Makes sense. There was a port of NT 3.1 for the DEC Alpha chip that was RISC based. It seems logical that the DEC defectors would have influenced this decision.
A body of lawyers not endorsing a law that would prohibit some lawsuits? Very strange indeed.
<satire/>
Seriously, would the passing UCITA result in more or less lawsuits? I'm assuming less since the room to challenge license clauses would be greatly reduced.
Yep, my bad, it's not compressed, DPCM is it's compressed variant and it's not on CDs. Regardless, I found yet another reference predating the patent that basically proves it's subject to prior art
here:
"With compression being top of mind for many operators in 1989, General Instrument broke through the digital barrier and compressed digital video into 6 MHz of spectrum. This breakthrough raised the industry's hopes of one day seeing digital pictures, while increasing channel capacity to hundreds of channels."
Exactly, they've apparently patented a concept that is blatantly obvious. This patent would NEVER have been granted if somebody with even a cursory knowledge of computers or even telephony had reviewed it. According to this patent, your digital cell phone even encroaches.
Compressed audio and video transmission patented? In 1991 at that? Come on, that's like me patenting that you can wear shoes and socks at the same time. Digitally compressed video and audio existed LONG before these jokers. I mean CDs used PCM back in the mid-80s, and as for video, look here and here and about 20,000 more references on Google. This patenting of ideas that are just naive bundles of existing concepts just blows me away... STOP THE INSANITY!
When is the last time you looked at OpenOffice? It already has good macro capabilities and supports OLE automation via the UNO inteface. You are probably thinking of the old StarOffice 5.2 which is a whole different story.
Re:More than 1.1 billion pigs are killed worldwide
on
Plan for Spam, Version 2
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Could Bayesian filtering be applied to filter offtopic posts as well?
That's my strategy too. I would take it one further however. Pick apart the email headers that you get bounced back to you and alert the ISPs. Many ISPs (not all) have policies against mass emails. If the email links to a website, find the domain admin and technical contacts and let their ISP know.. When I got my e-dentity stolen, the email contained a garbaged URL that lead to nowhere so tracking down those responsible was all but impossible. However, the email header had more than enough relaying info for me to let every ISP they used to send email know what had happened.
I'm with you on this... it's as illegal as stuffing a 12 page EULA agreement into a 40 character by 10 line textbox and expecting people to scroll and read through the entire thing. That said, it doesn't mean I agree with the practice on moral grounds since it's deceitful... plain and simple.
I agree to a point. However, I disagree that "joe sixpack" will *ever* feel comfortable in bash and vi. Reality is that "joe sixpack" was never comfortable in command line envs (think MS-DOS) and almost certainly never will be. Non-tech users operate in a point and click world. A keyboard to them is used only to bang out emails.
I don't know if the RIAA is involved, but I compiled and tested the code on BugTraq and this thing can definately do things you don't want an MP3 doing. The sample uses/bin/sh and is able to execute bins within that dir. This IS a serious announcement and we need to patch this thing out of existance.
Yep... you are bang on here. Reality is that if the software is buggy, and easily exploitable... IT'S THE SOFTWARE THAT'S AT FAULT. Fixing a certain northwestern company's poorly written code by moving the responsibility to the hardware layer is NOT the way to address the problem. Besides, when this gets cracked (and you're ignorant if you think it won't) then you'll need to have people flashing their BIOS rather than just installing an upgrade. It's utterly ridiculous... FIX THE LOUSY SOFTWARE.
It requries a video signal to record. That said, any kind of signal works (think DVD player powered on). You can feed in any audio signal and so long as the video signal is there. Ripping the braodcast off the Tivo afterwards requires a modded Tivo which can get expensive. I think a combination of a $50 WinTV card and a cron job are his best (and cheapest) bet.
Record expires on 07-Mar-2003.
Record created on 06-Mar-1996.
So far so good, same group of folks and it has been registered since 1996 so this didn't spring up overnight. Second, we can go to www.rustconsulting.com for a look at who we're dealing with:
Founded as the Rust Consulting Group, Inc., the Group was from the start a leader in applying computer technology to the practice of law. Using the most advanced computers and technology available, the Group computerized millions of documents in more than 500 cases such as MCI v. AT&T, Westmoreland v. CBS, and the Chem-Dyne environmental case.
Took a quick look at the site and found out that Rust Consulting is owned by SourceCorp which is publicly traded (symb: SRCP), not a typical thing for a con ring.
The only doubt that's left unresolved is why this thing is not SSL enabled. As for the SSN fear, your SSN can't be rebuilt without knowing what state your resided in when you were issued your SSN. The middle digits are of a random group that can't be related to any other info. They won't get far with just 4 digits. More info...
It's always wise to be weary of "free money" offers since that's the fingerprint of pretty much all con jobs, but a quick bit of research shows this is most likely legit. However, if it isn't, they left all the necessary info to track them down.
In total agreement. Mandrake has notoriously poor customer service and are generally unresponsive to their user base. If they would simply stop posting their ISO images, not binaries mind you, spruce up their customer service, and offer a DVD rather than a handful of CDs at a price that's not as much an M$ OS... they might actually SELL some software. As for me, it's too late to woo me back, I found all the above in SuSE 2 years ago.
Care to elborate there AnonCow? What sound card do you have and exaclty which format is not supported. Here's something that's bound to be an eye opener for you:
http://www.siu.edu/~acm/
... and here's a classic "If you want to make a positive impact at your school...". Nice, make a positive impact by manipulating your colleagues into using our products such as to ensure the continuation of our illegal monopoly. Just reading the job description makes me want to puke. Somebody mod this up.
The article lacks in detail. One has to wonder exactly what comprises the "new security abilities". You'd assume they'd still release secuirty patches.
That said, you have a point. One has to wonder where they'll draw the line between a fix and a feature. It's probably reasonable to assume that some security "features" will ever even be made available gratis for the "insecure" version of Windows. At very least, you expect they would be lagged significantly.
On the bright side, think of the good times all the crackers and script kiddies will have tearing apart all the Joe-user's "insecure" Win-machines. Is there any better way to get free advertising for paying-up for a "secure" flavour of Windows than this!
I think only the "ProSuite" version of Mandrake includes StarOffice 6.0 and it's a far cry from free at $200.
I don't a ton of experience with Mandrake but from what I've seen it makes a greater effort to feel more "windows-like" at least terms of menus and configuration panels than SuSE. This should make newbies feel far more comfortable. I use SuSE because Yast makes remote management very easy (esp. remote upgrades) and because they offer a DVD based distribution for much less than the other distros. If you want to install and walk away, I'd probably go with Mandrake. If you're going to be maintaining the box, I'd go with SuSE.
As for learning curve, the two are virtually identical for day-to-day use.
OpenOffice has worked perfected on almost all the MS-Office docs I've thrown at it. There's the occasional oddly (but still legible) rendered page but it hasn't ever refused to work on anything for me so far. I image macro heavy docs might be a sticky point. If MS-Office is a must, I'd recommend using Win4Lin and Win98 on top of Linux. It's great for the occasional win-only crud that pops up. Otherwise, Codeweavers' Crossover Office works pretty well too. I purchased Win4Lin after Crossover and I prefer to keep my windows apps nice and isolated like Win4Lin allows me to even though it's a little resource hungrier.
I installed using the character mode installer (Manual Installation). It's somewhat faster than the GUI installer and certainly uses less resources. I double checked and the installer needs to create a 40M ram disk in both instances. This doesn't leave a heck of alot of room with only 64M or RAM. It also obviously means it's plain impossible to install with only 32M of RAM.
No DVD problems to report like the reviewer encountered. However, the software configuration in the install is still quite poor (no change from 8.0 from what I can see). It did a fair job on hardware but I still had to hit Sax2 to properly configure my monitor.
That said, once installed, it has a nicely polished KDE desktop. I like the icon choice but default "curved" windows I just don't like, back to KDE 2 window decoration it goes. I do like the changes the made to the Yast character mode interface, much easier to navigate. I'm also a little disappointed that it shipped with 2.4.19 instead of 2.4.20.
Overall, not bad but non-techs would require a small amount of hand holding trying to install this release from scratch. The DVD has a very complete collection of software on it that is relatively up to date. It a nice tool to have handy when you're on the road.
Have to agree with the others here, Linux (read GNU/Linux) is plain fantastic on my desktop. I'm using KDE 3.1 (nothing against GNOME) and couldn't be happier. As for easy to live with, it depends on what you're referring to. It's certainly easy to work on but I do admittedly still have to do configuration and upgrades for friends and family. Hopefully, the LSB will help lay the groundwork for developing common configuration tools for the "point-and-click" user set. As for me, vi and a bash shell are all the configuration tools I need.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes sense. There was a port of NT 3.1 for the DEC Alpha chip that was RISC based. It seems logical that the DEC defectors would have influenced this decision.
wget does both and does it well.
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html
A body of lawyers not endorsing a law that would prohibit some lawsuits? Very strange indeed.
<satire/>
Seriously, would the passing UCITA result in more or less lawsuits? I'm assuming less since the room to challenge license clauses would be greatly reduced.
Off topic but ... ... bullets DO!!!
<grin>
Everybody knows that guns DO NOT kill people
</grin>
Yep, my bad, it's not compressed, DPCM is it's compressed variant and it's not on CDs. Regardless, I found yet another reference predating the patent that basically proves it's subject to prior art here:
"With compression being top of mind for many operators in 1989, General Instrument broke through the digital barrier and compressed digital video into 6 MHz of spectrum. This breakthrough raised the industry's hopes of one day seeing digital pictures, while increasing channel capacity to hundreds of channels."
Exactly, they've apparently patented a concept that is blatantly obvious. This patent would NEVER have been granted if somebody with even a cursory knowledge of computers or even telephony had reviewed it. According to this patent, your digital cell phone even encroaches.
Compressed audio and video transmission patented? In 1991 at that? Come on, that's like me patenting that you can wear shoes and socks at the same time. Digitally compressed video and audio existed LONG before these jokers. I mean CDs used PCM back in the mid-80s, and as for video, look here and here and about 20,000 more references on Google. This patenting of ideas that are just naive bundles of existing concepts just blows me away ... STOP THE INSANITY!
When is the last time you looked at OpenOffice? It already has good macro capabilities and supports OLE automation via the UNO inteface. You are probably thinking of the old StarOffice 5.2 which is a whole different story.
Could Bayesian filtering be applied to filter offtopic posts as well?
That's my strategy too. I would take it one further however. Pick apart the email headers that you get bounced back to you and alert the ISPs. Many ISPs (not all) have policies against mass emails. If the email links to a website, find the domain admin and technical contacts and let their ISP know.. When I got my e-dentity stolen, the email contained a garbaged URL that lead to nowhere so tracking down those responsible was all but impossible. However, the email header had more than enough relaying info for me to let every ISP they used to send email know what had happened.
I'm with you on this ... it's as illegal as stuffing a 12 page EULA agreement into a 40 character by 10 line textbox and expecting people to scroll and read through the entire thing. That said, it doesn't mean I agree with the practice on moral grounds since it's deceitful ... plain and simple.
I agree to a point. However, I disagree that "joe sixpack" will *ever* feel comfortable in bash and vi. Reality is that "joe sixpack" was never comfortable in command line envs (think MS-DOS) and almost certainly never will be. Non-tech users operate in a point and click world. A keyboard to them is used only to bang out emails.
I don't know if the RIAA is involved, but I compiled and tested the code on BugTraq and this thing can definately do things you don't want an MP3 doing. The sample uses /bin/sh and is able to execute bins within that dir. This IS a serious announcement and we need to patch this thing out of existance.
Yep ... you are bang on here. Reality is that if the software is buggy, and easily exploitable ... IT'S THE SOFTWARE THAT'S AT FAULT. Fixing a certain northwestern company's poorly written code by moving the responsibility to the hardware layer is NOT the way to address the problem. Besides, when this gets cracked (and you're ignorant if you think it won't) then you'll need to have people flashing their BIOS rather than just installing an upgrade. It's utterly ridiculous ... FIX THE LOUSY SOFTWARE.
It requries a video signal to record. That said, any kind of signal works (think DVD player powered on). You can feed in any audio signal and so long as the video signal is there. Ripping the braodcast off the Tivo afterwards requires a modded Tivo which can get expensive. I think a combination of a $50 WinTV card and a cron job are his best (and cheapest) bet.
Well ... lets see if this smells of a con job. First, who owns the
musiccdsettlement.com domain:
Rust Consulting, Inc.
cmichelsen AT rustconsulting.com
Rust Consulting, Inc.
501 MARQUETTE AVE STE 700
MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55402-1208
US
612-359-2000
Ok, so Rust Consulting, and just who are these guys?
Michelsen, Claus
postmaster AT RUSTCONSULTING.COM
Rust Consulting
501 Marquette Avenue #700
Mpls , MN 55402
612-359-2000
Record expires on 07-Mar-2003.
Record created on 06-Mar-1996.
So far so good, same group of folks and it has been registered since 1996 so this didn't spring up overnight. Second, we can go to www.rustconsulting.com for a look at who we're dealing with:
Founded as the Rust Consulting Group, Inc., the Group was from the start a leader in applying computer technology to the practice of law. Using the most advanced computers and technology available, the Group computerized millions of documents in more than 500 cases such as MCI v. AT&T, Westmoreland v. CBS, and the Chem-Dyne environmental case.
Took a quick look at the site and found out that Rust Consulting is owned by SourceCorp which is publicly traded (symb: SRCP), not a typical thing for a con ring.
The only doubt that's left unresolved is why this thing is not SSL enabled. As for the SSN fear, your SSN can't be rebuilt without knowing what state your resided in when you were issued your SSN. The middle digits are of a random group that can't be related to any other info. They won't get far with just 4 digits. More info ...
It's always wise to be weary of "free money" offers since that's the fingerprint of pretty much all con jobs, but a quick bit of research shows this is most likely legit. However, if it isn't, they left all the necessary info to track them down.
In total agreement. Mandrake has notoriously poor customer service and are generally unresponsive to their user base. If they would simply stop posting their ISO images, not binaries mind you, spruce up their customer service, and offer a DVD rather than a handful of CDs at a price that's not as much an M$ OS ... they might actually SELL some software. As for me, it's too late to woo me back, I found all the above in SuSE 2 years ago.
Banrisul, the largest bank in the South of Brazil, is already running Linux ATMs
Sound cards
Feel free to remove that foot from your mouth and get back to work.Support media file formats
This looks legitimate based on the URL root:
... and here's a classic "If you want to make a positive impact at your school ...". Nice, make a positive impact by manipulating your colleagues into using our products such as to ensure the continuation of our illegal monopoly. Just reading the job description makes me want to puke. Somebody mod this up.
http://www.siu.edu/~acm/
The article lacks in detail. One has to wonder exactly what comprises the "new security abilities". You'd assume they'd still release secuirty patches.
That said, you have a point. One has to wonder where they'll draw the line between a fix and a feature. It's probably reasonable to assume that some security "features" will ever even be made available gratis for the "insecure" version of Windows. At very least, you expect they would be lagged significantly.
On the bright side, think of the good times all the crackers and script kiddies will have tearing apart all the Joe-user's "insecure" Win-machines. Is there any better way to get free advertising for paying-up for a "secure" flavour of Windows than this!
I think only the "ProSuite" version of Mandrake includes StarOffice 6.0 and it's a far cry from free at $200.
I don't a ton of experience with Mandrake but from what I've seen it makes a greater effort to feel more "windows-like" at least terms of menus and configuration panels than SuSE. This should make newbies feel far more comfortable. I use SuSE because Yast makes remote management very easy (esp. remote upgrades) and because they offer a DVD based distribution for much less than the other distros. If you want to install and walk away, I'd probably go with Mandrake. If you're going to be maintaining the box, I'd go with SuSE.
As for learning curve, the two are virtually identical for day-to-day use.
OpenOffice has worked perfected on almost all the MS-Office docs I've thrown at it. There's the occasional oddly (but still legible) rendered page but it hasn't ever refused to work on anything for me so far. I image macro heavy docs might be a sticky point. If MS-Office is a must, I'd recommend using Win4Lin and Win98 on top of Linux. It's great for the occasional win-only crud that pops up. Otherwise, Codeweavers' Crossover Office works pretty well too. I purchased Win4Lin after Crossover and I prefer to keep my windows apps nice and isolated like Win4Lin allows me to even though it's a little resource hungrier.
I installed using the character mode installer (Manual Installation). It's somewhat faster than the GUI installer and certainly uses less resources. I double checked and the installer needs to create a 40M ram disk in both instances. This doesn't leave a heck of alot of room with only 64M or RAM. It also obviously means it's plain impossible to install with only 32M of RAM.
No DVD problems to report like the reviewer encountered. However, the software configuration in the install is still quite poor (no change from 8.0 from what I can see). It did a fair job on hardware but I still had to hit Sax2 to properly configure my monitor.
That said, once installed, it has a nicely polished KDE desktop. I like the icon choice but default "curved" windows I just don't like, back to KDE 2 window decoration it goes. I do like the changes the made to the Yast character mode interface, much easier to navigate. I'm also a little disappointed that it shipped with 2.4.19 instead of 2.4.20.
Overall, not bad but non-techs would require a small amount of hand holding trying to install this release from scratch. The DVD has a very complete collection of software on it that is relatively up to date. It a nice tool to have handy when you're on the road.
Have to agree with the others here, Linux (read GNU/Linux) is plain fantastic on my desktop. I'm using KDE 3.1 (nothing against GNOME) and couldn't be happier. As for easy to live with, it depends on what you're referring to. It's certainly easy to work on but I do admittedly still have to do configuration and upgrades for friends and family. Hopefully, the LSB will help lay the groundwork for developing common configuration tools for the "point-and-click" user set. As for me, vi and a bash shell are all the configuration tools I need.