If everyone used Linux instead of Windows, then the virus writers would write viruses for linux instead!
Yeah, probably; only, thanks to something called "privilege separation", they would never get transmitted anywhere. At least, not on a well-set-up system..... Even on a slightly-badly-set-up system, there will be log files kicking around to show what sort of thing was happening.
The virus doesn't exploit any massive windows bug.
Well, maybe I have a warped sense of priorities, but I'd regard running everything as the equivalent of "root" as a pretty massive bug.....
running unknown code is NOT a good idea on ANY operating system.
Agreed -- which is why I insist to have the source code for every piece of software I run.
Actually this is the most pointful idea I have heard so far. You can only download something if you know the hash for it. You obtain the hash from a pay site. You can now download the material, and other people can download it from you if they have the hash. The hash download is traceable, so if you give it away then you can be nabbed.
Nope, changed my mind. It just sounds more like a warped way of using public key encryption. And there has to be a way around it, because there always is. There are open-source -- and inherently unregulated -- ways of sharing files, so even if they shut down all the grey-market sharing networks tomorrow, there would be a black-market network within the week. And if it was https based, everyone's existing web browser would be the client.
It would be possible in theory to design an algorithm so that the fingerprint would not be affected by "inaudible" changes. Still, there are always ways around things; you could make very audible changes that would certainly fingerprint differently, by XORing the whole file with a repeated byte string {but obviously not the same length as the checksum} and distributing that string separately.
This is an important point. There will have to be some way for legally-redistributable material to be identified as such. It will be possible to misidentify non-freely-distributable material as freely-distributable. Therefore, the scheme is doomed to fail. QED.
It is actually rather nice for a text editor to be able to access the Internet -- you can use Kate on your own PC to edit your website on your ISP's server, using KBear for ftp; just give the filename as kbearftp://mylogin@myisp.co.uk:21/index.php or whatever.
But there is a way to run one Linux kernel on top of another; I forget what it's called but I know it exists. The point being that the "secondary" kernel can have been compiled without certain features. If the running kernel has no code in it that can access the network, then no userland application that is using that kernel can access the network. The "main" kernel, of course, has network support. Furthermore, since the "secondary" kernel's "kernel space" is within the "main" kernel's userland -- already subject to privilege separation -- there are potentially two levels of blocking. Even if you can root the secondary kernel, you're still in userland! Not to mention that since we switched from thin co-ax to UTP, you can plug and unplug the network with impunity:)
"virus" is a stuff-word {like "furniture"} rather than a thing-word {like "chair"}, so it doesn't really have a plural. If it was a thing-word, its plural could be "viri" {with one "i"} or "viruses" -- which is preferable because, although "viri" looks like Latin, it is bad Latin {because the Latin word doesn't have a plural in the first place} so, since it is being used like an English word, it should follow English pluralisation rules. In any case, "virii" {with two "i"s} would be the plural of "virius", not "virus".
True. The only thing that will improve the quality of device drivers is mandatory full disclosure. In other words, if you want to sell me a widget, you must be prepared to tell me everything I need to know to write my own driver, otherwise you are not allowed to sell me it. And, just to make sure, as a corollary: if I buy a widget off you and you haven't told me everything, then I automatically get the green light to probe it myself -- and publish everything I discover.
Or, in semi-legalese: Programming details form part of the instructions for use and are not proprietary secrets.
Ha ha ha! She's right an' all..... I haven't been seeing any of those kind of trolls for awhile. Mostly it's just been someone else pretending the reposted article was subtly altered. Congratulations for slipping that one in!
..... or you could have two different operators for numeric addition and string concatenation {like Perl}. That way you can mix scalar types all you like, then -- if you want to add numbers -- write any of "2" + 2, "2" + "2", 2 + "2" or 2 + 2 and know you will get 4, or if you want to concatenate strings, write any of "2" . 2, "2" . "2", 2 . "2" or 2 . 2 and get "22". {Of course, 2.2 should evaluate to two and one fifth, so maybe we need an operator that doesn't clash with the decimaal point. But if you like lots of whitespace in your programmes, just pretend that the string concatenation operator is a dot with a space in front of it.}
'+' seems to make sense as a string concatenation operator.
Not to me it doesn't, for the above reason. Of course you never really have to use it, because in Perl, you can always spot a variable by the dollar sign, and variables in "speech marks" get interpolated implicitly. So $foo . $bar can also be written as "$foo$bar", although you might need to use {curly brackets} around the name part if it isn't obvious where it ends -- "$foobar" is $foobar, "${foo}bar" is $foo . "bar". If you don't like the curly brackets you can use the dot.
I just like the idea of leaving the computer to do some of the work for me. For instance, why should I have to tell it what all my variables are going to be called and what type they are going to be, right at the beginning, when all that information is already in the programme somewhere if you look hard enough? Of course, I suppose I could write a Perl script to look for things that look like variable assignments, and build up a table of declarations to graft onto the beginning.....
Oracle supporting Linux and Mozilla could be a Good Thing for Open Source generally. How many applications outgrew MS Access and moved straight to Oracle on Windows? Of those, how many would work fine and dandy with PostgreSQL? Come to think of it, how many of them would work on MySQL?
All it really takes to migrate from one database server to another is to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of each SQL dialect {for instance MySQL and MS SQL use double speech marks, Postgres prefers single; MySQL doesn't have MONEY or BOOLEAN types} which is a one-off job and, if you have the source code for the middle bit, entirely feasible.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}
There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.
They're all right.
Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.
Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.
Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.
The Microsoft EULA is a piece of shit. It is illegal in many jurisdictions and unenforceable in others. See, in most countries, civilians have certain inalienable rights that nobody can take away, by any means, at all, ever. For instance, in most of the world, if a woman writes a letter explicitly authorising a man to have sexual intercourse with her, and he does, he can still be found guilty of rape because the right to refuse to have sex is protected.
The MS EULA asks you to give up your statutory rights to tinker with the software. In some countries, suggesting that you waive an inalienable right is just plain illegal. In others, the parts of the EULA that conflict with the law are unenforceable. In others still, the entire EULA is void.
If the GPL {which clearly does not seek to detract from your statutory rights} were ever tested in court and found to be unenforceable, EULAs which interfere with statutory rights would be even more unenforceable.
Oh, come off it. It's not the end of the world already. Someone gives you, for free and out of the goodness of their own heart, all the tools you need to do a job, does it a few times while you are watching just so you can get the idea how to do it, and you spit your dummy out because they won't actually do the job for free for you anymore.
I just hope you aren't the same people who whinge about people demanding the unfettered right to copy movies, CDs and so forth without compensating record company fatcats, because what you're doing yourselves isn't much different.
Aussie toilets -- at least the ones that flush:) -- are, like British ones, generally of the washdown variety. instead of a basin with a bottom exit {where the water swirls in a horizontal plane} and a high trap, the water in the bottom is just the seal in the U-bend; the exit is at the back of the basin, up and over the trap. During flushing, the water emerges from around the rim, lands in the bottom of the trap and displaces what is already there. No syphonic action is created; the waste is pushed out by the descending flushwater rather than drawn out by a partial vacuum. Though noisier in use than the syphonic closets common in the USA, washdown closets are generally more reliable as they do not depend on a narrow section in the waste pipe to create a partial vacuum -- the waste pipe is full bore all the way.
Although the washdown WC holds less water in its basin than the syphonic WC, the less efficient pushing action requires several changes to flush it clean, so there is no water saving benefit.
UK toilets also have a more complicated arrangement for emptying the cistern than the simple flapper valves used in the rest of the world. This uses a syphonic action initiated by lifting a diaphragm to force water over an inverted U-tube; once the syphon is started, the diaphragm flaps up to permit the rest of the water to pass. The benefit is that even if the flushing lever is jammed down, the cistern will not waste water by continuing to drain forever -- this was a legal requirement until quite recently, when somebody persuaded the UK government that if flapper valves are good enough for the rest of the world, then they should be good enough for the UK.
The website arses up Konqueror 3.1.5 completely - no scrolling arrows even on 1024x768 {my LCD won't go any higher than that} with the panel hidden. Mozilla Firebird 0.7 at least shows the scrolling arrows -- if you hide the panel; but I still couldn't get a sound to come out of the thing.
They may be using published standard for their audio files, but their web interface -- all I can say is GHICK!
If people are willing to pay a premium for the bandwidth cost they incur, then even 24bit versions of files could be sold.
That would be fine in theory, except the human ear can't hear the difference with anything better than about 18 bits. And how many hi-fis have a signal-to-noise ratio better than 144.5dB anyway? Come to think of it, how many mixing desks have that SNR? 24 bits is equivalent to a resolution of one centimetre in a hundred miles. So who's going to buy it?
Probably the same people who buy speakers labelled "3000W", feed them from amplifiers labelled "200W" that draw about 20 watts from the mains, and think they have a 6kW stereo {conveniently forgetting that 230V * 13A = 3kW, so a real 6kW amp could never work from a standard 13A power point -- we're talking those big fat round blue plugs here}. Or maybe the ones who use expensive oxygen free copper cables and gold-plated plugs -- the latest thing apparently is "directional" cables which are reckoned to sound better when the {alternating, in case anyone forgets} current is flowing from one end to the other.
In short, there's a limit to how hi your fi before you start wasting effort
Beta was technically superior to VHS, being a scaled-down verion of the broadcast-quality U-Matic system. Beta also had the feature that the cassette tape was "laced" the first press of the PLAY button and stayed so until the press of the EJECT button -- meaning that, as long as you had already hit play, you could go from fast wind to picture search {of course, you could fast wind "inside the cassette" if you went straight into that mode from insertion}. Unlike VHS which laced the tape on every press of play and unlaced it on stop -- so fast winding was always done with an unlaced tape. {Modern VHS recorders accomplish the lacing procedure much quicker so this is not an issue}.
Beta also had better resolution, and a recorder whose heads were in good condition could actually record the Teletext signal {transmitted while the electron beam is out of the visible screen area}. However, I don't recall this "accidental feature" being exploited on any movie cassettes; shame, because it would have allowed for {not quite DVD-style} special features such as subtitles and additional {textual and low-res graphics} material to be embedded in store-bought or rented movies. Of course if someone has an example of a prerecorded Beta cassette with teletext, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.
Unfortunately for Sony, Beta relied on more moving parts than VHS. Most of the TV/VCR rental companies chose VHS for its mechanical simplicity, despite the poorer picture resolution. Japanese-manufactured units {actually built by sewing-machine maker Elna, I think} were badged with the names used by the rental companies, and also sold under the Ferguson brand -- I used to have an old Ferguson 3V22, with "piano keys" and an Audio Dub mode for adding new sound to an existing recording. Follow-up models featured touch buttons and stereo audio {achieved by splitting the tiny edge track!}; but, since the internal TV receiver only decoded the mono FM audio {not all transmitters were broadcasting NICAM till the early 1990s}, and the UHF remodulator only encoded FM mono, this was effectively redundant.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the wonderful Philips V2000 system. This featured 8-hour , turn-over cassettes and fully automatic tracking, but there were only two manufacturers {Philips and Grundig -- Pye was already dead by then} and the machines just cost far too much, features notwithstanding.
Moral: Being good at your job won't necessarily make you popular.
You do not need to sue anyone for fraud, extortion or demanding money with menaces in the UK, where these are criminal offences. Just go to the police, make a statement, and the Crown Prosecution Service will take matters from then on.
They won't be hearing from my lawyer, because in the UK it is a criminal offence to send letters demanding money unless you really are owed it -- and even then you can't make threats. If they contact me, I will simply call the police. Fraud, extortion and demanding money with menaces are all CID matters, and SCO are going to be the ones needing lawyers.
Why does everyone get so pissy when MS announces that it's going to drop support for a 5-year-old OS?
Yet not a word is mentioned when Red Hat announces it's no longer going to support a barely 1-year-old OS?
Please. Someone explain.
It's simple. RedHat is based on Open Source software, which will continue to be maintained long after RedHat has ceased providong support for it. When RedHat finally drops support for a product, customers have three choices -- one of which requires no financial commitment, just hard work. These are: buy another RedHat OS; read the tech news and apply their own patches as and when released; or employ a third party to maintain their OS for them. Whereas Windows is Closed Source, thus effectively denying the second and third options. Furthermore, GNU/Linux is still getting faster with each release. It will run happily on older, less sophisticated hardware, especially in a non-GUI situation {even KDE is bearable on a 450MHz system or up}. Whereas, newer versions of Windows are more demanding, not less. Upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP might well require the purchase of new hardware. It will also cause compatibility problems for some software and hardware. Got an 8- or 16-bit expansion card tied to a piece of test equipment, made by a company that went out of business awile back? Visse-toi^UBonne chance, as they say in Paris.
Now, if there was a law which said that software source code had to be released into the Public Domain whenever a product reached End of Life, it might be a little different.....
We used to use Windows 98 on the desktop, RedHat on in-house servers and Slackware on our colocated servers. We're now in the process of switching to Mandrake on the desktop and Debian Stable on all servers. I have Debian Unstable on my desktop, 'cause I already had a spare box with Debian on it.
On a brand-new 1U rack mounted server, it's nice just to be able to type
# apt-get install apache
# apt-get install php4
# apt-get install mysql-server and know that within minutes, you will have a working LAMP server. The downside is that if you install just the base system, you sometimes find yourself needing to use apt-get for silly stuff like less. Of course, if you're setting up several machines, you could always make a dummy.deb package with no files, just dependencies on the packages you need, and install that.
Debian's kernel compilation system is also very easy to use - just run the configurator and make-kpkg will do all the important steps. You end up with a special.deb package containing your kernel image and your selected modules -- which you can then install using dpkg. Easy or what?
And "unstable" isn't half as bad as it sounds anyway. It's no more crash-prone than any other "brand new latest" distro.
I also have bought Officially Sanctioned copies of material that I previously owned in Independently Distributed form -- DVDs of stuff I taped off the telly, CDs of music I taped from other people's LPs, and so forth. So ownership of an Independent copy does not always preclude purchase of an Official one.
The thing you and I both know is, some DVDs are not worth paying for -- I for one would rather have a few tens of **** / ***** movies in my collection than a few hundred ** / *** ones. I simply won't buy a movie on DVD unless I know I'm going to watch it several times. But all the movie industry wants is for people to throw money at them.
And, in some cases, favourable Independent previews have been the sole reason for buying an Official copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this is the most pointful idea I have heard so far. You can only download something if you know the hash for it. You obtain the hash from a pay site. You can now download the material, and other people can download it from you if they have the hash. The hash download is traceable, so if you give it away then you can be nabbed.
Nope, changed my mind. It just sounds more like a warped way of using public key encryption. And there has to be a way around it, because there always is. There are open-source -- and inherently unregulated -- ways of sharing files, so even if they shut down all the grey-market sharing networks tomorrow, there would be a black-market network within the week. And if it was https based, everyone's existing web browser would be the client.
It would be possible in theory to design an algorithm so that the fingerprint would not be affected by "inaudible" changes. Still, there are always ways around things; you could make very audible changes that would certainly fingerprint differently, by XORing the whole file with a repeated byte string {but obviously not the same length as the checksum} and distributing that string separately.
This is an important point. There will have to be some way for legally-redistributable material to be identified as such. It will be possible to misidentify non-freely-distributable material as freely-distributable. Therefore, the scheme is doomed to fail. QED.
Why run Windows-style P2P on Linux? Just use httpsd!
It is actually rather nice for a text editor to be able to access the Internet -- you can use Kate on your own PC to edit your website on your ISP's server, using KBear for ftp; just give the filename as kbearftp://mylogin@myisp.co.uk:21/index.php or whatever.
:)
But there is a way to run one Linux kernel on top of another; I forget what it's called but I know it exists. The point being that the "secondary" kernel can have been compiled without certain features. If the running kernel has no code in it that can access the network, then no userland application that is using that kernel can access the network. The "main" kernel, of course, has network support. Furthermore, since the "secondary" kernel's "kernel space" is within the "main" kernel's userland -- already subject to privilege separation -- there are potentially two levels of blocking. Even if you can root the secondary kernel, you're still in userland! Not to mention that since we switched from thin co-ax to UTP, you can plug and unplug the network with impunity
"virus" is a stuff-word {like "furniture"} rather than a thing-word {like "chair"}, so it doesn't really have a plural. If it was a thing-word, its plural could be "viri" {with one "i"} or "viruses" -- which is preferable because, although "viri" looks like Latin, it is bad Latin {because the Latin word doesn't have a plural in the first place} so, since it is being used like an English word, it should follow English pluralisation rules. In any case, "virii" {with two "i"s} would be the plural of "virius", not "virus".
True. The only thing that will improve the quality of device drivers is mandatory full disclosure. In other words, if you want to sell me a widget, you must be prepared to tell me everything I need to know to write my own driver, otherwise you are not allowed to sell me it. And, just to make sure, as a corollary: if I buy a widget off you and you haven't told me everything, then I automatically get the green light to probe it myself -- and publish everything I discover.
Or, in semi-legalese: Programming details form part of the instructions for use and are not proprietary secrets.
Ha ha ha! She's right an' all ..... I haven't been seeing any of those kind of trolls for awhile. Mostly it's just been someone else pretending the reposted article was subtly altered. Congratulations for slipping that one in!
I just like the idea of leaving the computer to do some of the work for me. For instance, why should I have to tell it what all my variables are going to be called and what type they are going to be, right at the beginning, when all that information is already in the programme somewhere if you look hard enough? Of course, I suppose I could write a Perl script to look for things that look like variable assignments, and build up a table of declarations to graft onto the beginning
In some countries, yes.
Oracle supporting Linux and Mozilla could be a Good Thing for Open Source generally. How many applications outgrew MS Access and moved straight to Oracle on Windows? Of those, how many would work fine and dandy with PostgreSQL? Come to think of it, how many of them would work on MySQL?
All it really takes to migrate from one database server to another is to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of each SQL dialect {for instance MySQL and MS SQL use double speech marks, Postgres prefers single; MySQL doesn't have MONEY or BOOLEAN types} which is a one-off job and, if you have the source code for the middle bit, entirely feasible.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}
There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.
They're all right.
Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.
Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.
Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.
The Microsoft EULA is a piece of shit. It is illegal in many jurisdictions and unenforceable in others. See, in most countries, civilians have certain inalienable rights that nobody can take away, by any means, at all, ever. For instance, in most of the world, if a woman writes a letter explicitly authorising a man to have sexual intercourse with her, and he does, he can still be found guilty of rape because the right to refuse to have sex is protected.
The MS EULA asks you to give up your statutory rights to tinker with the software. In some countries, suggesting that you waive an inalienable right is just plain illegal. In others, the parts of the EULA that conflict with the law are unenforceable. In others still, the entire EULA is void.
If the GPL {which clearly does not seek to detract from your statutory rights} were ever tested in court and found to be unenforceable, EULAs which interfere with statutory rights would be even more unenforceable.
Oh, come off it. It's not the end of the world already. Someone gives you, for free and out of the goodness of their own heart, all the tools you need to do a job, does it a few times while you are watching just so you can get the idea how to do it, and you spit your dummy out because they won't actually do the job for free for you anymore.
I just hope you aren't the same people who whinge about people demanding the unfettered right to copy movies, CDs and so forth without compensating record company fatcats, because what you're doing yourselves isn't much different.
Although the washdown WC holds less water in its basin than the syphonic WC, the less efficient pushing action requires several changes to flush it clean, so there is no water saving benefit.
UK toilets also have a more complicated arrangement for emptying the cistern than the simple flapper valves used in the rest of the world. This uses a syphonic action initiated by lifting a diaphragm to force water over an inverted U-tube; once the syphon is started, the diaphragm flaps up to permit the rest of the water to pass. The benefit is that even if the flushing lever is jammed down, the cistern will not waste water by continuing to drain forever -- this was a legal requirement until quite recently, when somebody persuaded the UK government that if flapper valves are good enough for the rest of the world, then they should be good enough for the UK.
The website arses up Konqueror 3.1.5 completely - no scrolling arrows even on 1024x768 {my LCD won't go any higher than that} with the panel hidden. Mozilla Firebird 0.7 at least shows the scrolling arrows -- if you hide the panel; but I still couldn't get a sound to come out of the thing.
They may be using published standard for their audio files, but their web interface -- all I can say is GHICK!
Probably the same people who buy speakers labelled "3000W", feed them from amplifiers labelled "200W" that draw about 20 watts from the mains, and think they have a 6kW stereo {conveniently forgetting that 230V * 13A = 3kW, so a real 6kW amp could never work from a standard 13A power point -- we're talking those big fat round blue plugs here}. Or maybe the ones who use expensive oxygen free copper cables and gold-plated plugs -- the latest thing apparently is "directional" cables which are reckoned to sound better when the {alternating, in case anyone forgets} current is flowing from one end to the other.
In short, there's a limit to how hi your fi before you start wasting effort
Beta was technically superior to VHS, being a scaled-down verion of the broadcast-quality U-Matic system. Beta also had the feature that the cassette tape was "laced" the first press of the PLAY button and stayed so until the press of the EJECT button -- meaning that, as long as you had already hit play, you could go from fast wind to picture search {of course, you could fast wind "inside the cassette" if you went straight into that mode from insertion}. Unlike VHS which laced the tape on every press of play and unlaced it on stop -- so fast winding was always done with an unlaced tape. {Modern VHS recorders accomplish the lacing procedure much quicker so this is not an issue}.
Beta also had better resolution, and a recorder whose heads were in good condition could actually record the Teletext signal {transmitted while the electron beam is out of the visible screen area}. However, I don't recall this "accidental feature" being exploited on any movie cassettes; shame, because it would have allowed for {not quite DVD-style} special features such as subtitles and additional {textual and low-res graphics} material to be embedded in store-bought or rented movies. Of course if someone has an example of a prerecorded Beta cassette with teletext, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.
Unfortunately for Sony, Beta relied on more moving parts than VHS. Most of the TV/VCR rental companies chose VHS for its mechanical simplicity, despite the poorer picture resolution. Japanese-manufactured units {actually built by sewing-machine maker Elna, I think} were badged with the names used by the rental companies, and also sold under the Ferguson brand -- I used to have an old Ferguson 3V22, with "piano keys" and an Audio Dub mode for adding new sound to an existing recording. Follow-up models featured touch buttons and stereo audio {achieved by splitting the tiny edge track!}; but, since the internal TV receiver only decoded the mono FM audio {not all transmitters were broadcasting NICAM till the early 1990s}, and the UHF remodulator only encoded FM mono, this was effectively redundant.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the wonderful Philips V2000 system. This featured 8-hour , turn-over cassettes and fully automatic tracking, but there were only two manufacturers {Philips and Grundig -- Pye was already dead by then} and the machines just cost far too much, features notwithstanding.
Moral: Being good at your job won't necessarily make you popular.
You do not need to sue anyone for fraud, extortion or demanding money with menaces in the UK, where these are criminal offences. Just go to the police, make a statement, and the Crown Prosecution Service will take matters from then on.
You don't actually need an injunction to prevent someone committing a crime. SCO's actions would already be illegal in the UK.
They won't be hearing from my lawyer, because in the UK it is a criminal offence to send letters demanding money unless you really are owed it -- and even then you can't make threats. If they contact me, I will simply call the police. Fraud, extortion and demanding money with menaces are all CID matters, and SCO are going to be the ones needing lawyers.
Now, if there was a law which said that software source code had to be released into the Public Domain whenever a product reached End of Life, it might be a little different
We used to use Windows 98 on the desktop, RedHat on in-house servers and Slackware on our colocated servers. We're now in the process of switching to Mandrake on the desktop and Debian Stable on all servers. I have Debian Unstable on my desktop, 'cause I already had a spare box with Debian on it.
.deb package with no files, just dependencies on the packages you need, and install that.
.deb package containing your kernel image and your selected modules -- which you can then install using dpkg. Easy or what?
On a brand-new 1U rack mounted server, it's nice just to be able to type
# apt-get install apache
# apt-get install php4
# apt-get install mysql-server
and know that within minutes, you will have a working LAMP server. The downside is that if you install just the base system, you sometimes find yourself needing to use apt-get for silly stuff like less. Of course, if you're setting up several machines, you could always make a dummy
Debian's kernel compilation system is also very easy to use - just run the configurator and make-kpkg will do all the important steps. You end up with a special
And "unstable" isn't half as bad as it sounds anyway. It's no more crash-prone than any other "brand new latest" distro.
I also have bought Officially Sanctioned copies of material that I previously owned in Independently Distributed form -- DVDs of stuff I taped off the telly, CDs of music I taped from other people's LPs, and so forth. So ownership of an Independent copy does not always preclude purchase of an Official one.
The thing you and I both know is, some DVDs are not worth paying for -- I for one would rather have a few tens of **** / ***** movies in my collection than a few hundred ** / *** ones. I simply won't buy a movie on DVD unless I know I'm going to watch it several times. But all the movie industry wants is for people to throw money at them.
And, in some cases, favourable Independent previews have been the sole reason for buying an Official copy.