How many jobs have been destroyed or under pressure because people are willing to give away their software for nothing?
I don't know. I suppose there is pressure at the commercial unix companies and companies that produce(d) things like web servers and web browsers which now compete with linux, apache and mozilla and the like.
But I would think that there are more jobs in consulting, systems administration and programming for someone's specific need (or the need of a vertical market) than there are at companies that make the above things.
You don't know what you're talking about. The existance of free software has expanded the industry. I'm in the consulting field, and I am freqently setting up small linux machines to do small, miscellaneous and other complicated, highly customized projects for my clients. These projects wouldn't have been possible without free software. It would have either been too expensive or simply impossible because of the closed nature of the software.
That's a common misconception. Intruders can get in by manipulating anything that goes into your system regardless of who initiated the connection. For instance, it is common that windows machines are exploited through holes in web browsers and email clients, not services that are listening for connections.
There are literally years that pass between each update of Debian.
That's why I use it. I don't have to drive out to my servers and shut them down and do a distro upgrade (which inevitably screws a hundred things up) every 6 months because security updates won't be available soon.
Secondly, its a pain in the goatse to set up, first of all, you are forced to use Kernel 2.2
Don't know what you're talking about. I use 2.4 on all my debian systems. In fact, the installer CD I used (for XFS) is 2.4.
which is horribly hacked with "backports" to get any use on any modern machine (Read, made after 1999).
I installed a new debian system on a pentium III last week. No backports.
Configuring XFree86 is hell! If you don't have a Thick X11 orilley book, and a list of your horizontal sync values from your monitor's intruction manual (if you even have one), BOOM! There goes your monitor.
Wrong. No monitor made since like 1990 will blow up if you screw up the sync vals.
Apt-get has many flaws. First of all it uses a non standard package format (the rest of the world uses RPM, deprecate the DEB format!),
"rest of the world" uses rpm? Who the hell are you talking about?
has broken respetories,
Never had a problem with the repositories.
and out of date software to install.
Then run testing or unstable. The "out of date software" you find in stable is, well, stable.
All this combined with the kludgey dselect user interface make package management a nightmare.
Then don't use dselect, bonehead. Use tasksel or apt-get . Done.
Not really.. it must be primarily a circumvention device, something a software DVD player can hardly be considered.
In other words, it does the exact same thing any OTHER DVD player does... the same way, so if it's circumvention device, so is any other dvd player.
They will consider an open source software dvd player a circumvention device. Its already been tried. Look for the slashdot stories about the livid project being shut down in October-November 1999.
The issue is that whatever CSS key the open source player uses to decrypt the DVD is out in the open with open source software. That is how the whole thing got started. Someone reverse engineered a CSS key out of the Xing DVD player software (a DVD-CCA licensed closed source program). See this for more info.
The original issue was the publishing of the DeCSS code.
I still thik if the original publishing of the code had been in the form of a fully working player, there would have been no case in the first place.
I had the livid sources on my site, and documents about the CSS format. The lawyers wanted it all down.
EM is a very capable tool, and has made plenty of DB administrators out of people who really aren't very adept with the SQL langauge itself
There's no such thing as a DBA that isn't very adept with the SQL language. If you don't know SQL then you're just tinkering around and calling a consultant when something real needs to get done.
Probably not. CSS may not be a trade secret any longer, but there's also the problem that under the DMCA any open source DVD player could be considered a circumvention device and thus illegal.
The DVD CCA and motion picture studios were separately suing (or threatening to sue) people over both issues: the trade secret and the redistribution of a circumvention device. I got a C&D letter about the later myself. 2600 magazine was sued on grounds of the later also. Unfortunately 2600 lost, and they lost on appeal too. But no circumvention case has gone to the supreme court yet.
IPv6 won't catch on until firewall software is updated to interoperate with it unfortunately.
Most firewall software already does work with it. It is supported by linux, all the BSDs, Solaris, Win2k+, OS X. All the major router manufaturers support it. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head are those $50 disposable broadband routers that you get at consumer electronics places...
Media conglomerates think that software which manages their rights is called Digital Rights Management software, but software that manages our rights is called theft tools or the like.
I wouldn't be opposed to calling it Digital Rights Management as long as all software which helps people manage their rights is called Digital Rights Management software. DeCSS, for example, is Digital Rights Management software. It helps owners of DVDs manage their digital rights (rights to their private property, fair use rights, etc...).
It makes just as much sense to call CSS a theft tool as it does to call DeCSS digital rights management software.
Java is in effect a way to shop a program with source code. The GPL does in no way force people to leave any comments in or leave the identifier names meaningful. So, shipping Java bytecode is technically the same as shipping the source code [...] The important point is that the GPL says the source code must be shipped, so it's OK to run the decompiler [...].
You say they stripped information. That's not a GPL violation.
It works the other way too. Makes it much harder for a company to screw you. Say you need to work late. They decide they don't want to pay you for that time to try to claim you weren't there. Hard for them to say if there is a palm scan record of you leaving. Much easier to say if there is no record, or just a punch card.
Why would it be any harder for them to screw you? They control the system, they can make it say whatever the hell they want.
They don't have to exchange keys before hand if they use Diffie-Hellman, and all the monitoring in the world won't help unless they have enormous computational power.
Diffie Hellman doesn't help you prove the identity of the person you generated the key with and now have the secure channel with.
You still have to exchange public keys through some trusted channel.
The linked article says that this was an intermediate certificate that expired. Only the top level certs are stored in the web browser. Or does IE store or cache these intermediate ones or something?
It would make sense if it only hung while connecting to an ssl web site whose cert's trust path contains the expired intermediate cert....
Sounds like my experience. I've said in the past, there are only two types of bosses in the world, those that won't learn from their mistakes and those that don't learn from anything but mistakes.
I think you need some procmail rules to prevent your boss's stupidity from costing you time.
Slashdot Mirror
How many jobs have been destroyed or under pressure because people are willing to give away their software for nothing?
I don't know. I suppose there is pressure at the commercial unix companies and companies that produce(d) things like web servers and web browsers which now compete with linux, apache and mozilla and the like.
But I would think that there are more jobs in consulting, systems administration and programming for someone's specific need (or the need of a vertical market) than there are at companies that make the above things.
Bingo. Can't compete with free!
You don't know what you're talking about. The existance of free software has expanded the industry. I'm in the consulting field, and I am freqently setting up small linux machines to do small, miscellaneous and other complicated, highly customized projects for my clients. These projects wouldn't have been possible without free software. It would have either been too expensive or simply impossible because of the closed nature of the software.
If nobody's listening, you ain't getting in.
That's a common misconception. Intruders can get in by manipulating anything that goes into your system regardless of who initiated the connection. For instance, it is common that windows machines are exploited through holes in web browsers and email clients, not services that are listening for connections.
each DOCSIS cable modem gets its own set of frequencies to download on
Upstream bandwidth is shared, there is only a total of 11Mbps upstream for everyone on your segment.
Why don't they put everyone's upstream on separate frequencies just like the downstream?
There are literally years that pass between each update of Debian.
That's why I use it. I don't have to drive out to my servers and shut them down and do a distro upgrade (which inevitably screws a hundred things up) every 6 months because security updates won't be available soon.
Secondly, its a pain in the goatse to set up, first of all, you are forced to use Kernel 2.2
Don't know what you're talking about. I use 2.4 on all my debian systems. In fact, the installer CD I used (for XFS) is 2.4.
which is horribly hacked with "backports" to get any use on any modern machine (Read, made after 1999).
I installed a new debian system on a pentium III last week. No backports.
Configuring XFree86 is hell! If you don't have a Thick X11 orilley book, and a list of your horizontal sync values from your monitor's intruction manual (if you even have one), BOOM! There goes your monitor.
Wrong. No monitor made since like 1990 will blow up if you screw up the sync vals.
Apt-get has many flaws. First of all it uses a non standard package format (the rest of the world uses RPM, deprecate the DEB format!),
"rest of the world" uses rpm? Who the hell are you talking about?
has broken respetories,
Never had a problem with the repositories.
and out of date software to install.
Then run testing or unstable. The "out of date software" you find in stable is, well, stable.
All this combined with the kludgey dselect user interface make package management a nightmare.
Then don't use dselect, bonehead. Use tasksel or apt-get . Done.
I assume this is all MiniPCI and you have a thinkpad?
Yeah that is true nowadays. Although that definitely violates the DMCA.
Not really.. it must be primarily a circumvention device, something a software DVD player can hardly be considered.
In other words, it does the exact same thing any OTHER DVD player does... the same way, so if it's circumvention device, so is any other dvd player.
They will consider an open source software dvd player a circumvention device. Its already been tried. Look for the slashdot stories about the livid project being shut down in October-November 1999.
The issue is that whatever CSS key the open source player uses to decrypt the DVD is out in the open with open source software. That is how the whole thing got started. Someone reverse engineered a CSS key out of the Xing DVD player software (a DVD-CCA licensed closed source program). See this for more info.
The original issue was the publishing of the DeCSS code.
I still thik if the original publishing of the code had been in the form of a fully working player, there would have been no case in the first place.
I had the livid sources on my site, and documents about the CSS format. The lawyers wanted it all down.
EM is a very capable tool, and has made plenty of DB administrators out of people who really aren't very adept with the SQL langauge itself
There's no such thing as a DBA that isn't very adept with the SQL language. If you don't know SQL then you're just tinkering around and calling a consultant when something real needs to get done.
Probably not. CSS may not be a trade secret any longer, but there's also the problem that under the DMCA any open source DVD player could be considered a circumvention device and thus illegal.
The DVD CCA and motion picture studios were separately suing (or threatening to sue) people over both issues: the trade secret and the redistribution of a circumvention device. I got a C&D letter about the later myself. 2600 magazine was sued on grounds of the later also. Unfortunately 2600 lost, and they lost on appeal too. But no circumvention case has gone to the supreme court yet.
IPv6 won't catch on until firewall software is updated to interoperate with it unfortunately.
Most firewall software already does work with it. It is supported by linux, all the BSDs, Solaris, Win2k+, OS X. All the major router manufaturers support it. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head are those $50 disposable broadband routers that you get at consumer electronics places...
Media conglomerates think that software which manages their rights is called Digital Rights Management software, but software that manages our rights is called theft tools or the like.
I wouldn't be opposed to calling it Digital Rights Management as long as all software which helps people manage their rights is called Digital Rights Management software. DeCSS, for example, is Digital Rights Management software. It helps owners of DVDs manage their digital rights (rights to their private property, fair use rights, etc...).
It makes just as much sense to call CSS a theft tool as it does to call DeCSS digital rights management software.
I said distributing Java bytecode is like distributing the source code.
I did not say it is enough to satisfy the GPL requirements.
Yes you did.
From your post:
What kind of music does aphex twin do?
Are you high?
XFS (and posix acls) have much finer grained permissions than rwx.
It works the other way too. Makes it much harder for a company to screw you. Say you need to work late. They decide they don't want to pay you for that time to try to claim you weren't there. Hard for them to say if there is a palm scan record of you leaving. Much easier to say if there is no record, or just a punch card.
Why would it be any harder for them to screw you? They control the system, they can make it say whatever the hell they want.
What is the make/model of the card you put in?
NAT doesn't protect computers, firewalls do. The two are commonly used together, but they are not the same.
They don't have to exchange keys before hand if they use Diffie-Hellman, and all the monitoring in the world won't help unless they have enormous computational power.
Diffie Hellman doesn't help you prove the identity of the person you generated the key with and now have the secure channel with.
You still have to exchange public keys through some trusted channel.
The linked article says that this was an intermediate certificate that expired. Only the top level certs are stored in the web browser. Or does IE store or cache these intermediate ones or something?
It would make sense if it only hung while connecting to an ssl web site whose cert's trust path contains the expired intermediate cert....
I dealt with a few user complaints about their IE complaining about not being able to contact the CRL server.
If the certificate is expired, why is IE trying to look it up in the CRL? If it is expired, it is expired... how is the revocation list relevant?
Sounds like my experience. I've said in the past, there are only two types of bosses in the world, those that won't learn from their mistakes and those that don't learn from anything but mistakes.
I think you need some procmail rules to prevent your boss's stupidity from costing you time.
Either way, I frown upon this sort of piracy
What sort of piracy? I didn't see anything in your comment that described piracy.
Neither piracy nor copyright infringement for that matter.
So things like theft, murder, assault, speeding, etc
Well, think of actual theft, murder and assault as restrictions our well being.
As for speeding, yes that is an unreasonable constraint.
I think you need to get a web browser that doesn't do such stupid things.