I recently downloaded a recommended ethernet driver update from windows update. It deleted my previous drivers and crashed during installation. Attempts to replace or uninstall the partially installed drivers resulted in errors. So after about 20 minutes I just did a system restore.
I reported the problem, but it still recommends that I download that little ethernet driver update.
Over the years linux has been gaining strength at my university, appearing on more computers every year.
This year they put Windows XP Pro and Visual Studio.NET on all of the remaining windows pc's and gave free legal copies of both to any students who wanted to install them at home.
With any luck they'll create a mini black hole, it'll fall through the ground, and they'll just say "oops" and go onto their next project. 20 years later there will be great earthquakes and soon planet will give off several large explosions, the first of which killing all the survivors of the quakes, as it's sucked into the tiny black hole at its core.
Why don't they just admit that they now consider all crime and unpopular use of first amendment rights to be acts of terrorism?
The word terrorism has all but lost its meaning now. We used to consider a terrorist to be someone who kills innocent civilians to make a political statement. Now white hat hackers are terrorists. Peace march organizers are terrorists. P2P users are terrorists. And those terrorists and people who know the terrorists may be subject to FISA wiretaps, which are not checked by the judicial system.
I am honored to be your President during this time of opportunity and challenge for our country....
But I probably recieved it because I'm on the RNC mailing list. I'm on the DNC mailing list too. I just like to watch them fight back and forth in my inbox.
I'm currently taking a class called "computer ethics and legal issues". It actually counts as a philosophy credit rather than a CS credit, and it's not required, but many of us take it anyway. The class involves two 10 page essays and the rest is lectures from two CS professors and a philosophy professor.
The philosophy professor in that class recently told us a joke: "What's the difference between IT professionals and lawyers? Lawyers have ethics." By this he meant that lawyers must take an oath to follow a certain code of conduct while IT professionals as a whole have no such requirement.
I wrote a java web browser in about 3 weeks of classtime back in high school that rendered html as good as that does, at least on the sites I checked (google.com and mozilla.org).
Not to sound like I'm complaining. It's free afterall. And it's nice to see they haven't abandoned the project.
What about Oregon's new Senate Bill 742? Proposed by republican senator John Minnis, it says that whoever participates in or conspires to participate in any type of activity which disrupts commerce (or which at least one person involved intends to use to disrupt commerce, regardless of if they tell the others) faces a mandatory life sentence without paroll.
The idea of it is, that if you say you're going to go to a peace march, they can arrest you, because many peace marches disrupt commerce, and if found guilty of saying you're going to go to a peace march, they'll throw you in prison for life without giving the judge a chance to reduce the sentence. And I have not exaggerated a word of this.
Of course it advertises itself as an anti-terrorism bill, and our legistlators have a history of saying "aye" whenever a bill comes along that has a good sounding summary and was proposed by someone of their own party. And peace marchers are usually democrats, trouble makers in their eyes.
They might say that they're only going to use it against real terrorists, but if that's true they should put it in writing, rather than passing an "everyone is guilty of crimes punishable by death" law.
Just the fact that one of our legislators would propose something like that deeply offends all of us. And black people from California still can't get more than 30 miles past the border without getting pulled over, but that's another story. I'm voting democrat in the next state election if they decide to let me have a ballot this time.
Just blowing off some steam. Nothing new to see here.
If SCO Linux was ever released containing the SCO Unix source code in question, IBM could argue that they agreed to GPL the code by releasing it under the the GPL.
Though on one occasion I saw my own code obfuscated and introduced into another open source project by someone claiming to have written it themselves, so I sort of know how it feels to have your IP violated in such a way.
But SCO's motive is not to protect their Intellectual Property, it's to sue their way back into business while crushing their competition. There was no serious crime. Linux would still have the popularity it does today if none of their code was copied, and SCO would still see the same gradual decline in profit. They're trying to make it look as if the primary reason that Linux is awesome and they're going out of business is that some of their code was copied and/or rewritten from memory.
If their Unix source does appear in the SCO Linux, they could argue that they didn't put it there, but instead downloaded the packages that contain it from another distribution. In that case, they would not be the ones putting the source into GPL, so their IP would be violated. To defend themselves, IBM would not only have to show that SCO Linux contains the source in question, but that SCO introduced it into the source. By withholding that that source is, they are hindering IBM's ability to investigate for their own defense and perhaps giving themselves time to try and cover up some stuff.
I don't mind server blackhole lists, where connections from certain smtp servers are refused, but blackholing individual email addresses can cause a lot of problems. The most offensive spam usually doesn't include a real from address, and sometimes a from address is randomly selected from their spam victim list. I have on occasion recieved bounced spam that was sent with my email address. I would not like to be blocked because some blackhole list maintainer decided to add my email without verifying if I'm a spammer.
This may be unrelated, but AOL often blocks my email replies to tech support requests from AOL users. It annoys me. They never even give a reason why I'm blocked.
There are other fairly reliable ways to filter spam, without resorting to lists. Mozilla's bayesian filtering seems to work pretty good, though I haven't yet recieved enough personal email to thoroughly train it.
Well you know, Keanu Reeves also played the son of Satan in the Devil's Advocate, so I figure the producers of the Matrix thought they would cast him into the same role as before, as Neo, the anti-christ.
His patents are going to hurt people who utilize popup ads, which I like.
On the other hand, there are companies like Walker Associates that get tons of patents and never implement the ideas, but instead sue whoever comes up with the same idea out of business, essentially killing the technology. And many oil companies buy up clean energy patents so that they too can sue anyone who uses the technology out of business, while they still have no plans to use the technologies themselves, so that clean energy technologies are also killed. They will even wait until small competitors start investing great deals of money into those technologies, unaware of the patents, then come forth and say "cease and desist" at the time when it will cause the company the greatest financial loss.
Looking at both sides, I still feel that long term patents are bad. They shouldn't last 17-34 years. And the popup patent will only deal a temporary blow to popup ads. People will simply lose the right to make their own popup ads without paying a license, but his company will still be trying to put them everywhere.
So I think we should oppose these patent, as with any other long term patents, and seek alternative remedies to the popup ad problem.
I believe that the popup problem will fix itself because anyone who hates popups enough will not go to sites that use them, or will use popup blockers. For most users of non-ms browsers, the problem is already solved.
It deeply offends me whenever I see lawsuits like this, especially when I'm not the plaintiff. He wasn't hurt in any way that matters, and eBay did nothing wrong in relation to this case. I'm glad to see that the case was dismissed, and I hope he goes though many costly and unsuccessful appeals, finally being counter-sued for eBay's legal fees.
I see no serious problem with a desktop pc automatically logging in with root permissons. This has been successful for over 20 years in the dos/windows world. Desktop pc's can stand to be exploited every once in a while. Server pc's, on the other hand, need to be as secure as possible.
Maybe the reduced hassle is worth the occasional virus or other exploit. People can backup their files, and if their data is so incredibly valuable, they can disable the root auto-login.
Being primarily a windows user (though i'm trying to get away from ms products), none of my computers have ever been infected by a virus while I was using it, without the use of anti-virus software, although I scan them every few months. I have lost absolutely nothing on any of my desktops anywhere as a result of running with root-like permossions. I lose more data to windows crashes than anything else.
Sure, there's the possibility of a virus similar to slammer hitting all lindows desktop pc's with internet ip's and deleting everything on those that are logged in as root, but the losses are much less than if the computer was running in a business environment, and many compilers and utilities can now automate most of the process of strengthening programs against buffer overrun attacks.
It's a choice between security vs convenience, and most their target audience has already chosen convenience. They're only giving users what they want.
If that argument doesn't work for you, here's another one. Think of Lindows as a gateway OS. It gets people hooked on linux, while providing an environment that's familiar to them. Those who want more can then comfortably move to other linux distributions. It's like a ski resort providing a kiddie slope. Without them, you wouldn't have many skiers, even though most skilled skiers would be embarrassed to use them.
I hate to say it, but these recent events can be taken several different ways. Consider this: Even under a massive DDoS attack, their servers running SCO Unix are still functioning, quite well. I still get very quick responses when visiting their site. And nobody has succeeded at hacking/defacing it yet.
I would have expected a good DDoS attack to make them completely inaccessible, but when I go to their site I don't notice any difference.
If I don't like the popups on a site, I simply won't use the site.
Though if they really annoy me, like if the number of popups exceeds 20 at once, with various animated enlarge your <bleep> ads, I might get the administrative contact email of the domain and sign it up at a bunch of spam sites. But that's where I normally draw the line for vengeance.
Did people learn nothing from MS Access databases, where you've got a bunch of people accessing this database file directly instead of through a server? It didn't scale very well, network usage was excessive, and every once in a while the database would get irrepairably corrupted, often when any one of the computers accessing it crashed.
With direct memory access, we're going to have the same problem, plus garbage collection is going to be a pain. Memory locking will especially pose difficulties, and may require several round trips between the client and server. If a computer crashes, parts of memory in any computers it was accessing could be left in an intermediate state. And hackers and virus writers will see it as a dream come true.
It's greed. They don't want you to just buy the special edition and be done with it. By delaying the special edition, they may be able to get you to buy the regular edition as well.
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I recently downloaded a recommended ethernet driver update from windows update. It deleted my previous drivers and crashed during installation. Attempts to replace or uninstall the partially installed drivers resulted in errors. So after about 20 minutes I just did a system restore.
I reported the problem, but it still recommends that I download that little ethernet driver update.
Over the years linux has been gaining strength at my university, appearing on more computers every year.
This year they put Windows XP Pro and Visual Studio.NET on all of the remaining windows pc's and gave free legal copies of both to any students who wanted to install them at home.
With any luck they'll create a mini black hole, it'll fall through the ground, and they'll just say "oops" and go onto their next project. 20 years later there will be great earthquakes and soon planet will give off several large explosions, the first of which killing all the survivors of the quakes, as it's sucked into the tiny black hole at its core.
Why don't they just admit that they now consider all crime and unpopular use of first amendment rights to be acts of terrorism?
The word terrorism has all but lost its meaning now. We used to consider a terrorist to be someone who kills innocent civilians to make a political statement. Now white hat hackers are terrorists. Peace march organizers are terrorists. P2P users are terrorists. And those terrorists and people who know the terrorists may be subject to FISA wiretaps, which are not checked by the judicial system.
Subject: A Message from President George W. Bush
...
May 16, 2003
Dear David,
I am honored to be your President during this time of opportunity and challenge for our country.
But I probably recieved it because I'm on the RNC mailing list. I'm on the DNC mailing list too. I just like to watch them fight back and forth in my inbox.
I'm currently taking a class called "computer ethics and legal issues". It actually counts as a philosophy credit rather than a CS credit, and it's not required, but many of us take it anyway. The class involves two 10 page essays and the rest is lectures from two CS professors and a philosophy professor.
The philosophy professor in that class recently told us a joke: "What's the difference between IT professionals and lawyers? Lawyers have ethics." By this he meant that lawyers must take an oath to follow a certain code of conduct while IT professionals as a whole have no such requirement.
I wrote a java web browser in about 3 weeks of classtime back in high school that rendered html as good as that does, at least on the sites I checked (google.com and mozilla.org).
Not to sound like I'm complaining. It's free afterall. And it's nice to see they haven't abandoned the project.
What about Oregon's new Senate Bill 742? Proposed by republican senator John Minnis, it says that whoever participates in or conspires to participate in any type of activity which disrupts commerce (or which at least one person involved intends to use to disrupt commerce, regardless of if they tell the others) faces a mandatory life sentence without paroll.
The idea of it is, that if you say you're going to go to a peace march, they can arrest you, because many peace marches disrupt commerce, and if found guilty of saying you're going to go to a peace march, they'll throw you in prison for life without giving the judge a chance to reduce the sentence. And I have not exaggerated a word of this.
Of course it advertises itself as an anti-terrorism bill, and our legistlators have a history of saying "aye" whenever a bill comes along that has a good sounding summary and was proposed by someone of their own party. And peace marchers are usually democrats, trouble makers in their eyes.
They might say that they're only going to use it against real terrorists, but if that's true they should put it in writing, rather than passing an "everyone is guilty of crimes punishable by death" law.
Just the fact that one of our legislators would propose something like that deeply offends all of us. And black people from California still can't get more than 30 miles past the border without getting pulled over, but that's another story. I'm voting democrat in the next state election if they decide to let me have a ballot this time.
I feel like painting my resume on the sides of a giant wooden box and shipping it to:
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
It might be expensive though.
I bet some people will even sign them up for free magazines and other offers delivered to their physical address.
Just blowing off some steam. Nothing new to see here.
If SCO Linux was ever released containing the SCO Unix source code in question, IBM could argue that they agreed to GPL the code by releasing it under the the GPL.
Though on one occasion I saw my own code obfuscated and introduced into another open source project by someone claiming to have written it themselves, so I sort of know how it feels to have your IP violated in such a way.
But SCO's motive is not to protect their Intellectual Property, it's to sue their way back into business while crushing their competition. There was no serious crime. Linux would still have the popularity it does today if none of their code was copied, and SCO would still see the same gradual decline in profit. They're trying to make it look as if the primary reason that Linux is awesome and they're going out of business is that some of their code was copied and/or rewritten from memory.
If their Unix source does appear in the SCO Linux, they could argue that they didn't put it there, but instead downloaded the packages that contain it from another distribution. In that case, they would not be the ones putting the source into GPL, so their IP would be violated.
To defend themselves, IBM would not only have to show that SCO Linux contains the source in question, but that SCO introduced it into the source. By withholding that that source is, they are hindering IBM's ability to investigate for their own defense and perhaps giving themselves time to try and cover up some stuff.
I don't mind server blackhole lists, where connections from certain smtp servers are refused, but blackholing individual email addresses can cause a lot of problems. The most offensive spam usually doesn't include a real from address, and sometimes a from address is randomly selected from their spam victim list. I have on occasion recieved bounced spam that was sent with my email address. I would not like to be blocked because some blackhole list maintainer decided to add my email without verifying if I'm a spammer.
This may be unrelated, but AOL often blocks my email replies to tech support requests from AOL users. It annoys me. They never even give a reason why I'm blocked.
There are other fairly reliable ways to filter spam, without resorting to lists. Mozilla's bayesian filtering seems to work pretty good, though I haven't yet recieved enough personal email to thoroughly train it.
It'd be funny, although sad as well, if the hardest working team forgot item #291. Forgetting it means disqualification.
Well you know, Keanu Reeves also played the son of Satan in the Devil's Advocate, so I figure the producers of the Matrix thought they would cast him into the same role as before, as Neo, the anti-christ.
His patents are going to hurt people who utilize popup ads, which I like.
On the other hand, there are companies like Walker Associates that get tons of patents and never implement the ideas, but instead sue whoever comes up with the same idea out of business, essentially killing the technology. And many oil companies buy up clean energy patents so that they too can sue anyone who uses the technology out of business, while they still have no plans to use the technologies themselves, so that clean energy technologies are also killed. They will even wait until small competitors start investing great deals of money into those technologies, unaware of the patents, then come forth and say "cease and desist" at the time when it will cause the company the greatest financial loss.
Looking at both sides, I still feel that long term patents are bad. They shouldn't last 17-34 years. And the popup patent will only deal a temporary blow to popup ads. People will simply lose the right to make their own popup ads without paying a license, but his company will still be trying to put them everywhere.
So I think we should oppose these patent, as with any other long term patents, and seek alternative remedies to the popup ad problem.
I believe that the popup problem will fix itself because anyone who hates popups enough will not go to sites that use them, or will use popup blockers. For most users of non-ms browsers, the problem is already solved.
That was a cool episode. Oh, the memories...
It deeply offends me whenever I see lawsuits like this, especially when I'm not the plaintiff. He wasn't hurt in any way that matters, and eBay did nothing wrong in relation to this case. I'm glad to see that the case was dismissed, and I hope he goes though many costly and unsuccessful appeals, finally being counter-sued for eBay's legal fees.
I see no serious problem with a desktop pc automatically logging in with root permissons. This has been successful for over 20 years in the dos/windows world. Desktop pc's can stand to be exploited every once in a while. Server pc's, on the other hand, need to be as secure as possible.
Maybe the reduced hassle is worth the occasional virus or other exploit. People can backup their files, and if their data is so incredibly valuable, they can disable the root auto-login.
Being primarily a windows user (though i'm trying to get away from ms products), none of my computers have ever been infected by a virus while I was using it, without the use of anti-virus software, although I scan them every few months. I have lost absolutely nothing on any of my desktops anywhere as a result of running with root-like permossions. I lose more data to windows crashes than anything else.
Sure, there's the possibility of a virus similar to slammer hitting all lindows desktop pc's with internet ip's and deleting everything on those that are logged in as root, but the losses are much less than if the computer was running in a business environment, and many compilers and utilities can now automate most of the process of strengthening programs against buffer overrun attacks.
It's a choice between security vs convenience, and most their target audience has already chosen convenience. They're only giving users what they want.
If that argument doesn't work for you, here's another one. Think of Lindows as a gateway OS. It gets people hooked on linux, while providing an environment that's familiar to them. Those who want more can then comfortably move to other linux distributions. It's like a ski resort providing a kiddie slope. Without them, you wouldn't have many skiers, even though most skilled skiers would be embarrassed to use them.
I hate to say it, but these recent events can be taken several different ways. Consider this: Even under a massive DDoS attack, their servers running SCO Unix are still functioning, quite well. I still get very quick responses when visiting their site. And nobody has succeeded at hacking/defacing it yet.
I would have expected a good DDoS attack to make them completely inaccessible, but when I go to their site I don't notice any difference.
If I don't like the popups on a site, I simply won't use the site.
Though if they really annoy me, like if the number of popups exceeds 20 at once, with various animated enlarge your <bleep> ads, I might get the administrative contact email of the domain and sign it up at a bunch of spam sites. But that's where I normally draw the line for vengeance.
Did people learn nothing from MS Access databases, where you've got a bunch of people accessing this database file directly instead of through a server? It didn't scale very well, network usage was excessive, and every once in a while the database would get irrepairably corrupted, often when any one of the computers accessing it crashed.
With direct memory access, we're going to have the same problem, plus garbage collection is going to be a pain. Memory locking will especially pose difficulties, and may require several round trips between the client and server. If a computer crashes, parts of memory in any computers it was accessing could be left in an intermediate state. And hackers and virus writers will see it as a dream come true.
Keep server code on the server.
"Kids, how many times do we have to say this, watch out for the invisible power lines."
It's greed. They don't want you to just buy the special edition and be done with it. By delaying the special edition, they may be able to get you to buy the regular edition as well.
I can't wait that long.
Gotta set TTL to 129 now.