Last night, I got a worried IM from a younger cousin of mine. His mom had "cleaned up" their computer, and he was having trouble sending some wmv/rm files to friends of his. Windows Media Player kept giving him and his friends errors along the line of "I'm sorry, but you don't have a license to play that file." Of course, I immediately knew what was going on, and explained to him that Windows was just trying to prevent him from making illegal copies of music. The problem is, the files he was trying to share were of his band, off of their own demo CD. At that point, I pointed him to xiph and enlightened him about ogg vorbis.
MythTV has something that I haven't seen from any of the commercial players: MythWeb. Fully configuratble recording/list browsing/etc in a nice web interface (don't trust the screenshots on the MythTV website - they're old and out of date, and I haven't had time to make any of the new version). My MythTV box is rarely used for actually watching TV these days. I set up what I want to record via MythWeb, and archive shows to SVCD to be watched later on my dvd player.
You agreed to get those emails when you signed up for the hotmail account. How else is hotmail supposed to make money for Billy G. if they don't convince their non-paying customers to contribute for the services they're getting?
sometimes it is useful to have web-based email addresses
ssh keys + long passphrase
on
Real Security?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Since the replies seem to be taking a heavily pasword-oriented approach, I'll put in my $.02.
As a security feature at work, we've started switching our more important boxes to key-only login. I've done the same to my boxes at home, for good measure. Now, I have 2 keys. One that lives on my box at home, and one at work. They don't exist anywhere else (other than a USB pen drive for backup), and will never be copied off of these drives. I use a relatively long passphrase (19 chars), but since I use ssh agents (and agent forwarding when it's safe enough to do so), I only ever have to type the passphrase once per day (the machine is set to forget the passphrase when I leave work).
Now if only all of those ecommerce type places would work with my public keys...
Re:To me, "ISP" is much more narrower.
on
Who Is An ISP?
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· Score: 1
ISP to a company that provides access to the Net
Please don't confuse "Internet Access Provider" with "Internet Service Provider". They used to be one-and-the-same, but with the expansion of the web, I would definitely consider colo/hosting companies to be "service providers" even though they don't actually provide any access for dialup/dsl/cable users.
But on that note, a web host is providing access to the "net" if it is defined to include any net-accessible web page. They let people on the internet access that web page, so even by your definition, hosting companies (big or small, commercial or hobbiest) are ISP's, too.
I asked this exact same question...
on
Who Is An ISP?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I asked this exact same question the other day, and received an informative reply that was quite disturbing. Basically, even if I'd be allowed to sue as an ISP, I'd have to prove no less than $75k in damages before anyone would even bother to look at my case. Does this mean that I turn off my spam filters and create a bill of $50 for each spam email (at $50 per hour/partial-hour per message verified as spam)?
Granted, I still haven't even been able to find the full text of the bill anywhere in order to verify this.
I need a selection of 50,000 different headsets because damnit, a telephone is just *too* heavy to pick up with my hand
Yeah. Because the main point of a cell phone headset is to alleviate hand/arm strain due to phone weight and not to free up hands (and brain focus) from the phone so they can do unimportant things like DRIVING.
Yes, use froogle. But how are companies supposed to get listed in froogle? Our company requested information from them about 3 months ago, and were told to expect an answer back in about 10 days. We still haven't heard anything.
Besides, sometimes people who are browsing for things to buy (rather than looking for a specific thing) would rather do a search and come up with relevant similarities. It's been complained about that the high-ranking google results are too shopping-oriented, but for certain keywords this is a good thing - in our experience, most people searching for "1u server" or "blade server" are comparing vendors and looking for details about products, not looking for news articles.
Not that I can find the exact text of the law anywhere, but everything I've read about it says that only ISP's and Attorneys General can sue spammers. My question is what consitutes an ISP? I'm an end-user in most sense of the term, but I own/host several domain names for friends/family, including email services. I do this as a favor and don't make any money off of it, but I am providing an internet service. Does this mean that I can sue spammers as an ISP? After all, it's my mail server, my paid-for bandwidth (even if just a DSL connection) being wasted, and my time wasted trying to beef up my filters to keep the spam out.
It's a very, very evil hack. It works, for some definition of working - it'll make your Metacity very, very slow.
And presumably it'll stay that way. Apple's stuff works so nicely because they take advantage of hardware acceleration. We won't get that kind of performance in Linux until people stop fearing tighter integration of Gnome/KDE and GL.
How does any of this help those of us who vote absentee/mailin? My work/life schedule doesn't allow me the time to go in and actually vote with a machine. I'm not about to trust any online voting system (given that such a system would basically be an open invitation to hackers), so what does that leave us with? More and more people over the years are voting absentee, and I don't think I've ever heard of a proposed solution to go alongside the electronic voting machines.
Then again, I've never had trouble filling out my absentee ballots in WA. You just draw a line to complete an arrow next to the option you want to vote for.
Primarily, great, give the spammers a list of valid email addresses
Not if they set it up like Washington's registry. It's a searchable list that will tell you whether or not a specific address is on the list, but it will never give you a list of which ones are. Granted, given how poorly-written this bill seems to be, it seems unlikely that they'd be smart enough to set up a good do-not-email registry.
Are we so quick to forget incidents like this one, where Microsoft started going after schools for license violations? Microsoft and the Gates Foundation may give away a lot of stuff to schools and libraries, but it's rarely enough to make a dent in the budgets of most schools (I still send a number of old computers to my mom's classroom - running linux or old versions of macos - because her school can't afford to give her the computers she needs).
Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) is even trademarked
Merely adding the ™ symbol after your name doesn't really say more than "I use this name, I call it mine, and I may be in the process of registering it." Unless you have substantial documentation to back it up (which the universities do claim to have), it isn't really legally binding until you register it with the government and that little ™ turns into a nice ®. However, registering a trademark is expensive, and usually takes a long time, so most people just stick with the ™ if they have enough documentation to support the claim.
My wife is applying to law school this year, and we've run into the same questions. Do we get her a powerbook now, and hope that her preferred school (U. Washington) continues to not use the software, or do we wait until school is about to start before we decide? Granted, we're now waiting because she got a new desktop machine and I can't afford to get her a laptop, but the question is still out there.
On the "disadvantage" side of things, exam4 looks particularly bad. Other pages allow students access to some of their notes (thus, making it advantageous to have a laptop) but no find/search functionality (or some other kind of feature-disabled option). Thus, you can get at the notes in digital form, all of them, but have to put up with a few restrictions. If all you get is a word processor (read: text editor, since it doesn't really do any extra word-processing things), there's not much advantage for the students. Of course, the professors will have the advantage of not having to read handwritten tests, etc.
Most law schools that use software like this also seem to consider it OPTIONAL. If your school is basically forcing you to buy/use a Windows-based laptop, they'd better be a top-tier school worth the extra $1500+...
I'm not disagreeing that 2 million is a lot of people.
A more important note is that there are already loud complaints about overfull prisons in the US, and yet these corporate-senators want to pass a law to put more people in jail for something that only hurts a few people (yes, I've seen the new MPAA commercials - I've also seen revenue numbers for good movies continue to increase, despite piracy), and doesn't spend the effort trying to keep the violent criminals in jail, along with encarcerating those who haven't been caught yet.
Honestly, as a generally-law-abiding citizen, I'd much rather have a movie pirate than a rapist go free with (or without) a fine instead of jail time.
Sorry, as as been pointed out here countless times, that only applies to criminal law. Copyright infringement is a civil offense. Then again, maybe this new law (with jail time) will change the status of the crime(?) and they'll start having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the 16-year-old with a copy of Matrix on his/her hard drive cost them $1,000,000 in lost dvd sales.
It's as easy to add multimedia in Fedora as it is in debian, you add one non-free source and you're done.
One? You're talking about xmms-mp3, right? Because I had to install xmms-mp3, gstreamer-mp3, xine, mplayer and a suite of others, and because of their crippled gstreamer setup, rhythmbox still won't play mp3's.
Granted, I'm not about to let this stop me from playing with and using Fedora - I'm a staunch redhat fan, and will continue to be so as long as it's the enterprise standard and I get free tech support from the friends who set up and run those systems.
If it's a box running OSS couldn't someone edit the source to simply ignore the flag and record anyway?
As I understand it (from very quick readings about opencable), the flag would have to be detected in the tuner itself, and the signal decrypted via a smart card. In order to get at the API for those tuners, software authors would most likely have to pay a fee, and perhaps a royalty, much like mp3 works.
But I'm just speculating here. Either way, it's a bad thing when this is used for standard broadcast stuff, specifically to disable functionality like time shifting and digital recording, without offering a cheap/free alternative to those of us who don't want to pay companies like Tivo just so we can watch shows we'd otherwise miss.
Most of the comments here seem to indicate that the flag will indicate content that is ok-to-copy, but everything official that I've read leads me to believe that the "broadcast flag" will be used to mark shows/data as do-not-copy, rather than the other way around.
Honestly, I don't agree with either setup, since there are some times when I want to watch a show but am physically unable to sit in front of the TV, and the broadcast flag will lock the ability to record said shows out of OSS/free projects like mythtv. But shouldn't we at least know what we're complaining about?
Actually, I'm just quoting the estimated price that my dad was told when he ordered his (I'm jealous - wish I could afford one) - tacoma/seattle area. He ordered the full-package version (presumably gps, bluetooth, lojack, etc), and was told that it would be about $26k, but that they didn't have final pricing yet - maybe the estimate included tax, etc., too.
What really flored me was that the advice person actually answered with some good info about normalizing MP3s.
What, you mean like "Go into iTunes preferences, check the box that says 'sound check' under the 'effects' tab"? It doesn't even have to re-encode, just sets the volume flag in each file and respects it on playback. Even seems to work once transferred to my ipod.
The car costs about $26k, is bluetooth-enabled, and has finally started reaching customers in the past week or two. Pretty easy to add up to $1M when the 15,000 pre-ordered Prius's just shipped. Wish I could get one, too.
I was going to comment on this, too; but more along the lines of "changing lights isn't NEW". In the '90's, it was common to see strobe detectors attached to traffic light poles all over the place, but as I understand it, so many civilians purchased devices that would hit the proper strobe frequencies that that the cities had to abandon use of the devices. Sometimes similar technology is used, but instead of turning the lights green, it sets ALL lights in the intersection to red, and emergency vehicles just drive on the wrong side of the road (this has safety concerns, and doesn't seem to be practiced very often).
Honestly, with the availability of technologies like bluetooth and other encrypted wireless technologies, it shouldn't be hard to just encode a daily/weekly-changing code into the signals and give it out to emergency vehicles as needed.
That, and teaching drivers how to behave around those flashing lights (ie. pull over to the RIGHT if you are in the US - I've seen too many people on the freeway pull left, only to block an ambulance that was trying to get around traffic by driving on the shoulder).
Ok, lets say you run Oracle. Oracle says we will only support RedHats Enterprise version of software. I say "It's all Linux just tell me what to load" They say, buy the Enterprise version.
So if this is the case, how is this any different from what happens now? You're still not running Enterprise on your development machines (which, btw, is about $800 retail, not $1500-2500 -- that's for advanced server, not enterprise). In fact, theoretically the only difference in how things work between enterprise/advanced and the current RedHat 9 vs. the new Fedora distro is the name, and the fact that Fedora now has a lot more user contribution.
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Last night, I got a worried IM from a younger cousin of mine. His mom had "cleaned up" their computer, and he was having trouble sending some wmv/rm files to friends of his. Windows Media Player kept giving him and his friends errors along the line of "I'm sorry, but you don't have a license to play that file." Of course, I immediately knew what was going on, and explained to him that Windows was just trying to prevent him from making illegal copies of music. The problem is, the files he was trying to share were of his band, off of their own demo CD. At that point, I pointed him to xiph and enlightened him about ogg vorbis.
MythTV has something that I haven't seen from any of the commercial players: MythWeb. Fully configuratble recording/list browsing/etc in a nice web interface (don't trust the screenshots on the MythTV website - they're old and out of date, and I haven't had time to make any of the new version). My MythTV box is rarely used for actually watching TV these days. I set up what I want to record via MythWeb, and archive shows to SVCD to be watched later on my dvd player.
sometimes it is useful to have web-based email addresses
So run your own mail server and install IMP/HORDE or Squirrelmail.
As a security feature at work, we've started switching our more important boxes to key-only login. I've done the same to my boxes at home, for good measure. Now, I have 2 keys. One that lives on my box at home, and one at work. They don't exist anywhere else (other than a USB pen drive for backup), and will never be copied off of these drives. I use a relatively long passphrase (19 chars), but since I use ssh agents (and agent forwarding when it's safe enough to do so), I only ever have to type the passphrase once per day (the machine is set to forget the passphrase when I leave work).
Now if only all of those ecommerce type places would work with my public keys...
Please don't confuse "Internet Access Provider" with "Internet Service Provider". They used to be one-and-the-same, but with the expansion of the web, I would definitely consider colo/hosting companies to be "service providers" even though they don't actually provide any access for dialup/dsl/cable users.
But on that note, a web host is providing access to the "net" if it is defined to include any net-accessible web page. They let people on the internet access that web page, so even by your definition, hosting companies (big or small, commercial or hobbiest) are ISP's, too.
Granted, I still haven't even been able to find the full text of the bill anywhere in order to verify this.
Yeah. Because the main point of a cell phone headset is to alleviate hand/arm strain due to phone weight and not to free up hands (and brain focus) from the phone so they can do unimportant things like DRIVING.
Besides, sometimes people who are browsing for things to buy (rather than looking for a specific thing) would rather do a search and come up with relevant similarities. It's been complained about that the high-ranking google results are too shopping-oriented, but for certain keywords this is a good thing - in our experience, most people searching for "1u server" or "blade server" are comparing vendors and looking for details about products, not looking for news articles.
Not that I can find the exact text of the law anywhere, but everything I've read about it says that only ISP's and Attorneys General can sue spammers. My question is what consitutes an ISP? I'm an end-user in most sense of the term, but I own/host several domain names for friends/family, including email services. I do this as a favor and don't make any money off of it, but I am providing an internet service. Does this mean that I can sue spammers as an ISP? After all, it's my mail server, my paid-for bandwidth (even if just a DSL connection) being wasted, and my time wasted trying to beef up my filters to keep the spam out.
And presumably it'll stay that way. Apple's stuff works so nicely because they take advantage of hardware acceleration. We won't get that kind of performance in Linux until people stop fearing tighter integration of Gnome/KDE and GL.
Then again, I've never had trouble filling out my absentee ballots in WA. You just draw a line to complete an arrow next to the option you want to vote for.
Not if they set it up like Washington's registry. It's a searchable list that will tell you whether or not a specific address is on the list, but it will never give you a list of which ones are. Granted, given how poorly-written this bill seems to be, it seems unlikely that they'd be smart enough to set up a good do-not-email registry.
Are we so quick to forget incidents like this one, where Microsoft started going after schools for license violations? Microsoft and the Gates Foundation may give away a lot of stuff to schools and libraries, but it's rarely enough to make a dent in the budgets of most schools (I still send a number of old computers to my mom's classroom - running linux or old versions of macos - because her school can't afford to give her the computers she needs).
Merely adding the ™ symbol after your name doesn't really say more than "I use this name, I call it mine, and I may be in the process of registering it." Unless you have substantial documentation to back it up (which the universities do claim to have), it isn't really legally binding until you register it with the government and that little ™ turns into a nice ®. However, registering a trademark is expensive, and usually takes a long time, so most people just stick with the ™ if they have enough documentation to support the claim.
On the "disadvantage" side of things, exam4 looks particularly bad. Other pages allow students access to some of their notes (thus, making it advantageous to have a laptop) but no find/search functionality (or some other kind of feature-disabled option). Thus, you can get at the notes in digital form, all of them, but have to put up with a few restrictions. If all you get is a word processor (read: text editor, since it doesn't really do any extra word-processing things), there's not much advantage for the students. Of course, the professors will have the advantage of not having to read handwritten tests, etc.
Most law schools that use software like this also seem to consider it OPTIONAL. If your school is basically forcing you to buy/use a Windows-based laptop, they'd better be a top-tier school worth the extra $1500+...
A more important note is that there are already loud complaints about overfull prisons in the US, and yet these corporate-senators want to pass a law to put more people in jail for something that only hurts a few people (yes, I've seen the new MPAA commercials - I've also seen revenue numbers for good movies continue to increase, despite piracy), and doesn't spend the effort trying to keep the violent criminals in jail, along with encarcerating those who haven't been caught yet.
Honestly, as a generally-law-abiding citizen, I'd much rather have a movie pirate than a rapist go free with (or without) a fine instead of jail time.
Sorry, as as been pointed out here countless times, that only applies to criminal law. Copyright infringement is a civil offense. Then again, maybe this new law (with jail time) will change the status of the crime(?) and they'll start having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the 16-year-old with a copy of Matrix on his/her hard drive cost them $1,000,000 in lost dvd sales.
One? You're talking about xmms-mp3, right? Because I had to install xmms-mp3, gstreamer-mp3, xine, mplayer and a suite of others, and because of their crippled gstreamer setup, rhythmbox still won't play mp3's.
Granted, I'm not about to let this stop me from playing with and using Fedora - I'm a staunch redhat fan, and will continue to be so as long as it's the enterprise standard and I get free tech support from the friends who set up and run those systems.
As I understand it (from very quick readings about opencable), the flag would have to be detected in the tuner itself, and the signal decrypted via a smart card. In order to get at the API for those tuners, software authors would most likely have to pay a fee, and perhaps a royalty, much like mp3 works.
But I'm just speculating here. Either way, it's a bad thing when this is used for standard broadcast stuff, specifically to disable functionality like time shifting and digital recording, without offering a cheap/free alternative to those of us who don't want to pay companies like Tivo just so we can watch shows we'd otherwise miss.
Honestly, I don't agree with either setup, since there are some times when I want to watch a show but am physically unable to sit in front of the TV, and the broadcast flag will lock the ability to record said shows out of OSS/free projects like mythtv. But shouldn't we at least know what we're complaining about?
Actually, I'm just quoting the estimated price that my dad was told when he ordered his (I'm jealous - wish I could afford one) - tacoma/seattle area. He ordered the full-package version (presumably gps, bluetooth, lojack, etc), and was told that it would be about $26k, but that they didn't have final pricing yet - maybe the estimate included tax, etc., too.
What, you mean like "Go into iTunes preferences, check the box that says 'sound check' under the 'effects' tab"? It doesn't even have to re-encode, just sets the volume flag in each file and respects it on playback. Even seems to work once transferred to my ipod.
The car costs about $26k, is bluetooth-enabled, and has finally started reaching customers in the past week or two. Pretty easy to add up to $1M when the 15,000 pre-ordered Prius's just shipped. Wish I could get one, too.
Honestly, with the availability of technologies like bluetooth and other encrypted wireless technologies, it shouldn't be hard to just encode a daily/weekly-changing code into the signals and give it out to emergency vehicles as needed.
That, and teaching drivers how to behave around those flashing lights (ie. pull over to the RIGHT if you are in the US - I've seen too many people on the freeway pull left, only to block an ambulance that was trying to get around traffic by driving on the shoulder).
So if this is the case, how is this any different from what happens now? You're still not running Enterprise on your development machines (which, btw, is about $800 retail, not $1500-2500 -- that's for advanced server, not enterprise). In fact, theoretically the only difference in how things work between enterprise/advanced and the current RedHat 9 vs. the new Fedora distro is the name, and the fact that Fedora now has a lot more user contribution.