They can and do if you license the software. Read your license. You gave permission. In attempting to revoke the license, I am dropping the software licenses which grant permission.
That may or may not be true for schools. It's certainly not
true for consumers, since consumer rights laws in Europe are
much stronger than in the US.
Unfair clauses and ones that you didn't have the
chance to negotiate are automatically discarded.
See for example:
http://www.consumerdirect.gov.uk/before_you_buy/think_of/unfair-contracts
When we needed 50 new XP licenses, our distributor told us...
Who pays for their operating system? I spend all day at working testing
and developing virtualisation tech, and if an OS isn't a free ISO download away, forget
it. Windows just about qualifies, in that Microsoft gives you a limited-time demo. But
there are a dozen fantastic OSes and huges amounts of software which really are free
so why bother with stupid demos?
Newsflash: the marginal cost of operating
systems is zero. In fact, negative (you can get people to send you operating system install CDs for nothing).
I was about to buy a mod chip for my Wii precisely so that I can play
Densha-de Go
which only works on Japanese consoles. Note it only works on Japanese
consoles not because of some technical limitation or shortcoming of
non-Japanese Wii's, but entirely because
of a pointless software lock.
I'm just curious; why was the old Exchange implementation very hard to reproduce in other software? Isn't RPC still used to this today (included as used actively in Outlook 2007)?
It isn't hard particularly. Microsoft use an only slightly modified
DCE/RPC. SambaTNG and
now Samba include the tools you need to read and write this "MSRPC".
The problems are: (a) The protocols have huge numbers of
calls, making it impractical to implement every one, so you have
to implement the ones that are used (but each app uses different ones). (b) You have to emulate all the bugs in Microsoft's implementation, because the MS
implementation is the "standard", bugs and all. (c) You have to
map Microsoft concepts like users, ACLs, threads etc. into Unix ones, and there's
not a very natural mapping.
So after years of illegally leveraging their monopoly to
drive others out of business and drive up the price of
software and goods, their "punishment" is to charge people
even more. This "justice" things sounds great, wish I
could get some of that!
This is one of the many things the current government in the UK is getting wrong.
I don't object at all to high-priced petrol, but you've got to give people
the alternatives at the same time. If you live anywhere outside London there
are basically no good transport alternatives to the car.
For example, in my last job there was no real alternative way for me to
get to the office other than driving up and down the M1 (Britain's largest, busiest
motorway). Trains don't go that route because the train line was closed down
in the 60s and successive governments have shown no interest in reopening those
lines even though there is a sizable movement of people wanting it. The nearest
train is also very expensive -- something like 3x the price of the car.
One thing which could be done to help you would be to mandate that all employers
install showers for their workers. The costs would be small (they already have to
provide toilets, and a shower stall takes up hardly any more space than a toilet).
They should also be required to provide a secure place to lock up your bicycle.
There's a cost here, but a large benefit (suddenly a number of your employees
become healthier, more refreshed when they arrive at work, better able to concentrate, etc.)
Basically, you purchase the base-system and tack-on additional subscription based modules. My concerns are how the subscription model will function, the subscription pricing, and the potential for removal of prior features such as 3D acceleration on the 'base' system.
What's quite interesting is that this is how commercial Unix died. The vendors
started charging extra for the C compiler, the text tools, X support, &c. in exactly
this a-la-carte mode. It was deeply confusing for the customers are one
(of many other) reasons why everyone shifted to Linux.
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs
on
The GIMP UI Redesign
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I know it was a joke, but the GIMP already has a command line interface, if you can write Scheme. I think
they do Perl now as well. It was horrible and undocumented last time I used it.
Presumably that would mean that Microsoft couldn't legitimately
claim that Office 2007 followed an ISO standard, which is the
whole point of this exercise?
Well, I guess it wouldn't stop them from trying, or at least
issuing confusing public statements on the subject.
I think the real question is -- what are the FBI / police doing about it?
There's a huge, ongoing, major crime happening, and there is apparently
no police activity at all.
It frightens me that there's a very real chance that had castmember Chas Licciardello not been dressed up as Osama Bin Laden, they could have made it all the way inside.
It frightens you? Why?
Perhaps our "leaders" should not have
so much security. Might make them concentrate a little more on not
having policies which ruin so many lives and drive people to want
to murder them, eh?
Personally I think it's a huge shame that I can't walk up to
the Prime Minister and argue with him about his policies.
XenSource/Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, and Novell have invested millions in Xen, and for the sake of backwards compatibility they are now stuck with it.
You are wrong.
Red Hat and others have invested in libvirt and all
the virtualisation management tools they ship are based on libvirt. Libvirt supports
Xen, QEMU and KVM, and will soon support OpenVZ too. There is also discussion about
supporting VMWare.
The tile was then passed from student to student. As I said above, it was as hard as ceramic and as light as styrofoam. Even if an astronaut hit a tile deliberately with a sharp instrument, it is unlikely they could damage it.
I'm not sure what your teacher was showing you, but the Shuttle tiles are quite
definitely fragile. See these articles:
If by any chance you do need to contact the tile with your hands, we would require only gentle hand reaction alone. We want you to distribute the load over several fingers or the backs of the fingers. Source
[The tile is] a rather soft piece of material. You can easily scratch it with your
fingernail. It has... a very thin layer of fiberglass on the outside. It's a fabulous insulator and
NASA gave it to us to use as an insulator for an experiment we were doing. We were working at
high temperatures and needed an extremely good insulator.
So I had this tile sitting on my desk and it was a curiosity all along. And then it became much
more meaningful when I realized that, gee, it wouldn't be very difficult at all to damage this. I
could probably, with my finger, break through it.
Source
The only known technology in the early 1970s with the required thermal and weight characteristics was also so fragile, due to the very low density, that one could easily crush a TPS tile by hand. Source
I think that this damage is a perfect opportunity for NASA to do what it does best: testing new aerospace technologies - and in this case, repair of shuttle heat-shield damage. The repair job will be a great opportunity to learn new EVA skills and techniques. After the shuttle is safely down, the repair job can be studied, and evaluated for how it held up during re-entry, and I think that is valuable science that wouldn't otherwise be done.
The problem is that the repair itself is likely to cause loss of vehicle. The tiles are
incredibly delicate, and an astronaut housed in a bulky, heavy spacesuit, mounted on the end
of a remote-controlled arm in weightlessness of space, does not
have fine, careful control. He (or she) might easily put a boot or
shoulder into the other tiles, resulting in even worse damage.
I read TFA, and it included quite a lot of specific details, more than I expected, in fact.
Some details, but there was not much actual new research or evidence. He could have run the vmkmod module
through a disassembler and compared it to parts of the Linux binary. It takes a lot of effort, but you can
show that actual code has been copied that way, which is really what matters.
Because the law was passed by idiots who don't understand
the technology?
The disturbing thing is that quite
probably stupid laws are being passed all the time in other
areas where we aren't experts - farming, food, pharma, etc.
And to think that my [UK] government is made up almost
entirely of professional politicians who don't have any scientific education
at all beyond the bare minimum that finishes at age 16. (And they're
probably proud of this). Is this any way
to run a complex technology-based country?
Please note, that while the UK has one of the worlds most comprehensive use of surveillance (especially in the London area) it has *NOT* reduced crime rates. That is a simple statistical fact.
Actually it's worse than that. Now all the kids go around wearing
hoodies to avoid detection.
So the kids get away with crime and ordinary people are intimidated.
Honestly, although you are right, it's really not worth engaging these idiots who claim that humans haven't been to the moon.
By posting your +5 comment, at the time of writing 50% of the comments to the article now refer
these stupid claims that the landing was faked, and that just gives credence to these nutters, who
are a tiny percentage of the readership of slashdot.
Since the original Katamari Damacy isn't available at all in the UK, I had
to import it from Japan and use a PS2 modchip to play it. The follow-up
game was released in Europe months after appearing in US/Japan, so I also
imported that one.
The fact that
I could do this at all shows that there is no technical reason for the region
coding in this game - it's purely an illegal tactic to control market prices.
Instead, save the files to disk but get the md5 sum of the file and print out the md5 sum. Then you can prove that the logs haven't been tampered with.
That proves that the logs weren't tampered with, but it doesn't tell you what they
were before being altered. That's why you need to print out the full logs anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
They can and do if you license the software. Read your license. You gave permission. In attempting to revoke the license, I am dropping the software licenses which grant permission.
That may or may not be true for schools. It's certainly not true for consumers, since consumer rights laws in Europe are much stronger than in the US. Unfair clauses and ones that you didn't have the chance to negotiate are automatically discarded. See for example: http://www.consumerdirect.gov.uk/before_you_buy/think_of/unfair-contracts
Rich.
When we needed 50 new XP licenses, our distributor told us ...
Who pays for their operating system? I spend all day at working testing and developing virtualisation tech, and if an OS isn't a free ISO download away, forget it. Windows just about qualifies, in that Microsoft gives you a limited-time demo. But there are a dozen fantastic OSes and huges amounts of software which really are free so why bother with stupid demos?
Newsflash: the marginal cost of operating systems is zero. In fact, negative (you can get people to send you operating system install CDs for nothing).
Rich.
I was about to buy a mod chip for my Wii precisely so that I can play Densha-de Go which only works on Japanese consoles. Note it only works on Japanese consoles not because of some technical limitation or shortcoming of non-Japanese Wii's, but entirely because of a pointless software lock.
Rich.
I'm just curious; why was the old Exchange implementation very hard to reproduce in other software? Isn't RPC still used to this today (included as used actively in Outlook 2007)?
It isn't hard particularly. Microsoft use an only slightly modified DCE/RPC. SambaTNG and now Samba include the tools you need to read and write this "MSRPC".
The problems are: (a) The protocols have huge numbers of calls, making it impractical to implement every one, so you have to implement the ones that are used (but each app uses different ones). (b) You have to emulate all the bugs in Microsoft's implementation, because the MS implementation is the "standard", bugs and all. (c) You have to map Microsoft concepts like users, ACLs, threads etc. into Unix ones, and there's not a very natural mapping.
Rich.
So after years of illegally leveraging their monopoly to drive others out of business and drive up the price of software and goods, their "punishment" is to charge people even more. This "justice" things sounds great, wish I could get some of that!
Rich.
This is one of the many things the current government in the UK is getting wrong.
I don't object at all to high-priced petrol, but you've got to give people the alternatives at the same time. If you live anywhere outside London there are basically no good transport alternatives to the car.
For example, in my last job there was no real alternative way for me to get to the office other than driving up and down the M1 (Britain's largest, busiest motorway). Trains don't go that route because the train line was closed down in the 60s and successive governments have shown no interest in reopening those lines even though there is a sizable movement of people wanting it. The nearest train is also very expensive -- something like 3x the price of the car.
One thing which could be done to help you would be to mandate that all employers install showers for their workers. The costs would be small (they already have to provide toilets, and a shower stall takes up hardly any more space than a toilet). They should also be required to provide a secure place to lock up your bicycle. There's a cost here, but a large benefit (suddenly a number of your employees become healthier, more refreshed when they arrive at work, better able to concentrate, etc.)
Rich.
Basically, you purchase the base-system and tack-on additional subscription based modules. My concerns are how the subscription model will function, the subscription pricing, and the potential for removal of prior features such as 3D acceleration on the 'base' system.
What's quite interesting is that this is how commercial Unix died. The vendors started charging extra for the C compiler, the text tools, X support, &c. in exactly this a-la-carte mode. It was deeply confusing for the customers are one (of many other) reasons why everyone shifted to Linux.
Perhaps ReactOS will have their day yet ...
Rich.
It's also old news.
The SELinux guys debunked it over a month ago.
Rich.
I know it was a joke, but the GIMP already has a command line interface, if you can write Scheme. I think they do Perl now as well. It was horrible and undocumented last time I used it.
Rich.
Presumably that would mean that Microsoft couldn't legitimately claim that Office 2007 followed an ISO standard, which is the whole point of this exercise?
Well, I guess it wouldn't stop them from trying, or at least issuing confusing public statements on the subject.
Rich.
Rich.
I think the real question is -- what are the FBI / police doing about it? There's a huge, ongoing, major crime happening, and there is apparently no police activity at all.
Rich.
It frightens me that there's a very real chance that had castmember Chas Licciardello not been dressed up as Osama Bin Laden, they could have made it all the way inside.
It frightens you? Why?
Perhaps our "leaders" should not have so much security. Might make them concentrate a little more on not having policies which ruin so many lives and drive people to want to murder them, eh?
Personally I think it's a huge shame that I can't walk up to the Prime Minister and argue with him about his policies.
Rich.
An irreplaceable (though probably not priceless) drawing by an Auschwitz victim was lost aboard Columbia (reference).
Rich.
No one will ever need more than 64 cores.
Funny :-) The truth though is that probably no one will ever be able
to use more than 64 cores ...
Not with the current state of crappy software anyway.
Rich.
XenSource/Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, and Novell have invested millions in Xen, and for the sake of backwards compatibility they are now stuck with it.
You are wrong. Red Hat and others have invested in libvirt and all the virtualisation management tools they ship are based on libvirt. Libvirt supports Xen, QEMU and KVM, and will soon support OpenVZ too. There is also discussion about supporting VMWare.
Rich.
The tile was then passed from student to student. As I said above, it was as hard as ceramic and as light as styrofoam. Even if an astronaut hit a tile deliberately with a sharp instrument, it is unlikely they could damage it.
I'm not sure what your teacher was showing you, but the Shuttle tiles are quite definitely fragile. See these articles:
Rich.
I think that this damage is a perfect opportunity for NASA to do what it does best: testing new aerospace technologies - and in this case, repair of shuttle heat-shield damage. The repair job will be a great opportunity to learn new EVA skills and techniques. After the shuttle is safely down, the repair job can be studied, and evaluated for how it held up during re-entry, and I think that is valuable science that wouldn't otherwise be done.
The problem is that the repair itself is likely to cause loss of vehicle. The tiles are incredibly delicate, and an astronaut housed in a bulky, heavy spacesuit, mounted on the end of a remote-controlled arm in weightlessness of space, does not have fine, careful control. He (or she) might easily put a boot or shoulder into the other tiles, resulting in even worse damage.
Rich.
I read TFA, and it included quite a lot of specific details, more than I expected, in fact.
Some details, but there was not much actual new research or evidence. He could have run the vmkmod module through a disassembler and compared it to parts of the Linux binary. It takes a lot of effort, but you can show that actual code has been copied that way, which is really what matters.
Rich.
Then why the heck is it needed?
Because the law was passed by idiots who don't understand the technology?
The disturbing thing is that quite probably stupid laws are being passed all the time in other areas where we aren't experts - farming, food, pharma, etc. And to think that my [UK] government is made up almost entirely of professional politicians who don't have any scientific education at all beyond the bare minimum that finishes at age 16. (And they're probably proud of this). Is this any way to run a complex technology-based country?
Rich.
Please note, that while the UK has one of the worlds most comprehensive use of surveillance (especially in the London area) it has *NOT* reduced crime rates. That is a simple statistical fact.
Actually it's worse than that. Now all the kids go around wearing hoodies to avoid detection. So the kids get away with crime and ordinary people are intimidated.
Rich.
Mod parent up.
Even better, a link to the book at Amazon: McGee On Food and Cooking (Hardcover). (The hardcover version is worth getting).
Rich.
Honestly, although you are right, it's really not worth engaging these idiots who claim that humans haven't been to the moon. By posting your +5 comment, at the time of writing 50% of the comments to the article now refer these stupid claims that the landing was faked, and that just gives credence to these nutters, who are a tiny percentage of the readership of slashdot.
Rich.
Since the original Katamari Damacy isn't available at all in the UK, I had to import it from Japan and use a PS2 modchip to play it. The follow-up game was released in Europe months after appearing in US/Japan, so I also imported that one.
The fact that I could do this at all shows that there is no technical reason for the region coding in this game - it's purely an illegal tactic to control market prices.
Rich.
Instead, save the files to disk but get the md5 sum of the file and print out the md5 sum. Then you can prove that the logs haven't been tampered with.
That proves that the logs weren't tampered with, but it doesn't tell you what they were before being altered. That's why you need to print out the full logs anyway.
Rich.