Grad students aren't a whole lot better sometimes. I had a friend in a database class when I was still in college. The professor was actually quite good(one of those times when you get a class and you're using the professor's book because it's the standard text and not because the professor is a greedy bastard who wants to sell copies of his/her own book). The problem was that he had his grad students write the database engine which was used in the undergrad classes.
This was probably really good experience for the grad students, but it didn't end up with terribly reliable software. I still remember one particular bug.
My friend called me in because he was getting a seg fault he couldn't seem to fix. This segfault was on a stack declared integer, before it got passed to one of the dbengines functions it was fine afterwards segfault, couldn't even get it's memory address that seg faulted too.
How you segfault an integer I really don't know, but that wasn't even the weirdest part, if you made a copy of the integer at least after a certain point in the code, it would seg fault the copy as well.
I fully understand your pain(though I've tried linux again and find it much better than it was in 2002, or 2001, or for that matter early 2003). Unless of course you were using a winmodem, those things should never have been made, last thing anyone needed back then, or even now is to allocate processor cycles to run a modem which, if they company weren't so bloody cheap, would be running itself.
The answer to this is very simple and is mentioned directly in the article. It has to do with the way we treat the purchases and the way in which the machines work.
When you purchase a modern console system(especially the XBox which has a version of windows on it, you're purchasing a computer and software, you can likely modify the computer all you like(so long as you modifications don't alter the software or allow you to play pirated games), but not the software itself legally, because you bought the hardware outright but the software is licensed.
In the case of a car, not only are you historically "purchasing it outright" as is mentioned in the article, but for the purposes of these codes you are not attempting to alter the software(well it's really probably some form of ROM). All congress is asking for is that auto manufacturers give their customers the ability to look at the output of their car computer(which is not encrypted and thus not under the DMCA) and be able to determine this meaning. The output can be legally read by anyone, but the car companies work hard to prevent anyone from knowing what it means.
Re:they need updated docs for todays ram amounts
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Is Swap Necessary?
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Well that's really not a totally fair comparison. True, you may use far more resource intensive apps on your linux machine, but unless you're running some varation of wine(and even to a certain extent then) it's not likely many of those apps are games.
A heavily used server is really not comparable to a game even if it seems like it uses more resources simply because it's far more likely to be well written than your average game. I've seen some seriously nasty memory leaks in popular games that I'd never see in something which was better designed be it for Windows or Linux.
If you were comparing running the same app on windows vs linux then perhaps you could criticize the memory manager(which is honestly probably not as good), but you're not.
Running your own web/ftp server is an entirely different kettle of fish than running your own mail server.
A web/ftp server provides content and it can be important that you control what that content is, especially if you're using it for any sort of commercial purposes. An SMTP server on the other hand is essentially a forwarding device, short of properly securing it there is very little you can really do with your own SMTP server which you can't do with your ISP's.
This really only applies to outgoing mail since an incoming server can vary a great deal more, this doesn't however apply to the situation at hand since incoming doesn't affect this sort of filtering.
I didn't say comcast was blocking your mail server port(I don't even know or care if you're a comcast customer it's immaterial to my point), I was saying that if you were a spammer, by the terms of your service agreement you're most likely allowed to send spam if you wanted to. I don't know the specifics of your agreement, but if you're allowed to run your own services they probably can't do anything about how you run them within reason.
Since your ISP likely can't really do anything much about you, and since if you were a spammer you're about as likely to stop sending it because a recipient asked you to as hell is likely to freeze over. The only option available to recpient ISP's attempting to lower the amount of spam which makes it to their customers and probably more importantly goes through their mail server, is to block your IP.
Yes they could probably individually block IP's for individual spammers(assuming that the spammers aren't on a dynamic IP anyway which makes things more complicated, but it's easier to just block the entire range. It's not fair, but it's probably the only practical solution so long as there are people willing to work round the system.
They are indeed planning on letting the acid take care of Dino, however they haven't specified how long they expect Dino to last. Given that the perpetrator doesn't seem to have been on any of the hourly updates we can assume that he/she(though likely he) was there for some period less than that. Dino seems to be fine after several days, and a gas mask isn't too hard to obtain.
As a side note, when was the last time something being astronomically dangerous has ever stopped some idiot from attempting to be funny or cool? I know people who used to hood surf, and all things considered this is probably a lot safer.
As to the privacy issue, simply by the way smtp works you're data is going to be forwarded through someone's smtp server(unless you happen to be really close network wise to the person you're mailing) and if you really want your e-mail to be private not routing it through your isp isn't going to fix that, the only solution is to encrypt the stuff.
If your ISP is shyte at delivering mail that's not a reason to start your own mail server it's a reason to get a new isp because if they're shyte at something as basic as e-mail they're probably screwing you somewhere else.
As to the mail support people, the reason for their policy isn't because they want "centralized control over the entire internet" or whatever conspiracy theory you want, it's because they want to have someone they can take action against for abuse. If you run your own mail server, without violating the TOS for your ISP and you decide to send bulk mail the only thing they can do is block you. With your terms of service I doubt Comcast could even block your mailserver port, if you're paying to run your own services then they really don't have much to say abou what services you're running. I'm also willing ot bet that a large percentage of the people who call them are just "poor individual users running their own mail server" and a lot of them are also spammers.
Either the internet is centralized and controlled or it's free, if it's free then you have to put up with spammers, pedophiles, etc being able to do whatever the hell they want. Admitedly most of the people who use the internet aren't like that, they may be weird and possibly perverted like everyone else, but they're not a threat to anyone.
So long as whoever is keeping an eye on my web traffic leaves me alone I don't really care that they're looking, and if they want to be looking they will be whether it's legal or not.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with centralization so long as the people in charge of it don't abuse their power.
Well, lately of course I've been mucking about with testing different versions of Linux and generally screwing up my system royally so I've been reinstalling weekly, but that's a different story.
As for monthly reformats. Assuming you have a second drive or a second partition to keep stuff like documents and downloaded versions of your favorite programs, the whole process takes only a couple of hours(less if you set up the updates ahead of time, clears out all the junk on your system and gives you a more stable and efficient box).
Most of the time of course this isn't totally necessary(so long as you get your firewall and virus scanner up quickly enough), but especially if you're screwing around with lots of different new software and such it can sometimes become more necessary.
Damn Straight. I'd like to see my Canon S520 work too, I'm still working on it, but so far no luck without turboprint and I'd really rather not pay money to be able to use hardware I already bought.
Though I do think that given that ALSA is free that more distributions could bundle it with their software.
The other note of course being that, while we hopefully will eventually find power sources that don't need petroleum, we will never(at least so long as we're alive) manage to do without water and quite a bit of it. Fresh water is worth quite a bit of money all things considered.
Well the problem here is that that's not entirely true. Yes OSS receives testing from a much larger and broader group of people, but how much of an asset is that for the military.
I mean I can test the latest version of redhat, I can even, if I really desire to do so and am willing to work out the specifics, fix some of the problems I might encounter, but the militray is unlikely to care how something works on my system, they are going to want to know how it performs on their systems, the most important of which are likely to be either expensive and difficult to obtain servers or proprietary military hardware. I can't test that nor, I believe, can 99% of the people who test and examine OSS software.
Even the NSA doesn't use Linux, they use their own brand of Linux which they've probably modified the bejesus out of, Linux was just an easier place to start than other OS's(I don't doubt that the NSA could make their own version of Windows if they liked and there wouldn't be a damned thing MS could do about it, but it'd be a pain).
Well first off as a user you can't really judge what happened accurately. I know I've seen a lot of projects I thought were going to be amazingly simple and had them turn out to be a mess for one reason or another. You may be fully technically competent but you weren't in the loop on what was going wrong and why.
It may very well have been incompetency or sloth or any of a number of the things you claim, but if so there's no real way to determine whether this was the coders or the management or any other part of the vast government beauracracy.
I'm currently a young programmer and so I'm all for opportunity, but at the same time I hope someday, if I"m foolish enough to remain in IT that long, to be an old programmer.
Outsourcing in general from my experience tends to be a bit of a crap shoot. If you don't need stuff very often then it's all well and good, but the overhead of paying all the people who manage the outsourcing or contract the contractors and everything else that goes into it can quite quickly mount up to more than the cost of a full time employee with benefits.
None of this really applies to the IRS of course, young programmer or old I wouldn't want to be the guy in charge of this project, dealing with 40 years of dependencies and data conversions and backups and everything else, especially for the government institution which invented that pile of dung we call the tax code, wouldn't be easy. The easiest way of course would be to toss the old stuff, but I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that isn't an option the progammers could entertain.
I can't really see that being so much of a problem. KDE is KDE regardless of what you put it on, be it Debian or RedHat or even to a certain extent BSD or even Solaris. I don't use gnome(I confess, I like a pretty GUI), but I assume it's pretty much the same there.
The only differences I've really seen between the Red Hat 9 I'm typing this on and the various prior versions of Mandrake is on the administrative side. The admin GUIs vary(though not really the software underneath them, and to a slightly lesser extent the installation procedure. These differences may be minor or major, but to a large extent they are immaterial. Anyone who can't figure out the differences ought not to be fiddling with the settings in the first place.
This is only vaguely true. It's true in the sense that evidence obtained by a private entity is not barred from courtroom use(under certain strictures as I recall IANAL, but I believe that if the government or one of the lawyers involved etc ask you to do it it can't be even if you're a private citizen).
However should a private entity do this you are fully within your rights to call up your local branch of law enforcement and charge them with breaking and entering or whatever the equivilant crime is for computers(I knew I just forget). Both of which are felonies. So the RIAA could charge you with IP theft, and even send you to jail, but you could do the same thing.
As has been noted however that this does not apply to things which are within plain sight/the public domain. Which is to say that if they log on to kazaa/bittorrent/etc and find you sharing their stuff they can probably do something about it, especially with the somewhat loose strictures on subpoenas for account information these days.
I admit that I don't know the statistics and I suppose that the number of very young children who need organ donation is likely significantly smaller than the number of adults, but likely so is the supply.
The big question I would raise is whether they might not have been able to save the lives of eight other children or even two or three rather than using all eight organs on one child. If this is not the case and especially if the damage to the childs own organs was the result of some accident or disease etc rather than major genetic malfunction then I suppose this is all well and good, but if not I'm not sure if we should be sacrificing the lives of children who are in need of only one organ and who are otherwise healthy to do a complete overhaul of a single child.
Never really did work out why it was ok for someone to see a dismembered corpse(artificial or not) on network tv or even in a pg movie, but you see a nipple and you're rated R or worse. I don't know about you, but I think that 99.9999% of people in the world have seen a female nipple at some point in their lives and most of those people weren't traumatized by it.
While this is stupid, it's nowhere near the level of replacing the word "french" with the word "freedom" as was popular amongst Americans of the more moronic classes(not to say that people don't have the right to disapprove of the French, but that they think renaming their food is an adequate way of expressing this dislike). In any event e-mail is probably too well established to be ousted in use by any but the most arrogantly patriotic.
They'll be lucky if they can even keep their government officials using it for more than 6 months without some sort of very serious repurcussions/rewards.
No offense, but that would be a rather insane topic for any even halfway competent tv producer, even excluding the possiblity of offending someone rich and powerful.
I'm a nerd, and I care about software licensing issues, but I care because they affect my life, not because I find them to be exciting or interesting in and of themselves. Even I don't really want to watch a full hour of people arguing the legal semantics of SCO, and I doubt most/.ers would either.
That's not to say most of us wouldn't tune in, but that would only be because they were pandering to our interests, we would likely find the show dull and not ever watch it again.
Yes, they have to show that either the evidence will be destroyed or that it will cause irreperable harm to their company. There's not a whole lot which can cause irreperable harm to a copyright holder since pretty much anything can be repaired by money, and if you're doing something which can actually cause such irreperable harm then you probably deserve to have your stuff siezed because you're doing something I can't even think of at this moment, though if Microsoft could have somehow proven that whoever released the windows sourecode was going to do so in advance(not people distributing it later) that might, I say might, have qualified.
Odds are the risk of evidence being destroyed is much more likely to be the provision which is used and abused since it's a much easier thing to prove or speculate on.
Someone has to do the policing and we know the users won't do it to themselves, and the difference between companies policing and the government doing so doesn't seem to be that different these days what with government policing serving the interests of companies over those of people. Of course in an ideal world we'd be happiest with government policing because then we'd know at least that everyong was getting screwed equally.
On a less cynical note, while I understand that it's in the best interests of all that such computers not be allowed onto the internet, might it not be better for the ISP which, unless something really odd is going on, has access to the users contact information to call said user and tell them that there's a problem with their machine.
Not only would this minimize the resultant maze of phone calls, screaming, and threats which is normally associated with a company cutting off a users service, but it might also provide the company with an added source of revenue. If the user can't fix themselves you offer to send a tech out there to do it for them for a nominal fee, saves you time and money all round with a small potential for profit. Cut a distribution deal with a good AV client/firewall vendor and you're doing even better.
Of course on occaision you'll run into someone who won't rather than can't fix it or who wants to spam or commit DoS attacks or whatever the case may be. Then your phonecall gives you a recorded copy of the user willfully violating the terms of service and you can boot em with impunity and keep the money.
Seems a pretty good idea to me, so long as it doesn't get out of hand(though companies who called you up when there wasn't any sort of problem would soon have no customers). Fewer spammers, people aren't disconnected for no reason, more tech jobs(someone has to go fix the computers), everyone wins.
Well on a slightly more serious note it might not be such a bad threat. Given the propensity of obese people(and pretty much everyone else) to shift the blame for all of their problems onto someone else(see fast food law suits) it might work wonders for personal responsiblity.
Scientist:"You say you can't help eating too much, well ok, we'll cut open your head and stick this little chip in which can help you with that." Fat Person: "On second thought maybe I can just cut back on the snack foods and exercise more."
And if they can't actually control it, well then this will help.
Ya know, considering the kinds of political candidates we get lately I'd be thrilled to have someone I can feel good about, even if it's not because I like or agree with them, but because an electrical stimulator gave me a pleasant feeling.
Freedom of thought is overrated anyway, it's not like we can do much about the things we disagree with.
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This was probably really good experience for the grad students, but it didn't end up with terribly reliable software. I still remember one particular bug.
My friend called me in because he was getting a seg fault he couldn't seem to fix. This segfault was on a stack declared integer, before it got passed to one of the dbengines functions it was fine afterwards segfault, couldn't even get it's memory address that seg faulted too.
How you segfault an integer I really don't know, but that wasn't even the weirdest part, if you made a copy of the integer at least after a certain point in the code, it would seg fault the copy as well.
I fully understand your pain(though I've tried linux again and find it much better than it was in 2002, or 2001, or for that matter early 2003). Unless of course you were using a winmodem, those things should never have been made, last thing anyone needed back then, or even now is to allocate processor cycles to run a modem which, if they company weren't so bloody cheap, would be running itself.
When you purchase a modern console system(especially the XBox which has a version of windows on it, you're purchasing a computer and software, you can likely modify the computer all you like(so long as you modifications don't alter the software or allow you to play pirated games), but not the software itself legally, because you bought the hardware outright but the software is licensed.
In the case of a car, not only are you historically "purchasing it outright" as is mentioned in the article, but for the purposes of these codes you are not attempting to alter the software(well it's really probably some form of ROM). All congress is asking for is that auto manufacturers give their customers the ability to look at the output of their car computer(which is not encrypted and thus not under the DMCA) and be able to determine this meaning. The output can be legally read by anyone, but the car companies work hard to prevent anyone from knowing what it means.
A heavily used server is really not comparable to a game even if it seems like it uses more resources simply because it's far more likely to be well written than your average game. I've seen some seriously nasty memory leaks in popular games that I'd never see in something which was better designed be it for Windows or Linux.
If you were comparing running the same app on windows vs linux then perhaps you could criticize the memory manager(which is honestly probably not as good), but you're not.
A web/ftp server provides content and it can be important that you control what that content is, especially if you're using it for any sort of commercial purposes. An SMTP server on the other hand is essentially a forwarding device, short of properly securing it there is very little you can really do with your own SMTP server which you can't do with your ISP's.
This really only applies to outgoing mail since an incoming server can vary a great deal more, this doesn't however apply to the situation at hand since incoming doesn't affect this sort of filtering.
Since your ISP likely can't really do anything much about you, and since if you were a spammer you're about as likely to stop sending it because a recipient asked you to as hell is likely to freeze over. The only option available to recpient ISP's attempting to lower the amount of spam which makes it to their customers and probably more importantly goes through their mail server, is to block your IP.
Yes they could probably individually block IP's for individual spammers(assuming that the spammers aren't on a dynamic IP anyway which makes things more complicated, but it's easier to just block the entire range. It's not fair, but it's probably the only practical solution so long as there are people willing to work round the system.
As a side note, when was the last time something being astronomically dangerous has ever stopped some idiot from attempting to be funny or cool? I know people who used to hood surf, and all things considered this is probably a lot safer.
If your ISP is shyte at delivering mail that's not a reason to start your own mail server it's a reason to get a new isp because if they're shyte at something as basic as e-mail they're probably screwing you somewhere else.
As to the mail support people, the reason for their policy isn't because they want "centralized control over the entire internet" or whatever conspiracy theory you want, it's because they want to have someone they can take action against for abuse. If you run your own mail server, without violating the TOS for your ISP and you decide to send bulk mail the only thing they can do is block you. With your terms of service I doubt Comcast could even block your mailserver port, if you're paying to run your own services then they really don't have much to say abou what services you're running. I'm also willing ot bet that a large percentage of the people who call them are just "poor individual users running their own mail server" and a lot of them are also spammers.
Either the internet is centralized and controlled or it's free, if it's free then you have to put up with spammers, pedophiles, etc being able to do whatever the hell they want. Admitedly most of the people who use the internet aren't like that, they may be weird and possibly perverted like everyone else, but they're not a threat to anyone.
So long as whoever is keeping an eye on my web traffic leaves me alone I don't really care that they're looking, and if they want to be looking they will be whether it's legal or not.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with centralization so long as the people in charge of it don't abuse their power.
As for monthly reformats. Assuming you have a second drive or a second partition to keep stuff like documents and downloaded versions of your favorite programs, the whole process takes only a couple of hours(less if you set up the updates ahead of time, clears out all the junk on your system and gives you a more stable and efficient box).
Most of the time of course this isn't totally necessary(so long as you get your firewall and virus scanner up quickly enough), but especially if you're screwing around with lots of different new software and such it can sometimes become more necessary.
Though I do think that given that ALSA is free that more distributions could bundle it with their software.
The other note of course being that, while we hopefully will eventually find power sources that don't need petroleum, we will never(at least so long as we're alive) manage to do without water and quite a bit of it. Fresh water is worth quite a bit of money all things considered.
I mean I can test the latest version of redhat, I can even, if I really desire to do so and am willing to work out the specifics, fix some of the problems I might encounter, but the militray is unlikely to care how something works on my system, they are going to want to know how it performs on their systems, the most important of which are likely to be either expensive and difficult to obtain servers or proprietary military hardware. I can't test that nor, I believe, can 99% of the people who test and examine OSS software.
Even the NSA doesn't use Linux, they use their own brand of Linux which they've probably modified the bejesus out of, Linux was just an easier place to start than other OS's(I don't doubt that the NSA could make their own version of Windows if they liked and there wouldn't be a damned thing MS could do about it, but it'd be a pain).
Perhaps the theory was that they shouldn't need a status indicator change to tell them the lights are out.
It may very well have been incompetency or sloth or any of a number of the things you claim, but if so there's no real way to determine whether this was the coders or the management or any other part of the vast government beauracracy.
I'm currently a young programmer and so I'm all for opportunity, but at the same time I hope someday, if I"m foolish enough to remain in IT that long, to be an old programmer.
Outsourcing in general from my experience tends to be a bit of a crap shoot. If you don't need stuff very often then it's all well and good, but the overhead of paying all the people who manage the outsourcing or contract the contractors and everything else that goes into it can quite quickly mount up to more than the cost of a full time employee with benefits.
None of this really applies to the IRS of course, young programmer or old I wouldn't want to be the guy in charge of this project, dealing with 40 years of dependencies and data conversions and backups and everything else, especially for the government institution which invented that pile of dung we call the tax code, wouldn't be easy. The easiest way of course would be to toss the old stuff, but I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that isn't an option the progammers could entertain.
That depends entirely on where you are when you start digging.
The only differences I've really seen between the Red Hat 9 I'm typing this on and the various prior versions of Mandrake is on the administrative side. The admin GUIs vary(though not really the software underneath them, and to a slightly lesser extent the installation procedure. These differences may be minor or major, but to a large extent they are immaterial. Anyone who can't figure out the differences ought not to be fiddling with the settings in the first place.
However should a private entity do this you are fully within your rights to call up your local branch of law enforcement and charge them with breaking and entering or whatever the equivilant crime is for computers(I knew I just forget). Both of which are felonies. So the RIAA could charge you with IP theft, and even send you to jail, but you could do the same thing.
As has been noted however that this does not apply to things which are within plain sight/the public domain. Which is to say that if they log on to kazaa/bittorrent/etc and find you sharing their stuff they can probably do something about it, especially with the somewhat loose strictures on subpoenas for account information these days.
The big question I would raise is whether they might not have been able to save the lives of eight other children or even two or three rather than using all eight organs on one child. If this is not the case and especially if the damage to the childs own organs was the result of some accident or disease etc rather than major genetic malfunction then I suppose this is all well and good, but if not I'm not sure if we should be sacrificing the lives of children who are in need of only one organ and who are otherwise healthy to do a complete overhaul of a single child.
Never really did work out why it was ok for someone to see a dismembered corpse(artificial or not) on network tv or even in a pg movie, but you see a nipple and you're rated R or worse. I don't know about you, but I think that 99.9999% of people in the world have seen a female nipple at some point in their lives and most of those people weren't traumatized by it.
They'll be lucky if they can even keep their government officials using it for more than 6 months without some sort of very serious repurcussions/rewards.
I'm a nerd, and I care about software licensing issues, but I care because they affect my life, not because I find them to be exciting or interesting in and of themselves. Even I don't really want to watch a full hour of people arguing the legal semantics of SCO, and I doubt most /.ers would either.
That's not to say most of us wouldn't tune in, but that would only be because they were pandering to our interests, we would likely find the show dull and not ever watch it again.
Odds are the risk of evidence being destroyed is much more likely to be the provision which is used and abused since it's a much easier thing to prove or speculate on.
On a less cynical note, while I understand that it's in the best interests of all that such computers not be allowed onto the internet, might it not be better for the ISP which, unless something really odd is going on, has access to the users contact information to call said user and tell them that there's a problem with their machine.
Not only would this minimize the resultant maze of phone calls, screaming, and threats which is normally associated with a company cutting off a users service, but it might also provide the company with an added source of revenue. If the user can't fix themselves you offer to send a tech out there to do it for them for a nominal fee, saves you time and money all round with a small potential for profit. Cut a distribution deal with a good AV client/firewall vendor and you're doing even better.
Of course on occaision you'll run into someone who won't rather than can't fix it or who wants to spam or commit DoS attacks or whatever the case may be. Then your phonecall gives you a recorded copy of the user willfully violating the terms of service and you can boot em with impunity and keep the money.
Seems a pretty good idea to me, so long as it doesn't get out of hand(though companies who called you up when there wasn't any sort of problem would soon have no customers). Fewer spammers, people aren't disconnected for no reason, more tech jobs(someone has to go fix the computers), everyone wins.
Scientist:"You say you can't help eating too much, well ok, we'll cut open your head and stick this little chip in which can help you with that." Fat Person: "On second thought maybe I can just cut back on the snack foods and exercise more."
And if they can't actually control it, well then this will help.
Freedom of thought is overrated anyway, it's not like we can do much about the things we disagree with.