sun's asinine default partitions, UFS filesystem, and their commandline utilities which are just dying to be replaced with GNU tools or similar. Sure you COULD take x86 Linux programs and run them, but really why would you want to? I've played with Solaris a few times, and while its neat to say you did it, and I do kind of like their firewall software, virtually every Linux distro or BSD I've used is easier to deal with. And at least for me, I'm going through all this aggravation just to do something I could do already on my Linux or OpenBSD machines.
Now, about SPARC machines, I don't know about the Blade2k's, but we had a lab at school that had 30 or so Blade 150's, all tricked out with 21" monitors and 1.5GB of RAM, and they SUCKED! I've talked to people using them in industry who have agreed with my impression. 500-somewhad-MHz Sparc chips are sloooowww, and their graphics capabilities were none too impressive either. Performancewise, my home PC running Solaris 9 x86 was a hell of a lot more responsive (though I didn't get to have luxuries like sound, so its a tradeoff), and its only a P3-850 with 512MB RAM. Granted, my PC doesn't do fancy 64-bit things, but still... CDE's not that intensive, you'd think any old sparc would be able to handle it without missing a beat.
This is one of the funnier posts I've ever been tempted to mod Insightful. I mean come on, how many pre-1.0 programs work as well as Phoenix 0.6? I imagine the same is true of Thunderbird 0.1, though I've only used its predecessor "alpha" releases sparingly. In a way its a little irritating, because when I try to tell people about Phoenix, some will say "oh its only version 0.6, I'll wait a while on that one."
At the same time though, the Mozilla 1.0 release WAS way cool, very stable, and really the model of what a 1.0 release should be. And thats a big part of why nobody seemed to care when 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3 came out. 1.0 wasn't really broken (leaving aside security issues).
Hmm... makes me wonder what Phoenix/Thunderbird will look like when they hit 1.0.
They do this at BU too. Just started last year as a direct result of it being a pain in the ass to find all the Codered/Nimda infected machines. All in all, when you have a massive network full of relatively unrestricted users, I don't think its unreasonable to have enough information to easily determine who's who.
Oh I disagree... I guess it depends on your University, but I almost never got portscanned randomly, and I know for a fact that the University Network Security people DID scan for CodeRed/Nimda and things of that nature. They'd do it, shut off the jack, and then you'd call and they'd tell you your box was infected with this and that.
Well sure, they're not going to stick their necks WAY out for their students... I wouldn't expect them to. The fact that they looked at what they got and decided to make it as hard for the RIAA as they could without putting their respective institutions in any real jeopardy is pretty good though... more than I would have expected.
Hmm... I'm not sure which Boston University you went to, but I'm more inclined to agree with the previous poster. Those BUPD cruisers you see everywhere? Guess who they work for. Hint: the answer is not City of Boston (though they are naturally answerable to the real cops to some degree). They are definitely allowed to enter dorm rooms at any point with or without any probable cause. Dorm security is outsourced, but that really is ancilliary to the point. Further, the trouble with those "its on the books but we don't care" rules, is that some of the RA's/administration do in fact care and will make your life miserable if you give them the chance. As far as filesharing goes, its true that they don't really crackdown, but its also true that its tremendously taxing on the network infrastructure, and getting worse every year, so they do send nasty grams, and if you're really bad Jim Stone might call and give you a verbal asskicking.
Its funny though, somehow I knew when I saw autopr0n's post that if I looked at the ones beneath it somebody would mention BUPD.
True enough, but then why go out of their way to exclude the rest of us from even viewing their index page? I've never understood why developers do that...
Sure, this isn't really news. Vendors have been doing it for a while. Its still pretty crappy though. I mean, even if I'm not dual-booting, I paid for Windows XP and I want Windows XP. I don't want its retarded cousin who doesn't have a proper install procedure. At the very least the vendor should make it clear that you're getting a Recovery CD and not the actual install disc. I guess maybe recovery cds are fine for joe blow who doesn't know a damn thing about his system, but for those of us who want to have control over our machines, they're a tremendous pain in the ass.
Of course, all this is pretty immaterial as I use Linux pretty exclusively these days. I'm just remembering my Windows days and why I switched.
> The only thing I can think of is an assumption that people would choose an OS based on its proprietary browser (Explorer7 or Safari) but I think everyone would agree that the decision would probably work the other way around (OS first, browser selection consequential).
See I don't think thats true at all. You sell the OS based on what you can do with it, i.e. what applications will it run. If everybody uses IE and is okay with it, they'd probably rather continue to use it than learn something new. After all, learning a different browser may not be hard, but its still infinitely harder than not learning anything.
Now on the other hand, if everyone and their mother tries out Mozilla and finds it to be acceptable, and gets used to using it, well now they can go to pretty much whatever OS they want and be that much more comfortable because they already know the web browser app.
Its really the same old trick. Get your users hooked on your applications and keep them stuck on your OS. Because really, who other than us gives a crap what the underlying OS is?
> However, paying money for browsers is a new idea that probably won't catch on.
Actually its a really old idea that was done away with sometime around 1995 I think. I still remember buying Netscape 2.0. I think I might have an IE disk I paid for too. When IE and Netscape started going at it, they both became free downloads and gradually the purchasable disks went away. Why? Because nobody pays for what they can get for free. It amazes me that opera has survived this long.
> When was the last time MS released an OS upgrade and said "well, this OS isn't as stable as the last one, but we will release some service packs in a few month and those who are running mission critical applications should wait until these are released before upgrading."
Never. See, these FreeBSD guys are slackers. They're clearly releasing beta code and calling it final. Every Microsoft release is Better, Faster, Easier to Use, More Stable and Reliable than Ever (tm), and helps You Do More Faster. FreeBSD needs to get its act together before it dies out.
Humorless moderators, please consult your sarcasm meters before exercising your mystical powers.
The article mentions at the end that most Model M's have a speaker hole in their chassis. Well, mine's still actually got the speaker built into it, and I've always wondered if there's a way to get that speaker to do anything. Anybody know?
As a somewhat OT aside, I'd like to mention that #3 may be changing somewhat. As an example, my friend just bought the new Metallica CD (caution, I didn't verify that its not a copy-protected cd, but I don't think it is). It cost $10 at the store, and it came with a companion DVD and access to a website with more content. Needless to say, he was pretty surprised and happy. Hopefully more artists will do stuff like this. After all, if Lars can do it, anyone can.
>Lastly, are they seriously suggesting rolling out a full PKI for all AIM users? Again, details are light so I'm not sure this is what they mean, but it does seem to be implied. If so, someone needs to inform them of the harsh realities of PKI. Certs for AOL users wouldn't be too hard, since they already have addresses, CC #s, etc to let them (at least with reasonable probability) check on people's identity. But everybody else - forget it.
Sounds like a new marketing campaign to me.... instant message securely, only when you sign up for AOL.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, chances are that site's either in Mass or the UK now. Niagra Mohawk's owned by National Grid USA (in Mass), which is a subsidiary of National Grid in the UK.
> For those dumping on ham radio as being obsolete or feel broadband is more important, consider that this will interfere with many other services including international ship distress frequencies, government (including military) allocations, shortwave broadcasts, and most likely aviation and public safety frequencies. Is your ability to get high speed pr0n more important than all this ?
I pointed this out above somewhere too, but 80MHz is well below all the marine frequencies that I know of. Additionally there are few to no powerlines on the water, so I think ships in distress will likely be fine (or at least no more in trouble than they would be otherwise).
> This implementation of BPL would be disastrous for ham radio and anyone else using HF frequencies, like shortwave broadcasters, coast guard, government, marine, and so on.
Minor point, but afaik marine and coast guard channels are all around 155-165MHz. Sure this implementation is eating a lot of bandwidth so to speak, but its not quite as disastrous as you say. More to the point, if it were eating Coast Guard channels, there's no way in hell Washington or the FCC or anybody would let it fly.
fair enough, but it seems to me in that case they should use -P for ssh too.
Mod parent up... I tried that powertoy, praying it would be useful, but it was absolutely pointless. If anything, it slowed me down and made me less productive, and I'm a guy who uses virtual desktops regularly in Gnome.
> God forbid we should worry about the important things, like who is going to pay for our parent's medical care, our environment, our rights as individual citizens, our massively corrupt politicians, overpopulation, corporate greed...
Point well taken, but I'd say a few of these important things do apply to the whole music sharing fiasco. At the very least corporate greed, and arguably our rights as individual citizens and our massively corrupt politicians as well.
>The typical interpretation I read is "if you put GPL code in your software that you release as a binary, you have to release the source, no exceptions."
This is true... in order to use the GPL'ed code. If something like this went to court, under no circumstances would the judge force the offending product to be GPL'd. Thats not how it works. The charge in court would be that because MS didn't GPL the product, the had no license to use the GPL'd code, and therefore they are in violation of somebody's copyright. Then it becomes a matter of somebody (FSF maybe) collecting damages from MS, and MS removing the GPL'd code. This whole idea of the GPL magically opening closed-source programs is ridiculous. Which is not to say that MS shouldn't fear the GPL. Nobody likes being sued for copyright infringement. But the penalties they would face would be along the same lines as if they stole somebody's proprietary code, nothing more drastic.
Well, I'm not about sending Bill money, but dancing monkeys? C'mon now, who doesn't want their tax dollars going to such a noble cause!
phew... and here I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to patch my Windows whathaveyou install in time
Solaris is neat and all, and I don't think I ever crashed it... but IMO its really nothing special either (barring when its used by crazy people who need 50 processors and 1000% uptime). At least on x86 its obnoxious to configure and use for anything, and hardware support is marginal at best. Don't even get me started on Sun's asinine default partitions, UFS filesystem, and their commandline utilities which are just dying to be replaced with GNU tools or similar. Sure you COULD take x86 Linux programs and run them, but really why would you want to? I've played with Solaris a few times, and while its neat to say you did it, and I do kind of like their firewall software, virtually every Linux distro or BSD I've used is easier to deal with. And at least for me, I'm going through all this aggravation just to do something I could do already on my Linux or OpenBSD machines.
Now, about SPARC machines, I don't know about the Blade2k's, but we had a lab at school that had 30 or so Blade 150's, all tricked out with 21" monitors and 1.5GB of RAM, and they SUCKED! I've talked to people using them in industry who have agreed with my impression. 500-somewhad-MHz Sparc chips are sloooowww, and their graphics capabilities were none too impressive either. Performancewise, my home PC running Solaris 9 x86 was a hell of a lot more responsive (though I didn't get to have luxuries like sound, so its a tradeoff), and its only a P3-850 with 512MB RAM. Granted, my PC doesn't do fancy 64-bit things, but still... CDE's not that intensive, you'd think any old sparc would be able to handle it without missing a beat.
This is one of the funnier posts I've ever been tempted to mod Insightful. I mean come on, how many pre-1.0 programs work as well as Phoenix 0.6? I imagine the same is true of Thunderbird 0.1, though I've only used its predecessor "alpha" releases sparingly. In a way its a little irritating, because when I try to tell people about Phoenix, some will say "oh its only version 0.6, I'll wait a while on that one."
At the same time though, the Mozilla 1.0 release WAS way cool, very stable, and really the model of what a 1.0 release should be. And thats a big part of why nobody seemed to care when 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3 came out. 1.0 wasn't really broken (leaving aside security issues).
Hmm... makes me wonder what Phoenix/Thunderbird will look like when they hit 1.0.
ooh, ooh! and Seth MacFarlane too!
They do this at BU too. Just started last year as a direct result of it being a pain in the ass to find all the Codered/Nimda infected machines. All in all, when you have a massive network full of relatively unrestricted users, I don't think its unreasonable to have enough information to easily determine who's who.
Oh I disagree... I guess it depends on your University, but I almost never got portscanned randomly, and I know for a fact that the University Network Security people DID scan for CodeRed/Nimda and things of that nature. They'd do it, shut off the jack, and then you'd call and they'd tell you your box was infected with this and that.
Well sure, they're not going to stick their necks WAY out for their students... I wouldn't expect them to. The fact that they looked at what they got and decided to make it as hard for the RIAA as they could without putting their respective institutions in any real jeopardy is pretty good though... more than I would have expected.
Hmm... I'm not sure which Boston University you went to, but I'm more inclined to agree with the previous poster. Those BUPD cruisers you see everywhere? Guess who they work for. Hint: the answer is not City of Boston (though they are naturally answerable to the real cops to some degree). They are definitely allowed to enter dorm rooms at any point with or without any probable cause. Dorm security is outsourced, but that really is ancilliary to the point. Further, the trouble with those "its on the books but we don't care" rules, is that some of the RA's/administration do in fact care and will make your life miserable if you give them the chance. As far as filesharing goes, its true that they don't really crackdown, but its also true that its tremendously taxing on the network infrastructure, and getting worse every year, so they do send nasty grams, and if you're really bad Jim Stone might call and give you a verbal asskicking.
Its funny though, somehow I knew when I saw autopr0n's post that if I looked at the ones beneath it somebody would mention BUPD.
True enough, but then why go out of their way to exclude the rest of us from even viewing their index page? I've never understood why developers do that...
Sure, this isn't really news. Vendors have been doing it for a while. Its still pretty crappy though. I mean, even if I'm not dual-booting, I paid for Windows XP and I want Windows XP. I don't want its retarded cousin who doesn't have a proper install procedure. At the very least the vendor should make it clear that you're getting a Recovery CD and not the actual install disc. I guess maybe recovery cds are fine for joe blow who doesn't know a damn thing about his system, but for those of us who want to have control over our machines, they're a tremendous pain in the ass.
Of course, all this is pretty immaterial as I use Linux pretty exclusively these days. I'm just remembering my Windows days and why I switched.
> The only thing I can think of is an assumption that people would choose an OS based on its proprietary browser (Explorer7 or Safari) but I think everyone would agree that the decision would probably work the other way around (OS first, browser selection consequential).
See I don't think thats true at all. You sell the OS based on what you can do with it, i.e. what applications will it run. If everybody uses IE and is okay with it, they'd probably rather continue to use it than learn something new. After all, learning a different browser may not be hard, but its still infinitely harder than not learning anything.
Now on the other hand, if everyone and their mother tries out Mozilla and finds it to be acceptable, and gets used to using it, well now they can go to pretty much whatever OS they want and be that much more comfortable because they already know the web browser app.
Its really the same old trick. Get your users hooked on your applications and keep them stuck on your OS. Because really, who other than us gives a crap what the underlying OS is?
> However, paying money for browsers is a new idea that probably won't catch on.
Actually its a really old idea that was done away with sometime around 1995 I think. I still remember buying Netscape 2.0. I think I might have an IE disk I paid for too. When IE and Netscape started going at it, they both became free downloads and gradually the purchasable disks went away. Why? Because nobody pays for what they can get for free. It amazes me that opera has survived this long.
> When was the last time MS released an OS upgrade and said "well, this OS isn't as stable as the last one, but we will release some service packs in a few month and those who are running mission critical applications should wait until these are released before upgrading."
Never. See, these FreeBSD guys are slackers. They're clearly releasing beta code and calling it final. Every Microsoft release is Better, Faster, Easier to Use, More Stable and Reliable than Ever (tm), and helps You Do More Faster. FreeBSD needs to get its act together before it dies out.
Humorless moderators, please consult your sarcasm meters before exercising your mystical powers.
Maybe a little OT, but...
The article mentions at the end that most Model M's have a speaker hole in their chassis. Well, mine's still actually got the speaker built into it, and I've always wondered if there's a way to get that speaker to do anything. Anybody know?
> ...from what I remember of my undergrad stats course, I would say that that is a pretty damn significant correlation.
From what I remember from my stats course, correlation does not imply causality.
Sorry, I couldn't resist that. Truthfully, I find this study hard to believe too.
As a somewhat OT aside, I'd like to mention that #3 may be changing somewhat. As an example, my friend just bought the new Metallica CD (caution, I didn't verify that its not a copy-protected cd, but I don't think it is). It cost $10 at the store, and it came with a companion DVD and access to a website with more content. Needless to say, he was pretty surprised and happy. Hopefully more artists will do stuff like this. After all, if Lars can do it, anyone can.
>Lastly, are they seriously suggesting rolling out a full PKI for all AIM users? Again, details are light so I'm not sure this is what they mean, but it does seem to be implied. If so, someone needs to inform them of the harsh realities of PKI. Certs for AOL users wouldn't be too hard, since they already have addresses, CC #s, etc to let them (at least with reasonable probability) check on people's identity. But everybody else - forget it.
Sounds like a new marketing campaign to me.... instant message securely, only when you sign up for AOL.