IANAL, but...When you purchase software, you give the vendor money and they give you software. There's an exchange, and usually a contract (express [EULA] and implied). It is forseeable that laws could enforce certain warranties with software purchased under contract.
But with free software, there is no contract because there is no consideration (money) on the part of the user (you could argue that this nullifies things like the GPL, but that's another story). So, it would be impossible to claim damages for something when you never entered in to any contract. FOSS would be immune to liability laws.
Blocking egress port 25 ought to be standard for all residential ISPs. There is no reason for a consumer level access user to need to run their own mailserver, and in fact almost none do (on purpose).
I disagree. Though it's technically against the contract, my ISP generally looks the other way while I run my own mail server. As long as I keep it secure I don't see what the problem is. And ya know what -- I NEVER get spam. In fact, if everyone ran his or her own mailserver it'd make it a lot harder for spammers. Instead of being able to send 4 billions messages a day to Hotmail and Yahoo they'd have to targer each individual SMTP server.
Just don't buy what you don't agree to. The problem is, most people (and businesses) never fully follow these license agreements. How many companies only keep ONE archival backup of their purchased software like the license demands? I would love to see Microsoft and the BSA really try to tighten things down because then people might look for alternatives. It's a free market economy (in America). High-priced, restrictive software might not be so popular if people actually had to PAY for and agree to ALL license terms.
I'm not at all familiar with the real-life speeds 802.11g can currently provide, but maybe the new spec, while theoretically slower, will have other benefits. Maybe it'll be more reliable and more consistent. Maybe in everyday use it really will be faster. Seriously, does anyone really see 54Mbps curently?
Well, I have no idea if you're right, but I'm certainly impressed by the reasoning and justification of your response. Thanks for the grammar lesson.
I think modern English grammar rules have relaxed a lot in recent years (decades?) and so it's doubtful anyone would ever catch this type of error on a resume or whatever. But I still like to know what is "technically" correct.
From what I understand, ReiserFS 4 is supposed to have a SQL-like implementation of its filesystem. Would it bring Longhorn/BeOS functionality to Linux?
I know what you mean. Actually, my gandmother said the other day she was about to visit a web page but she didn't feel it was "secure" and decided to browse elsewhere.
This isn't unrealistic with P2P
on
The Virus Did It
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've seen a lot of jokes about Kaaza and other P2P networks doing this automatically, modded as funny. However, I think there's more to it than that. At least with eDonkey2000, I see files appear in my download section that aren't mine. I'm not all that clear on how it works but I think it's part of the caching mechanism to help your "peers" with their downloads as they do for you.
Anyway, with P2P getting more sophisticated, efficient and private, I can easily see this happening a lot. Of course, I don't think anyone should be guilty in cases like these. Apparently, neither do the British courts.
You're right, and I should have been more clear. I didn't mean to single out GUI applications. And certain code can always have efficiency problems. I was speaking more from an architecture standpoint. The Registry itself represents a fundamental difference in the way programs are supposed to run, which I think gives them a percieved performance boost.
People are constantly griping about how Mac OSX is slow (as well as with KDE and Gnome for Linux) compared to Windows. And they're right. Windows is faster for a lot of GUI applications -- but there's a reason for the difference.
The biggest thing that helps Windows' speed is the registry. It's basically a database and so it's faster in searching for settings and library links. However, there are two big problems with the registry that in my opinion do not offset its speed advantage. First, the registry slows down a lot as it grows and software is installed and removed. After a certain size, the registry actually makes things slower. Second, anyone who's used Regclean knows that it is almost NEVER in a clean state and eventually program installations get corrupted, "cruft factor" sets in, and people concede it's time to reinstall. You don't have this problem in OSX.
I know this has been said before, but it seems almost everyday Windows become more Unix-like (cleaner, faster, more stable, better) while Linux becomes more Windows-like (less stable, slower, more bloated and less stable [why is is that the 2.2 kernels are generally considered more stable than the 2.4 series?]). With current predictions showing PDAs are going to overtake desktops in the next few years, the Linux community has to concede the desktop market to Microsoft and move on. Servers are is where Linux/Unix strength is. It just always seems to me Linux is playing catchup to Microsoft on the desktop while MS is learnig from their mistakes and trying to move forward.
This will not "reduce the spam." That's like saying copy-protection mechanisms will stop piracy. Or that it's possible to make the Internet completely secure. New protocols will take longer to develop than will crackers' methods of exploiting them.
I emailed webmaster@aol.com about this last week and whoever responded didn't have a clue. She said there was a problem with mailing more than 10 people at a time and that the issue should be fixed soon. What does that have to do with having a dynamic IP? I even pasted the exact 550 bounce message and she responded as if she'd never seen it before. I can't believe they didn't announce this, but I'm even more surprised they didn't even tell their own tech support!
Well, I don't know your whole situation, but I'd guess this is a matter of not using the right settings for mplayer. There are 4 million options and they can get confusing as hell, but with all that means the ability to really optimize everything. You may need to use some weird combination of switches and play around with it a little but I'm sure it can be made to be as efficient as xine.
Yes, but couldn't support for all known codecs be compiled in without the codecs themselves? Obviously, certain files wouldn't play until the actual codecs were installed but it would save the hassle of having to recompile all the time.
This would also eliminated the need for compile-time switches and auto-detects as everything would be "turned on" by default. Who cares if the resulting binary is twice as large.
I've tried Knoppix and it's great -- but I was wondering if anyone knew if it's possible to unmount the cd after boot. It's be nice to be able to insert a music or data cd while Knoppix is running but I don't know if that's possible since the Knoppix CD itself needs to stay mounted.
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But with free software, there is no contract because there is no consideration (money) on the part of the user (you could argue that this nullifies things like the GPL, but that's another story). So, it would be impossible to claim damages for something when you never entered in to any contract. FOSS would be immune to liability laws.
Not to be confused with earrings, ornaments for your ear, I can see how someone might be selling "earings" on Ebay:
earing : n. Nautical. A short line attaching an upper corner of a sail to the yard.
I disagree. Though it's technically against the contract, my ISP generally looks the other way while I run my own mail server. As long as I keep it secure I don't see what the problem is. And ya know what -- I NEVER get spam. In fact, if everyone ran his or her own mailserver it'd make it a lot harder for spammers. Instead of being able to send 4 billions messages a day to Hotmail and Yahoo they'd have to targer each individual SMTP server.
Just don't buy what you don't agree to. The problem is, most people (and businesses) never fully follow these license agreements. How many companies only keep ONE archival backup of their purchased software like the license demands? I would love to see Microsoft and the BSA really try to tighten things down because then people might look for alternatives. It's a free market economy (in America). High-priced, restrictive software might not be so popular if people actually had to PAY for and agree to ALL license terms.
I'm not at all familiar with the real-life speeds 802.11g can currently provide, but maybe the new spec, while theoretically slower, will have other benefits. Maybe it'll be more reliable and more consistent. Maybe in everyday use it really will be faster. Seriously, does anyone really see 54Mbps curently?
I think modern English grammar rules have relaxed a lot in recent years (decades?) and so it's doubtful anyone would ever catch this type of error on a resume or whatever. But I still like to know what is "technically" correct.
On the other hand, I'm no grammar expert, so this post is more of a question than an assertion.
And the first thing a monkey will type....
A Unix command.
From what I understand, ReiserFS 4 is supposed to have a SQL-like implementation of its filesystem. Would it bring Longhorn/BeOS functionality to Linux?
I know what you mean. Actually, my gandmother said the other day she was about to visit a web page but she didn't feel it was "secure" and decided to browse elsewhere.
Anyway, with P2P getting more sophisticated, efficient and private, I can easily see this happening a lot. Of course, I don't think anyone should be guilty in cases like these. Apparently, neither do the British courts.
You're right, and I should have been more clear. I didn't mean to single out GUI applications. And certain code can always have efficiency problems. I was speaking more from an architecture standpoint. The Registry itself represents a fundamental difference in the way programs are supposed to run, which I think gives them a percieved performance boost.
Sorry, you're right. I shouldn't have singled out GUI applications. It's just that that's what most people seem to complain about.
The biggest thing that helps Windows' speed is the registry. It's basically a database and so it's faster in searching for settings and library links. However, there are two big problems with the registry that in my opinion do not offset its speed advantage. First, the registry slows down a lot as it grows and software is installed and removed. After a certain size, the registry actually makes things slower. Second, anyone who's used Regclean knows that it is almost NEVER in a clean state and eventually program installations get corrupted, "cruft factor" sets in, and people concede it's time to reinstall. You don't have this problem in OSX.
I know this has been said before, but it seems almost everyday Windows become more Unix-like (cleaner, faster, more stable, better) while Linux becomes more Windows-like (less stable, slower, more bloated and less stable [why is is that the 2.2 kernels are generally considered more stable than the 2.4 series?]). With current predictions showing PDAs are going to overtake desktops in the next few years, the Linux community has to concede the desktop market to Microsoft and move on. Servers are is where Linux/Unix strength is. It just always seems to me Linux is playing catchup to Microsoft on the desktop while MS is learnig from their mistakes and trying to move forward.
This will not "reduce the spam." That's like saying copy-protection mechanisms will stop piracy. Or that it's possible to make the Internet completely secure. New protocols will take longer to develop than will crackers' methods of exploiting them.
I emailed webmaster@aol.com about this last week and whoever responded didn't have a clue. She said there was a problem with mailing more than 10 people at a time and that the issue should be fixed soon. What does that have to do with having a dynamic IP? I even pasted the exact 550 bounce message and she responded as if she'd never seen it before. I can't believe they didn't announce this, but I'm even more surprised they didn't even tell their own tech support!
It refers to preemptable work on BSD, but here is a good general description of kernel preemption.
Well, I don't know your whole situation, but I'd guess this is a matter of not using the right settings for mplayer. There are 4 million options and they can get confusing as hell, but with all that means the ability to really optimize everything. You may need to use some weird combination of switches and play around with it a little but I'm sure it can be made to be as efficient as xine.
Yes, but couldn't support for all known codecs be compiled in without the codecs themselves? Obviously, certain files wouldn't play until the actual codecs were installed but it would save the hassle of having to recompile all the time. This would also eliminated the need for compile-time switches and auto-detects as everything would be "turned on" by default. Who cares if the resulting binary is twice as large.
Anyone know if this is a repost? I think I remember hearing about this before.
You could build your own
I've tried Knoppix and it's great -- but I was wondering if anyone knew if it's possible to unmount the cd after boot. It's be nice to be able to insert a music or data cd while Knoppix is running but I don't know if that's possible since the Knoppix CD itself needs to stay mounted.