And it's so true that nobody likes the man. I mean, the way he's conducted business his whole career is about making a quick buck with minimal effort, pushing the legal system to it's limits.
For something that has yet to be proven, and all signs point to the SCO case as being a farse.
These companies backing their products with legal aid are simply doing it as a marketing ploy. RedHat, HP, Novell.. they know there's nothing to worry about, that's why they've all been so eager to extend these "services."
I can't wait until the whole SCO case is just over. We all here know that SCO will lose.
It's funny that you mentioned the idle thing, because it's so true.
I see a lot of admins making a big deal out of a machine that's running at 80% CPU all the time (a busy web server.) I say, GOOD, use the processing power, *that's what it's there for*. Only until you reach 100% does it begin to be a problem.
Now, I know there's always stipulations, and I'm assuming that said busy web server is caching most of the data into RAM here and/or the disk I/O is not a huge bottleneck.
The C64 blows away your 8088 with a dumb terminal CRT. What could you DO with that thing? Use Wordstar and print on your dot matrix printer?
The C64 was an incredible little machine. Yup, only 64K of memory, and you could only really use 32K of it. It was only 0.98Mhz. And people did amazing things with it. Full color graphics, three channel synthesizer (which people are still using in audio gear; long live the SID!) and easy connectivity to things like joysticks, modems, and even mice. You know, there's a reason Commodore sold millions of them.
Take a look at some of the C64 demos that folks STILL MAKE at www.scene.org (check out the past few assembly archives, and other parties,) and watch the video of some guy doing a live DJ set with a C64 (assembly 03).. then tell me the C64 is a Plastic K-Mart computer. Show me an Apple II demo or even a PC jr demo. Oh wait, there aren't any, because they weren't good enough to do anything except play Oregon Trail with the beeper speakers. 'BEEEEP. You win.' yay.
So do yourself a favor. Go download the VICE emulator, and then download some C64 demos, or even some of the wonderful games you can find at www.c64.org. Maybe you can see what you missed all those years, looking at your monochrome screen and listening to your computer beep at you.
It's not always about K's and Mhz. Thought people would have learned that by now.
Shit, even the TI99-4a was better then the early IBM PC's.
Don't you think it's even a little possible that we're the audience they are targeting here?
Not everyone can just go ahead and compete with the iPod right away, and there's plenty of us nerds around to create a pretty good business for these guys if we buy these things. Then, if it does well, who knows.
Everything that exists doesn't have to appeal to everyone or sell a billion units to be successful.
I think the name Napster actually has a negative effect on them, because people go to get more free music and figure out they have to pay. "Hey, this is bullshit!!"
iTunes on the other hand never was a place to get free music, so it doesn't have that negative vibe.
I think the "GUI is for dummies" mentality is slowly fading away. Anyone with half a brain can see the power in being able to visualize complex systems. At-a-glance monitoring is a wonderful thing.
The thing I like about Unix stuff is that when there is a good GUI interface for something, that usually doesn't mean you're locked out of the nitty gritty back-end as with some.. other GUI systems. I think a good GUI can compliment a system quite well and I enjoy using them when they are well constructed.
You're right, but at the rate the security patches flow in from Microsoft, you can't keep up with them. Well, okay. You can, but not if you actually want to test them beforehand.
The sheer volume of critical patches, you know- the weekly "This security hole could allow the attacker to gain complete control over your system" ones, do not inspire confidence that Microsoft is taking care of business; it simply shows me that their software is buggy and has a history of serious security flaws.
I can't blame the admins all the time, even though I do think that your average Unix admin is better then your average NT admin.
"Perhaps there's a lack of care among IIS admins contributing to the problem?"
While this is certianly true, in my opinion, it does not excuse the fact that these exploits are not because the admins didn't change a default password or something. They happen because there's a fault in the programming code.
There's some big web sites and hosting companies that run IIS and without being extremely diligent and purchasing extra software to protect yourself (or developing it in house) there's a significant change of being compromized.
I was lumping "convicted" and "sentencing" together. This guy was not, and his point is valid. She hasn't been sentenced yet. When she is, whe will go to jail.
Microsoft was convicted, and sentenced. They should have paid up by now.
I agree. When you're thrown in jail for being convicted of a crime, they don't let you go just because you're put in for an appeal. They throw your ass in jail and you can wait there.
The same should be true for monitary punishments. Pay up, and if you win, you can have it back. It's still better then jail time, because they can't give you back lost time.
You could always buy a blank tape and record your CD to it. You still can. And it's not any easier to copy vinyl.
Seems to me that only once the P2P stuff really took off did the RIAA turn into the big DRM monster they are now. I mean, they were never a good organization. But they weren't suing people either.
New technology is and probably always will be very slow to saturate a market, especially with consumer electronics. It seems to me that they were simply trying to push things along a little quicker. It may have been really expensive to produce three different mediums for a single album (Vinyl, tape, CD.)
When I was growing up, and old enough to buy music, there were a lot of cassette tapes. Some CD's, few. And not very much vinyl. Maybe the RIAA pushes the vinyl out the door the rest of the way but over here, there wasn't much left anyways.
We're better overall with CD's then vinyl or tapes. They are random access. They sound more precise. They don't degrade over time just from playing them. They are easier to store in the car.
Perhaps the CD will be the last open format for mass distribution.
ps. Betamax has nothing to do with this. Not even a little. Beta was actually a better quality picture then VHS but only Sony made it. It was too expensive, and when the other companies got together and made VHS for a lot cheaper, they won. Betamax never established it's market, so it was vulnerable to this. Sony makes this mistake a lot, like they did with the Minisisc. Very cool tech, but expensive and only Sony made it. They let others make it eventually but it was too late.
CD's eventually took over because the players became affordable, they don't "wear out" and sound like garbage after too many plays like tapes, and they play in any CD player, not specific versions or brands.
It took a long time for tapes to die. And CD's were more expensive then tapes (and still are, even though a CD is a fraction of the cost to manufacture then a tape)
Vinyl was phased out by casettes long before CD's became the standard. CD's have been the primary format for only a little over a decade. Before that, it was tapes and CD's released together on almost every release, even though CD's have been around for a fairly long time.
My PC Speakers, like many people who listen to music from their computers often, are good. They have good sound and a great sounding sub. Multimedia speakers are pretty cheap these days; I got mine for about $100 and they sound just as good as your average home stereo.
Lots of people connect their headphones to the computer to listen to music. And some people connect the PC to their high quality audio systems.
But even still, unless I'm listening to the music on a $15 set of speakers, 128Kbps MP3's can sound like garbage on many songs. Pretty much any song with symbols or other sounds that hit the treble.
And I guess you haven't hit the P2P stuff lately, because more people then not are ripping songs at much better quality then they used to..ogg are common, with 192Kbps variable rates. These are very good quality files. Variable rate MP3's are also common, as are 256Kbps files. When I download for a particular song, I look for the highest bitrate and I almost always find one better then 128. The difference in file size from 128Kbps crap to 192Kbps variable rate can often be insignificant, and even 20% larger files won't phase most people.
I've got a few CD's that are multisession. They usually have some crappy PC-Friendly junk that always seems to crash.
Out of all the CD's I do have, which isn't TOO many but probably around 30 or so, not a single one is even 60 minutes, nevermind 70. Almost all albums have around 12 - 14 songs, some less some more. There's exceptions, but not enough to worry about the extra space required for the psuedo copy protection that this Beastie Boys album has.
The other crappy part about this whole thing is that these WMA files won't sound as good as your standard 44.1Khz, 16-bit *uncompressed* audio. I mean, they could sound just about as good, but in my experience these DRM music files are usually encoded at something like 128Kbps, and will especially be so if the album is larger then normal.
The above points aside, the whole DRM thing in it's current forms depend on technology that changes too much. I don't want my music CD to be unusable in six years because Windows 2010 won't run the application. Or the required libraries are no longer available. Or I'm running a different processor platform, or not Windows at all.
CD's eventually took over because they worked with every CD player no matter what, no exceptions. This DRM crap works on no CD Players and there's no single DRM standard that everyone is using.
DRM will get between a person and his or her music. It won't stop music from being copied (Haven't they learned anything from the last three decades of trying to copy protect software?) and it will simply cause law-abiding citizens their time and money.
I am forced to work with these things a lot, and every time I've been able to get a firmware update for them. Be they the wireless routers or the wireless access points.
I guess you got unlucky. But in my case, I've handled a lot of these things, from old to new, and I've always found there to be a fairly recent update for them. If the device is new enough (anything in the G family) then the updates add WPA and other nice functionality.
The idea was, if this new encryption can be done in firmware, then I'm willing to bet that you'll be able to get the added features from Linksys without extra cost, assuming your device isn't two years old.
If you can find a job doing phone support for what you want to focus on, such as Microsoft Exchange or Linux or whatever, you'll be able to land a better job after a short time. That's what I did.
Although a lot of jobs still say "you need a BS" most of the ones I've been seeing lately only mention experience, or mention "degree a plus."
You don't learn IT in college. By the time you graduate, the tech is practically obsolete.
Although their guy got it wrong (the player does not play the redbook audio it plays WMA files) it does sound to me like this is simply a multi-session CD.
A PC will always play the last session, and an audio player will always play the first session. In this manner you can put both data and audio on a CD and have them easily accessable to both types of players.
In Windows, all you have to do is hold down the shift key while mounting the CD. It will load the first session on the disc instead of their crap DRM data session. Then rip away.
There was no clear way to integrate dspam with my postfix gateway as with spamassassin. Lots of instruction on setting it up with a local mail handler but not so much for a relay host.
Maybe there's a way to do it but I couldn't take the time to figure out a good way to get it done.
Re:But Linksys has a history of good updates
on
IEEE Approves 802.11i
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· Score: 2, Informative
I wouldn't really count Linksys on that bandwagon yet. They've been really good about keeping their firmware up to date even on old devices. If you have any of their "G" products and even some of the not-too-old 802.11b ones, they've provided updates that now include WPA instead of just WEP.
Linksys usually keeps their products updated to the latest capabilities within two years, and past that they still provide bug fixes.
This new encryption thing might be different and/or it might require new hardware or faster processors. Who knows. But if they can do it in software, you'll probably get it for nothing on your existing Linksys product.
Do you *really* think that the teachers and school administrators are going to give that stuff to the kids? More likely, it will be available in libraries and such, and you'll need a parent to rent or buy them.
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And it's so true that nobody likes the man. I mean, the way he's conducted business his whole career is about making a quick buck with minimal effort, pushing the legal system to it's limits.
The man is a slime-ball.
For something that has yet to be proven, and all signs point to the SCO case as being a farse.
These companies backing their products with legal aid are simply doing it as a marketing ploy. RedHat, HP, Novell.. they know there's nothing to worry about, that's why they've all been so eager to extend these "services."
I can't wait until the whole SCO case is just over. We all here know that SCO will lose.
Ohh yea, just throw in some "full 3D support" and we'll be all set.
We'll see how many decades it takes them to get that done.
The Linux Kernel is Monolithic
The Windows Kernel is Monopolithic
=)
It's funny that you mentioned the idle thing, because it's so true.
I see a lot of admins making a big deal out of a machine that's running at 80% CPU all the time (a busy web server.) I say, GOOD, use the processing power, *that's what it's there for*. Only until you reach 100% does it begin to be a problem.
Now, I know there's always stipulations, and I'm assuming that said busy web server is caching most of the data into RAM here and/or the disk I/O is not a huge bottleneck.
The C64 blows away your 8088 with a dumb terminal CRT. What could you DO with that thing? Use Wordstar and print on your dot matrix printer?
The C64 was an incredible little machine. Yup, only 64K of memory, and you could only really use 32K of it. It was only 0.98Mhz. And people did amazing things with it. Full color graphics, three channel synthesizer (which people are still using in audio gear; long live the SID!) and easy connectivity to things like joysticks, modems, and even mice. You know, there's a reason Commodore sold millions of them.
Take a look at some of the C64 demos that folks STILL MAKE at www.scene.org (check out the past few assembly archives, and other parties,) and watch the video of some guy doing a live DJ set with a C64 (assembly 03).. then tell me the C64 is a Plastic K-Mart computer. Show me an Apple II demo or even a PC jr demo. Oh wait, there aren't any, because they weren't good enough to do anything except play Oregon Trail with the beeper speakers. 'BEEEEP. You win.' yay.
So do yourself a favor. Go download the VICE emulator, and then download some C64 demos, or even some of the wonderful games you can find at www.c64.org. Maybe you can see what you missed all those years, looking at your monochrome screen and listening to your computer beep at you.
It's not always about K's and Mhz. Thought people would have learned that by now.
Shit, even the TI99-4a was better then the early IBM PC's.
Don't you think it's even a little possible that we're the audience they are targeting here?
Not everyone can just go ahead and compete with the iPod right away, and there's plenty of us nerds around to create a pretty good business for these guys if we buy these things. Then, if it does well, who knows.
Everything that exists doesn't have to appeal to everyone or sell a billion units to be successful.
I think the name Napster actually has a negative effect on them, because people go to get more free music and figure out they have to pay. "Hey, this is bullshit!!"
iTunes on the other hand never was a place to get free music, so it doesn't have that negative vibe.
I think the "GUI is for dummies" mentality is slowly fading away. Anyone with half a brain can see the power in being able to visualize complex systems. At-a-glance monitoring is a wonderful thing.
The thing I like about Unix stuff is that when there is a good GUI interface for something, that usually doesn't mean you're locked out of the nitty gritty back-end as with some.. other GUI systems. I think a good GUI can compliment a system quite well and I enjoy using them when they are well constructed.
You're right, but at the rate the security patches flow in from Microsoft, you can't keep up with them. Well, okay. You can, but not if you actually want to test them beforehand.
The sheer volume of critical patches, you know- the weekly "This security hole could allow the attacker to gain complete control over your system" ones, do not inspire confidence that Microsoft is taking care of business; it simply shows me that their software is buggy and has a history of serious security flaws.
I can't blame the admins all the time, even though I do think that your average Unix admin is better then your average NT admin.
Okay, but why is this called an appeal then?
About your sig..
90% of the spam that makes it's way into my mailbox is plain text.
"Perhaps there's a lack of care among IIS admins contributing to the problem?"
While this is certianly true, in my opinion, it does not excuse the fact that these exploits are not because the admins didn't change a default password or something. They happen because there's a fault in the programming code.
There's some big web sites and hosting companies that run IIS and without being extremely diligent and purchasing extra software to protect yourself (or developing it in house) there's a significant change of being compromized.
I was lumping "convicted" and "sentencing" together. This guy was not, and his point is valid. She hasn't been sentenced yet. When she is, whe will go to jail.
Microsoft was convicted, and sentenced. They should have paid up by now.
I agree. When you're thrown in jail for being convicted of a crime, they don't let you go just because you're put in for an appeal. They throw your ass in jail and you can wait there.
The same should be true for monitary punishments. Pay up, and if you win, you can have it back. It's still better then jail time, because they can't give you back lost time.
I don't know, it sounds a little extremist to me.
You could always buy a blank tape and record your CD to it. You still can. And it's not any easier to copy vinyl.
Seems to me that only once the P2P stuff really took off did the RIAA turn into the big DRM monster they are now. I mean, they were never a good organization. But they weren't suing people either.
New technology is and probably always will be very slow to saturate a market, especially with consumer electronics. It seems to me that they were simply trying to push things along a little quicker. It may have been really expensive to produce three different mediums for a single album (Vinyl, tape, CD.)
When I was growing up, and old enough to buy music, there were a lot of cassette tapes. Some CD's, few. And not very much vinyl. Maybe the RIAA pushes the vinyl out the door the rest of the way but over here, there wasn't much left anyways.
We're better overall with CD's then vinyl or tapes. They are random access. They sound more precise. They don't degrade over time just from playing them. They are easier to store in the car.
Perhaps the CD will be the last open format for mass distribution.
ps. Betamax has nothing to do with this. Not even a little. Beta was actually a better quality picture then VHS but only Sony made it. It was too expensive, and when the other companies got together and made VHS for a lot cheaper, they won. Betamax never established it's market, so it was vulnerable to this. Sony makes this mistake a lot, like they did with the Minisisc. Very cool tech, but expensive and only Sony made it. They let others make it eventually but it was too late.
CD's eventually took over because the players became affordable, they don't "wear out" and sound like garbage after too many plays like tapes, and they play in any CD player, not specific versions or brands.
.ogg are common, with 192Kbps variable rates. These are very good quality files. Variable rate MP3's are also common, as are 256Kbps files. When I download for a particular song, I look for the highest bitrate and I almost always find one better then 128. The difference in file size from 128Kbps crap to 192Kbps variable rate can often be insignificant, and even 20% larger files won't phase most people.
It took a long time for tapes to die. And CD's were more expensive then tapes (and still are, even though a CD is a fraction of the cost to manufacture then a tape)
Vinyl was phased out by casettes long before CD's became the standard. CD's have been the primary format for only a little over a decade. Before that, it was tapes and CD's released together on almost every release, even though CD's have been around for a fairly long time.
My PC Speakers, like many people who listen to music from their computers often, are good. They have good sound and a great sounding sub. Multimedia speakers are pretty cheap these days; I got mine for about $100 and they sound just as good as your average home stereo.
Lots of people connect their headphones to the computer to listen to music. And some people connect the PC to their high quality audio systems.
But even still, unless I'm listening to the music on a $15 set of speakers, 128Kbps MP3's can sound like garbage on many songs. Pretty much any song with symbols or other sounds that hit the treble.
And I guess you haven't hit the P2P stuff lately, because more people then not are ripping songs at much better quality then they used to.
HAH! I was just going to say that.
She really has her finger on the heartbeat of the gamer..
I've got a few CD's that are multisession. They usually have some crappy PC-Friendly junk that always seems to crash.
Out of all the CD's I do have, which isn't TOO many but probably around 30 or so, not a single one is even 60 minutes, nevermind 70. Almost all albums have around 12 - 14 songs, some less some more. There's exceptions, but not enough to worry about the extra space required for the psuedo copy protection that this Beastie Boys album has.
The other crappy part about this whole thing is that these WMA files won't sound as good as your standard 44.1Khz, 16-bit *uncompressed* audio. I mean, they could sound just about as good, but in my experience these DRM music files are usually encoded at something like 128Kbps, and will especially be so if the album is larger then normal.
The above points aside, the whole DRM thing in it's current forms depend on technology that changes too much. I don't want my music CD to be unusable in six years because Windows 2010 won't run the application. Or the required libraries are no longer available. Or I'm running a different processor platform, or not Windows at all.
CD's eventually took over because they worked with every CD player no matter what, no exceptions. This DRM crap works on no CD Players and there's no single DRM standard that everyone is using.
DRM will get between a person and his or her music. It won't stop music from being copied (Haven't they learned anything from the last three decades of trying to copy protect software?) and it will simply cause law-abiding citizens their time and money.
Well, I don't know what to tell you man.
I am forced to work with these things a lot, and every time I've been able to get a firmware update for them. Be they the wireless routers or the wireless access points.
I guess you got unlucky. But in my case, I've handled a lot of these things, from old to new, and I've always found there to be a fairly recent update for them. If the device is new enough (anything in the G family) then the updates add WPA and other nice functionality.
The idea was, if this new encryption can be done in firmware, then I'm willing to bet that you'll be able to get the added features from Linksys without extra cost, assuming your device isn't two years old.
If you can find a job doing phone support for what you want to focus on, such as Microsoft Exchange or Linux or whatever, you'll be able to land a better job after a short time. That's what I did.
Although a lot of jobs still say "you need a BS" most of the ones I've been seeing lately only mention experience, or mention "degree a plus."
You don't learn IT in college. By the time you graduate, the tech is practically obsolete.
Although their guy got it wrong (the player does not play the redbook audio it plays WMA files) it does sound to me like this is simply a multi-session CD.
A PC will always play the last session, and an audio player will always play the first session. In this manner you can put both data and audio on a CD and have them easily accessable to both types of players.
In Windows, all you have to do is hold down the shift key while mounting the CD. It will load the first session on the disc instead of their crap DRM data session. Then rip away.
There was no clear way to integrate dspam with my postfix gateway as with spamassassin. Lots of instruction on setting it up with a local mail handler but not so much for a relay host.
Maybe there's a way to do it but I couldn't take the time to figure out a good way to get it done.
I wouldn't really count Linksys on that bandwagon yet. They've been really good about keeping their firmware up to date even on old devices. If you have any of their "G" products and even some of the not-too-old 802.11b ones, they've provided updates that now include WPA instead of just WEP.
Linksys usually keeps their products updated to the latest capabilities within two years, and past that they still provide bug fixes.
This new encryption thing might be different and/or it might require new hardware or faster processors. Who knows. But if they can do it in software, you'll probably get it for nothing on your existing Linksys product.
Do you *really* think that the teachers and school administrators are going to give that stuff to the kids? More likely, it will be available in libraries and such, and you'll need a parent to rent or buy them.
Insightful my ass. You're being ignorant.