what exactly is the point of announcing minor versions on/.?
It's news because 2.6.8 is the first release to include the 3ware 3w-9xxx driver I needed desparately, and it's being released just two days after decided to step back to the 2.4 kernel tree to get the machine running!
their local WalMart has put all the mom and pops out of business.
I'm sure that is true, to a certain extent, but KMart was doing that long before WalMart. And I remember back when Sears was the one putting the M&P stores out of business...
And, of course, there's this new-fangled thing out there called "The Interenet" that is killing off all the Mom & Pop stores this week, but no one wants to talk about it on Slashdot... they just want to rant about WalMart!
For my part, I don't understand why they didn't start fixing their apps months ago.
Mayhaps because fixing sites for SP2 would have broken them for pre-SP2 WinXP?
I had numerous problems with doing things in a standards-based, secure way that won't work under Internet Explorer... That's why we develop using Mozilla and Opera to make sure the site is "clean", then test under IE and resolve the problems!
So basically, you're saying that Windows is hard to use because you don't know how to use it?
No, I'm saying that Windows is harder to maintain than Linux because it will silently change things that have a serious effect on the system's operation and/or stability. When I change something in Linux, I know what I changed. When I change something in Windows, I do not know what Windows changed without telling me.
From my example - I changed an interface's IP address. Windows changed the interface's bindings to various services, all on its own. Even when I restored the setting that I'd changed, things still didn't work... because it was the silent change that broke things, not my change.
We refer to this sort of crap as "Windows is being helpful again!"
given that Windows is easier to install and maintain than Linux.
My experience with Windows is that, so long as nothing goes wrong, there isn't much maintenance. But, when problems arise, even finding documentation on how to fix things is a problem, despite its popularity.
Recently, I needed to change the subnet on the public side of a group of computers, including a Win2K server and some Linux boxes. The Linux boxes took 5 minutes each, and all the daemons adjusted to the changes with a simple 'service XXX restart'. Never even had to reset the hardware.
It also took 5 minutes to change the IP on the Win2K box... but it required a restart... and several very important things didn't come back afterwards (Exchange and RAS in particular). It took two days to track down WHY, because everything looked correct.
Turned out that the settings were correct, but neither Exchange nor RAS are tolerant of changes to the binding order of interfaces, and any significant change (like an IP) to an interface changes its binding order... making it invisible to both applications. This isn't documented in anyplace convenient; I only found it by tracking down specific error message text via GOOGLE, piecing together information off of several of the results, finally finding a very nice MSKB article on the subject... which hadn't appeared in the GOOGLE search results!
I'm now fighting a problem where this same machine has decided that its second and third net cards are deaf... They exist, they detect the network, Win2K says they're working, but the rest of the network can't talk to them. And the customer gets frustrated, while I try to find SOMETHING on the net that would explain the behaviour. I could have fixed this problem within an hour under Linux...
As Dogbert said, "We have the very best kind of evidence. Anecdotal!
I wasn't blocking ads on Slashdot until they started going "dynamic". If something is moving on the page besides the mouse cursor, it better be a hell of a lot more interesting than Microsoft trying to tell me that using a quad Xeon under Windows 2003 to approximate the work done by a uniprocessor AMD XP2000+ under Linux is an effective way to "lower my TCO"!
These subsidies would provide the money to cover the cost...
But, just where the hell do you think the money comes from for these subsidies? The government can not give away anything it didn't steal from someone else (i.e., taxpayers), and then only after they filter it through 20 levels of bureaucracy to siphon off 70-90% of it.
And what would be the point of having 98% penetration of broadband, when so many Americans can't deal with the level of internet they already have? Look at the large number of open relays and proxies in Korea... Much of that comes from ignorance of how to deal with BB that rivals our own. How many of us have a sibling, parent, grandparent, or other relative that thinks that everything on internet is real and true, for whom broadband access would just allow them to screw up quicker?
We are currently working on providing SPF records.
If you can get SPF implemented (it isn't that hard, really), I will remove the "soft bounce" blocks on our end, on the assumption that rediffmail will be taking care of its own. The problem is the spoofed spam, claiming to be rediffmail (and hotmail, and yahoo, and [insert virtually big ISP domain here]).
I dont know why you find rediffmail so unusable.
I wasn't making comment on the usability, although someone else might have mentioned it. I've never tried your system, so I can't address that issue.
not mentioned in this review... the Indian rediffmail.
Probably because it is blocked in many places. I know that our servers routinely block anything from this domain, because it is mostly spam.
Granted, only about 1 in 100 spam messages we've received claiming to be one of the rediffmail domains has actually come from a rediffmail server. But the messages that were really from rediffmail were directed at long-inactive email accounts, and several spam traps. We do not have a block against their servers, but the from address better be on one of our whitelists, or it will be "soft bounced" until we can find out from the recipient if it should be passed through.
This is all subject to change when/if they publish SPF records for their domain, but I certainly wouldn't use an rediffmail account for anything you want delivered...
how damned helpful of you by answering a simple question with a useless, sarcastic comment.
And how typical of those who don't read the articles to also not read the comments... While the subject was "RTFA", the content explained the situation quite well.
The story listed links to answers (not just the article) which apply to SPF in general. Anyone who has an interest should be reading the SPF pages on pobox.com for more information. And, if you're not in control of your domain's email, you need to ask these questions of the person who IS in charge, because they're out of your control, in any case.
The reference implementation of the SPF validator includes code to validate using Microsoft CallerID records as well. That means that the XML parser needs to be present on the server.
Re:Stealing bad music?
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Stealing is taking something so that somebody else can no longer use it.
Keep tell yourself that, and you'll come to believe it some day. However, that won't change the laws, which call a lot of things "theft" and "stealing" where no property disappears. For example, if I work on your car for 5 hours, and you don't pay me for my labor, it's "Theft of service". You haven't stolen my ability to do more work, but you have stolen my time. Now, most states won't let me put your butt in jail, but I am allowed to file liens against your car to force payment.
Granted, downloading a pirate copy of the latest CD didn't involve you taking that CD out of a music store. And, maybe you wouldn't have bought it anyway, so there isn't a "lost sale" involved. And, you might even think that CDs are priced outrageously... Although I don't remember the old vinyl LPs being cheaper than CDs are today (accounting for inflation).
But I know people (and you probably do, too!) that would only buy CDs if they couldn't download it for free. My nephew would be one of them, if I didn't have his computer set up so that he can't install the latest file swapping program to come down the wire. "It's not stealing", he claims, "because everyone is doing it!"
Considering that the ilks of Microsoft don't pay taxes (with some 60 billion $ cash reserve)
What does having $60B in cash have to do with how much taxes anyone pays? We do not, at present, have "wealth" taxes in the United States (The exception to this is property taxes, where we pay rent on what we own to the local government bodies to let us own it.). We only pay taxes on the wealth as we accumulate it.
If I pay taxes on my corporate profits, and put them into a vault, I could accumulate a lot of cash, and still not owe any additional taxes on that money. Unless you can prove that Microsoft managed to accumulate that money without paying the 15-34% corporate income tax on the net profits, then the "arse" isn't the original poster!
Ah, but you forget that people like this live by knowing the limits of the law, and exploring their edges. You can't play the game without knowing the rules!
At least some of those law books are probably well worn. Companies like this spend lots of time exploring what has and hasn't been explicitely been ruled to be illegal, and trying variations on what has been to get around whatever was perceived to be the downfall of the now-illegal ploy.
There are several worms out there that target random addresses in domains. One of my client's domains is under attack right now - over the past week, several hundred infected systems have tried to contact several THOUSAND different email addresses within this domain, which has 10 total VALID addresses. A catch-all address would simply put all of those copies into a mailbox somewhere...
Re:Stealing bad music?
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 1
What do you mean you're against downloading music?
I mean I'm against it in the context of the parent message - downloading copyrighted music in violation of that copyright. I've got no problem with legal downloading.
Stealing bad music?
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
While I'm against downloading music, I can see why some people do it... Lack of perceived value of "albums". They're not stealing the bad music, just the stuff they want.
My solution to only liking one or two songs on an album is to set my price point for buying it lower... I won't buy it at full price. Others just download the song(s) they want. I have one song in my MP3 collection that didn't come from a CD I own - it was encoded from an HBO concert, because I didn't want to spend $18 for the two-CD set the song is found on, which was full of, well, CRAP.
Even the artists themselves are realizing that they've been selling albums that consist of one or two songs, plus filler. This information was gleaned from the recent Frontline show, "How the Music Died".
True, there has been a large outcry about this lack of enforcement. I remember watching the noted conservatives Tipper Gore (sic) testify before Congress about the need to impose labeling standards on albums, and the cry from the entertainment industry about censorship.
A lot of people of various political strips have shouted for years that there has been no enforcement of standards, and called for censorship of even commercials for being a "bad influence on children". Different political sides call it different things. One popular term right now is "enforcing community standards".
My standards are that I don't like being around people that spend their lives spewing vulgarities for the sake of being vulgar. I have two nephews that couldn't get two sentences out consecutively without saying "F...". They're getting better; now that they're finding out that employers don't like it, they can sometimes go hours without calling someone a whore, or implying they have sex with ducks, or... you get the picture.
I've watched Howard Stern. He doesn't have to be vulgar to be good at what he does. But it is his trademark, and he choses to be. Richard Dreyfuss, same thing. But, I think, in his case, he doesn't believe he can be good without the vulgarities.
Some would argue that a cop show, or music video, or [insert show type here] can't be realistic without portraying the vulgarity present in the real world, but I thought the liberal ideal was to move beyond such crassness... You know, the whole Star Trek sanitized future. And yet, some of them are fighting to do just the opposite.
It has to be acknowledged that the rules in question have been in place for
decades
. The current "crackdown" is an attempt to apply them uniformly... Howard Stern isn't the only one who has been fined, he is just one who doesn't care to stop. He should welcome the FCC's new initiative to make the radio stations hang onto tapes, because it will give him and Mancow proof to use against the groups they claim are making false statements about their shows... rather than the FCC just taking the complainer's side.
In related news, The Book Industry Association of America (BIAA) filed suit against 2,000 of the most blatent book swapping sites. Officials of the Chicago Public Library declined to comment, after being named in the suit.
New York Public Library spokesperson Larry "two-fingers" Benito would only say that they had contacted "our people who deal with this sort of thing", and that he "expected a swift and satisfying outcome" to the suit.
I think the economics of "estimated losses due to piracy" is calculated with the same formula used to create government budgets... That is, Marketing projected sales of 25,000,000 units in Fiscal 2003. Sales were only 19,000,000 units. Therefore, 6,000,000 units were STOLEN, because Marketing is never wrong...
Washington does it by projecting budgetary growth of 10%/year. If only 5% more is allocated, the budget was CUT by a Draconian FIVE PERCENT, even though we spent more money!
Ah, like a certain "photogallery" script I found, that simply wraps some HTML and IMG height=100/width=120 tags around a listing all graphic files it finds in a directory, with a sprinkle of Javascript to translate the "links" into an "open window, insert already-downloaded graphic" call? Even attached to the same 100Mb network, it took a LONG time to view the "thumbnails" of one directory out of dozens...
PLEASE don't "scale" images with the IMG tag's height and width.
Wish I didn't have to, but... this graphic must be printable. If you print it outside of the browser, the graphic's included pixels/cm setting rules, and it prints properly. If I scale it down prior to sending it, the embedded 2-D scan code doesn't reliably scan anymore. It's not a case of sending "4x more data than necessary", it's a case of forcing the browser to properly display what is sent.
In my case, though, it's a two-color (black and white) PNG, lots of white space, typically 17K or less in size. We originally sent it as mostly-HTML with just the minimum graphic, but even CSS didn't provide sufficient control over placement to meet the style guide we had to live by for accommodating the automated systems that later scan the label.
I think there is a problem with definitions here. "Enterprise" doesn't mean the same thing as "deployed on hundreds of different systems world-wide".
If I'm doing something for a large company (dozens of servers), there is going to be some form of configuration management involved to keep those servers consistent amongst themselves. Therefore, "all the little incompatibilities" aren't the factor they are in something like Squirrelmail or phpMyAdmin, where you can't control what Joe Sixpack has installed on his server.
Textbook isn't wrong - The JPEG isn't identical to the original graphic, even if the quality is set to "high". It just looks like it, to the unaided eye.
Believe me, I went through this. I tried JPEG for maps that I was presenting on my website. When I used JPEG for display, I had to maintain a separate GIF or PNG of the map for editing, because the JPEG had all sharp color transitions muddied. They looked great, unless you tried to edit them, which I was doing as often as conditions they depicted changed!
Choice of graphic format, of course, depends upon many conditions. In my case, the maps can be rendered in 16 colors, so a PNG was smaller than either a GIF or JPEG of the same map. Photos that aren't going to be zoomed in on too tightly are great in JPEG. GIFs can be animated, but don't do subtle color changes (max 256-color pallet) well. But, that's text-book answers again...
Slashdot Mirror
It's news because 2.6.8 is the first release to include the 3ware 3w-9xxx driver I needed desparately, and it's being released just two days after decided to step back to the 2.4 kernel tree to get the machine running!
I'm sure that is true, to a certain extent, but KMart was doing that long before WalMart. And I remember back when Sears was the one putting the M&P stores out of business...
And, of course, there's this new-fangled thing out there called "The Interenet" that is killing off all the Mom & Pop stores this week, but no one wants to talk about it on Slashdot... they just want to rant about WalMart!
Mayhaps because fixing sites for SP2 would have broken them for pre-SP2 WinXP?
I had numerous problems with doing things in a standards-based, secure way that won't work under Internet Explorer... That's why we develop using Mozilla and Opera to make sure the site is "clean", then test under IE and resolve the problems!
No, I'm saying that Windows is harder to maintain than Linux because it will silently change things that have a serious effect on the system's operation and/or stability. When I change something in Linux, I know what I changed. When I change something in Windows, I do not know what Windows changed without telling me.
From my example - I changed an interface's IP address. Windows changed the interface's bindings to various services, all on its own. Even when I restored the setting that I'd changed, things still didn't work... because it was the silent change that broke things, not my change.
We refer to this sort of crap as "Windows is being helpful again!"
My experience with Windows is that, so long as nothing goes wrong, there isn't much maintenance. But, when problems arise, even finding documentation on how to fix things is a problem, despite its popularity.
Recently, I needed to change the subnet on the public side of a group of computers, including a Win2K server and some Linux boxes. The Linux boxes took 5 minutes each, and all the daemons adjusted to the changes with a simple 'service XXX restart'. Never even had to reset the hardware.
It also took 5 minutes to change the IP on the Win2K box... but it required a restart... and several very important things didn't come back afterwards (Exchange and RAS in particular). It took two days to track down WHY, because everything looked correct.
Turned out that the settings were correct, but neither Exchange nor RAS are tolerant of changes to the binding order of interfaces, and any significant change (like an IP) to an interface changes its binding order... making it invisible to both applications. This isn't documented in anyplace convenient; I only found it by tracking down specific error message text via GOOGLE, piecing together information off of several of the results, finally finding a very nice MSKB article on the subject... which hadn't appeared in the GOOGLE search results!
I'm now fighting a problem where this same machine has decided that its second and third net cards are deaf... They exist, they detect the network, Win2K says they're working, but the rest of the network can't talk to them. And the customer gets frustrated, while I try to find SOMETHING on the net that would explain the behaviour. I could have fixed this problem within an hour under Linux...
As Dogbert said, "We have the very best kind of evidence. Anecdotal!
I wasn't blocking ads on Slashdot until they started going "dynamic". If something is moving on the page besides the mouse cursor, it better be a hell of a lot more interesting than Microsoft trying to tell me that using a quad Xeon under Windows 2003 to approximate the work done by a uniprocessor AMD XP2000+ under Linux is an effective way to "lower my TCO"!
But, just where the hell do you think the money comes from for these subsidies? The government can not give away anything it didn't steal from someone else (i.e., taxpayers), and then only after they filter it through 20 levels of bureaucracy to siphon off 70-90% of it.
And what would be the point of having 98% penetration of broadband, when so many Americans can't deal with the level of internet they already have? Look at the large number of open relays and proxies in Korea... Much of that comes from ignorance of how to deal with BB that rivals our own. How many of us have a sibling, parent, grandparent, or other relative that thinks that everything on internet is real and true, for whom broadband access would just allow them to screw up quicker?
If you can get SPF implemented (it isn't that hard, really), I will remove the "soft bounce" blocks on our end, on the assumption that rediffmail will be taking care of its own. The problem is the spoofed spam, claiming to be rediffmail (and hotmail, and yahoo, and [insert virtually big ISP domain here]).
I dont know why you find rediffmail so unusable.
I wasn't making comment on the usability, although someone else might have mentioned it. I've never tried your system, so I can't address that issue.
Probably because it is blocked in many places. I know that our servers routinely block anything from this domain, because it is mostly spam.
Granted, only about 1 in 100 spam messages we've received claiming to be one of the rediffmail domains has actually come from a rediffmail server. But the messages that were really from rediffmail were directed at long-inactive email accounts, and several spam traps. We do not have a block against their servers, but the from address better be on one of our whitelists, or it will be "soft bounced" until we can find out from the recipient if it should be passed through.
This is all subject to change when/if they publish SPF records for their domain, but I certainly wouldn't use an rediffmail account for anything you want delivered...
And how typical of those who don't read the articles to also not read the comments... While the subject was "RTFA", the content explained the situation quite well.
The story listed links to answers (not just the article) which apply to SPF in general. Anyone who has an interest should be reading the SPF pages on pobox.com for more information. And, if you're not in control of your domain's email, you need to ask these questions of the person who IS in charge, because they're out of your control, in any case.
The reference implementation of the SPF validator includes code to validate using Microsoft CallerID records as well. That means that the XML parser needs to be present on the server.
Keep tell yourself that, and you'll come to believe it some day. However, that won't change the laws, which call a lot of things "theft" and "stealing" where no property disappears. For example, if I work on your car for 5 hours, and you don't pay me for my labor, it's "Theft of service". You haven't stolen my ability to do more work, but you have stolen my time. Now, most states won't let me put your butt in jail, but I am allowed to file liens against your car to force payment.
Granted, downloading a pirate copy of the latest CD didn't involve you taking that CD out of a music store. And, maybe you wouldn't have bought it anyway, so there isn't a "lost sale" involved. And, you might even think that CDs are priced outrageously... Although I don't remember the old vinyl LPs being cheaper than CDs are today (accounting for inflation).
But I know people (and you probably do, too!) that would only buy CDs if they couldn't download it for free. My nephew would be one of them, if I didn't have his computer set up so that he can't install the latest file swapping program to come down the wire. "It's not stealing", he claims, "because everyone is doing it!"
What does having $60B in cash have to do with how much taxes anyone pays? We do not, at present, have "wealth" taxes in the United States (The exception to this is property taxes, where we pay rent on what we own to the local government bodies to let us own it.). We only pay taxes on the wealth as we accumulate it.
If I pay taxes on my corporate profits, and put them into a vault, I could accumulate a lot of cash, and still not owe any additional taxes on that money. Unless you can prove that Microsoft managed to accumulate that money without paying the 15-34% corporate income tax on the net profits, then the "arse" isn't the original poster!
Ah, but you forget that people like this live by knowing the limits of the law, and exploring their edges. You can't play the game without knowing the rules!
At least some of those law books are probably well worn. Companies like this spend lots of time exploring what has and hasn't been explicitely been ruled to be illegal, and trying variations on what has been to get around whatever was perceived to be the downfall of the now-illegal ploy.
There are several worms out there that target random addresses in domains. One of my client's domains is under attack right now - over the past week, several hundred infected systems have tried to contact several THOUSAND different email addresses within this domain, which has 10 total VALID addresses. A catch-all address would simply put all of those copies into a mailbox somewhere...
I mean I'm against it in the context of the parent message - downloading copyrighted music in violation of that copyright. I've got no problem with legal downloading.
My solution to only liking one or two songs on an album is to set my price point for buying it lower... I won't buy it at full price. Others just download the song(s) they want. I have one song in my MP3 collection that didn't come from a CD I own - it was encoded from an HBO concert, because I didn't want to spend $18 for the two-CD set the song is found on, which was full of, well, CRAP.
Even the artists themselves are realizing that they've been selling albums that consist of one or two songs, plus filler. This information was gleaned from the recent Frontline show, "How the Music Died".
True, there has been a large outcry about this lack of enforcement. I remember watching the noted conservatives Tipper Gore (sic) testify before Congress about the need to impose labeling standards on albums, and the cry from the entertainment industry about censorship.
A lot of people of various political strips have shouted for years that there has been no enforcement of standards, and called for censorship of even commercials for being a "bad influence on children". Different political sides call it different things. One popular term right now is "enforcing community standards".
My standards are that I don't like being around people that spend their lives spewing vulgarities for the sake of being vulgar. I have two nephews that couldn't get two sentences out consecutively without saying "F...". They're getting better; now that they're finding out that employers don't like it, they can sometimes go hours without calling someone a whore, or implying they have sex with ducks, or... you get the picture.
I've watched Howard Stern. He doesn't have to be vulgar to be good at what he does. But it is his trademark, and he choses to be. Richard Dreyfuss, same thing. But, I think, in his case, he doesn't believe he can be good without the vulgarities.
Some would argue that a cop show, or music video, or [insert show type here] can't be realistic without portraying the vulgarity present in the real world, but I thought the liberal ideal was to move beyond such crassness... You know, the whole Star Trek sanitized future. And yet, some of them are fighting to do just the opposite.
It has to be acknowledged that the rules in question have been in place for
decades
. The current "crackdown" is an attempt to apply them uniformly... Howard Stern isn't the only one who has been fined, he is just one who doesn't care to stop. He should welcome the FCC's new initiative to make the radio stations hang onto tapes, because it will give him and Mancow proof to use against the groups they claim are making false statements about their shows... rather than the FCC just taking the complainer's side.
New York Public Library spokesperson Larry "two-fingers" Benito would only say that they had contacted "our people who deal with this sort of thing", and that he "expected a swift and satisfying outcome" to the suit.
Washington does it by projecting budgetary growth of 10%/year. If only 5% more is allocated, the budget was CUT by a Draconian FIVE PERCENT, even though we spent more money!
Ah, like a certain "photogallery" script I found, that simply wraps some HTML and IMG height=100/width=120 tags around a listing all graphic files it finds in a directory, with a sprinkle of Javascript to translate the "links" into an "open window, insert already-downloaded graphic" call? Even attached to the same 100Mb network, it took a LONG time to view the "thumbnails" of one directory out of dozens...
Wish I didn't have to, but... this graphic must be printable. If you print it outside of the browser, the graphic's included pixels/cm setting rules, and it prints properly. If I scale it down prior to sending it, the embedded 2-D scan code doesn't reliably scan anymore. It's not a case of sending "4x more data than necessary", it's a case of forcing the browser to properly display what is sent.
In my case, though, it's a two-color (black and white) PNG, lots of white space, typically 17K or less in size. We originally sent it as mostly-HTML with just the minimum graphic, but even CSS didn't provide sufficient control over placement to meet the style guide we had to live by for accommodating the automated systems that later scan the label.
If I'm doing something for a large company (dozens of servers), there is going to be some form of configuration management involved to keep those servers consistent amongst themselves. Therefore, "all the little incompatibilities" aren't the factor they are in something like Squirrelmail or phpMyAdmin, where you can't control what Joe Sixpack has installed on his server.
TruBass - that fishy smell isn't artificial!
Believe me, I went through this. I tried JPEG for maps that I was presenting on my website. When I used JPEG for display, I had to maintain a separate GIF or PNG of the map for editing, because the JPEG had all sharp color transitions muddied. They looked great, unless you tried to edit them, which I was doing as often as conditions they depicted changed!
Choice of graphic format, of course, depends upon many conditions. In my case, the maps can be rendered in 16 colors, so a PNG was smaller than either a GIF or JPEG of the same map. Photos that aren't going to be zoomed in on too tightly are great in JPEG. GIFs can be animated, but don't do subtle color changes (max 256-color pallet) well. But, that's text-book answers again...