From the indie side, I can attest to the fact that iTMS isn't as easy to get into as you'd think. Let's start with contracts. Just getting into the US market took my indie label group almost 4 months of daily calling before Cupertino got its act together and sent us back a signed contract. Want to get on iTMS Australia? Need an Australian business license. Want to get into iTMS Japan? You need your own translator to provide metadata. The list goes on.
Then, there's actually uploading. Don't own a Mac? Gotta get one before you can use iTunes Producer to submit content. If you're a label group, guess what? You still have to load your releases manually. Version 1.4 of the software allows you to import a text-list of track metadata, but there's no written spec, and if you actually reverse-engineer the spec from a sample export, you still have to set up each release by hand and load the audio in manually. I'd love to have the time to reverse-engineer the iTunes Producer software itself to figure out the XML feed, but there's only so much time in the day, and asking for the specs gets quite the laugh on the other end of the phone.
Okay, so let's assume that you've taken the time to load up the releases. If you don't have the bulk of content or a massive PR machine behind you, you're going to have a hard time convincing the content manager that you should get a featured spot on your genre's front menu. Otherwise, you get filed in with the rest, and if you're in a popular genre grouping, good luck getting the casual customer market.
We're able to sustain our aggregation model by giving a 60/40 split on all net profit (artist gets the lion's share)... and we're only releasing 5-10 EPs a week. It's safe to assume that, if you up the number of releases a label group/aggregator has to distribute per selling cycle, the more manpower's going to be required to distribute it. It'd be nice if iTMS had an open SOAP spec for reporting and content ingestion, but it should come as no surprise that Apple keeps yet another system closed off from developers.
While I don't know the specifics of how the big labels provide content, I think it's safe to assume that working each release as much as possible for site exposure justifies a bulk of the portion the label takes.
And thus we begin to see where multilateral trade agreements (instead of half-assed bilaterals like NAFTA) might just be the salvation for the global market. Japan's still tied up in fixing their financial nightmares (finally down below 3% of loans in default in the Big Four, as opposed to the whopping 9% in 2001), Germany's still in EU hell (exports are up, but so is unemployment, and the tax wedge ~40% doesn't help domestic spending any), and the USA, well... I don't think the USA knows what to make of the H1B visa's influence on the pool of available thought-workers. Suffice it to say, it's inevitable that countries like China and India develop a burgeoning middle class, so FUD-spreading lazy-ass nationalists are going to have to adapt or die.
I, for one, welcome our new entrepreneurial overlords.
If you know the zip and exchange you wish to take down, you can just walk every 4-digit combination (and it doesn't matter if the number's good or not; it'll be routed regardless).
Why spend money on a primary injunction? While some predicted that this may have been a ruse to get bought out, others held to the premise that SCO is on a sinking ship and just wants money. Since the controversy started, their stock price has gone from $1.09 to upwards of $12 per share. Coincidence? Nope; controversy sells.
By spreading FUD and insisting everyone cease and desist without actually seeking an injunction, it seems that the dynamic duo of Sontag and McBride are hoping to make some money without doing any dirty work. However, as was noted before, we have seen the GPL stand up to the legal tests (remember Progress and MySQL fighting over Gemini?). I hope someone eventually nails these guys with a libel suit. They haven't proven anything and they talk about this magical "discovery" phase like the dirty laundry is about to be aired... but it hasn't. As of the time of this post, SCO still has GPL'd Linux up on their FTP: ftp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/scolinux/server/4.0/upda tes/SRPMS/. If that's not donation, I don't know what is.
What I find most disturbing about Laura Didio's response was that: she is not a coder, and she isn't even familiar with the field. Her vacuous commentary shows what it is to be an outsider looking in, true. However, the excess use of exclamation points and wishy-washy commentary seems that she doesn't know and doesn't seem to want to know (her comment about "extreme limitations" on code reviewers leaves a bad taste in my mouth).
If this is how legal review will go, we're all screwed in the OSS camp. I think that ESR's paper cut to the chase, tore open their claims with factual references, and has yet to be addressed by anyone. That paper, in and of itself, is probably going to be used as the corpus of the legal defense... and it scares me that these "reviewers" have yet to read it or address it in any of their commentaries.
You can get a lot of the same in vim, if you're willing to learn the keystrokes. I know visual block mode has saved my bacon many a time when tearing through extended sections of LISP or C.
Of course, if you have the spare bandwidth and nothing better to do, you could just make those zip files as symlinks to/dev/urandom. The fun would never end!
Re:Redifference between uppercase and lowercase
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Verbing Weirds Google
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· Score: 1
erm. The thing is, fording a river more than likely comes from the old word "fjord", which had to do with the same act. Google came up with the word first. Ford was a guy's last name, probably from a long line of heritage that had something to do with river-crossings (like Cooper, Smith, etc. had to do with respective professions ofr previous eras).
They coined the term; they kind of have to do the dance of formality in filing this suit. Even if it fails... it's kind of an unwritten obligation in order to keep trademark.
Here's what I consider stupid about all this. If you write something that is stateful and capable of Turing decision, you just wrote a program. You programmed; SGML is not programming, it's markup. However, shell, C, Ruby, Perl, FORTRAN, MIPS assembly... what have you. It's all programming. You write a coherent path from A to B that allows for some varied input to calculate. Decisions are made based on the state that is carried; so where's this bias coming from?
I am a C programmer by nature; I love inline asm like no other, even if it kills portability. I'm fortunate enough to be comfortable in x86 and SPARC assembly, so I can reasonably roll out different versions of my projects if needed. However, the first language I ever picked up was Perl, and I'll be damned if anyone can part me from the power that the regex system in that language carries. It makes a lot of low-priority, mass-storage parsing a hell of a lot easier than coding it up into a fully-compiled language.
Now, that said, I do think that this comes down to using the right tool for the right job. I'd be a fool to think that I could write some of the heavily-traversed data-access software we use (since we're currently running some bargain-basement DBMS, there's quite a bit of in-house work to interface) in an interpreted language. We'd never be able to get all the day-end reports printed before midnight (and the office closes at 5; we burn trees like no other). Nevertheless, sometimes I'll knock out my algorithm in Perl to lay out the concept before attacking it in C; that saves me a lot of algorithm checking when I'm debugging. Hell, it probably saves me 3 days' debug time by punching up the algorithm in Perl in one day.
The beauty of computing is that there is no one "right" way of solving a problem. Deadlines, urgency, process priority, systems load... These are the things that determine which angle to approach "How do I code X?", and anyone who thinks otherwise is pretty foolish and closed-minded.
Minix is Andy Tanenbaum's OS... the relation was that Tanenbaum has been highly derisive of Linux from the start for having a monolithic kernel... you'll find comp.os.minix posting of "Linux is obsolete" since 01/92 by Tanenbaum. He highly touts his microkernel design, but has done his fair share of spreading FUD against Linux. Minix has its own license and seems largely to have been a reverse-engineering of the UNIX concept into microkernel form. Linux was done in the same style, but with a monolithic form. *shrugs*
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html for more info on Minix.
What bothers me about this topic posting.
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The Linux Uprising
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"...A good read to align yourself with what mainstream businesspeople are fed."
Are you serious? IMO, this looks like FUD. Yeah, they talk about the "Linux Uprising" in the first article, and Tux looks like he's been living under powerlines in the top banner. Yeah, it's a bit of horse puckey how romanticized and incorrect they were in the first article (see: comments on Intel making "chips for Linux", "resentment for Microsoft", and "rotten economy" as reasons for Linux becoming a favored OS). No, they didn't address server benchmark testing or overall gains in stability and performance, but it's excusable....
Read McNealy's article. Read "Before Linux is on Every Desktop". Touching on embedded Linux? Sun support for Linux for the sake of a *nix OS, and the primary pros that come with such a styled system? From McNealy: "The operating system is still the underlying plumbing on top of which you build the real value-add -- the applications and services to run your business....Linux impacts everyone <in the OS industry>." Coming from a CEO of a very influential company in the tech market, this isn't something to thumb your nose at.
Yeah, there's FUD in the first article, but you really need to read all the articles before you recommend everyone to do the same with bad expectations.
Yeah, I often sit in a darkened server room chanting over the old NCR box while it unloads the 7Gig DB to monthly take backups.
I think the IT manager here is gonna buy new spook robes soon.
Yes, schools need to do more to encourage students to learn; that's what school really teaches. If you learn the mental discipline to teach yourself instead of waiting to be handed the project or lesson plan, your learning will be based solely on desire and not by necessity.
No one ever succeeded in life by waiting for hand-outs; sometimes, you have to take the initiative. While I do think that more honest computing should occur within high-school curricula, I do not agree that it is this panacea you claim it will be. Nor do I agree that pubescent script-kiddieism has anything to do with "hacking skills"; rather, more often than not it's the same kinds of kids who let the air out of your bike tires or put "kick me" signs on your back. The only people who do that are either your best friends pranking you, or the bullies you've somehow managed to irritate. Neither case warrants being labeled as the enlightened state of mind you seem to believe the kiddies posess.
I honestly didn't get into anything technically oriented until I started college; I'd been a molecular bio geek before that (some change, huh?). The difference was that I did it because I found it interesting, I had a head for it, and it was fun! Now I just started a job in MIS support (it's not apps dev, but the industry's a bit slow out here right now). However, I'm actually in the process of working with Red Hat a bit right now on Advanced Server; there seems to be an issue with tty* bindings that actually didn't show up in the mainline releases. Not a bad gig at all, but it was because I loved what I did and made sure I found the proper learning to get there (and no, not all college education prepares you for a job; the ones who get hired are the ones who learn outside of the classroom).
Stay motivated and stick with it because you want to. Part of what makes programming, designing, engineering, and hacking so enjoyable is that it's something you control completely; sometimes you may be given a guideline as to what's expected at the end, but you have to determine the best path to get there. Best of luck.
If you actually read the grandparent, you'd see that the email address is fake and that there is no return mailer. Either this is one dumb spammer who is being purely annoying, or there's something underhanded here.
As far as MS paying bandwidth charges... if it's locally-hosted spam, they don't pay on it. Fire up the spam daemon and bombard the email service internally. Why? Perhaps just to generate more clicks, I would guess.
I'm sort of disappointed the parent didn't give the extended headers; I know that hotmail would show the mail server routing... in such a case they could block the spammer if he/she was doing it directly from the home machine, or if not, to contact someone down on the anon-mail host to shut the crap off. In any case, there's a simple solution (and yes, you can tell in access logs who has been sending a ton of spam at once from the same IP, it's not that hard). Now, if these really are the headers as completely as given.... then what's left to think but perhaps they might have a hand in it? I seriously hope you weren't convinced of your statement that "email does not contain the IP address the stuff was sent from". Even a spoofed or bogus IP would show up on a robust service monitor's detection when a crapflood of spam comes in.
This could all just be MS/Big Brother FUD and this is just an isolated case of an uberignorant spammer who goofed up his mail, but I'd be interested to see what's up. I don't think MS is as innocent as they portend, given how easy it is to set up access control by IP to services. Yes, good on MS for going after spammers... but after how long that Hotmail has been spam-riddled? It reeks of opportunism to me.
As for disclosing Office document format... hell they created it, under their own terms and conditions, which a user HAS to accept prior to installing. If you're not happy with it, just return the CD. How hard can that be?
Actually, where I'm standing, that's pretty damn hard. It's called "You opened the package, dummy, and we can't shrink-wrap it to put it back on the shelves. You don't like it? Sorry, eat the $80 you shelled out. For all we know, you still have it installed on a PC somewhere."
AFAIK, I saw something the other day about someone raising a suit against MS, Best Buy, and a couple other companies for not taking the product back when individuals disagree with the EULA. As it's not printed on the box, a person must open the product packaging to get to the license. The issue is how the licenses are handled; if the cd jewel cases aren't also shrink-wrapped inside the boxes, it doesn't matter if the EULA is printed on paper or is on the cd; the stores can assume the worst and hose you for possibly trying to scam fair use.
As far as my own take on this... I do agree with you, in that if you don't want it, you can change it. I do think that this is the same, tired whining by companies that didn't get enough money the first time around, so now they have changed the venue and are trying again. Now, I draw the line in what I consider "appropriate to bundle with an OS". When I choose an OS, I choose it for memory management, compiler and asm optimizations per hardware platform, etc. I don't choose linux because I like vi better than Notepad, or lynx better than IE6 (even though those are my preferences). And yes, some linux distros do bundle extra crap in with their desktop installs; it's demographic targeting.
I ask you, which linux distros do this? Red Hat and Mandrake come to mind, honestly. Who uses these by and large, but the converts from Windows who still don't know all the ropes when it comes to configure/make/make install? Then, you take it a step down to your Debian installs, wherein you end up tearing the crap out of dpkg to choose everything you want in out of the possible install profiles, but you still get the choice if you are willing to look at the plethora of alternative options for what you desire. Taking it down to the level of purism, you have LFS, Slackware... linux of that nature, where you really have to go out and find what you want. The system only has on it what you intentionally put on there.
It's an OS's primary concern to make the most of the physical resources of the machine and to make sure that all additional programs play nicely with one another and actually do something. It's not the real point of responsibility to tack on peripheral software goodies, and when one intentionally warps his OS's kernel into "needing" some of the options in question, a case can be made for unfair practices in marketing.
However, to make a long story short, the case already has been made. To make it again in another time and another place, saying the same thing but about MS's newest PC OS, is redundant, tired, and annoying. Too much tongue-wagging by the jealous ones who didn't get the results from throwing a tantrum before.
A lot of the argument here is from the example of the Parti Quebecois up in Canada, basically arguing that since 100,000 PQ members were able to obtain a majority in the provincial parliament for an area of 6.2 million denizens, that 20,000 people would be able to accomplish the same in any U.S. state under 1.2 million. While this *might* be feasible in a state like Wyoming or Alaska, the fact that they even listed states like Delaware or Rhode Island as a possibility is humorous at best. When considering the overall distribution of voters per square mile, one can see that DE and RI are relatively densely resided upon, and more voters are thus inclined to be informed. The other thing that the PQ had going for them when they started was racial tension. My experience has been that many native-French speakers from Quebec feel that it is their city and has little else to do with the rest of the country; in fact, that much of Canada hinges on the business generated by the propserous city. I doubt the FSP is going to find much success in stirring racial tensions in, say, North Dakota.
I also find it humorous when the self-referential author of this page states that "the role of civil government should be 'the protection of citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property'", yet has no qualms speaking freely in the next paragraph about pandering to "special interests" or "constituencies" (primarily, Native Americans). Does it not seem odd to anyone that, in conjunction with vehement arguments against proportional representation, that the real goals of the FSP are just as blatantly underhanded as the major two parties that are so argued against?
Oh wait. Sorry, this must all just be a joke. Our nameless, faceless author has a disclaimer stating that he/she isn't even necessarily representing the views and opinions of the actual movement or its leaders. Oh, the irony of it all. I say, ship em out to Seward's Folly, let em freeze for awhile as they live out their "ideals", and let them come back to society when they see how silly this is in practice.
This is nothing new. This is a liberal application to a technical field. Most other degrees have it; why? To round out the logic process.
Currently, the computer science department at my uni allows for a wide range of perspective; hands-on robotics programming, 3d CAVE modeling, compiler and OS design, etc. Teaching pure skills (such as programming languages or formulae) only leads to mental regurgitation later in life. Guess what? You still have to take your humanities courses before you can even consider doing your upper-level comp.sci. core.
I know other universities are like this as well; the only question that seems, in my mind, to be outstanding, is this. The students all seemed to have turned down offers from Ivy League institutions to go to a free school. Is it because of money, or the program? And does this statement really apply to those kinds of students, who probably come from affluent backgrounds anyways? Quote:
Often, students follow a lock-step program, beginning with science and math courses, but barely touch on engineering studies until their third year in school. And fewer than half of those who enroll in engineering programs complete their degree within five years. Underrepresented minorities drop out at the highest rate.
Sure, the idea of free (as in beer) education must seem great; but is this really reinventing the wheel? Most liberal arts programs in place do well enough. Granted, they may be State U. or anything non-Ivy League... but the diversified programs do already exist. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see what's so special about this new school.
listen4ever.com redirects to mp3mediaworld.com. Now, every link on this site is to a Dutch site. It doesn't appear that they even host any archives, but link to a handful of others.
Where's the China come in? oh wait. Dig'ing on listen4ever.com comes up with authorities being dns1.hichina.com and dns2.hichina.com.
What I'm really curious as to the RIAA's plan, is whether or not they're going to go after the 15-20.nl sites that are all linked from here. Also, where do they get the idea that the portal is the evil? I would think that such a knee-jerk reaction by them would be followed by petitioning for all of the American ISP's to block traffic to any Dutch site, if this suit holds any water whatsoever (IMHO, it holds water like a sieve).
But, your logic is flawed. The virus isn't neutralized. In effect, the proposed idea is to just BSOD the offending originator. If the person reboots, then, how're they to tell that the thing didn't just crash?
The fact remains that DoS'ing is illegal. And you could always accuse and point fingers in the name of proactivism, but you don't have any due process that would precipitate said attack. You just do it and claim that the new legislation protects you, and if you can show logs that, without a doubt, it came from them, then that's fine.
But, say, someone got this on a financial server by accident? Is it okay to disrupt a company's business if they just got it within the course of a day, and a smaller company with a smaller range of admin duties, has an active admin who catches it and takes this vigilantism upon himself? Sure, he has logs. But is it right to disrupt others' business? How would you claim the lost hours of work at that point? Who would you turn to for lost revenue? The government?
This whole law is ludicrous. You can't justify an attack on someone simply because they appear to be an originator. You don't *know* for certain unless you get on the horn and talk to their admins about what's goin on with their systems.
It's been noted before, but... What's the point of attacking back? A lot of finger-pointing will ensue and "trace backs" will occur... But does anyone remember the when the WANK worm hit NASA?
C.H. Chassot is right. You can't put a finger on the originator as being the perp; oftentimes, they may have been hacked, cleaned up, and used as a launch point when the real perps were out of the thick of it. Just like the US had a hard time, and "traced" the WANK worm back to a server in France, in the end it's not always going to be black-and-white.
If you don't know about WANK, I'd suggest reading a nice tale that documents it quite nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, there's actually uploading. Don't own a Mac? Gotta get one before you can use iTunes Producer to submit content. If you're a label group, guess what? You still have to load your releases manually. Version 1.4 of the software allows you to import a text-list of track metadata, but there's no written spec, and if you actually reverse-engineer the spec from a sample export, you still have to set up each release by hand and load the audio in manually. I'd love to have the time to reverse-engineer the iTunes Producer software itself to figure out the XML feed, but there's only so much time in the day, and asking for the specs gets quite the laugh on the other end of the phone.
Okay, so let's assume that you've taken the time to load up the releases. If you don't have the bulk of content or a massive PR machine behind you, you're going to have a hard time convincing the content manager that you should get a featured spot on your genre's front menu. Otherwise, you get filed in with the rest, and if you're in a popular genre grouping, good luck getting the casual customer market.
We're able to sustain our aggregation model by giving a 60/40 split on all net profit (artist gets the lion's share)... and we're only releasing 5-10 EPs a week. It's safe to assume that, if you up the number of releases a label group/aggregator has to distribute per selling cycle, the more manpower's going to be required to distribute it. It'd be nice if iTMS had an open SOAP spec for reporting and content ingestion, but it should come as no surprise that Apple keeps yet another system closed off from developers.
While I don't know the specifics of how the big labels provide content, I think it's safe to assume that working each release as much as possible for site exposure justifies a bulk of the portion the label takes.
In Korea, only old people use discounted iPods!
And thus we begin to see where multilateral trade agreements (instead of half-assed bilaterals like NAFTA) might just be the salvation for the global market. Japan's still tied up in fixing their financial nightmares (finally down below 3% of loans in default in the Big Four, as opposed to the whopping 9% in 2001), Germany's still in EU hell (exports are up, but so is unemployment, and the tax wedge ~40% doesn't help domestic spending any), and the USA, well... I don't think the USA knows what to make of the H1B visa's influence on the pool of available thought-workers. Suffice it to say, it's inevitable that countries like China and India develop a burgeoning middle class, so FUD-spreading lazy-ass nationalists are going to have to adapt or die.
I, for one, welcome our new entrepreneurial overlords.
If you know the zip and exchange you wish to take down, you can just walk every 4-digit combination (and it doesn't matter if the number's good or not; it'll be routed regardless).
Oh, wait. You can always perform trial and error.
Is this really just a weekend excursion for a buncha Yalies to play ShadowRun?
Why spend money on a primary injunction? While some predicted that this may have been a ruse to get bought out, others held to the premise that SCO is on a sinking ship and just wants money. Since the controversy started, their stock price has gone from $1.09 to upwards of $12 per share. Coincidence? Nope; controversy sells.
a tes/SRPMS/. If that's not donation, I don't know what is.
By spreading FUD and insisting everyone cease and desist without actually seeking an injunction, it seems that the dynamic duo of Sontag and McBride are hoping to make some money without doing any dirty work. However, as was noted before, we have seen the GPL stand up to the legal tests (remember Progress and MySQL fighting over Gemini?). I hope someone eventually nails these guys with a libel suit. They haven't proven anything and they talk about this magical "discovery" phase like the dirty laundry is about to be aired... but it hasn't. As of the time of this post, SCO still has GPL'd Linux up on their FTP: ftp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/scolinux/server/4.0/upd
What I find most disturbing about Laura Didio's response was that: she is not a coder, and she isn't even familiar with the field. Her vacuous commentary shows what it is to be an outsider looking in, true. However, the excess use of exclamation points and wishy-washy commentary seems that she doesn't know and doesn't seem to want to know (her comment about "extreme limitations" on code reviewers leaves a bad taste in my mouth).
If this is how legal review will go, we're all screwed in the OSS camp. I think that ESR's paper cut to the chase, tore open their claims with factual references, and has yet to be addressed by anyone. That paper, in and of itself, is probably going to be used as the corpus of the legal defense... and it scares me that these "reviewers" have yet to read it or address it in any of their commentaries.
Survey sez: Where's the HURD? I bet Stallman's glad right about now GNU really is nonprofit.
You can get a lot of the same in vim, if you're willing to learn the keystrokes. I know visual block mode has saved my bacon many a time when tearing through extended sections of LISP or C.
Of course, if you have the spare bandwidth and nothing better to do, you could just make those zip files as symlinks to /dev/urandom. The fun would never end!
erm. The thing is, fording a river more than likely comes from the old word "fjord", which had to do with the same act. Google came up with the word first. Ford was a guy's last name, probably from a long line of heritage that had something to do with river-crossings (like Cooper, Smith, etc. had to do with respective professions ofr previous eras). They coined the term; they kind of have to do the dance of formality in filing this suit. Even if it fails... it's kind of an unwritten obligation in order to keep trademark.
Obviously, I shouldn't be ragging on SGML's, as I just b0rked the tag. *sigh*
Here's what I consider stupid about all this. If you write something that is stateful and capable of Turing decision, you just wrote a program. You programmed; SGML is not programming, it's markup. However, shell, C, Ruby, Perl, FORTRAN, MIPS assembly... what have you. It's all programming. You write a coherent path from A to B that allows for some varied input to calculate. Decisions are made based on the state that is carried; so where's this bias coming from?
I am a C programmer by nature; I love inline asm like no other, even if it kills portability. I'm fortunate enough to be comfortable in x86 and SPARC assembly, so I can reasonably roll out different versions of my projects if needed. However, the first language I ever picked up was Perl, and I'll be damned if anyone can part me from the power that the regex system in that language carries. It makes a lot of low-priority, mass-storage parsing a hell of a lot easier than coding it up into a fully-compiled language.
Now, that said, I do think that this comes down to using the right tool for the right job. I'd be a fool to think that I could write some of the heavily-traversed data-access software we use (since we're currently running some bargain-basement DBMS, there's quite a bit of in-house work to interface) in an interpreted language. We'd never be able to get all the day-end reports printed before midnight (and the office closes at 5; we burn trees like no other). Nevertheless, sometimes I'll knock out my algorithm in Perl to lay out the concept before attacking it in C; that saves me a lot of algorithm checking when I'm debugging. Hell, it probably saves me 3 days' debug time by punching up the algorithm in Perl in one day.
The beauty of computing is that there is no one "right" way of solving a problem. Deadlines, urgency, process priority, systems load... These are the things that determine which angle to approach "How do I code X?", and anyone who thinks otherwise is pretty foolish and closed-minded.
Minix is Andy Tanenbaum's OS... the relation was that Tanenbaum has been highly derisive of Linux from the start for having a monolithic kernel... you'll find comp.os.minix posting of "Linux is obsolete" since 01/92 by Tanenbaum. He highly touts his microkernel design, but has done his fair share of spreading FUD against Linux. Minix has its own license and seems largely to have been a reverse-engineering of the UNIX concept into microkernel form. Linux was done in the same style, but with a monolithic form. *shrugs* http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html for more info on Minix.
"...A good read to align yourself with what mainstream businesspeople are fed."
Are you serious? IMO, this looks like FUD. Yeah, they talk about the "Linux Uprising" in the first article, and Tux looks like he's been living under powerlines in the top banner. Yeah, it's a bit of horse puckey how romanticized and incorrect they were in the first article (see: comments on Intel making "chips for Linux", "resentment for Microsoft", and "rotten economy" as reasons for Linux becoming a favored OS). No, they didn't address server benchmark testing or overall gains in stability and performance, but it's excusable....
Read McNealy's article. Read "Before Linux is on Every Desktop". Touching on embedded Linux? Sun support for Linux for the sake of a *nix OS, and the primary pros that come with such a styled system? From McNealy: "The operating system is still the underlying plumbing on top of which you build the real value-add -- the applications and services to run your business....Linux impacts everyone <in the OS industry>." Coming from a CEO of a very influential company in the tech market, this isn't something to thumb your nose at.
Yeah, there's FUD in the first article, but you really need to read all the articles before you recommend everyone to do the same with bad expectations.
Yeah, I often sit in a darkened server room chanting over the old NCR box while it unloads the 7Gig DB to monthly take backups. I think the IT manager here is gonna buy new spook robes soon.
So what've they been doin in the courts so often? I thought they were just the best defense attorneys money could buy.
Yes, schools need to do more to encourage students to learn; that's what school really teaches. If you learn the mental discipline to teach yourself instead of waiting to be handed the project or lesson plan, your learning will be based solely on desire and not by necessity.
No one ever succeeded in life by waiting for hand-outs; sometimes, you have to take the initiative. While I do think that more honest computing should occur within high-school curricula, I do not agree that it is this panacea you claim it will be. Nor do I agree that pubescent script-kiddieism has anything to do with "hacking skills"; rather, more often than not it's the same kinds of kids who let the air out of your bike tires or put "kick me" signs on your back. The only people who do that are either your best friends pranking you, or the bullies you've somehow managed to irritate. Neither case warrants being labeled as the enlightened state of mind you seem to believe the kiddies posess.
I honestly didn't get into anything technically oriented until I started college; I'd been a molecular bio geek before that (some change, huh?). The difference was that I did it because I found it interesting, I had a head for it, and it was fun! Now I just started a job in MIS support (it's not apps dev, but the industry's a bit slow out here right now). However, I'm actually in the process of working with Red Hat a bit right now on Advanced Server; there seems to be an issue with tty* bindings that actually didn't show up in the mainline releases. Not a bad gig at all, but it was because I loved what I did and made sure I found the proper learning to get there (and no, not all college education prepares you for a job; the ones who get hired are the ones who learn outside of the classroom).
Stay motivated and stick with it because you want to. Part of what makes programming, designing, engineering, and hacking so enjoyable is that it's something you control completely; sometimes you may be given a guideline as to what's expected at the end, but you have to determine the best path to get there. Best of luck.
If you actually read the grandparent, you'd see that the email address is fake and that there is no return mailer. Either this is one dumb spammer who is being purely annoying, or there's something underhanded here.
As far as MS paying bandwidth charges... if it's locally-hosted spam, they don't pay on it. Fire up the spam daemon and bombard the email service internally. Why? Perhaps just to generate more clicks, I would guess.
I'm sort of disappointed the parent didn't give the extended headers; I know that hotmail would show the mail server routing... in such a case they could block the spammer if he/she was doing it directly from the home machine, or if not, to contact someone down on the anon-mail host to shut the crap off. In any case, there's a simple solution (and yes, you can tell in access logs who has been sending a ton of spam at once from the same IP, it's not that hard). Now, if these really are the headers as completely as given.... then what's left to think but perhaps they might have a hand in it? I seriously hope you weren't convinced of your statement that "email does not contain the IP address the stuff was sent from". Even a spoofed or bogus IP would show up on a robust service monitor's detection when a crapflood of spam comes in.
This could all just be MS/Big Brother FUD and this is just an isolated case of an uberignorant spammer who goofed up his mail, but I'd be interested to see what's up. I don't think MS is as innocent as they portend, given how easy it is to set up access control by IP to services. Yes, good on MS for going after spammers... but after how long that Hotmail has been spam-riddled? It reeks of opportunism to me.
As for disclosing Office document format... hell they created it, under their own terms and conditions, which a user HAS to accept prior to installing. If you're not happy with it, just return the CD. How hard can that be?
Actually, where I'm standing, that's pretty damn hard. It's called "You opened the package, dummy, and we can't shrink-wrap it to put it back on the shelves. You don't like it? Sorry, eat the $80 you shelled out. For all we know, you still have it installed on a PC somewhere."
AFAIK, I saw something the other day about someone raising a suit against MS, Best Buy, and a couple other companies for not taking the product back when individuals disagree with the EULA. As it's not printed on the box, a person must open the product packaging to get to the license. The issue is how the licenses are handled; if the cd jewel cases aren't also shrink-wrapped inside the boxes, it doesn't matter if the EULA is printed on paper or is on the cd; the stores can assume the worst and hose you for possibly trying to scam fair use.
As far as my own take on this... I do agree with you, in that if you don't want it, you can change it. I do think that this is the same, tired whining by companies that didn't get enough money the first time around, so now they have changed the venue and are trying again. Now, I draw the line in what I consider "appropriate to bundle with an OS". When I choose an OS, I choose it for memory management, compiler and asm optimizations per hardware platform, etc. I don't choose linux because I like vi better than Notepad, or lynx better than IE6 (even though those are my preferences). And yes, some linux distros do bundle extra crap in with their desktop installs; it's demographic targeting.
I ask you, which linux distros do this? Red Hat and Mandrake come to mind, honestly. Who uses these by and large, but the converts from Windows who still don't know all the ropes when it comes to configure/make/make install? Then, you take it a step down to your Debian installs, wherein you end up tearing the crap out of dpkg to choose everything you want in out of the possible install profiles, but you still get the choice if you are willing to look at the plethora of alternative options for what you desire. Taking it down to the level of purism, you have LFS, Slackware... linux of that nature, where you really have to go out and find what you want. The system only has on it what you intentionally put on there.
It's an OS's primary concern to make the most of the physical resources of the machine and to make sure that all additional programs play nicely with one another and actually do something. It's not the real point of responsibility to tack on peripheral software goodies, and when one intentionally warps his OS's kernel into "needing" some of the options in question, a case can be made for unfair practices in marketing.
However, to make a long story short, the case already has been made. To make it again in another time and another place, saying the same thing but about MS's newest PC OS, is redundant, tired, and annoying. Too much tongue-wagging by the jealous ones who didn't get the results from throwing a tantrum before.
From http://www.freestateproject.org/strategies.htm
/me awaits the -2 flamebait, -3 troll
A lot of the argument here is from the example of the Parti Quebecois up in Canada, basically arguing that since 100,000 PQ members were able to obtain a majority in the provincial parliament for an area of 6.2 million denizens, that 20,000 people would be able to accomplish the same in any U.S. state under 1.2 million. While this *might* be feasible in a state like Wyoming or Alaska, the fact that they even listed states like Delaware or Rhode Island as a possibility is humorous at best. When considering the overall distribution of voters per square mile, one can see that DE and RI are relatively densely resided upon, and more voters are thus inclined to be informed. The other thing that the PQ had going for them when they started was racial tension. My experience has been that many native-French speakers from Quebec feel that it is their city and has little else to do with the rest of the country; in fact, that much of Canada hinges on the business generated by the propserous city. I doubt the FSP is going to find much success in stirring racial tensions in, say, North Dakota.
I also find it humorous when the self-referential author of this page states that "the role of civil government should be 'the protection of citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property'", yet has no qualms speaking freely in the next paragraph about pandering to "special interests" or "constituencies" (primarily, Native Americans). Does it not seem odd to anyone that, in conjunction with vehement arguments against proportional representation, that the real goals of the FSP are just as blatantly underhanded as the major two parties that are so argued against?
Oh wait. Sorry, this must all just be a joke. Our nameless, faceless author has a disclaimer stating that he/she isn't even necessarily representing the views and opinions of the actual movement or its leaders. Oh, the irony of it all. I say, ship em out to Seward's Folly, let em freeze for awhile as they live out their "ideals", and let them come back to society when they see how silly this is in practice.
This is nothing new. This is a liberal application to a technical field. Most other degrees have it; why? To round out the logic process.
Currently, the computer science department at my uni allows for a wide range of perspective; hands-on robotics programming, 3d CAVE modeling, compiler and OS design, etc. Teaching pure skills (such as programming languages or formulae) only leads to mental regurgitation later in life. Guess what? You still have to take your humanities courses before you can even consider doing your upper-level comp.sci. core.
I know other universities are like this as well; the only question that seems, in my mind, to be outstanding, is this. The students all seemed to have turned down offers from Ivy League institutions to go to a free school. Is it because of money, or the program? And does this statement really apply to those kinds of students, who probably come from affluent backgrounds anyways? Quote:
Often, students follow a lock-step program, beginning with science and math courses, but barely touch on engineering studies until their third year in school. And fewer than half of those who enroll in engineering programs complete their degree within five years. Underrepresented minorities drop out at the highest rate.
Sure, the idea of free (as in beer) education must seem great; but is this really reinventing the wheel? Most liberal arts programs in place do well enough. Granted, they may be State U. or anything non-Ivy League... but the diversified programs do already exist. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see what's so special about this new school.
listen4ever.com redirects to mp3mediaworld.com. Now, every link on this site is to a Dutch site. It doesn't appear that they even host any archives, but link to a handful of others.
.nl sites that are all linked from here. Also, where do they get the idea that the portal is the evil? I would think that such a knee-jerk reaction by them would be followed by petitioning for all of the American ISP's to block traffic to any Dutch site, if this suit holds any water whatsoever (IMHO, it holds water like a sieve).
Where's the China come in? oh wait. Dig'ing on listen4ever.com comes up with authorities being dns1.hichina.com and dns2.hichina.com.
What I'm really curious as to the RIAA's plan, is whether or not they're going to go after the 15-20
What will they think of next?
But, your logic is flawed. The virus isn't neutralized. In effect, the proposed idea is to just BSOD the offending originator. If the person reboots, then, how're they to tell that the thing didn't just crash? The fact remains that DoS'ing is illegal. And you could always accuse and point fingers in the name of proactivism, but you don't have any due process that would precipitate said attack. You just do it and claim that the new legislation protects you, and if you can show logs that, without a doubt, it came from them, then that's fine.
But, say, someone got this on a financial server by accident? Is it okay to disrupt a company's business if they just got it within the course of a day, and a smaller company with a smaller range of admin duties, has an active admin who catches it and takes this vigilantism upon himself? Sure, he has logs. But is it right to disrupt others' business? How would you claim the lost hours of work at that point? Who would you turn to for lost revenue? The government?
This whole law is ludicrous. You can't justify an attack on someone simply because they appear to be an originator. You don't *know* for certain unless you get on the horn and talk to their admins about what's goin on with their systems.
It's been noted before, but... What's the point of attacking back? A lot of finger-pointing will ensue and "trace backs" will occur... But does anyone remember the when the WANK worm hit NASA? C.H. Chassot is right. You can't put a finger on the originator as being the perp; oftentimes, they may have been hacked, cleaned up, and used as a launch point when the real perps were out of the thick of it. Just like the US had a hard time, and "traced" the WANK worm back to a server in France, in the end it's not always going to be black-and-white. If you don't know about WANK, I'd suggest reading a nice tale that documents it quite nicely.