If a product is closed source and proprietary, then that should be all you need to know about it.
The company for which I work already uses VoIP, but we wouldn't touch Skype with a barge pole. It's our policy that we avoid closed-source software as far as possible, even if that means having to do stuff by hand. We use asterisk for an exchange, together with Zultys hardware IP phones, using SIP. We just have an ISDN-30 line (E1) connected with the appropriate hardware interface card (by Digium) to the asterisk server. The card is multi-span, just in case 30 lines turns out not to be enough. The server is a dual Xeon 2.8, which might be slightly overkill for Asterisk; but it's also running our office software (we pretty much were using LAMP applications before the name was coined) and the E1 card needed a 3V3 PCI slot which is only found on expensive mobos. (There is now a 5V version available..... d'oh!)
We paid money for the hardware, and we paid in blood, sweat and tears for the software; but nobody can ever take away what we learned.
"Old-fashioned" gift vouchers worked. You know..... a little slip of paper with some fancy printing, like a special banknote only redeemable in certain stores, which you buy at the till and place in a birthday card. What was ever wrong with them anyway?
CCTV cameras are not used against terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles. They are mostly used to catch people peeing in the street (locking up public toilets is always a good way for a council to raise some revenue), rolling joints, and other petty things. In my experience CCTV cameras have not reduced littering; camera-equipped streets are just as full of crap as everywhere else.
CCTV cameras do not reduce crime, they merely displace it. Once the locations of CCTV cameras become known, criminals simply avoid them and commit crimes elsewhere. There was an incident in my home city where somebody went around spraying paint on every property in a street except the ones covered by cameras.
CCTV cameras are widely abused. CCTV monitoring is unregulated. Often monitoring centres are filled with dirty old men letching at attractive young women, occasionally attractive young men. Sometimes the monitoring operatives will be so busy spying on a particular "target" that a real incident will go unnoticed.
CCTV cameras do not provide an undo button. By the time the crime has been committed, it is already too late. Stolen property may be recovered; but the greatest probability is that it will already have been sold on by the time that the authorities get around to investigating the incident. Rewinding a tape will not bring a dead person back to life, nor will it undo the psychological damage caused by being a victim of crime.
CCTV cameras do not provide incontrovertible evidence. CCTV footage is often of insufficient quality to enable an arrest to be made. There have been many cases where tapes have been "accidentally" lost, erased or never even loaded into the recorder. It is also possible that CCTV footage -- especially if stored digitally -- could be tampered with.
CCTV cameras engender a false sense of security. The lumpenproletariat expect that CCTV will protect them from the "evil people", and as a consequence take less responsibility for their own security.
The potential costs associated with CCTV cameras outweigh the benefits. Imagine the misuse of CCTV if an extremist group such as the BNP somehow managed to take power. We have pretty much taken for granted the right to come and go and carry out our business without anyone else knowing or caring about it. What if something that you currently enjoy doing became illegal?
The greatest cause of crime in Britain today is drug prohibition. A dose of heroin which costs pennies to manufacture sells for £10; most of that goes on the costs associated with hiding the business from the police. Since dealing is already illegal, there is no incentive for dealers to be concerned with product quality nor customer welfare. There is a definite disincentive against users seeking help to break a habit, because to do so might involve betraying friends. (Altruism is hard-wired into humans, for the sake of survival of the species as a whole; but is bypassed entirely in times when an immediate need is present. An addict, especially of painkillers, needs their drug with their whole body, in the same way as you or I might need food, or water, or the toilet. If you are ever so careless as to get so desperate that you have no alternative but to take a huge crap right in the middle of a crowded shopping street, I guarantee you that you will not feel one iota of remorse or embarrassment until after the deed is done. Unsatisfied need overrides everything else).
Nicotine is reckoned to be more addictive than heroin (though the different legal status undeniably distorts this statistic), but is legal and -- compared to heroin -- it is cheap to maintain a nicotine habit. (The illegal smuggling of rolling tobacco from the continent, where taxes are lower because there is no NHS, is known about, and largely tolerated, by
They probably have already written papers on it..... in their own languages.
Want my theory? I think the brain uses multiple techniques in parallel, then releases resources from the ones found to be going nowhere. So at any one time you may be trying to read a word letter-by-letter, recognising the word from the Bouma shape, and picking likely words from context. The different techniques will have different successes depending on various factors (clean type vs. messy handwriting, familiar vs unfamiliar words, &c). So my theory is that the brain is trying various methods at the same time, each narrowing down the possibilities, and just goes with whatever produces a result first. As soon as that happens, any half-finished tests in progress are scrapped and their resources deallocated. The eye movements may well have something to do with this..... different reading techniques require different resolutions, the eye is great at recognising outlines but needs to zero-in on details, once a clue is established from the word envelope. There is evidence that fonts such as Times are more readable than Helvetica, so maybe serifs add recognisability in their own way? And if this is what is happening, then it would explain some of the test results in the article too, since they were looking for a single technique in use at any one time.
If all this sounds inefficient, you have to remember that human beings are optimised for non-optimum conditions..... for instance, we have kidneys that pack up if you drink nothing but de-mineralised water, and an immune system that goes berserk and tries to poison you with histamine if it doesn't get enough germs to fight off.
Because the boys' book talks about erections and bollocks and spunk, which are hilariously funny. The same funny thing they use when they are made to stand up and go wee-wee in front of everybody in the middle of town, is also used for dispensing this white stuff as a part of making babies..... hahahahaha!
Whereas periods -- or, to give them their proper name, The Curse -- are not at all funny, and that part of the body which is covered by a girl's bikini bottoms (but isn't her bottom) is absolutely umnentionable.
In other words, the same reason that "cunt" ie considered a much ruder word than "prick".
That's normal. You should protect your phpmyadmin with a.htaccess file. Of course, for.htaccess to work, you also have to modify your httpd.conf, because it most probably has "AllowOverride none" turned on globally.
"root" and no password is misleading. It is in the default configuration for mysql, but it only works from localhost.
Much less secure is a situation I encountered on a site with a certain hosting company who will not be named and shamed here. A friend of mine set up a site with them before I could warn him off. Well, basically they have a separate SQL server than their web servers, but the mysql usernames and passwords are the same as the linux usernames and passwords. And not only that, but I was able to connect to their server from my own machine! While it was nice to be able to work on his DB with my own phpmyadmin, it's more than a little worrying that their firewall doesn't block off 3306. Especially as the same company also offers MS hosting packages, and if they're as sloppy with those as they are with their linux ones.....
The password coincidence is deeply worrying, because all you need to do is get a hosting account on their server; then it's trivial to read any other user's files, including their mysql passwords -- which are the same as their linux paswords.
This isn't messy. Messy would be if there was a case of Person A distributing Person B's GPL code as shareware, Person B protestingagainst this, Person C encouraging people not to pay Person A on the basis that A has no right to profit from B's work without B's approval, and Person D who is not obviously affiliated with Person A, B or C, taking some sort of direct action against Person C.
The source code is sort-of available, as it says on the site. So what is now needed is for the copyright holders of any material used in the Win32 version of XChat (gettext for one) to come together and demand what is rightfully theirs, i.e. that the XChat distributors stop using their copyrighted code in ways of which they do not approve. Unfortunately, nobody else but the holders of the infringed rights can do this. The XChat developers will be up on a simple charge of copyright violation. Their only defence will be that they had some licence to distribute the copyrighted code in question. The GPL is conditional, and gives permission only if they have complied with its terms. They haven't. Oops. Like porridge?
Once that is successful, then anyone who paid a shareware fee should be able to try to sue to get it back, unless going to court for copyright violation bankrupted XChat.....
I didn't see any notices on the XChat site about what sorts of things they would like to do to "copyright violators" who don't pay their $25. Shame really..... it would have been delightful to see all those things done to the XChat developers, who are *at least* as bad.
If I had mod points, you would be Insightful. However, I haven't, so I'm replying. A media player does not need a browser engine. mpg321 hasn't got one, and it does just fine.
The real problem is that DOS was never designed to be networked, and that carried over into Windows. NT's access control is based on VAX/VMS, which is rather OTT for most people's requirements, and so most people simply don't use it. Unix/Linux/OSX access control, while less sophisticated, is at least more likely to be used properly.
Hardware no-execute (NX) is an absolute red herring in this context, BTW. It can always be bypassed in software -- otherwise you would have a Computationally Incomplete system -- and, if you can persuade a user to execute arbitrary software on a system without NX, you can just as easily persuade a user to execute the NX bypass exploit on a system with NX.
I suspect that the success rate we are seeing at the moment is due to people clicking on these Intellitext links because they expect the link to point to a dictionary definition or something interesting -- and my guess is, many of them are going to be disappointed to discover that the link actually points to an advert.
In the long run, this could actually do more harm than good. People will end up not clicking underlined words even when they are links to definitions, interesting factoids and so forth. The internet will simply disappear even further up its own arsehole.
If I were Prime Minister, it would be law that readers must be able to distinguish instantly between editorial content (which they presumably want to read) and advertisements -- ideally, in a paper publication, it should be possible to pull out all the adverts in one swift hand movement and file them in the recycling bin, without disrupting the real content. I would also implement a special kind of "broadcast flag" which could be used to temporarily turn off VCRs during the advert breaks -- this should save the fast forward buttons! Needless to say, attempting to pass an advertisement off as editorial content would be a very severe offence.
If the GPL is ruled invalid it would impact on the validity of EULAs, for the following reasons:
EULAs such as Microsoft's are actually already illegal (or at least, not enforceable) in many jurisdictions -- where your rights under the law are sacrosanct, nothing can attempt to abridge them. Even if you promise not to do something that the law specifically says you have a right to do {such as reverse-engineering software for certain purposes, i.e. academic study or developing interoperable products}, you can't actually be held to that promise. In some jurisdictions, it's actually an offence to ask someone to make that empty promise.
The GPL -- as clearly stated in the Preamble -- makes no attempt to restrict your statutory rights. Instead, it gives you additional rights over and above your statutory rights, subject to certain conditions. These are clearly not inalienable rights.
So much for the difference and apologies to everyone who already knew that, but some people don't so it needed saying. The similarity is the way the licence is delivered and accepted without feedback to the licensor. (The GPL may even be at an advantage here, thanks to its wording; Sections 4 and 6 say if you receive GPL software from someone who is acting in breach of the GPL, this does not prejudice your rights as long as you play along. Section 5 clearly states the consequences of non-acceptance -- that you retain your statutory rights and nothing more.)
The only reason why the GPL could be found to be invalid is because the proper procedure to create a legally binding contract is not being followed -- there is plenty of evidence showing that is perfectly OK to give someone limited permission to make copies of a copyrighted work, and to impose conditions on their doing so. If this is the case, then any EULA which also failed properly to create a legally binding contract would be null and void.
Finally, even if the GPL is found to be valid, this does not mean that EULAs are valid. In fact, it might well substantially weaken EULAs; a "typical" EULA is almost certain to be read out in court as part of the proceedings, and it's very likely that someone will pick up on it.
Classical Marxist theory states you have a Working Class and a Ruling Class. The Working Class has exactly one asset, its labour. The Ruling Class ultimately depends for its survival on the Working Class.
According to this model, the Working Class could use its labour just to support itself, and say a big fat "screw you" to the Ruling Class -- and do less work into the bargain, to the tune of whatever it was costing to keep the Ruling Class in luxury goods. This is what most people think of as "revolution", and it usually goes T.U. when the organisers of the Revolution, having won the respect of the people, start falling into the decadent ways of the former Ruling Class.
Well, that may have worked in a manufacturing economy when the Working Class was doing things like growing food, building houses, making cars, &c. But today, thanks to a combination of automating many jobs out of existence and outsourcing the rest, a new class has emerged: the Consuming Class. The Consuming Class own DVD players and cell phones (made, BTW, using a labour force to whom such things would largely be useless), and think they are above the Working Class. The Consuming Class does work, but it is meaningless and irrelevant: what the heck is a telephone sanitiser going to do after the revolution? And on the flipside, who will till the soil, grind the grain, bake the bread? Who will build the homes, do the wiring and the plumbing? Marxist theory suggests the Consuming Class would perish before the Ruling Class, since the latter at least usually has savings.
The other reason why Classical Marxist theory doesn't apply anymore is that -- as far as some kinds of things are concerned -- we are now living in an age of plenty rather than an age of scarcity, and that really tends to muck up the traditional concept of value which underpins both Capitalism and Socialism. When it takes hardly any more work to make a thousand or a million examples of something than it took to make the first, how do you decide what price to sell it for?
As a former New Age Traveller, I have first hand experience of attempting a unilateral declaration of independence, and it isn't easy. Every so often, you still run up against a dependency on some big corporation or another: the supermarkets, the oil companies, and -- for some of my friends -- the NHS.
Social change is needed alright, but a lot of people are going to get hurt when it comes.
Most of the scam e-mails don't render properly in KMail -- which is what I mostly use -- anyway. But if they did, I'd probably go ahead and fill in a whole bunch of bogus details anyway. Can't be too hard to write a script that does a HTTP GET on the site URL, then submits random data. Preferably plausible data..... maybe we could borrow the spammers' trick of picking words that seem to go together? And, of course, credit card numbers that pass The Test..... not difficult, you just generate a 15 digit random string, and calculate the check digit.
IMHO the only thing missing from KMail is the ability to turn on and off off HTML rendering and image loading on a folder-by-folder basis (so I can view known "ham" e-mail in the format it was sent; but my brain already renders HTML so well that <em>this looks a bit slanty</em>).
Windows has finally collapsed under the weight of all the patches that have been added to it. Patches to fix security holes, patches to fix the stuff that doesn't work because of the other patches, and patches for patches - all built on an infrastructure that was fundamentally rotten. The fact is, so much software depends at low levels on Windows's lack of security, it was bound to break good and hard when the real issues were addressed. And now it's impossible to maintain backward compatibility, because the legitimate software is using exactly the same security holes as the malware.
Whether the closed source nature of Windows and Windows applications encourages this kind of slovenly programming is not the real issue here. The real issue dates right back to the early days, and the difference between mini- and microcomputers.
Unix was conceived from the outset as a minicomputer OS. That meant it had to have at least some awareness of multiple users -- some of whom might be dangerous, whether due to malice or incompetence. Privilege separation was built in from the outset; with just one, special user account able to do absolutely anything, including bring the system down irretrievably. This purposely was never blocked.
MS-DOS was conceived from the outset as a microcomputer OS -- it was once a CP/M clone. A computer running DOS would have a single user, and not be connected electrically to anything else -- except maybe a minicomputer, via an RS-232 serial link; and requiring a particular program to send data to and accept data from the port, and when that program is not running, nothing happening on the port can affect what the computer is doing. Therefore, there was no need for privilege separation; that one user could effectively be given root privileges. Or almost..... because Microsoft decided that there are some things that the user does not need to know about or have any control over.
Advance a few years and we have networks. Unix -- thanks to the ingenious concept of treating everything as a file -- gains the ability to treat storage devices and peripherals attached to other network nodes as its own. MS-DOS PCs are generally connected to communal file and printer servers -- effectively, using the network as an alternate hard disk / printer interface. This functionality has just been bodged in, a little at a time, as and when necessary.
Now remember that Linux and Mac OS X are both based on Unix -- which was already a fully fledged, network-aware system -- while Windows is based on MS-DOS, which began as an "island" system without giving the user full manual override ability. In other words, someone could cause Windows to run a program without the user even being aware of it, much less able to do anything about it.
Once you factor in a huge influx of clueless users -- and I'm talking tipp-ex on the screen, broken the coffee cup holder, adding up the spreadsheet with a calculator type cluelessness -- this becomes a recipe for disaster. For Windows to reach the point of total unusability was inevitable, and -- this sticks in my craw a bit -- it's a testament to Microsoft's hard work and determination that it's actually taken up to now for this to happen.
Why would anybody want to migrate towards a new Open Source database server when there are already two, one of which is its own bastard cousin? See, if the fact of your DB server being Open Source is that vitally important -- say, a "no source, no sale" procurement policy -- then you will already have chosen one of the Big Two:
PostgreSQL is an indirect descendant of an earlier version of Ingres; and, having been Open Source all along, ought to have improved slightly faster than the original Ingres project. It has a reputation for slowness; but, then again, so does Ingres.
MySQL is undisputedly fast; but when you actually look at what it had to jettison in order to get that speeds boost, you might think twice about deploying it. Think of it more as a sort of scripting language extension for handling a special kind of array, than a "proper" relational database server. {But, said the amateur tech pundit, watch out; because someday soon, Lua is going to find its way into MySQL, giving it those fancy "staw'd pro-cee-joor" deeleys.}
If it is not important that you are using an Open Source solution, and you aren't using one of the Big Two anyway, why are you going to suddenly want to switch to Open Source? And if you were already thinking of switching to Open Source, chances are you've already chosen Postgres or My.
As soon as there is an Open Source version of System V, that's the end of the line for SCO. The next Linux kernel release following the Open Sourcing of Solaris could -- entirely legally -- have been based on Open Source Solaris.
Mind, SCO's tail seems firmly between their legs right now -- IMHO they hope to disappear quietly into the night, and maybe nobody will come chasing after them to finish them off.
Compelled to join up?! I thought that was against international law, unless a country was actually at war. Beside which, it doesn't work..... if you only accept people into the army who choose to join, then you have by definition excluded the unwilling -- who can be a huge handicap. A smart person especially, forced into the army against their own will, could be a formidable "enemy within". OK, they'd get court-martialled; but by then it's already too late.
In a combat situation, which would would you bet on: three up-for-it psychos who are there by choice and loving every minute -- or two dozen kids who all would rather be at home, playing computer games and smoking dope?
I checked the site, and "growisofs" (which is used by K3B..... easily the most user-friendly piece of software ever written, it even shows you the command-line way you could have done it..... that's a lovely touch, it helps to ease the transition from n00b to l33t) is part of DVD+RWtools.
Still, what it really needs is for someone sufficiently technically-minded to get hold of an actual sample to play with.
If you choose to join the army, then you have to put up with the consequences of that decision. If you are not prepared to put up with it, then you probably should never have joined the army in the first place -- or you should have dropped out during the first couple of weeks, while you still can do so with little or no shame. Is Finland at war with anyone? I really hope not, for Finland's sake, if this is the sort of thing that is happening.
The reality of the situation is that if you join the army, you can expect to get bullied by your "superior" officers {speech marks to indicate that they are just human beings and therefore, not superior to any other human being}, punished for trivial infractions {whether or not your fault} including demonstrating the ability to think for yourself, and -- if your country goes to war -- shot at by the Americans. On the upside, you will have no shortage of opportunities for heavy drinking {no stronger/more enjoyable substances, though} and casual sex; and, in a minority of cases, you might even get to do some of the bullying yourself.
Hey, maybe we should blame this on films and video games that artificially glamorise the military lifestyle! In ther meantime, if you have more than half a brain, just stay out of the army, mmmkay?
There's a simple explanation for this..... Licencing. Jörg Schilling, the author of cdrecord, decided to make, and profit from, a non-Free "pro-DVD" version. It is available as a binary only, and even requires unlocking to be able to handle discs bigger than 1GB. So much for the idea that "only code compiled on this here box should be run on this here box". As it was his own code, there was not much anybody could do about it..... {Think about it this way. An individual who is not allowed to keep slaves, though considerably freer than a slave, is less free than an individual who is allowed to keep slaves; though the average level of freedom in a society which forbids slavery is almost certainly greater than it would be in a society which tolerates it. Assuming, of course, that you can measure freedom on a linear scale where 0 = component in a machine and infinity = able to modify laws of physics at will.}
SuSE is a paid-for distribution; it contains closed-source and other non-Free components, distributed under special arrangements with the copyright holders. It is very likely that some licencing conflict somewhere precludes SuSE Linux AG from distributing cdrecord-prodvd. It is also possible that SuSE charges a premium for the "enhanced", DVD-ready version of its software, and will not allow HP to resell it.
However, all the older versions of cdrecord were released under the GPL, and the source code was already out there; so anybody else could work in DVD support independently. This is exactly what was done with the version that comes with Debian (at least, Sarge/Testing and Sid/Unstable), as the below excerpt indicates:
# cdrecord --version Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a29-dvd (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling Note: This version is an unofficial (modified) version with DVD support Note: and therefore may have bugs that are not present in the original. Note: Please send bug reports or support requests to <warly@mandrakesoft.com>. Note: The author of cdrecord should not be bothered with problems in this version. NOTE: this version of cdrecord is an inofficial (modified) release of cdrecord and thus may have bugs that are not present in the original version. Please send bug reports and support requests to <cdrtools@packages.debian.org>. The original author should not be bothered with problems of this version.
DVD recording also works properly on Mandrake -- the other free-as-in-beer distro. Not surprising really since a Mandrake developer is credited in the output above! It ought to be possible to get the source code from Debian or Mandrake. Once you've patched it to cope with SuSE's file structure {makes much use of/opt, IIRC; Debian is/usr all the way} you could always repackage it as an RPM. This is the best thing to do anyway if you intend to put the main binary in/usr/bin; just be sure to give it a version number higher than the distribution's official package, in case of security updates trampling on it.
Note that my trials have been confined to DVD+RW discs {which, officially, aren't even DVDs; the DVD-forum clearly couldn't stand the fact that someone had managed to invent a better way of making recordable DVDs than they had, and threw their toys out of the pram}. It is no coincidence that these discs are what my TV recorder requires.....
There is also the more mundane possibility that the supplied DVD+RW drive is incompatible with the kernel on the supplied install/rescue disc. I found a DVD+RW in a 1U server that would boot the Debian Woody CD, but not install from it -- I was so glad I had specced in a floppy drive! Downloading and compiling a new kernel soon sorted it; but Debian doesn't require a kernel which is patched to buggery.
My assertion still stands, because he had the chutzpah. The bankers and financiers, not being scientists nor engineers, were unable to spot the impossibility of his claims.
Well, I'm certain that it's possible; but the realisation of such a device would require more than I can spare, since I'd have to get hold of, and learn to use, some specialised kit -- and fit this in with a full-time job.
OTOH, I'd love to see such a device for real. I've described it, in varying levels of detail, many times before. If you have, or know somebody who has access to PCI bus prototyping cards, high-end micros / DSPs that can keep up with the data rate, and so forth, I'd be more than delighted to know that my idea had reached the stage of a working prototype. I'd be tempted to take out a patent on the idea, but I'm not sure that (a) it would pass the "obvious to an expert in the field" test {even someone like me could think of it, for crying out loud} and (b) I haven't blown it already by describing it on a public forum such as Slashdot.
That would be defeated by using a piece of hardware which sits on the PCI bus, and perfectly emulates a sound card; so it can intercept the clear digital signal (many legacy sound cards are reasonably open specced and don't support encryption; consider the venerable SoundBlaster 16 bit, surely the Epson FX-80 of sound cards).
The whole point of emulation is that if you're doing it properly, it's absolutely impossible for any software to tell whether it's running in a real or emulated environment. That's really a manifestation of the same physical law that says you can't tell the difference, by measuring the voltage drop and current flow alone, between a 100 ohm resistor and two 200 ohm resistors in parallel, or even ten 10 ohm resistors in series -- just on a huge scale, with a vastly more complicated circuit.
You would just have to make sure so as to reject exactly the same bits on the second encoding cycle that were rejected the first time around. If you could make sure of that, then you should not lose any quality. How easy it may be to make sure of that is another matter.
Don't tell anybody, but this must actually break the iTunes DRM good and hard. CrossOverOffice almost certainly uses a standard Linux sound driver to get the sound data to the sound chip. This is bound to mean/dev/dsp, which is "hackable" in the sense that anyone with root access can snarf the digital audio data between when it gets decrypted by iTunes and when it gets sent to the sound chip. You can then make unlimited unencumbered copies. Additionally, knowing that the file was uncompressed from lossy AAC compression, it should be possible to recompress it in such a way as exactly to recover the original compressed file, just sans DRM encumbrance.
The same would, of course, also go for any successful attempt to run Windows Media Player under Linux.
DRM is a pipe dream. There is a fundamental physical reason why it will never work, though a formal mathematical proof escapes me right now. It's time to stop trying to do the impossible, even if that means having to swallow the unpalatable.
Slashdot Mirror
If a product is closed source and proprietary, then that should be all you need to know about it.
..... d'oh!)
The company for which I work already uses VoIP, but we wouldn't touch Skype with a barge pole. It's our policy that we avoid closed-source software as far as possible, even if that means having to do stuff by hand. We use asterisk for an exchange, together with Zultys hardware IP phones, using SIP. We just have an ISDN-30 line (E1) connected with the appropriate hardware interface card (by Digium) to the asterisk server. The card is multi-span, just in case 30 lines turns out not to be enough. The server is a dual Xeon 2.8, which might be slightly overkill for Asterisk; but it's also running our office software (we pretty much were using LAMP applications before the name was coined) and the E1 card needed a 3V3 PCI slot which is only found on expensive mobos. (There is now a 5V version available
We paid money for the hardware, and we paid in blood, sweat and tears for the software; but nobody can ever take away what we learned.
"Old-fashioned" gift vouchers worked. You know ..... a little slip of paper with some fancy printing, like a special banknote only redeemable in certain stores, which you buy at the till and place in a birthday card. What was ever wrong with them anyway?
CCTV cameras are not used against terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles.
They are mostly used to catch people peeing in the street (locking up public toilets is always a good way for a council to raise some revenue), rolling joints, and other petty things. In my experience CCTV cameras have not reduced littering; camera-equipped streets are just as full of crap as everywhere else.
CCTV cameras do not reduce crime, they merely displace it.
Once the locations of CCTV cameras become known, criminals simply avoid them and commit crimes elsewhere. There was an incident in my home city where somebody went around spraying paint on every property in a street except the ones covered by cameras.
CCTV cameras are widely abused.
CCTV monitoring is unregulated. Often monitoring centres are filled with dirty old men letching at attractive young women, occasionally attractive young men. Sometimes the monitoring operatives will be so busy spying on a particular "target" that a real incident will go unnoticed.
CCTV cameras do not provide an undo button.
By the time the crime has been committed, it is already too late. Stolen property may be recovered; but the greatest probability is that it will already have been sold on by the time that the authorities get around to investigating the incident. Rewinding a tape will not bring a dead person back to life, nor will it undo the psychological damage caused by being a victim of crime.
CCTV cameras do not provide incontrovertible evidence.
CCTV footage is often of insufficient quality to enable an arrest to be made. There have been many cases where tapes have been "accidentally" lost, erased or never even loaded into the recorder. It is also possible that CCTV footage -- especially if stored digitally -- could be tampered with.
CCTV cameras engender a false sense of security.
The lumpenproletariat expect that CCTV will protect them from the "evil people", and as a consequence take less responsibility for their own security.
The potential costs associated with CCTV cameras outweigh the benefits.
Imagine the misuse of CCTV if an extremist group such as the BNP somehow managed to take power. We have pretty much taken for granted the right to come and go and carry out our business without anyone else knowing or caring about it. What if something that you currently enjoy doing became illegal?
The greatest cause of crime in Britain today is drug prohibition. A dose of heroin which costs pennies to manufacture sells for £10; most of that goes on the costs associated with hiding the business from the police. Since dealing is already illegal, there is no incentive for dealers to be concerned with product quality nor customer welfare. There is a definite disincentive against users seeking help to break a habit, because to do so might involve betraying friends. (Altruism is hard-wired into humans, for the sake of survival of the species as a whole; but is bypassed entirely in times when an immediate need is present. An addict, especially of painkillers, needs their drug with their whole body, in the same way as you or I might need food, or water, or the toilet. If you are ever so careless as to get so desperate that you have no alternative but to take a huge crap right in the middle of a crowded shopping street, I guarantee you that you will not feel one iota of remorse or embarrassment until after the deed is done. Unsatisfied need overrides everything else).
Nicotine is reckoned to be more addictive than heroin (though the different legal status undeniably distorts this statistic), but is legal and -- compared to heroin -- it is cheap to maintain a nicotine habit. (The illegal smuggling of rolling tobacco from the continent, where taxes are lower because there is no NHS, is known about, and largely tolerated, by
They probably have already written papers on it ..... in their own languages.
..... different reading techniques require different resolutions, the eye is great at recognising outlines but needs to zero-in on details, once a clue is established from the word envelope. There is evidence that fonts such as Times are more readable than Helvetica, so maybe serifs add recognisability in their own way? And if this is what is happening, then it would explain some of the test results in the article too, since they were looking for a single technique in use at any one time.
..... for instance, we have kidneys that pack up if you drink nothing but de-mineralised water, and an immune system that goes berserk and tries to poison you with histamine if it doesn't get enough germs to fight off.
Want my theory? I think the brain uses multiple techniques in parallel, then releases resources from the ones found to be going nowhere. So at any one time you may be trying to read a word letter-by-letter, recognising the word from the Bouma shape, and picking likely words from context. The different techniques will have different successes depending on various factors (clean type vs. messy handwriting, familiar vs unfamiliar words, &c). So my theory is that the brain is trying various methods at the same time, each narrowing down the possibilities, and just goes with whatever produces a result first. As soon as that happens, any half-finished tests in progress are scrapped and their resources deallocated. The eye movements may well have something to do with this
If all this sounds inefficient, you have to remember that human beings are optimised for non-optimum conditions
Because the boys' book talks about erections and bollocks and spunk, which are hilariously funny. The same funny thing they use when they are made to stand up and go wee-wee in front of everybody in the middle of town, is also used for dispensing this white stuff as a part of making babies ..... hahahahaha!
Whereas periods -- or, to give them their proper name, The Curse -- are not at all funny, and that part of the body which is covered by a girl's bikini bottoms (but isn't her bottom) is absolutely umnentionable.
In other words, the same reason that "cunt" ie considered a much ruder word than "prick".
That's normal. You should protect your phpmyadmin with a .htaccess file. Of course, for .htaccess to work, you also have to modify your httpd.conf, because it most probably has "AllowOverride none" turned on globally.
.....
"root" and no password is misleading. It is in the default configuration for mysql, but it only works from localhost.
Much less secure is a situation I encountered on a site with a certain hosting company who will not be named and shamed here. A friend of mine set up a site with them before I could warn him off. Well, basically they have a separate SQL server than their web servers, but the mysql usernames and passwords are the same as the linux usernames and passwords. And not only that, but I was able to connect to their server from my own machine! While it was nice to be able to work on his DB with my own phpmyadmin, it's more than a little worrying that their firewall doesn't block off 3306. Especially as the same company also offers MS hosting packages, and if they're as sloppy with those as they are with their linux ones
The password coincidence is deeply worrying, because all you need to do is get a hosting account on their server; then it's trivial to read any other user's files, including their mysql passwords -- which are the same as their linux paswords.
This isn't messy. Messy would be if there was a case of Person A distributing Person B's GPL code as shareware, Person B protestingagainst this, Person C encouraging people not to pay Person A on the basis that A has no right to profit from B's work without B's approval, and Person D who is not obviously affiliated with Person A, B or C, taking some sort of direct action against Person C.
.....
..... it would have been delightful to see all those things done to the XChat developers, who are *at least* as bad.
The source code is sort-of available, as it says on the site. So what is now needed is for the copyright holders of any material used in the Win32 version of XChat (gettext for one) to come together and demand what is rightfully theirs, i.e. that the XChat distributors stop using their copyrighted code in ways of which they do not approve. Unfortunately, nobody else but the holders of the infringed rights can do this. The XChat developers will be up on a simple charge of copyright violation. Their only defence will be that they had some licence to distribute the copyrighted code in question. The GPL is conditional, and gives permission only if they have complied with its terms. They haven't. Oops. Like porridge?
Once that is successful, then anyone who paid a shareware fee should be able to try to sue to get it back, unless going to court for copyright violation bankrupted XChat
I didn't see any notices on the XChat site about what sorts of things they would like to do to "copyright violators" who don't pay their $25. Shame really
Still, serves them right for listening to MW radio, I suppose. Get an FM set already!
If I had mod points, you would be Insightful. However, I haven't, so I'm replying. A media player does not need a browser engine. mpg321 hasn't got one, and it does just fine.
The real problem is that DOS was never designed to be networked, and that carried over into Windows. NT's access control is based on VAX/VMS, which is rather OTT for most people's requirements, and so most people simply don't use it. Unix/Linux/OSX access control, while less sophisticated, is at least more likely to be used properly.
Hardware no-execute (NX) is an absolute red herring in this context, BTW. It can always be bypassed in software -- otherwise you would have a Computationally Incomplete system -- and, if you can persuade a user to execute arbitrary software on a system without NX, you can just as easily persuade a user to execute the NX bypass exploit on a system with NX.
I suspect that the success rate we are seeing at the moment is due to people clicking on these Intellitext links because they expect the link to point to a dictionary definition or something interesting -- and my guess is, many of them are going to be disappointed to discover that the link actually points to an advert.
In the long run, this could actually do more harm than good. People will end up not clicking underlined words even when they are links to definitions, interesting factoids and so forth. The internet will simply disappear even further up its own arsehole.
If I were Prime Minister, it would be law that readers must be able to distinguish instantly between editorial content (which they presumably want to read) and advertisements -- ideally, in a paper publication, it should be possible to pull out all the adverts in one swift hand movement and file them in the recycling bin, without disrupting the real content. I would also implement a special kind of "broadcast flag" which could be used to temporarily turn off VCRs during the advert breaks -- this should save the fast forward buttons! Needless to say, attempting to pass an advertisement off as editorial content would be a very severe offence.
If the GPL is ruled invalid it would impact on the validity of EULAs, for the following reasons:
EULAs such as Microsoft's are actually already illegal (or at least, not enforceable) in many jurisdictions -- where your rights under the law are sacrosanct, nothing can attempt to abridge them. Even if you promise not to do something that the law specifically says you have a right to do {such as reverse-engineering software for certain purposes, i.e. academic study or developing interoperable products}, you can't actually be held to that promise. In some jurisdictions, it's actually an offence to ask someone to make that empty promise.
The GPL -- as clearly stated in the Preamble -- makes no attempt to restrict your statutory rights. Instead, it gives you additional rights over and above your statutory rights, subject to certain conditions. These are clearly not inalienable rights.
So much for the difference and apologies to everyone who already knew that, but some people don't so it needed saying. The similarity is the way the licence is delivered and accepted without feedback to the licensor. (The GPL may even be at an advantage here, thanks to its wording; Sections 4 and 6 say if you receive GPL software from someone who is acting in breach of the GPL, this does not prejudice your rights as long as you play along. Section 5 clearly states the consequences of non-acceptance -- that you retain your statutory rights and nothing more.)
The only reason why the GPL could be found to be invalid is because the proper procedure to create a legally binding contract is not being followed -- there is plenty of evidence showing that is perfectly OK to give someone limited permission to make copies of a copyrighted work, and to impose conditions on their doing so. If this is the case, then any EULA which also failed properly to create a legally binding contract would be null and void.
Finally, even if the GPL is found to be valid, this does not mean that EULAs are valid. In fact, it might well substantially weaken EULAs; a "typical" EULA is almost certain to be read out in court as part of the proceedings, and it's very likely that someone will pick up on it.
Classical Marxist theory states you have a Working Class and a Ruling Class. The Working Class has exactly one asset, its labour. The Ruling Class ultimately depends for its survival on the Working Class.
According to this model, the Working Class could use its labour just to support itself, and say a big fat "screw you" to the Ruling Class -- and do less work into the bargain, to the tune of whatever it was costing to keep the Ruling Class in luxury goods. This is what most people think of as "revolution", and it usually goes T.U. when the organisers of the Revolution, having won the respect of the people, start falling into the decadent ways of the former Ruling Class.
Well, that may have worked in a manufacturing economy when the Working Class was doing things like growing food, building houses, making cars, &c. But today, thanks to a combination of automating many jobs out of existence and outsourcing the rest, a new class has emerged: the Consuming Class. The Consuming Class own DVD players and cell phones (made, BTW, using a labour force to whom such things would largely be useless), and think they are above the Working Class. The Consuming Class does work, but it is meaningless and irrelevant: what the heck is a telephone sanitiser going to do after the revolution? And on the flipside, who will till the soil, grind the grain, bake the bread? Who will build the homes, do the wiring and the plumbing? Marxist theory suggests the Consuming Class would perish before the Ruling Class, since the latter at least usually has savings.
The other reason why Classical Marxist theory doesn't apply anymore is that -- as far as some kinds of things are concerned -- we are now living in an age of plenty rather than an age of scarcity, and that really tends to muck up the traditional concept of value which underpins both Capitalism and Socialism. When it takes hardly any more work to make a thousand or a million examples of something than it took to make the first, how do you decide what price to sell it for?
As a former New Age Traveller, I have first hand experience of attempting a unilateral declaration of independence, and it isn't easy. Every so often, you still run up against a dependency on some big corporation or another: the supermarkets, the oil companies, and -- for some of my friends -- the NHS.
Social change is needed alright, but a lot of people are going to get hurt when it comes.
Most of the scam e-mails don't render properly in KMail -- which is what I mostly use -- anyway. But if they did, I'd probably go ahead and fill in a whole bunch of bogus details anyway. Can't be too hard to write a script that does a HTTP GET on the site URL, then submits random data. Preferably plausible data ..... maybe we could borrow the spammers' trick of picking words that seem to go together? And, of course, credit card numbers that pass The Test ..... not difficult, you just generate a 15 digit random string, and calculate the check digit.
IMHO the only thing missing from KMail is the ability to turn on and off off HTML rendering and image loading on a folder-by-folder basis (so I can view known "ham" e-mail in the format it was sent; but my brain already renders HTML so well that <em>this looks a bit slanty</em>).
Windows has finally collapsed under the weight of all the patches that have been added to it. Patches to fix security holes, patches to fix the stuff that doesn't work because of the other patches, and patches for patches - all built on an infrastructure that was fundamentally rotten. The fact is, so much software depends at low levels on Windows's lack of security, it was bound to break good and hard when the real issues were addressed. And now it's impossible to maintain backward compatibility, because the legitimate software is using exactly the same security holes as the malware.
..... because Microsoft decided that there are some things that the user does not need to know about or have any control over.
Whether the closed source nature of Windows and Windows applications encourages this kind of slovenly programming is not the real issue here. The real issue dates right back to the early days, and the difference between mini- and microcomputers.
Unix was conceived from the outset as a minicomputer OS. That meant it had to have at least some awareness of multiple users -- some of whom might be dangerous, whether due to malice or incompetence. Privilege separation was built in from the outset; with just one, special user account able to do absolutely anything, including bring the system down irretrievably. This purposely was never blocked.
MS-DOS was conceived from the outset as a microcomputer OS -- it was once a CP/M clone. A computer running DOS would have a single user, and not be connected electrically to anything else -- except maybe a minicomputer, via an RS-232 serial link; and requiring a particular program to send data to and accept data from the port, and when that program is not running, nothing happening on the port can affect what the computer is doing. Therefore, there was no need for privilege separation; that one user could effectively be given root privileges. Or almost
Advance a few years and we have networks. Unix -- thanks to the ingenious concept of treating everything as a file -- gains the ability to treat storage devices and peripherals attached to other network nodes as its own. MS-DOS PCs are generally connected to communal file and printer servers -- effectively, using the network as an alternate hard disk / printer interface. This functionality has just been bodged in, a little at a time, as and when necessary.
Now remember that Linux and Mac OS X are both based on Unix -- which was already a fully fledged, network-aware system -- while Windows is based on MS-DOS, which began as an "island" system without giving the user full manual override ability. In other words, someone could cause Windows to run a program without the user even being aware of it, much less able to do anything about it.
Once you factor in a huge influx of clueless users -- and I'm talking tipp-ex on the screen, broken the coffee cup holder, adding up the spreadsheet with a calculator type cluelessness -- this becomes a recipe for disaster. For Windows to reach the point of total unusability was inevitable, and -- this sticks in my craw a bit -- it's a testament to Microsoft's hard work and determination that it's actually taken up to now for this to happen.
Why would anybody want to migrate towards a new Open Source database server when there are already two, one of which is its own bastard cousin? See, if the fact of your DB server being Open Source is that vitally important -- say, a "no source, no sale" procurement policy -- then you will already have chosen one of the Big Two:
PostgreSQL is an indirect descendant of an earlier version of Ingres; and, having been Open Source all along, ought to have improved slightly faster than the original Ingres project. It has a reputation for slowness; but, then again, so does Ingres.
MySQL is undisputedly fast; but when you actually look at what it had to jettison in order to get that speeds boost, you might think twice about deploying it. Think of it more as a sort of scripting language extension for handling a special kind of array, than a "proper" relational database server. {But, said the amateur tech pundit, watch out; because someday soon, Lua is going to find its way into MySQL, giving it those fancy "staw'd pro-cee-joor" deeleys.}
If it is not important that you are using an Open Source solution, and you aren't using one of the Big Two anyway, why are you going to suddenly want to switch to Open Source? And if you were already thinking of switching to Open Source, chances are you've already chosen Postgres or My.
As soon as there is an Open Source version of System V, that's the end of the line for SCO. The next Linux kernel release following the Open Sourcing of Solaris could -- entirely legally -- have been based on Open Source Solaris.
Mind, SCO's tail seems firmly between their legs right now -- IMHO they hope to disappear quietly into the night, and maybe nobody will come chasing after them to finish them off.
Compelled to join up?! I thought that was against international law, unless a country was actually at war. Beside which, it doesn't work ..... if you only accept people into the army who choose to join, then you have by definition excluded the unwilling -- who can be a huge handicap. A smart person especially, forced into the army against their own will, could be a formidable "enemy within". OK, they'd get court-martialled; but by then it's already too late.
In a combat situation, which would would you bet on: three up-for-it psychos who are there by choice and loving every minute -- or two dozen kids who all would rather be at home, playing computer games and smoking dope?
I checked the site, and "growisofs" (which is used by K3B ..... easily the most user-friendly piece of software ever written, it even shows you the command-line way you could have done it ..... that's a lovely touch, it helps to ease the transition from n00b to l33t) is part of DVD+RWtools.
Still, what it really needs is for someone sufficiently technically-minded to get hold of an actual sample to play with.
If you choose to join the army, then you have to put up with the consequences of that decision. If you are not prepared to put up with it, then you probably should never have joined the army in the first place -- or you should have dropped out during the first couple of weeks, while you still can do so with little or no shame. Is Finland at war with anyone? I really hope not, for Finland's sake, if this is the sort of thing that is happening.
The reality of the situation is that if you join the army, you can expect to get bullied by your "superior" officers {speech marks to indicate that they are just human beings and therefore, not superior to any other human being}, punished for trivial infractions {whether or not your fault} including demonstrating the ability to think for yourself, and -- if your country goes to war -- shot at by the Americans. On the upside, you will have no shortage of opportunities for heavy drinking {no stronger/more enjoyable substances, though} and casual sex; and, in a minority of cases, you might even get to do some of the bullying yourself.
Hey, maybe we should blame this on films and video games that artificially glamorise the military lifestyle! In ther meantime, if you have more than half a brain, just stay out of the army, mmmkay?
SuSE is a paid-for distribution; it contains closed-source and other non-Free components, distributed under special arrangements with the copyright holders. It is very likely that some licencing conflict somewhere precludes SuSE Linux AG from distributing cdrecord-prodvd. It is also possible that SuSE charges a premium for the "enhanced", DVD-ready version of its software, and will not allow HP to resell it.
However, all the older versions of cdrecord were released under the GPL, and the source code was already out there; so anybody else could work in DVD support independently. This is exactly what was done with the version that comes with Debian (at least, Sarge/Testing and Sid/Unstable), as the below excerpt indicates:
DVD recording also works properly on Mandrake -- the other free-as-in-beer distro. Not surprising really since a Mandrake developer is credited in the output above! It ought to be possible to get the source code from Debian or Mandrake. Once you've patched it to cope with SuSE's file structure {makes much use of /opt, IIRC; Debian is /usr all the way} you could always repackage it as an RPM. This is the best thing to do anyway if you intend to put the main binary in /usr/bin; just be sure to give it a version number higher than the distribution's official package, in case of security updates trampling on it.
.....
Note that my trials have been confined to DVD+RW discs {which, officially, aren't even DVDs; the DVD-forum clearly couldn't stand the fact that someone had managed to invent a better way of making recordable DVDs than they had, and threw their toys out of the pram}. It is no coincidence that these discs are what my TV recorder requires
There is also the more mundane possibility that the supplied DVD+RW drive is incompatible with the kernel on the supplied install/rescue disc. I found a DVD+RW in a 1U server that would boot the Debian Woody CD, but not install from it -- I was so glad I had specced in a floppy drive! Downloading and compiling a new kernel soon sorted it; but Debian doesn't require a kernel which is patched to buggery.
As for the wireless bit, well, TTBOMK the Intel
My assertion still stands, because he had the chutzpah. The bankers and financiers, not being scientists nor engineers, were unable to spot the impossibility of his claims.
Well, I'm certain that it's possible; but the realisation of such a device would require more than I can spare, since I'd have to get hold of, and learn to use, some specialised kit -- and fit this in with a full-time job.
OTOH, I'd love to see such a device for real. I've described it, in varying levels of detail, many times before. If you have, or know somebody who has access to PCI bus prototyping cards, high-end micros / DSPs that can keep up with the data rate, and so forth, I'd be more than delighted to know that my idea had reached the stage of a working prototype. I'd be tempted to take out a patent on the idea, but I'm not sure that (a) it would pass the "obvious to an expert in the field" test {even someone like me could think of it, for crying out loud} and (b) I haven't blown it already by describing it on a public forum such as Slashdot.
That would be defeated by using a piece of hardware which sits on the PCI bus, and perfectly emulates a sound card; so it can intercept the clear digital signal (many legacy sound cards are reasonably open specced and don't support encryption; consider the venerable SoundBlaster 16 bit, surely the Epson FX-80 of sound cards).
The whole point of emulation is that if you're doing it properly, it's absolutely impossible for any software to tell whether it's running in a real or emulated environment. That's really a manifestation of the same physical law that says you can't tell the difference, by measuring the voltage drop and current flow alone, between a 100 ohm resistor and two 200 ohm resistors in parallel, or even ten 10 ohm resistors in series -- just on a huge scale, with a vastly more complicated circuit.
You would just have to make sure so as to reject exactly the same bits on the second encoding cycle that were rejected the first time around. If you could make sure of that, then you should not lose any quality. How easy it may be to make sure of that is another matter.
Don't tell anybody, but this must actually break the iTunes DRM good and hard. CrossOverOffice almost certainly uses a standard Linux sound driver to get the sound data to the sound chip. This is bound to mean /dev/dsp, which is "hackable" in the sense that anyone with root access can snarf the digital audio data between when it gets decrypted by iTunes and when it gets sent to the sound chip. You can then make unlimited unencumbered copies. Additionally, knowing that the file was uncompressed from lossy AAC compression, it should be possible to recompress it in such a way as exactly to recover the original compressed file, just sans DRM encumbrance.
The same would, of course, also go for any successful attempt to run Windows Media Player under Linux.
DRM is a pipe dream. There is a fundamental physical reason why it will never work, though a formal mathematical proof escapes me right now. It's time to stop trying to do the impossible, even if that means having to swallow the unpalatable.