They just got boned by that Eolas thing where loading a plugin in a browser was patented.
The only time I've ever head of them using their patents is over the use of FAT in compact flash devices, which seems to me to be a patent describing a specific behaviour of a specific type of filesystem, rather than the vague transparent plugin thing.
This isn't even about changing patent law, just the application and granting process, which I believe the FTC has direct control over. That is, they can give the order "no more rubber stamping" or "take these steps to search for prior art", etc. No new laws are needed to at least improve the current situation.
There are redundant systems in place. Analog radar, humans with brains.
At least there should be. Computers crash, break, have bugs, etc. They're a tool - a more efficient and convenient tool to be sure.
But when they break, there are contingencies so that planes can still take off and land, and wont just fall out of the sky.
This is also why Y2K was such a bunch of stupidity. We really aren't as reliant on computers as people think. We know they crash and are prepared to handle it when they do.
Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company's e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command--it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
IF YOU CANT USE WINDOWS, DO NOT CALL YOURSELF A COMPUTER EXPERT
It's not Microsofts fault he cant format a document in word, and that he installed Bonzi Buddy or some other bullshit that's crashing IE. The last time any version of windows refused to shut down for me was Win ME, and it was because of Creative's widely-known-to-be-shit soundblaster drivers conflicting with the onboard chip built into the motherboard.
I haven't rebooted the XP machine in my office in months. I come in, hack around all day in Vis Studio and SQL Server, and leave.
I'm just so tired of hearing this shit. A journalist computer expert who doesn't know how to do bullets in Word. Sheesh. Hell, if he can't use Word he won't be able to use OpenOffice either, since it works pretty much the same way.
I have no great love for Word. Clippy annoys me as much as anyone. But for crying out loud.
How about an article like this:
I built Samba against the wrong SSL libraries and now it segfaults when I try to auth against LDAP over SSL. I followed a cookbook to set up TLS so I don't know which file is the client cert, CA cert or what.
I also screwed around with my PAM config and now I can't log in! I really hate spending 10 minutes each day using my friends Windows box to google to remember how to start in singleuser mode and fix PAM to use/etc/shadow.
Therefore, linux really sucks and will be irrelevant real soon now.
It's more than worthy of the franchise, IMO. I was worried it would wind up all craptastic like Deus Ex IW did, but they pulled it off.
Gameplay is the same as ever, enemy AI is much improved though, and there's a lot more chatter by the NPCs.
The complaints I'm hearing are about textures not being detailed enough - complaints from folks who spent 1000 bucks on a video card and dont understand why developers dont target them specifically. The lighting effects are great (bloom rocks) and overall the game pushes my 9800 pro to its limit running at 1024x768.
My only small gripe is the "load zones" in the game - blue foggy stargate-looking areas that you walk into and it loads the next part of the stage. My PC could no doubt handle the whole map, so it's probably an artifact of the XBox port. It's not that bad though, you spend like a half an hour in one area before you reach a "load zone" so it's not a constant nuisance, and the levels are otherwise extremely well designed and layed out.
Sounds great, even though I'm just using the digital out on an old SBLive card to some dolby 5.1 speakers. Its the kind of game that makes me want to drop 300 bucks on a new card and speakers to hear the footsteps more accurately.
If you got into my bank account online, you could transfer money from chequing to savings and back, you could even make mortgage payments (or others on the list I've set up) for me. You can't download my cash, access my credit card info (for use on eBay, etc) - even if you could you wouldn't be able to ship your goods anywhere but my home or office.
And you'd likely be busted within hours, since I check my balances regularly for any sign of fraud.
I've always felt that security is best handled by common sense in meatspace.
The only people I've known who've been ripped off, had their credit cards abused, etc, had it happen by not taking the carbons when they use Visa to pay for gas. Ie; by some moron in the real world (who's inevitably caught, it's probably the most tracable way to steal money).
Well, obviously I'd try the one under the one you last scratched off.
There is no perfect scheme. The best you can do is know how much you have, and watch your accounts for any signs of fraud or tampering. Banks/Credit Card co's over here are really good about reversing charges and tracking down fraudsters.
The problem is if Mary has a list of 25 TAN's that she's crossing out, what stops me from sneaking up behind her, knocking her out with a blackjack, hiding her body in a dark corner, and then draining her account?
Sorry, been playing too much Thief 3 lately.
But my password is as secure as I make it, so is my login (which I chose and is just as obscure as my password). Both exist only in my head.
The problem inherent with one-time passwords and TAN schemes is that people print them out and stick them on their monitor with a post-it. That's not very secure, especially if I'm a tech-savvy burglar who notices it while I'm creeping out with your VCR after dousing the torches with a water torch and distracting you with a noisemaker... sorry im done
I understand X's seperate buffers. I understand in one app it may be Ctrl-C to get the clipboard buffer, in another it may be Alt (oh excuse me, Meta) Q. Who knows.
I also know that most apps have their own redundant application-level cut/copy/paste. In pico/pine/nano its Ctrl-K for cut, and Ctrl-U for un-cut. I know if I want to cut and paste within a single text file I can use C-k and C-u to move lines. If I want to move text from xterm A to OOo document B it's something different entirely.
I know the unix labs at my school had cheatsheets the size of movie posters on every machine to remind casual users how to copy a block of text, and other trivial tasks. I also know they were perpetually empty, and the Windows and Mac labs perpetually full.
I also know it's annoying and makes even the most airbrushed linux gui behave like an unprofessional piece of crap.
You may enjoy memerizing key bindings for umpteen million different apps, but I don't and neither does the majority of the unix desktop's potential market.
I've read that document before, it spells out the nuts and bolts stuff, but has nothing to do with UI or any ctrl-c/ctrl-v standards.
It's not even a matter of support for it not existing (though dragging and dropping files is pretty much missing standards). The issue is really that app developers dont care.
Nor is there any pressure for programmers to follow conventions. The nature of OSS is that the programmers really dont care if anyone uses their stuff or not, much is written to "scratch an itch".
You can use something other than Ctrl-C/ctrl-V/Ctrl-X in windows if you want. You can bind Ctrl-C to something else, and make alt-ctrl-shift-f1 copy. But if you do, people will deem your application hard to use - and since much Windows development is about making something commercially viable, it's a much bigger no-no.
Hell, with unix desktops its bigger than that. A million competing widget sets, a million different UIs, etc.. Mixing Motif with Java apps with QT etc, etc.. It makes for a disjointed and quite ugly work environment.
Which is probably why everytime I see screenshots of the latest KDE or Gnome, or the latest greatest theme for either, they show a slick desktop with a fancy rendered background - and a handful of xterms running crap like top and ircii. Usually there's a token copy of the GIMP open with a bitmap of tux.
And any mention of a possible solution brings down the wrath of nerds who want to keep unix as unintuitive and awkward as possible.
Besides the nuisance of what mouse click or keystroke you use to move text, it's not a clipboard like Windows uses, merely a text buffer.
Ie; it's only good for text. You cant copy/paste (and by extension drag and drop) files, bitmaps, etc uniformly between apps.
It's just another item in a laundry list of issues that are major to end users, but a low priority for hackers. Another speedbump on the road to Linux (unix) as a truly competitive desktop platform.
An older power supply, sufficient for that pentium system (hell a 486 with a math co proc is enough) probably wont even need a fan.
As for the price, there's a shop up the road with a crate full of pentium mobos with chips and RAM for a buck a piece (untested, but so far I'm 3 for 3 grabbing working ones).
You can get (relatively) cheap IDECompact Flash adapters, use 'em just like a hard drive - but beware the limited rewrite capacity. Treat it as a read only device, do any *caching in RAM.
Once I had a working linux router/firewall with a small enough root filesystem (on a HDD) that worked fine when mounted read only, copying it to a flash card and replacing the HDD was nothing.
* My homebrewed firewall uses squid as a transparent** cache/proxy, pdnsd and other such caches to speed up the interweb.
** Yeah I know transparent proxies are technically against the rules, but you can suck it.
Now if anyone can tell me where I can actually get one of these Mini-ITX boards I'd be happy.
No I didn't miss anything, I mentioned that they checked it was indeed PD.
Which raises another question. Legally speaking, would an email from an anonymous guy on the internet hold up in court as proof that that person wrote it?
Say, for instance, SCO managed to produce a significant amount of code that existed in the linux kernel - an obvious copy. Would linux be able to pull out an old archived email from "BigDaddy23@hotmail.com" that says "I wrote all this, honest injun!"? And if he doesn't even have that, could every kernel hacker in the world wind up in front of a judge trying to prove a negative (I didn't write that!)?
I bring this up because the SCO thing is merely the tip of the iceberg. More of this shit is coming. I have no doubt there is stolen code in various OSS projects. But who pays the piper when it's found and the project is called out?
I'd sure like to see the author of the code in question be accountable, not everyone who's ever contributed to or even used the project.
I wasnt bashing these folks, I was bashing this cavalier attitude that 99% of the project maintainers on sourceforge have. If one subroutine is suspect, the whole project is suspect.
Ie; if the SAMBA team wasnt prepared to prove (and no doubt they are, this is for the sake of argument) that the code was indeed their own original work, and none of it was copy/pasted from the leaked Win2k source, then it's a timebomb ticking on all those servers.
The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could produce some sort of audit trail, send it to SCO, and say "here's who contributed what, go take it up with the author".
And, I mentioned that they checked the code was indeed PD. It was beside my point.
Did ya miss that on your way to bash me for karma?
Following our policy to "Patch first, ask questions later", we integrated the new feature as soon as practical, without wasting time arguing about it on a mailing list
The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.
At least Linus wants folks signing patches now. But how much damage has been done to the various Free projects we all rely on? How can anyone guarantee the pedigree of any of the code on my linux box with a "go ahead and paste it in!!" attitude?
Anyhow, I call this Kinkscape since I use KDE. You may know it as Ginkscape.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you surprised MS would be there?
They just got boned by that Eolas thing where loading a plugin in a browser was patented.
The only time I've ever head of them using their patents is over the use of FAT in compact flash devices, which seems to me to be a patent describing a specific behaviour of a specific type of filesystem, rather than the vague transparent plugin thing.
This isn't even about changing patent law, just the application and granting process, which I believe the FTC has direct control over. That is, they can give the order "no more rubber stamping" or "take these steps to search for prior art", etc. No new laws are needed to at least improve the current situation.
It's not like you have any prior art, but you should patent FAILING IT!
There are redundant systems in place. Analog radar, humans with brains.
At least there should be. Computers crash, break, have bugs, etc. They're a tool - a more efficient and convenient tool to be sure.
But when they break, there are contingencies so that planes can still take off and land, and wont just fall out of the sky.
This is also why Y2K was such a bunch of stupidity. We really aren't as reliant on computers as people think. We know they crash and are prepared to handle it when they do.
It's just zealot bullshit.
/etc/shadow.
Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company's e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command--it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
IF YOU CANT USE WINDOWS, DO NOT CALL YOURSELF A COMPUTER EXPERT
It's not Microsofts fault he cant format a document in word, and that he installed Bonzi Buddy or some other bullshit that's crashing IE. The last time any version of windows refused to shut down for me was Win ME, and it was because of Creative's widely-known-to-be-shit soundblaster drivers conflicting with the onboard chip built into the motherboard.
I haven't rebooted the XP machine in my office in months. I come in, hack around all day in Vis Studio and SQL Server, and leave.
I'm just so tired of hearing this shit. A journalist computer expert who doesn't know how to do bullets in Word. Sheesh. Hell, if he can't use Word he won't be able to use OpenOffice either, since it works pretty much the same way.
I have no great love for Word. Clippy annoys me as much as anyone. But for crying out loud.
How about an article like this:
I built Samba against the wrong SSL libraries and now it segfaults when I try to auth against LDAP over SSL. I followed a cookbook to set up TLS so I don't know which file is the client cert, CA cert or what.
I also screwed around with my PAM config and now I can't log in! I really hate spending 10 minutes each day using my friends Windows box to google to remember how to start in singleuser mode and fix PAM to use
Therefore, linux really sucks and will be irrelevant real soon now.
I just hate this type of zealot idiocy.
It's more than worthy of the franchise, IMO. I was worried it would wind up all craptastic like Deus Ex IW did, but they pulled it off.
Gameplay is the same as ever, enemy AI is much improved though, and there's a lot more chatter by the NPCs.
The complaints I'm hearing are about textures not being detailed enough - complaints from folks who spent 1000 bucks on a video card and dont understand why developers dont target them specifically. The lighting effects are great (bloom rocks) and overall the game pushes my 9800 pro to its limit running at 1024x768.
My only small gripe is the "load zones" in the game - blue foggy stargate-looking areas that you walk into and it loads the next part of the stage. My PC could no doubt handle the whole map, so it's probably an artifact of the XBox port. It's not that bad though, you spend like a half an hour in one area before you reach a "load zone" so it's not a constant nuisance, and the levels are otherwise extremely well designed and layed out.
Sounds great, even though I'm just using the digital out on an old SBLive card to some dolby 5.1 speakers. Its the kind of game that makes me want to drop 300 bucks on a new card and speakers to hear the footsteps more accurately.
If you got into my bank account online, you could transfer money from chequing to savings and back, you could even make mortgage payments (or others on the list I've set up) for me. You can't download my cash, access my credit card info (for use on eBay, etc) - even if you could you wouldn't be able to ship your goods anywhere but my home or office.
And you'd likely be busted within hours, since I check my balances regularly for any sign of fraud.
I've always felt that security is best handled by common sense in meatspace.
The only people I've known who've been ripped off, had their credit cards abused, etc, had it happen by not taking the carbons when they use Visa to pay for gas. Ie; by some moron in the real world (who's inevitably caught, it's probably the most tracable way to steal money).
Well, obviously I'd try the one under the one you last scratched off.
There is no perfect scheme. The best you can do is know how much you have, and watch your accounts for any signs of fraud or tampering. Banks/Credit Card co's over here are really good about reversing charges and tracking down fraudsters.
Unbreakable encryption, sure, but your head is certainly breakable and I can just take your list of scratch-off passwords..
Now, if you had a good secure password that existed only in your head, I'd have locked myself out by breaking your head.
The problem is if Mary has a list of 25 TAN's that she's crossing out, what stops me from sneaking up behind her, knocking her out with a blackjack, hiding her body in a dark corner, and then draining her account?
Sorry, been playing too much Thief 3 lately.
But my password is as secure as I make it, so is my login (which I chose and is just as obscure as my password). Both exist only in my head.
The problem inherent with one-time passwords and TAN schemes is that people print them out and stick them on their monitor with a post-it. That's not very secure, especially if I'm a tech-savvy burglar who notices it while I'm creeping out with your VCR after dousing the torches with a water torch and distracting you with a noisemaker... sorry im done
'cause it's not a linux problem. It's just as annoying in SCO Unix, HP-UX, AIX, etc.
Not just the X clipboard, the whole ball of wax.
I understand X's seperate buffers. I understand in one app it may be Ctrl-C to get the clipboard buffer, in another it may be Alt (oh excuse me, Meta) Q. Who knows.
I also know that most apps have their own redundant application-level cut/copy/paste. In pico/pine/nano its Ctrl-K for cut, and Ctrl-U for un-cut. I know if I want to cut and paste within a single text file I can use C-k and C-u to move lines. If I want to move text from xterm A to OOo document B it's something different entirely.
I know the unix labs at my school had cheatsheets the size of movie posters on every machine to remind casual users how to copy a block of text, and other trivial tasks. I also know they were perpetually empty, and the Windows and Mac labs perpetually full.
I also know it's annoying and makes even the most airbrushed linux gui behave like an unprofessional piece of crap.
You may enjoy memerizing key bindings for umpteen million different apps, but I don't and neither does the majority of the unix desktop's potential market.
When you can drag a bitmap from your eMail, into GIMP, edit it, then drag it into your OpenOffice document, let me know.
Until then, it's broken in my eyes.
I've read that document before, it spells out the nuts and bolts stuff, but has nothing to do with UI or any ctrl-c/ctrl-v standards.
It's not even a matter of support for it not existing (though dragging and dropping files is pretty much missing standards). The issue is really that app developers dont care.
Nor is there any pressure for programmers to follow conventions. The nature of OSS is that the programmers really dont care if anyone uses their stuff or not, much is written to "scratch an itch".
You can use something other than Ctrl-C/ctrl-V/Ctrl-X in windows if you want. You can bind Ctrl-C to something else, and make alt-ctrl-shift-f1 copy. But if you do, people will deem your application hard to use - and since much Windows development is about making something commercially viable, it's a much bigger no-no.
Hell, with unix desktops its bigger than that. A million competing widget sets, a million different UIs, etc.. Mixing Motif with Java apps with QT etc, etc.. It makes for a disjointed and quite ugly work environment.
Which is probably why everytime I see screenshots of the latest KDE or Gnome, or the latest greatest theme for either, they show a slick desktop with a fancy rendered background - and a handful of xterms running crap like top and ircii. Usually there's a token copy of the GIMP open with a bitmap of tux.
It's always been broken.
And any mention of a possible solution brings down the wrath of nerds who want to keep unix as unintuitive and awkward as possible.
Besides the nuisance of what mouse click or keystroke you use to move text, it's not a clipboard like Windows uses, merely a text buffer.
Ie; it's only good for text. You cant copy/paste (and by extension drag and drop) files, bitmaps, etc uniformly between apps.
It's just another item in a laundry list of issues that are major to end users, but a low priority for hackers. Another speedbump on the road to Linux (unix) as a truly competitive desktop platform.
An older power supply, sufficient for that pentium system (hell a 486 with a math co proc is enough) probably wont even need a fan.
As for the price, there's a shop up the road with a crate full of pentium mobos with chips and RAM for a buck a piece (untested, but so far I'm 3 for 3 grabbing working ones).
Hell no need for GBit. 100mbit is still many times faster than writing to a Compact Flash.
For audio, a good full-duplex 10mbit link should do the trick.
Run an ethernet cable to a SAN box in another room (or in a sound-deadening enclosure like a decent camping cooler)
Throw your local root filesystem on the flash and leave it read only.
Hooray!
I thought it was funny.
Yeah, a G5 sure is a "silent PC" if you run 15 foot cords to kb/monitor/mouse and put them in a soundproof room.
But, interesting is right out.
You can get (relatively) cheap IDECompact Flash adapters, use 'em just like a hard drive - but beware the limited rewrite capacity. Treat it as a read only device, do any *caching in RAM.
Once I had a working linux router/firewall with a small enough root filesystem (on a HDD) that worked fine when mounted read only, copying it to a flash card and replacing the HDD was nothing.
* My homebrewed firewall uses squid as a transparent** cache/proxy, pdnsd and other such caches to speed up the interweb.
** Yeah I know transparent proxies are technically against the rules, but you can suck it.
Now if anyone can tell me where I can actually get one of these Mini-ITX boards I'd be happy.
milestone 9 mentions EPS and PDF. Version 0.43 I believe.
No I didn't miss anything, I mentioned that they checked it was indeed PD.
Which raises another question. Legally speaking, would an email from an anonymous guy on the internet hold up in court as proof that that person wrote it?
Say, for instance, SCO managed to produce a significant amount of code that existed in the linux kernel - an obvious copy. Would linux be able to pull out an old archived email from "BigDaddy23@hotmail.com" that says "I wrote all this, honest injun!"? And if he doesn't even have that, could every kernel hacker in the world wind up in front of a judge trying to prove a negative (I didn't write that!)?
I bring this up because the SCO thing is merely the tip of the iceberg. More of this shit is coming. I have no doubt there is stolen code in various OSS projects. But who pays the piper when it's found and the project is called out?
I'd sure like to see the author of the code in question be accountable, not everyone who's ever contributed to or even used the project.
I wasnt bashing these folks, I was bashing this cavalier attitude that 99% of the project maintainers on sourceforge have. If one subroutine is suspect, the whole project is suspect.
Ie; if the SAMBA team wasnt prepared to prove (and no doubt they are, this is for the sake of argument) that the code was indeed their own original work, and none of it was copy/pasted from the leaked Win2k source, then it's a timebomb ticking on all those servers.
The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could produce some sort of audit trail, send it to SCO, and say "here's who contributed what, go take it up with the author".
And, I mentioned that they checked the code was indeed PD. It was beside my point.
Did ya miss that on your way to bash me for karma?
Following our policy to "Patch first, ask questions later", we integrated the new feature as soon as practical, without wasting time arguing about it on a mailing list
The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.
At least Linus wants folks signing patches now. But how much damage has been done to the various Free projects we all rely on? How can anyone guarantee the pedigree of any of the code on my linux box with a "go ahead and paste it in!!" attitude?
Anyhow, I call this Kinkscape since I use KDE. You may know it as Ginkscape.
Enough said.
Does the Russian's new policy of sending up folks for big amounts of cash (the Japanese reporter, etc) not count as commercial flight?
Think of how long a wild dog lives compared to a domestic one, who no doubt gets just as much crap into his belly from messy children.
Think how long humans lived, before McDonalds and after.
George Burns smoked cigars and drank well into his 900s. Some people die for no good reason in childhood.