Way off-topic rant... please ignore if you prefer to read about The Post 9/11 Tech Boom, which thanks to lack of hyphen is grammatically equivalent to The 9/11 Tech Boom at Post Cereals...
The question is though will the West sort out the problem with AIDS in Africa - or will they decide its
too much money to spend on a problem that's not to do with their own people?
The thing about AIDS - 99% of people who contract it are either ignorant or stupid. The other 1% are unlucky. It's almost completely preventable, in other words. So possibly the best thing that can be done is public AIDS education (not to be confused with AIDS awareness - what good does wearing a red ribbon do, honestly?), to combat ignorance. Stupidity you can't do all that much about - think of it as evolution by natural selection. To help the last 1% you have research, into cures and treatments and so forth. That research money so far has a very low ROI, since HIV demonstrated itself long ago to be very problematic for developing a classic virus vaccine.
Speaking of public AIDS education, I feel the job here in the US is basically done. Pretty much nobody these days is unaware of the major risk factors, just like nobody truly believes cigarettes aren't harmful. The only need for AIDS education here anymore is to kids too young to have heard it already - say 5th grade or so, no need to go older or younger. The same is not true in the third world - they could use a lot of AIDS education. (No, I'm not blowing smoke, I've BTDT.) Presumably that's what you're referring to.
Anyway, back to my off-topic point. So why does so much AIDS charity money (and that's a big industry - don't let anyone tell you "we don't spend enough on AIDS") go to biotech research, as opposed to epidemiological measures such as partner notification and testing - tried-and-true preventative measures?
Here's why: because officially, AIDS isn't an epidemic, it's a political statement. The gay lobby (among others) has fought very hard to make sure AIDS is not treated the same as any other disease - and that means health care professionals can't legally take the kinds of measures they would with, say, a hepatitis epidemic. Because that would "violate the privacy" of people with HIV, which is somehow different from violating the privacy of people with the hepatitis-B virus, or anthrax bacteria. What, is this because AIDS is an STD? Humbug - so is hepatitis.
The result, according to one study (sorry, don't have the cite at work, it's in a magazine at home from 4 or 5 years ago), is that since the health sector is not allowed to treat AIDS like the epidemic you and I probably thought it was, HIV has been allowed to spread to an estimated 100,000 people more than it would otherwise have done.
Of course, it's best not to try to explain this to Hollywood, or the gay lobby, or other AIDS activists. As the article pointed out (I'll get a cite and quote some passages if anyone wants - just email, or reply here), they don't like to hear this sort of thing. Then again, the article continues, you wouldn't like it either - being told that by through everything you believe in and by all the hard work you have done, you have helped to kill 100,000 people.
Aviation and
nuclear technology also advanced greatly during the Second World War, as did seige weaponary during
European conflicts during the middle ages.
Ummm, not to disagree with your thesis, but didn't the "European conflicts during the middle ages" last for pretty much the whole middle ages? You kind of lose perspective on how "fast" things advance when they have the space of a Hundred Years' War, as opposed to six years of WWII.
Post-Columbine, now Post-9/11. What other horrors can turn into tech articles?
Maybe after the next Star Wars movie comes out, and it turns out not to suck as bad as the last one did, JonKatz will realise that Lucas has forever changed our viewpoint on the suckiness of Star Wars prequel and then suddenly everything will have a "post-Episode II" angle.
Wow! So if I only need to crack 128-bit keys I only need to spend something like $1.93831e-258! I can't
wait to get started.
<grin> Yeah, if you can find any 128-bit RSA keys you want to crack. When I first used PGP v2.x back in 1994 or so, the key lengths you could generate were 512, 768 (recommended for ordinary folk) and 1024 ("military-grade"). Not sure if PGP has ever supported or recommended a mere 128-bit private key....
Is there any special reason all these key lengths are always powers of two? Does it have some sort of
inherent advantage or is it just people's being geeky?
You mean like 56-bit DES? Or 168-bit Rijndael? Or 768-bit RSA?
I think it is just people being geeky. Working with bytes in groups of 8 or 16 is often useful - blocks larger than that don't seem to figure all that much into crypto algorithms.
The only question in my mind is whether RSA is still worth using at all.
As opposed to what? Do you have a better public key system in mind? RSA is efficient and well-understood. AFAIK, it has no serious competition (ok there's DSA but it's horribly slow in comparison).
How big is safe? 8192 bits?
Yah, you do that. Or just add another 32 bits to the key. If it takes someone 1 minute to crack a 1024-bit key, it will take him a couple hundred years to crack a 1066-bit key.
Ok, in that case, why are there still limits on key length? If it was just encryption being easily
available they would have removed all restrictions because it would make no difference.
The US government sets limits on key length? What limits, and why have I never heard of them?
You are implicitly agreeing to the contract by using the software.
Says who? Says Microsoft. I say I am not agreeing to the contract, but simply using copyrighted material in a fair-use manner. What gives Microsoft the right to determine what action I need to take to agree to a contract?
Why can't the author of a book print an EULA on the shrinkwrap of the book saying you agree to burn the book after 1 year unless you purchase an extended license to "own" it for more than a year? Similar gimmicks were long ago ruled invalid by the courts, when they established first sale doctrine.
You can't make someone agree to a contract by saying that they are agreeing to a contract. That should be self-evident.
P.S. By reading this message you agree to pay me $200 in legal consulting fees, even though IANAL. If you choose not to accept this, you must immediately forget what I just said and contact your ISP for a refund of bandwidth charges.
I think it would come down to intent. Of course if copying is an essential step to using it, that is
probably permitted under most EULA language, such as installation from CD-ROM to your hard drive in
order to use the product.
Nope, it isn't. Copying from the CD-ROM to the hard drive is an essential step in running xxx software on my second computer - yet the EULA only allows me to install it on one computer. Conflict. This is a simple example of a situation where copyright law gives me certain rights and an EULA, under guise of allowing me to use what I've already bought and paid for, tries to take away some of these rights (in this case, right to use on as many of my own computers as I wish).
as long as it
stays in your possession and is only installed and used in accordance with the license your purchased.
I didn't purchase a license - I purchased software. They consider it a copyrighted work - doesn't that mean that when I buy it I get to use it according to copyright law? What if I refuse to agree to the EULA - why should I have to return the software for a refund? Why can't I just use it however copyright law says I can?
(or GPL software for that matter, it has more
than a few EULA like clauses)
Care to point out the EULA-like clauses in the GPL? I must have missed them. It seems to me that the GPL is quite the opposite of what one normally thinks of as an EULA. It grants you additional rights you didn't already have under copyright law - specifically, creating and distributing derived works. Most EULAs only purport to take away rights you have under copyright law - the right to use the software in your own home in any way you see fit, most commonly.
Then, technically, any code contributed by those under-18 to the linux kernel can be used freely in
proprietary products!
Actually, if you want to play it that way, any code contributed by those under-18 to the linux kernel cannot be redistributed at all. Remember, absent a specific license - copyright law states that you can use your copy for anything you want, but cannot redistribute it unless you are the copyright holder. So if you assume a minor can't give you permission to redistribute his work - then you can't redistribute it - free or otherwise.
Apple is technically within their rights here, and it's even (arguably) a good idea. It's a shame that
he can't contribute, but Apple needs to protect themselves from liability.
Why exactly is it (arguably) a good idea? It sounds like Apple just doesn't want him spilling information he gets via NDA. Which just begs the question: why does he need to sign an NDA at all?
He shouldn't need any non-public information. After all, any use he puts the information to will be open-source, i.e. publicly available. How can you produce open-source code using information you aren't allowed to leak, without leaking it?
(Actually the NDA thing is probably meaningless anyway. I did some contract work for Linuxcare back in the day, and they had me sign an NDA, but I never saw, nor expected to ever see, any Linuxcare proprietary information. To this day I'm not sure why they thought they needed me to sign it.)
I doubt that. PDF is pretty much a write-only format, a bit like saving your document in JPEG format (well, not that bad - at least PDF is vector- and font-based). To import a PDF into a word processor would require pretty much reconstructing the formatting from screen position, just like modern OCR software does after it picks up individual characters.
Of course, it would be possible to embed StarOffice-specific markup into the PDF file, which would be ignored by other PDF viewers but used to reconstruct the original document when read back into StarOffice... but what would be the point? Then you could read in PDF files, but only if they were produced by StarOffice... in which case why not just use RTF or whatever to begin with?
For me, I'd like a distribution that included every application that it could cram in...possibly with
Disk 1 very supported...and Disk 3 being "extra apps we like and threw in." Disk 1 could have all the
core apps, so Bob Person could just stick it in and get all he wants and needs. While I have my extras
on the other disks.
Oh, like Debian? 8672 packages and counting - built from 6252 source packages. This is the 'woody' distribution, currently in a sort of beta (the 'unstable' distribution is not nearly so small).
The contents of CD #1 are determined by a popularity contest. You can voluntarily install the package 'popularity-contest', and it sets up a cron job to run once a week, check your list of installed packages and access timestamps, and email an address at debian.org with stats on what you have and how recently you have used it. The stats are collated anonymously and thus the CD distribution order is determined.
Result: you can get a quite useful install with only CD 1 available (if you get the non-US ISO, of course, which has ssh).
Oh please. All of this post-911 oversensitivity crap really has me on edge.
Hear hear! It's not like the plot calls for winged Nazgûl dive-bombing Isengard.
Re:How many do you think Two Towers is going to wi
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Next year's Oscars may not have as many other good films. Do you think that the Two Towers is the likely
canidate for next years?
Well, my guess is that Two Towers won't be as impressive as Fellowship, because the ground has already been broken. Everyone now knows what Peter Jackson's Middle Earth looks and feels like. The rest of the trilogy, while I'm sure it will be great and I can't wait to see it, just won't have the same power to overawe the viewer.
Unless the sequels strike off into new territory - better special effects, for example - they will be "just sequels". Which is fine by me... the source material is one huge book, and I want to eventually watch a 9-hour LOTR marathon and see it as one huge movie... but not so fine for continued Academy Awards.
Anyone up for some free karma? Explain what mechanism this uses. Is it a meta-front-end for the OWA front-end, or does it actually use MSRPC?
If the latter, what RPC implementation does it use? MSRPC is based on DCE/RPC, for which there is a free implementation on Sourceforge - I'm curious as to whether they're using that or something else.
I'll agree that it is annoying to have packages making assumptions about where they put boot scripts.
But Linux is about choice. There is more than one standard to choose from. Sounds to me like you are
trying to make cookie cutters.
Ummm, that's kind of the whole point of the LSB.
So they made decisions you disagreed with - perhaps you prefer BSD or (horrors) AIX init scripts over sysv ones. Get over it, or complain to the LSB people. A possible compromise - I heard the LSB was considering this, haven't heard further - is requiring Linux vendors to supply a program/script like Debian's/usr/sbin/update-rc.d, rather than having the app install its own init scripts directly. Debian uses this to support two init script schemes, seamlessly.
I've only been using Linux for a few month now, and it is an area I'm unsure about, how does package
management relate to software you compiled yourself?
Locally-compiled software can certainly take advantage of system facilities provided by packaged software, but the converse is not really true, unless you use RPM with its filename-based dependencies.
I don't see this as a problem - particularly with Debian. The vendor (well, volunteer squad) built packages that depend on each other, so if for example you have libreadline installed locally and you try to install a package that depends on libreadline, it will still fetch the one off http.us.debian.org or wherever.
A waste of space, getting two copies of libreadline? Well, really you shouldn't have compiled a local copy of it anyway. If you truly needed to customise the readline installation, you should have downloaded the source package (apt-get source libreadline), optionally edited the debian/changelog file to reflect whatever changes you'd made, compiled it into a binary package, and installed that. Then it would no longer really be considered "locally-installed" but "package-managed" software, and everything integrates as you expect, assuming you didn't break the package in the process (installing it under/usr/local, or something else that might violate the assumptions of dependent software).
Occasionally I hear how RPM is superior to Debian packaging, and one point of debate is that RPM supports "file dependencies", i.e. dependencies not on a specific package but on a specific file, which could be satisfied by any package providing the file, or you providing it by compiling something locally. I have yet to see much use for this, or any advantage over the Debian alternatives / virtual packages system. (Another advantage of RPMs is allowing simultaneous install of multiple versions, provided files don't clash. The Debian workaround is multiple package names like gcc-2.95 and gcc-3.0, and is arguably a kludge.)
If you're a systems administerator and don't
know how to package applications, you need to learn because you need it to do your job.
Good point, but it does create a lot of work if you need to be cross-platform. Sure, I've created one or two Debian packages, and I know where to look to see how to do an IRIX or AIX package, but if I wanted to roll out some software across all my Unices at once, it would take quite a bit of time to work up packaging scripts for all three (well, four, I'd need HP-UX as well).
My solution is: if the packaging scripts are already written (almost always true for Debian, and I think it's often true for RPM, if I cared about those), I use them to compile a custom binary package. Otherwise I usually just create binary tarballs, and document what I did (including configure options and patches, if any). Unless you have the luxury of a homogeneous Unix installation (my Linux boxes are all Debian, but I can't do that with various other Unix boxes), I figure that's the sanest way.
Isn't it nice that this kind of story came out just before the CBDTPA, SSSCA, whatever the hell it will
be called next is about to be voted on?
Anyone remember President Bush's State of the Union address in January 1992? Remember, he was in danger of doing badly in the upcoming election thanks to a cyclical downturn in the economy. He made a lot of points that night but most notably he was proposing to pour $8 billion more into the war on drugs.
To illustrate why this was needed, he produced a small amount of cocaine, which had been seized across the street from the White House not long before.
Rather a dramatic statement, but the news came out a few days later that some street punk had in fact been hired to sell that cocaine in that particular location, just for the State of the Union address.
Funny thing is that President Bush probably didn't need that coke sale after all. As I recall, one of the major criticisms from Sen. Daschle or whoever it was doing the "other party's response" that year was that spending $8 billion, while a good start, was not going far enough in the all-important War on Drugs.
This is the idea of Civil Disobediance put into words by Henry David Thoreau and so well put into action
by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. If you swamp the system with so many targets then the system will
fail. You can arrest hundreds or thousands, but you cannot arrest tens of thousands and millions of
people for performing a harmless action. It will bring your state to a grinding halt.
Please don't spit on the memories of those great men by glorifying copyright infringement as a sort of freedom fight. It is one thing to break the law to stand up for the principle that you or someone you care about is being denied his rights and human dignity. It is altogether different to break the law because you're a cheap, spoiled consumer who can't accept that when you want something but are unwilling to pay for it (or wait for the release, in some cases), you have to do without. This sort of "civil disobedience" has the same legitimacy as the LA riots after the Rodney King affair, or a little despot in a banana republic.
(not that I support this sort of copying -- this guy was obviously a parasite, trying to live off the
work of others)
Translation: "Please don't sue me."
Very funny. Actually kind of insulting. Are you really assuming that everyone shares your world-view that being an "unauthorised entertainment industry distributor" (shall we say) is morally justifiable?
Believe it or not, it is possible to support DeCSS, support free software, hate HR, JV and Sen. H (oh and the late Sonny Bono while we're at it), yet still come down strongly in support of prosecuting copyright violators. In fact, I'd venture to say a great number of free software contributors (as opposed to free software groupies, aka/.ers) would be in this category.
CSS is involved more if someone is copying a VHS tape to DVD, because they at least need to encode the
picture using CSS (a feature built in to DVD recorders).
No they don't. Unencrypted DVDs exist and work fine.
Copying a DVD to a DVD doesn't require any
knowledge of CSS at all: Just make a perfect bit-by-bit digital copy.
Not with consumer-level technology, for two reasons. First, consumer DVD burning tech is only at 4.7GB, giving you only half the capacity of a commercial dual-layer DVD. So most DVD releases won't fit, as they have more than a couple hours of footage (including extras). And if you are doing bit-for-bit without regard to what the bits mean, you can't just put half the bits on each of two discs - the result wouldn't play.
Second, and perhaps more to the point, blank DVDs cannot be CSS-encrypted - the space for your encryption keys (every CSS disc has them) is pre-zeroed and can't be overwritten.
Meaning, if you want to do proper DVD piracy, bit-for-bit, you'll need expensive pressing equipment and matching media. That's one reason Big Media hates DeCSS so much (at least it's the stated reason - we all know there are others).
If fair use also applied to the software industry, I could take a GPL'd piece of software, and use it
any way I wish. But it doesn't...
<suspicious look> Is this a troll, or just an honest (mis)understanding? As far as I know, fair use does apply to the software industry. And yes you can take a GPL'd piece of software and use it any way you wish. This is probably the most misunderstood / overlooked clause in the GPL:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of
running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program
is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the
Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Whether that is true depends on what the Program does. [Emphasis mine.]
Does that settle the matter? Copyright law treats use (or fair use) much differently from duplication, aka redistribution.
Don't be fooled by commercial EULAs, or "click-thru" licenses. They do not fall under copyright law at all - they fall under contract law, and as such, it is unknown if they are actually valid or enforceable, since you never actually signed them. Of course the software industry will say they are legal, but think about it - that's what they would say.
Actually, the GPL is also a contract, but note that in that case it doesn't matter if you sign it or not, since it adds to the rights you already have (fair use) by giving you certain rights of redistribution. If you disagree with it, you haven't lost anything - you just don't get those additional rights. By contrast most EULAs take away rights you should have - the right to use the software in any way you see fit, on as many computers (that you own) as you wish. So the question of whether you enter the contract or not is important in that case.
(Go ahead, mod me offtopic, you know you want to. (: )
Slashdot Mirror
Way off-topic rant ... please ignore if you prefer to read about The Post 9/11 Tech Boom, which thanks to lack of hyphen is grammatically equivalent to The 9/11 Tech Boom at Post Cereals...
The thing about AIDS - 99% of people who contract it are either ignorant or stupid. The other 1% are unlucky. It's almost completely preventable, in other words. So possibly the best thing that can be done is public AIDS education (not to be confused with AIDS awareness - what good does wearing a red ribbon do, honestly?), to combat ignorance. Stupidity you can't do all that much about - think of it as evolution by natural selection. To help the last 1% you have research, into cures and treatments and so forth. That research money so far has a very low ROI, since HIV demonstrated itself long ago to be very problematic for developing a classic virus vaccine.
Speaking of public AIDS education, I feel the job here in the US is basically done. Pretty much nobody these days is unaware of the major risk factors, just like nobody truly believes cigarettes aren't harmful. The only need for AIDS education here anymore is to kids too young to have heard it already - say 5th grade or so, no need to go older or younger. The same is not true in the third world - they could use a lot of AIDS education. (No, I'm not blowing smoke, I've BTDT.) Presumably that's what you're referring to.
Anyway, back to my off-topic point. So why does so much AIDS charity money (and that's a big industry - don't let anyone tell you "we don't spend enough on AIDS") go to biotech research, as opposed to epidemiological measures such as partner notification and testing - tried-and-true preventative measures?
Here's why: because officially, AIDS isn't an epidemic, it's a political statement. The gay lobby (among others) has fought very hard to make sure AIDS is not treated the same as any other disease - and that means health care professionals can't legally take the kinds of measures they would with, say, a hepatitis epidemic. Because that would "violate the privacy" of people with HIV, which is somehow different from violating the privacy of people with the hepatitis-B virus, or anthrax bacteria. What, is this because AIDS is an STD? Humbug - so is hepatitis.
The result, according to one study (sorry, don't have the cite at work, it's in a magazine at home from 4 or 5 years ago), is that since the health sector is not allowed to treat AIDS like the epidemic you and I probably thought it was, HIV has been allowed to spread to an estimated 100,000 people more than it would otherwise have done.
Of course, it's best not to try to explain this to Hollywood, or the gay lobby, or other AIDS activists. As the article pointed out (I'll get a cite and quote some passages if anyone wants - just email, or reply here), they don't like to hear this sort of thing. Then again, the article continues, you wouldn't like it either - being told that by through everything you believe in and by all the hard work you have done, you have helped to kill 100,000 people.
Ummm, not to disagree with your thesis, but didn't the "European conflicts during the middle ages" last for pretty much the whole middle ages? You kind of lose perspective on how "fast" things advance when they have the space of a Hundred Years' War, as opposed to six years of WWII.
Maybe after the next Star Wars movie comes out, and it turns out not to suck as bad as the last one did, JonKatz will realise that Lucas has forever changed our viewpoint on the suckiness of Star Wars prequel and then suddenly everything will have a "post-Episode II" angle.
<grin> Yeah, if you can find any 128-bit RSA keys you want to crack. When I first used PGP v2.x back in 1994 or so, the key lengths you could generate were 512, 768 (recommended for ordinary folk) and 1024 ("military-grade"). Not sure if PGP has ever supported or recommended a mere 128-bit private key....
You mean like 56-bit DES? Or 168-bit Rijndael? Or 768-bit RSA?
I think it is just people being geeky. Working with bytes in groups of 8 or 16 is often useful - blocks larger than that don't seem to figure all that much into crypto algorithms.
(IANAC.)
As opposed to what? Do you have a better public key system in mind? RSA is efficient and well-understood. AFAIK, it has no serious competition (ok there's DSA but it's horribly slow in comparison).
Yah, you do that. Or just add another 32 bits to the key. If it takes someone 1 minute to crack a 1024-bit key, it will take him a couple hundred years to crack a 1066-bit key.
The US government sets limits on key length? What limits, and why have I never heard of them?
Says who? Says Microsoft. I say I am not agreeing to the contract, but simply using copyrighted material in a fair-use manner. What gives Microsoft the right to determine what action I need to take to agree to a contract?
Why can't the author of a book print an EULA on the shrinkwrap of the book saying you agree to burn the book after 1 year unless you purchase an extended license to "own" it for more than a year? Similar gimmicks were long ago ruled invalid by the courts, when they established first sale doctrine.
You can't make someone agree to a contract by saying that they are agreeing to a contract. That should be self-evident.
P.S. By reading this message you agree to pay me $200 in legal consulting fees, even though IANAL. If you choose not to accept this, you must immediately forget what I just said and contact your ISP for a refund of bandwidth charges.
Nope, it isn't. Copying from the CD-ROM to the hard drive is an essential step in running xxx software on my second computer - yet the EULA only allows me to install it on one computer. Conflict. This is a simple example of a situation where copyright law gives me certain rights and an EULA, under guise of allowing me to use what I've already bought and paid for, tries to take away some of these rights (in this case, right to use on as many of my own computers as I wish).
I didn't purchase a license - I purchased software. They consider it a copyrighted work - doesn't that mean that when I buy it I get to use it according to copyright law? What if I refuse to agree to the EULA - why should I have to return the software for a refund? Why can't I just use it however copyright law says I can?
Care to point out the EULA-like clauses in the GPL? I must have missed them. It seems to me that the GPL is quite the opposite of what one normally thinks of as an EULA. It grants you additional rights you didn't already have under copyright law - specifically, creating and distributing derived works. Most EULAs only purport to take away rights you have under copyright law - the right to use the software in your own home in any way you see fit, most commonly.
Actually, if you want to play it that way, any code contributed by those under-18 to the linux kernel cannot be redistributed at all. Remember, absent a specific license - copyright law states that you can use your copy for anything you want, but cannot redistribute it unless you are the copyright holder. So if you assume a minor can't give you permission to redistribute his work - then you can't redistribute it - free or otherwise.
Why exactly is it (arguably) a good idea? It sounds like Apple just doesn't want him spilling information he gets via NDA. Which just begs the question: why does he need to sign an NDA at all?
He shouldn't need any non-public information. After all, any use he puts the information to will be open-source, i.e. publicly available. How can you produce open-source code using information you aren't allowed to leak, without leaking it?
(Actually the NDA thing is probably meaningless anyway. I did some contract work for Linuxcare back in the day, and they had me sign an NDA, but I never saw, nor expected to ever see, any Linuxcare proprietary information. To this day I'm not sure why they thought they needed me to sign it.)
I doubt that. PDF is pretty much a write-only format, a bit like saving your document in JPEG format (well, not that bad - at least PDF is vector- and font-based). To import a PDF into a word processor would require pretty much reconstructing the formatting from screen position, just like modern OCR software does after it picks up individual characters.
Of course, it would be possible to embed StarOffice-specific markup into the PDF file, which would be ignored by other PDF viewers but used to reconstruct the original document when read back into StarOffice ... but what would be the point? Then you could read in PDF files, but only if they were produced by StarOffice ... in which case why not just use RTF or whatever to begin with?
Oh, like Debian? 8672 packages and counting - built from 6252 source packages. This is the 'woody' distribution, currently in a sort of beta (the 'unstable' distribution is not nearly so small).
The contents of CD #1 are determined by a popularity contest. You can voluntarily install the package 'popularity-contest', and it sets up a cron job to run once a week, check your list of installed packages and access timestamps, and email an address at debian.org with stats on what you have and how recently you have used it. The stats are collated anonymously and thus the CD distribution order is determined.
Result: you can get a quite useful install with only CD 1 available (if you get the non-US ISO, of course, which has ssh).
Hear hear! It's not like the plot calls for winged Nazgûl dive-bombing Isengard.
Well, my guess is that Two Towers won't be as impressive as Fellowship, because the ground has already been broken. Everyone now knows what Peter Jackson's Middle Earth looks and feels like. The rest of the trilogy, while I'm sure it will be great and I can't wait to see it, just won't have the same power to overawe the viewer.
Unless the sequels strike off into new territory - better special effects, for example - they will be "just sequels". Which is fine by me ... the source material is one huge book, and I want to eventually watch a 9-hour LOTR marathon and see it as one huge movie ... but not so fine for continued Academy Awards.
Anyone up for some free karma? Explain what mechanism this uses. Is it a meta-front-end for the OWA front-end, or does it actually use MSRPC?
If the latter, what RPC implementation does it use? MSRPC is based on DCE/RPC, for which there is a free implementation on Sourceforge - I'm curious as to whether they're using that or something else.
Ummm, that's kind of the whole point of the LSB.
So they made decisions you disagreed with - perhaps you prefer BSD or (horrors) AIX init scripts over sysv ones. Get over it, or complain to the LSB people. A possible compromise - I heard the LSB was considering this, haven't heard further - is requiring Linux vendors to supply a program/script like Debian's /usr/sbin/update-rc.d, rather than having the app install its own init scripts directly. Debian uses this to support two init script schemes, seamlessly.
Locally-compiled software can certainly take advantage of system facilities provided by packaged software, but the converse is not really true, unless you use RPM with its filename-based dependencies.
I don't see this as a problem - particularly with Debian. The vendor (well, volunteer squad) built packages that depend on each other, so if for example you have libreadline installed locally and you try to install a package that depends on libreadline, it will still fetch the one off http.us.debian.org or wherever.
A waste of space, getting two copies of libreadline? Well, really you shouldn't have compiled a local copy of it anyway. If you truly needed to customise the readline installation, you should have downloaded the source package (apt-get source libreadline), optionally edited the debian/changelog file to reflect whatever changes you'd made, compiled it into a binary package, and installed that. Then it would no longer really be considered "locally-installed" but "package-managed" software, and everything integrates as you expect, assuming you didn't break the package in the process (installing it under /usr/local, or something else that might violate the assumptions of dependent software).
Occasionally I hear how RPM is superior to Debian packaging, and one point of debate is that RPM supports "file dependencies", i.e. dependencies not on a specific package but on a specific file, which could be satisfied by any package providing the file, or you providing it by compiling something locally. I have yet to see much use for this, or any advantage over the Debian alternatives / virtual packages system. (Another advantage of RPMs is allowing simultaneous install of multiple versions, provided files don't clash. The Debian workaround is multiple package names like gcc-2.95 and gcc-3.0, and is arguably a kludge.)
Good point, but it does create a lot of work if you need to be cross-platform. Sure, I've created one or two Debian packages, and I know where to look to see how to do an IRIX or AIX package, but if I wanted to roll out some software across all my Unices at once, it would take quite a bit of time to work up packaging scripts for all three (well, four, I'd need HP-UX as well).
My solution is: if the packaging scripts are already written (almost always true for Debian, and I think it's often true for RPM, if I cared about those), I use them to compile a custom binary package. Otherwise I usually just create binary tarballs, and document what I did (including configure options and patches, if any). Unless you have the luxury of a homogeneous Unix installation (my Linux boxes are all Debian, but I can't do that with various other Unix boxes), I figure that's the sanest way.
Anyone remember President Bush's State of the Union address in January 1992? Remember, he was in danger of doing badly in the upcoming election thanks to a cyclical downturn in the economy. He made a lot of points that night but most notably he was proposing to pour $8 billion more into the war on drugs.
To illustrate why this was needed, he produced a small amount of cocaine, which had been seized across the street from the White House not long before.
Rather a dramatic statement, but the news came out a few days later that some street punk had in fact been hired to sell that cocaine in that particular location, just for the State of the Union address.
Funny thing is that President Bush probably didn't need that coke sale after all. As I recall, one of the major criticisms from Sen. Daschle or whoever it was doing the "other party's response" that year was that spending $8 billion, while a good start, was not going far enough in the all-important War on Drugs.
Please don't spit on the memories of those great men by glorifying copyright infringement as a sort of freedom fight. It is one thing to break the law to stand up for the principle that you or someone you care about is being denied his rights and human dignity. It is altogether different to break the law because you're a cheap, spoiled consumer who can't accept that when you want something but are unwilling to pay for it (or wait for the release, in some cases), you have to do without. This sort of "civil disobedience" has the same legitimacy as the LA riots after the Rodney King affair, or a little despot in a banana republic.
Very funny. Actually kind of insulting. Are you really assuming that everyone shares your world-view that being an "unauthorised entertainment industry distributor" (shall we say) is morally justifiable?
Believe it or not, it is possible to support DeCSS, support free software, hate HR, JV and Sen. H (oh and the late Sonny Bono while we're at it), yet still come down strongly in support of prosecuting copyright violators. In fact, I'd venture to say a great number of free software contributors (as opposed to free software groupies, aka /.ers) would be in this category.
No they don't. Unencrypted DVDs exist and work fine.
Not with consumer-level technology, for two reasons. First, consumer DVD burning tech is only at 4.7GB, giving you only half the capacity of a commercial dual-layer DVD. So most DVD releases won't fit, as they have more than a couple hours of footage (including extras). And if you are doing bit-for-bit without regard to what the bits mean, you can't just put half the bits on each of two discs - the result wouldn't play.
Second, and perhaps more to the point, blank DVDs cannot be CSS-encrypted - the space for your encryption keys (every CSS disc has them) is pre-zeroed and can't be overwritten.
Meaning, if you want to do proper DVD piracy, bit-for-bit, you'll need expensive pressing equipment and matching media. That's one reason Big Media hates DeCSS so much (at least it's the stated reason - we all know there are others).
Somewhat OT...
<suspicious look> Is this a troll, or just an honest (mis)understanding? As far as I know, fair use does apply to the software industry. And yes you can take a GPL'd piece of software and use it any way you wish. This is probably the most misunderstood / overlooked clause in the GPL:
Does that settle the matter? Copyright law treats use (or fair use) much differently from duplication, aka redistribution.
Don't be fooled by commercial EULAs, or "click-thru" licenses. They do not fall under copyright law at all - they fall under contract law, and as such, it is unknown if they are actually valid or enforceable, since you never actually signed them. Of course the software industry will say they are legal, but think about it - that's what they would say.
Actually, the GPL is also a contract, but note that in that case it doesn't matter if you sign it or not, since it adds to the rights you already have (fair use) by giving you certain rights of redistribution. If you disagree with it, you haven't lost anything - you just don't get those additional rights. By contrast most EULAs take away rights you should have - the right to use the software in any way you see fit, on as many computers (that you own) as you wish. So the question of whether you enter the contract or not is important in that case.
(Go ahead, mod me offtopic, you know you want to. (: )