Have you ever dealt with a university's disciplinary system? Do you have any idea of how arbitrary and capricious those things tend to get?
Granted, this is at a public university, which normally makes things a lot better (anything the U does is being done by the gov't), but who knows in Texas...
After Mattel filed suit, Mattel and MCA employees traded barbs in the press. When an MCA spokeswoman noted that each album included a disclaimer saying that Barbie Girl was a "social commentary [that was] not created or approved by the makers of the doll," a Mattel representative responded by saying, "That's unacceptable. . . . It's akin to a bank robber handing a note of apology to a teller during a heist. [It n]either diminishes the severity of the crime, nor does it make it legal." He later characterized the song as a "theft" of "another company's property."
MCA filed a counterclaim for defamation based on the Mattel representative's use of the words "bank robber," "heist," "crime" and "theft." But all of these are variants of the invective most often hurled at accused infringers, namely "piracy." No one hearing this accusation understands intellectual property owners to be saying that infringers are nautical cutthroats with eyepatches and peg legs who board galleons
to plunder cargo. In context, all these terms are nonactionable "rhetorical hyperbole," Gilbrook v. City of Westminster, 177 F.3d 839, 863 (9th Cir. 1999). The parties are advised to chill.
In addition to the last sentence (which I never thought I'd see in a legal brief), the interesting thing about this is that they consider "piracy" and "theft" of copyrights to be popular invective with no legal bearing (thus, not actionable as defamation because courts shouldn't consider such statements literally).
I've heard the 9th circuit is weird, though, and that other courts like to disagree with them. Seems to be weird in a good way...
I don't know any details, first off, this is all innuendo and rumor.
GHS likes to pretend that it is a continuously successful company, but a couple of years back during the really bad part of the tech crash, they had layoffs. They got around their no-layoffs policy by shoving the employees they liked the least into jobs they didn't want to do, and then either firing them or waiting until they quit.
I'm sorry, no. Gnoppix is for some idiotic reason based on debian stable. I run debian stable as a sysadmin on old workhorse machines which are used primarily as servers (including command-line timesharing, so not just "invisible" machines). I can't stand running it more than a year after its typical release on a desktop -- the linux desktop is moving fast and woody already lacks a lot of hardware support. I honestly don't know how the gnoppix folks are compensating for this with hardware detection and all. Also, I know gnoppix has modern gnome packages, but they're backports, which makes them different from debian testing by default, and it's just one more variable to debug. There's really no point in basing a bootcd on stable; it's like basing a bootcd on RHEL.
Like some smoke-filled-room committee of vendors' "experts" is going to do things better than an organization that's open and responsive to both vendors and users... right.
I find it interesting that you insist (in boldface) that Apple be such an important player in that kind of process. Apple would have shipped OS X earlier if it had tempered the advice of all the experts they'd brought in with some common sense. (The obvious example is Tevanian's insistence on using Mach, which required a good part of a whole team of kernel engineers over 4 years to fix up, because it was his pet research project at CMU.)
What about those who call it mah-koh'-six?:-P It rolls off the tongue, plus it sounds more like a real Unix (which it is).
Reminds me of when a classmate of mine in school first saw the Mac OS 7.5.3 startup screen (which as late as 7.5.0 had just been "Welcome to Macintosh"). "Oh, it's Make-ohs!" (rhymes with a certain brand of fake meat salad topping).
The ide-scsi bug mentioned is also in earlier versions of linux, including 2.4. In addition, it causes data loss.
If you burn a data CD without padding on the end, and the size is just wrong for your kernel/buffer/hardware combination, and you then rip it on a CD-R drive which is driven by the ide-scsi driver (rather than ide-CD) using "dd" without specifying the actual size, the iso image you rip may very well be truncated by up to 300K!. Read the cdrecord manpage if you don't believe me! The problem is that at the end of the disk, an i/o error is flagged, and data in a certain buffer is not returned.
FUCK ide-scsi. Something with that kind of bug shouldn't be in the kernel.
The Intersil PrismGT chipset used in low-end 802.11g cards from Netgear/SMC/D-Link (not the turbo 108 variety), and the Atheros 5k family used in almost all turbo 108 mbps 802.11g cards and nearly all 802.11a cards have good native linux drivers which are either entirely or have the most significant parts as open source.
Although the DriverLoader apparently supports these cards, please support these companies in either helping develop Linux driver support or releasing specifications (both of which Intel and Broadcom adamantly refuse to do) by
a) purchasing their products when you have a choice (e.g. buy Pentium-M instead of Centrino and add on a third-party wireless card, and don't buy 802.11g products from Linksys or Dell which use Broadcom), and
b) Use the open-source drivers rather than emulating windows drivers, let the chip (Atheros and Globespan/Virata nee Intersil) and the card companies know that you appreciate their linux support. Report bugs and feedback to the open source projects, too.
It's nice to have something like this around as a stopgap way to load drivers for hardware made by manufacturers with poor linux support, and even as a way for manufacturers to ship initial drivers for linux inexpensively for them (and claim "linux support out of the box"), but it is no substitute for published specs and real drivers (which, with published specs, the companies don't even have to develop themselves).
Do you know it's a Linux problem? That is, have you gotten the centrino working properly in windows?
It's possible the access points you're connecting to have problems properly supporting Wi-Fi power saving mode, which the centrino (among many other new wireless chipsets) relies on. Basically, low-power Wi-Fi clients poll the AP for packets instead of listening all the time.
This is possibly why Intel is running that "verified with Centrino" campaign -- they found out too late that the corners they cut (not falling back from optional parts of the wi-fi spec) aren't compatible with the corners AP vendors cut.
Well, for one thing, offering customers indemnification involves having money to pay them off if you lose your bet, or being able to take out insurance to cover it instead.
Given that (a) SCO is one rug short of a going out of business sale and (b) anyone in their right mind thinks they're on shaky legal ground to begin with, possibly in both suits, this could be a massive liability for them.
Keith seems to believe that the solution to X performance issues lies in the clients; and in the long run this may very well be true. However, NX takes the old proxy/agent paradigm pioneered by LBX and dxpc and does something useful with it finally.
I'm an officer in a student computing organization at a major american university. We have a netblock (/26) that we partially administer, and we were forwarded a complaint from the security dude here made by the BSA about a copy of Norton AV... on an IP address that had not been in any use at all for several months, and which had a barely-used VMS VAX before that, certainly not a common target for breakins and warez.
These organizations really do sometimes have bad information.
My Linux adventure started with RedHat 6 (ok, that's the first I adminned, I had accounts on slackware boxen back in '94)... and I was quite impressed with how far linux had come by that point.
Now that I'm used to debian, any RPM based distribution seems a bit rustic... not just in that "quaint old thing that time forgot" way, but more in that "roof is leaking and the toilet's in that shack out back" sort of way.
I'm used to installing security patches by ssh'ing into a system, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, wham, bam. My folks have a mandrake 8.1 box (for the UI and end-user support where mandrake is fantastic, since they never use the command-line) which needed the major ssh patch last year to avoid getting rooted. I assume the worst of it would be that they'd need to download it over a dialin and that would take forever. Boy, was I wrong.
The installation of the new ssh rpm's took longer than downloading them over a 56k modem. By a factor of 5 or so. I almost cancelled the install before it was done (which I'm glad I didn't, since that might have corrupted the rpm database). When that was all done, it still wasn't installed/configured correctly (my fault this time, but the package should have handled it), so the end result was no sshd until I was at their place and could fix it in person (since I need sshd to remotely fix their machine).
Fuck RPM. They've been through 4 major revisions and still can't get it right. I might be wrong about something here, but I've *never* had this problem with debian, ever. Debian upgrades always install quickly and smoothly for me.
Then I will reply with a snide remark that Piltdown Man was a notorious hoax and thus no subject of any real comparison, deliberately ignoring that you almost definitely knew that already, and the lack of any relevance to your insult.
According to this article, copy protection is a "crime against humanity". Why? Because bending the rules is an integral part of society, and DRM is either insecure and ineffective, or leaves most users no wiggle room (especially with a law like DMCA preventing users from spreading information on how to bypass it).
Likewise, VA/OSDN makes sure in their sourceforge TOS that the owner has agreed to license their code as open source, and they specifically deny the right to remove code from CVS or their download mirrors unless there's a legal problem with it. All this means is that VA can use the code however they want as long as it's under the same license the author used. They don't own the copyright and they can't change the license. The TOS was written by a clueless lawyer and that clause is basically redundant since the owner has already agreed to license code as OSS.
I'm not sure about other methods, but if you use Wilkinson's GSSAPI patch with credentials delegation enabled, krb5 TGTs will be forwarded when the user authenticates with krb5/gssapi.
The problem is that the current version of OpenSSH does an aklog with krb4, which may or may not work without additional patching (i.e. changing the aklog code to use krb5) depending on how your sshd handles the krb libs.
There's another set of archives of stuff from the unix-haters list at this website. It's a bunch of stuff that didn't make the handbook, and is not as interesting in general (more repetitive), etc. However, if you're at an academic environment and there's crufty old stuff (say, like the zephyr IM system) sitting around, or you've been in the unix admin business for a while..., you're bound to find some mention of numerous design and implementation bogosities in your (least) favorite packages.
Sure, you're right -- people of a variety of political persuasions have done incredible inhuman things. So my statement was poorly phrased. Whatever. I suspect you don't really care about the rest of this, but...
With regard to the Manhattan Institute morons, their policies do encourage violations of civil rights; they do pretend that police brutality, racial profiling, and abuse of law enforcement powers don't exist. They do these for reasons which support the same people involved in supporting economic conservatism (not conservatism in the sense of being fiscally cautious, but the conservative agenda as a whole) These are your rights too.
And, hey, I never said anything about their seminal late 80's work being all bad -- I think it's awfully polemic, and for all the wrong reasons, but there are good ideas embedded in that stuff sometimes. (Notably, the result was dialogue on welfare reform; the MI morons wanted no welfare at all. Thank God for Clinton.)
Also, the nazis weren't leftists by anyone's standards -- their fascist policies are a lot closer in origin to GW Bush and his Patriot Act nonsense.
There are a bunch of posts farther down that nobody is going to see about this, so I'll go ahead and post here anyway.
The Manhattan Institute (hereafter the MI) made a name for itself with some books in the late 80's which changed the face of political debate on welfare reform and community policing. They used this fame to continue to get a lot of publishing attention -- endorsing law and order (and police violence) in their City Journal rag; skewing the meaning of statistics on race and intelligence in the infamous Bell Curve; pandering to naive religious simpletons by stating that the counterculture caused all our problems (in Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare).
But their problems start from the very beginning. The MI has always pushed the neoconservative agenda, and their entire agenda has tried to make room for negative stereotypes of people in poverty, plus loads of police profiling, violence, and brutality. A quick googling will show various allegations of connections to the CIA, from conspiracy theories to proven facts. Some of this you'd better believe, given that a Boston Globe article mirrored on their own website mentions how their founder went on to be Reagan's chief CIA spook (warning: this article crashes my mozilla for some reason; use lynx). I don't want to invoke godwin's law here, but with eerie similarities like these it's hard not to. And apart from the article linked from this/. story there's enough fearmongering there to make ready.gov look honest and tame.
Incidentally, our favorite simpleton George "Dubya" Bush is a big fan of their work (notice how "faith-based initiatives" are prominent on their front page) since he swallowed up Magnet's pandering, but that's another story. Remember, when economic conservatism is around, social intolerance is never far away.
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Granted, this is at a public university, which normally makes things a lot better (anything the U does is being done by the gov't), but who knows in Texas...
After Mattel filed suit, Mattel and MCA employees traded barbs in the press. When an MCA spokeswoman noted that each album included a disclaimer saying that Barbie Girl was a "social commentary [that was] not created or approved by the makers of the doll," a Mattel representative responded by saying, "That's unacceptable. . . . It's akin to a bank robber handing a note of apology to a teller during a heist. [It n]either diminishes the severity of the crime, nor does it make it legal." He later characterized the song as a "theft" of "another company's property."
MCA filed a counterclaim for defamation based on the Mattel representative's use of the words "bank robber," "heist," "crime" and "theft." But all of these are variants of the invective most often hurled at accused infringers, namely "piracy." No one hearing this accusation understands intellectual property owners to be saying that infringers are nautical cutthroats with eyepatches and peg legs who board galleons to plunder cargo. In context, all these terms are nonactionable "rhetorical hyperbole," Gilbrook v. City of Westminster, 177 F.3d 839, 863 (9th Cir. 1999). The parties are advised to chill.
In addition to the last sentence (which I never thought I'd see in a legal brief), the interesting thing about this is that they consider "piracy" and "theft" of copyrights to be popular invective with no legal bearing (thus, not actionable as defamation because courts shouldn't consider such statements literally).
I've heard the 9th circuit is weird, though, and that other courts like to disagree with them. Seems to be weird in a good way...
I don't know any details, first off, this is all innuendo and rumor.
GHS likes to pretend that it is a continuously successful company, but a couple of years back during the really bad part of the tech crash, they had layoffs. They got around their no-layoffs policy by shoving the employees they liked the least into jobs they didn't want to do, and then either firing them or waiting until they quit.
It's based on dxpc, actually. If the site weren't slashdotted I'd throw you a link.
I'm sorry, no. Gnoppix is for some idiotic reason based on debian stable. I run debian stable as a sysadmin on old workhorse machines which are used primarily as servers (including command-line timesharing, so not just "invisible" machines). I can't stand running it more than a year after its typical release on a desktop -- the linux desktop is moving fast and woody already lacks a lot of hardware support. I honestly don't know how the gnoppix folks are compensating for this with hardware detection and all. Also, I know gnoppix has modern gnome packages, but they're backports, which makes them different from debian testing by default, and it's just one more variable to debug. There's really no point in basing a bootcd on stable; it's like basing a bootcd on RHEL.
So what was Windows ME, then?
Gnome Wave Cleaner. I haven't done much with it yet but it looks pretty versatile.
I find it interesting that you insist (in boldface) that Apple be such an important player in that kind of process. Apple would have shipped OS X earlier if it had tempered the advice of all the experts they'd brought in with some common sense. (The obvious example is Tevanian's insistence on using Mach, which required a good part of a whole team of kernel engineers over 4 years to fix up, because it was his pet research project at CMU.)
What about those who call it mah-koh'-six? :-P It rolls off the tongue, plus it sounds more like a real Unix (which it is).
Reminds me of when a classmate of mine in school first saw the Mac OS 7.5.3 startup screen (which as late as 7.5.0 had just been "Welcome to Macintosh"). "Oh, it's Make-ohs!" (rhymes with a certain brand of fake meat salad topping).
If you burn a data CD without padding on the end, and the size is just wrong for your kernel/buffer/hardware combination, and you then rip it on a CD-R drive which is driven by the ide-scsi driver (rather than ide-CD) using "dd" without specifying the actual size, the iso image you rip may very well be truncated by up to 300K!. Read the cdrecord manpage if you don't believe me! The problem is that at the end of the disk, an i/o error is flagged, and data in a certain buffer is not returned.
FUCK ide-scsi. Something with that kind of bug shouldn't be in the kernel.
Although the DriverLoader apparently supports these cards, please support these companies in either helping develop Linux driver support or releasing specifications (both of which Intel and Broadcom adamantly refuse to do) by
a) purchasing their products when you have a choice (e.g. buy Pentium-M instead of Centrino and add on a third-party wireless card, and don't buy 802.11g products from Linksys or Dell which use Broadcom), and
b) Use the open-source drivers rather than emulating windows drivers, let the chip (Atheros and Globespan/Virata nee Intersil) and the card companies know that you appreciate their linux support. Report bugs and feedback to the open source projects, too.
It's nice to have something like this around as a stopgap way to load drivers for hardware made by manufacturers with poor linux support, and even as a way for manufacturers to ship initial drivers for linux inexpensively for them (and claim "linux support out of the box"), but it is no substitute for published specs and real drivers (which, with published specs, the companies don't even have to develop themselves).
It's possible the access points you're connecting to have problems properly supporting Wi-Fi power saving mode, which the centrino (among many other new wireless chipsets) relies on. Basically, low-power Wi-Fi clients poll the AP for packets instead of listening all the time.
This is possibly why Intel is running that "verified with Centrino" campaign -- they found out too late that the corners they cut (not falling back from optional parts of the wi-fi spec) aren't compatible with the corners AP vendors cut.
Well, for one thing, offering customers indemnification involves having money to pay them off if you lose your bet, or being able to take out insurance to cover it instead. Given that (a) SCO is one rug short of a going out of business sale and (b) anyone in their right mind thinks they're on shaky legal ground to begin with, possibly in both suits, this could be a massive liability for them.
Keith seems to believe that the solution to X performance issues lies in the clients; and in the long run this may very well be true. However, NX takes the old proxy/agent paradigm pioneered by LBX and dxpc and does something useful with it finally.
I'm an officer in a student computing organization at a major american university. We have a netblock (/26) that we partially administer, and we were forwarded a complaint from the security dude here made by the BSA about a copy of Norton AV... on an IP address that had not been in any use at all for several months, and which had a barely-used VMS VAX before that, certainly not a common target for breakins and warez.
These organizations really do sometimes have bad information.
My Linux adventure started with RedHat 6 (ok, that's the first I adminned, I had accounts on slackware boxen back in '94)... and I was quite impressed with how far linux had come by that point.
Now that I'm used to debian, any RPM based distribution seems a bit rustic... not just in that "quaint old thing that time forgot" way, but more in that "roof is leaking and the toilet's in that shack out back" sort of way.
I'm used to installing security patches by ssh'ing into a system, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, wham, bam. My folks have a mandrake 8.1 box (for the UI and end-user support where mandrake is fantastic, since they never use the command-line) which needed the major ssh patch last year to avoid getting rooted. I assume the worst of it would be that they'd need to download it over a dialin and that would take forever. Boy, was I wrong.
The installation of the new ssh rpm's took longer than downloading them over a 56k modem. By a factor of 5 or so. I almost cancelled the install before it was done (which I'm glad I didn't, since that might have corrupted the rpm database). When that was all done, it still wasn't installed/configured correctly (my fault this time, but the package should have handled it), so the end result was no sshd until I was at their place and could fix it in person (since I need sshd to remotely fix their machine).
Fuck RPM. They've been through 4 major revisions and still can't get it right. I might be wrong about something here, but I've *never* had this problem with debian, ever. Debian upgrades always install quickly and smoothly for me.
Parent of this post is actually insightful, much more so than the top post in this thread.
Then I will reply with a snide remark that Piltdown Man was a notorious hoax and thus no subject of any real comparison, deliberately ignoring that you almost definitely knew that already, and the lack of any relevance to your insult.
According to this article, copy protection is a "crime against humanity". Why? Because bending the rules is an integral part of society, and DRM is either insecure and ineffective, or leaves most users no wiggle room (especially with a law like DMCA preventing users from spreading information on how to bypass it).
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2003 OSDN.
Likewise, VA/OSDN makes sure in their sourceforge TOS that the owner has agreed to license their code as open source, and they specifically deny the right to remove code from CVS or their download mirrors unless there's a legal problem with it. All this means is that VA can use the code however they want as long as it's under the same license the author used. They don't own the copyright and they can't change the license. The TOS was written by a clueless lawyer and that clause is basically redundant since the owner has already agreed to license code as OSS.
The problem is that the current version of OpenSSH does an aklog with krb4, which may or may not work without additional patching (i.e. changing the aklog code to use krb5) depending on how your sshd handles the krb libs.
There's another set of archives of stuff from the unix-haters list at this website. It's a bunch of stuff that didn't make the handbook, and is not as interesting in general (more repetitive), etc. However, if you're at an academic environment and there's crufty old stuff (say, like the zephyr IM system) sitting around, or you've been in the unix admin business for a while..., you're bound to find some mention of numerous design and implementation bogosities in your (least) favorite packages.
With regard to the Manhattan Institute morons, their policies do encourage violations of civil rights; they do pretend that police brutality, racial profiling, and abuse of law enforcement powers don't exist. They do these for reasons which support the same people involved in supporting economic conservatism (not conservatism in the sense of being fiscally cautious, but the conservative agenda as a whole) These are your rights too.
And, hey, I never said anything about their seminal late 80's work being all bad -- I think it's awfully polemic, and for all the wrong reasons, but there are good ideas embedded in that stuff sometimes. (Notably, the result was dialogue on welfare reform; the MI morons wanted no welfare at all. Thank God for Clinton.)
Also, the nazis weren't leftists by anyone's standards -- their fascist policies are a lot closer in origin to GW Bush and his Patriot Act nonsense.
There are a bunch of posts farther down that nobody is going to see about this, so I'll go ahead and post here anyway.
The Manhattan Institute (hereafter the MI) made a name for itself with some books in the late 80's which changed the face of political debate on welfare reform and community policing. They used this fame to continue to get a lot of publishing attention -- endorsing law and order (and police violence) in their City Journal rag; skewing the meaning of statistics on race and intelligence in the infamous Bell Curve; pandering to naive religious simpletons by stating that the counterculture caused all our problems (in Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare).
But their problems start from the very beginning. The MI has always pushed the neoconservative agenda, and their entire agenda has tried to make room for negative stereotypes of people in poverty, plus loads of police profiling, violence, and brutality. A quick googling will show various allegations of connections to the CIA, from conspiracy theories to proven facts. Some of this you'd better believe, given that a Boston Globe article mirrored on their own website mentions how their founder went on to be Reagan's chief CIA spook (warning: this article crashes my mozilla for some reason; use lynx). I don't want to invoke godwin's law here, but with eerie similarities like these it's hard not to. And apart from the article linked from this /. story there's enough fearmongering there to make ready.gov look honest and tame.
Incidentally, our favorite simpleton George "Dubya" Bush is a big fan of their work (notice how "faith-based initiatives" are prominent on their front page) since he swallowed up Magnet's pandering, but that's another story. Remember, when economic conservatism is around, social intolerance is never far away.
Well, in that case I'd be surprised that they allow Li-Ion batteries around, given that they have a tendency to spontaneously explode.