There are already a lot of laws like that. Corporations find ways around them. They get their employees to each make the maximum allowed personal donation, to the maximum number of senators, representatives, etc., effectively overcoming any caps intended to prevent corporations from buying politicians. Then, they contribute by other indirect means. Maybe they'll run free campaign ads, film documentaries on how great the politician is, give gifts to their family members, etc.
You'll probably never be hacked in that way. It's just a possibility. About 5 seconds, until the DNS lookup tries out. Now that I've looked it up, an exception to that is NetBIOS which tries WINS and broadcast first, so Windows file sharing doesn't have have the same delay. An exception to that exception is Windows XP which by default tries to connect to a UNC path via WebDAV (http) first, and falls back to normal file sharing when that fails.
ARP matches IP addresses (not names) to MAC addresses.
I suppose I've been lucky. I can connect to printers shared from Windows machines just fine. I have a faint memory of permission difficulties in Warty, and it's all worked fine in Hoary and Breezy.
It has a bug with the particular model I'm using though. It prints in an alternating right-left-right-left fashion, and the lines are way out of alignment. I can't make make it print like right-return-right-return fashion to force it to be aligned at the cost of printing speed, and it seems to ignore alignment settings, using the way-off defaults instead. It's a Lexmark Z22.
What I liked most about Hoary over Warty was that X.org had good support for my video chipset, and XFree86 did not. Any XFree86 based distro would crash after a couple minutes of doing anything 3D.
For me, brown is just hard to look at for hours upon hours. After getting tired of the small selection of alternatives that come with Ubuntu, and seeing nothing I really liked in the repositories or at gnome-look.org, I downloaded the latest Red Hat BlueCurve theme from one of the Fedora ftp sites and removed all the Red Hat logo icons. I've been using that theme since Hoary, copying it over from backups with every reinstall. But very recently I've been using Kubuntu.
In XP, I use the classic 2000 theme. I've hated the default XP theme since the first moment I laid eyes on it. It's all big and colorful. Playskool ain't got nothin' on them.
In 32 bit protected mode, 16 bit instructions require a prefix to tell it that the following instruction is 16 bit, wasting a byte and a CPU cycle. In 16 bit real mode, the same is true of 32 bit instructions. But modern processors aren't optimized to preserve 16 bit performance. If they can improve 32 bit performance just a little, they'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of 16 bit performance to do it. Also, if you're mixing 16 and 32 bit variables in C/C++, it'll do a lot of expensive conversions to make it all work. I've done very little with 64 bit though, aside from playing with MMX on one occasion.
I saw this idea at the 1996 COMDEX. The glasses use LCD's to block one eye at a time, alternating with each frame. That allows any normal video display to be used. The demo game was Descent II. It was neat, but you had to wear those glasses and the flicker was annoying.
It looks just like Breezy, which looks just like Hoary, which looked just like Warty. I'm more into seeing what's new than seeing what's the same.
I'll probably wait for them to include the 2.6.14 kernel before upgrading from Breezy. Dapper still has 2.6.12, and even Firefox 1.0.7. They're still a long way from release though, so I'm hopeful that they'll get those upgraded.
I think this is a variant of this story where every friday night, a cleaning lady would unplug the life support to a particular hospital bed to plug in a floor polisher, killing a patient every friday that the bed was occupied. The article mentions several variants, including one where a system goes down the same time each day for several minutes.
You may expect a program CD to auto-run, but nobody expects a music CD to run executable code. You expect music CD's to simply be read and played, which does not involve running code from the CD. Music and data CD's are even encoded differently. Pure music CD's have no filesystem. If you look carefully on the surface of a DRM'd CD, you'll see two faint bands, a large outer band for audio, and a thin, almost invisible inner band for data. For a long time, CD's were either all-audio, or all-data, and almost never hybrid, and for the most part that's how it still is, which leads some people to the false assumption that music CD's can't infect their system.
The amount of harm in installing a rootkit is often uncertain, except that there's always some harm. They modify internal operating system structures, and can cause quirks and instability. Rootkits simply do not get the same quality of testing as mature operating system code. We already know that Sony's DRM'd CD's will crash Windows Vista. At the very least, they cause a slight slowdown and make it easier for other unwanted programs to hide from the user. At the worst, any patch to the operating system which changes one of those internal structures could render a system running the rootkit unbootable, which for an average user (not most skilled users) means the loss of everything they had on the system, if they're forced to reformat and reinstall the system using the restore CD that came with the system. For such an inexperienced user, the damage caused by the rootkit could be in the tens of thousands of dollars.
I got a computer science degree from Southern Oregon University, and I've taken a few classes on computer related legal issues, but none of which (as far as I can remember) has any relation to what I just said.
Eventually hardware fails, always. Notice the signs that something is about to fail so that you can replace it when in a timely manner and with little downtime, or none in some cases. If you know you'll have to take a server down, figure out how to replace it without data loss or downtime. With an MSDFS root, which Samba does well, phasing out a dying or obsolete server is relatively easy. Otherwise, you'll just have to fiddle with the DNS and maybe give the new server the same IP. You can also look into clustering, but the cost and complexity can be prohibitive for smaller companies, and possibly for home experimentation.
Always keep good backups. If someone comes to you and says they deleted an important file last week, be able to get it back without a full restore. Also, be able to do a full restore of a server, and know it'll work. If the server catches fire, have a plan to replace it within the hour.
Make some ethernet cables. Buy some raw cable, and end plugs, and put them together the right way. The ordering is very important. Not only must each end match, but the color coded twisted wire pairs must be arranged in a certain, non-obvious way or else you'll experience severe noise and crosstalk problems.
Mix older (bargain) gigabit hardware, different brands. Some card-switch or switch-switch combinations have slightly hard to diagnose problems. If you ping, you'll have zero packet loss. But if you transfer a file, sometimes speed will drop down to 20kb/s or so, and it'll only happen in one direction. I've seen buggy drivers cause this too. When packets are sent in rapid sequence, every other packet is lost, and the send window shrinks until it's sending only one packet at a time, and waiting for an ack before sending the next.
Get a really, really long ethernet cable and use it to plug a windows pc to a switch. Let it autodetect the speed. If it's long enough, it'll still detect 100mbit or 1 gigabit, and then fail to connect. You'll have to force it to 10mbit, or get better cabling, or use a switch, hub, or some other repeater to break it into two short connections.
Again, get a really long ethernet cable, and put a sharp kink in it. You do this by making a small loop, then trying to force it straight by pulling instead of carefully undoing the loop. Line quality will suffer dearly, even though you may still be able to connect. The best fix is often to buy a new cable. Any sort of sharp bend will cause problems.
Have fun with Windows name resolution. Windows PC's seem to be able to find each other pretty well just using WINS or broadcasts, but only after checking DNS first, which goes out to your ISP's servers if you don't have your own DNS server(s) set up. These requests tend to fail almost immediately without delay, so the issue can go unnoticed. This allows your network to be hacked a bit more easily from the outside, and also allows internet problems to translate into delays in local name resolution. This sort of problem is easy to create and easy to fix, and plagues some small businesses that lack experienced or knowledgeable IT staff.
Microsoft did very well with their boot prefetch optimization in XP. Most distros still run startup programs one at a time, waiting for each to exit before starting the next. It simplifies configuration, only having to specify loading order than specify dependencies for each startup item, but it's really slow, and will continue to be slow unless the distros want to break some backward compatibility. That's my guess anyways.
It's not so bad. I tried running firefox on a 233mhz debian system with 96mb and it took over a minute to load. I was using icewm, which is supposed to be pretty light. Times are changing I guess. Back in '95, Windows 95 was seen as bloatware. Nowadays, we look at Win2k which wants at least 16-32x as much ram minimum as 95 and think of how light 2k it is compared to XP.
Do I have to buy new games? Or what if I upgrade to a newer release of their console that claims backward compatibility, but most of my games won't work because they're locked into the older, obsolete console?
I then treat the high quality oggs as though they were my masters. I transcode them to other formats as necessary. For example, 128k mp3's for mp3 cd players, or 96k oggs to fit on my 1gb usb key.
Which ones? A quick search on uspto.gov for "perpetual motion" returns 65 patents, with another 41 applications pending. Not all of them claim to achieve perpetual motion though. One, for example, describes the invention as a perfect universal translator capable of decoding unknown languages on the fly, and suggests the idea of someday embedding it into an android, which by then might be driven by perpetual motion.
TigerDirect will sell you XP Home for $89.99, and it's not the upgrade version. That's not the retail price, but nobody buys at retail price these days. If I search Froogle, I can find much lower prices, but I wouldn't trust anyone selling below $60 or so.
My Ubuntu system at home came with thousands of programs, with many thousand more available in their repositories. An Office suite is installed whether you want it or not, unless you choose the minimal install, which few people do. The whole thing leaves very room for commercial competition for what runs on my desktop. Whatever someone wants to sell me, I probably already have some preinstalled equivalent on my Ubuntu system. Maybe this is unfair to others who would like to sell me something, but as a user I really don't mind getting a better system for the same price. Anti-virus vendors have had over 20 years to find other avenues of business, and now they're upset that after all this time Microsoft has decided to compete with them, not to sell as a standalone program, but to improve the security of their desktop operating systems. I'd actually like to see Windows bundled with Office and Visual Studio. Hell, why not throw in the whole enchilada? Because it saves consumers money at the expense of third parties software publishers?
Traditionally, a lot of OEM's have been bundling antivirus/antimalware trialware with systems, which times out after usually 60 days, leaving the system worse off than if it had no antivirus at all, unprotected but with all the slowness and instability that comes with running antivirus software.
In that universe, SCO wins its lawsuit, the US outlaws Linux and uses political pressure to force others to do the same, the nations of earth fall to Microsoft's armies after a malicious Windows Update takes over all the smart weapons, aircrafts, cell phones, servers, and desktops running Windows, and the Terran Empire is founded.
Dynamic linking of GPL licensed and closed source binaries together is only a violation if you distribute them together, IIRC. There's certainly nothing preventing an end user from installing proprietary software on their home system running Linux, that would be ludicrous, so they should be able to run proprietary drivers as well.
That said, I'm 100% certain that Linux already does this to an extent. Binary compatibility from one version to the next seems to not be as good as many would like, though I have no first hand knowledge of any of this.
Would your minor code changes somehow taint all the other packages on the system? If I install a single third party RPM on a Red Hat system, you think they'll simply refuse to provide support for anything else running on that system? And how would they know? "Oh, and by the way, I made a source modification to a program completely unrelated to the problem we're experiencing. Is that alright?" Even if they discover you slightly broke the agreement, they hope you'll renew next year, and they can't afford frequent bad press, so they'll still provide support to the extent that it's still worthwhile.
The internet is a good support tool. If that's not enough, there are people and companies other than Red Hat who can be hired in an emergency. There aren't many things that you can't fix anyways. If you can't get an answer from support, the source is always available. If your job is on the line, you'll dig in and find the answer, though it may take a while. And if the problem is serious enough, costly enough, just pay RH what it takes to get support.
Even with Windows, there are a lot of problems that I can't fix and they won't fix, but there are almost always somewhat obvious workarounds, harder and less desirable as they may be. I've never called Microsoft's tech support, and I generally have little faith in tech support. I feel like I'd spend more time trying to explain my problem and trying all the "standard solutions" that they make everyone try than I would troubleshooting the problem myself. The people and businesses who are likely to benefit the most from paid tech support are also the least likely to modify the source code.
No kidding. I know an MSCE who absolutely won't allow any open source whatsoever on the hundreds of desktops and several servers he manages because he heard that open source was horribly insecure, like spyware and crap. If it didn't come from Microsoft, and it's not Microsoft certified, he won't trust it at all.
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There are already a lot of laws like that. Corporations find ways around them. They get their employees to each make the maximum allowed personal donation, to the maximum number of senators, representatives, etc., effectively overcoming any caps intended to prevent corporations from buying politicians. Then, they contribute by other indirect means. Maybe they'll run free campaign ads, film documentaries on how great the politician is, give gifts to their family members, etc.
You'll probably never be hacked in that way. It's just a possibility. About 5 seconds, until the DNS lookup tries out. Now that I've looked it up, an exception to that is NetBIOS which tries WINS and broadcast first, so Windows file sharing doesn't have have the same delay. An exception to that exception is Windows XP which by default tries to connect to a UNC path via WebDAV (http) first, and falls back to normal file sharing when that fails.
ARP matches IP addresses (not names) to MAC addresses.
Too bad AC's don't get reply notifications.
I suppose I've been lucky. I can connect to printers shared from Windows machines just fine. I have a faint memory of permission difficulties in Warty, and it's all worked fine in Hoary and Breezy.
It has a bug with the particular model I'm using though. It prints in an alternating right-left-right-left fashion, and the lines are way out of alignment. I can't make make it print like right-return-right-return fashion to force it to be aligned at the cost of printing speed, and it seems to ignore alignment settings, using the way-off defaults instead. It's a Lexmark Z22.
What I liked most about Hoary over Warty was that X.org had good support for my video chipset, and XFree86 did not. Any XFree86 based distro would crash after a couple minutes of doing anything 3D.
For me, brown is just hard to look at for hours upon hours. After getting tired of the small selection of alternatives that come with Ubuntu, and seeing nothing I really liked in the repositories or at gnome-look.org, I downloaded the latest Red Hat BlueCurve theme from one of the Fedora ftp sites and removed all the Red Hat logo icons. I've been using that theme since Hoary, copying it over from backups with every reinstall. But very recently I've been using Kubuntu.
In XP, I use the classic 2000 theme. I've hated the default XP theme since the first moment I laid eyes on it. It's all big and colorful. Playskool ain't got nothin' on them.
In 32 bit protected mode, 16 bit instructions require a prefix to tell it that the following instruction is 16 bit, wasting a byte and a CPU cycle. In 16 bit real mode, the same is true of 32 bit instructions. But modern processors aren't optimized to preserve 16 bit performance. If they can improve 32 bit performance just a little, they'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of 16 bit performance to do it. Also, if you're mixing 16 and 32 bit variables in C/C++, it'll do a lot of expensive conversions to make it all work. I've done very little with 64 bit though, aside from playing with MMX on one occasion.
I saw this idea at the 1996 COMDEX. The glasses use LCD's to block one eye at a time, alternating with each frame. That allows any normal video display to be used. The demo game was Descent II. It was neat, but you had to wear those glasses and the flicker was annoying.
It looks just like Breezy, which looks just like Hoary, which looked just like Warty. I'm more into seeing what's new than seeing what's the same.
I'll probably wait for them to include the 2.6.14 kernel before upgrading from Breezy. Dapper still has 2.6.12, and even Firefox 1.0.7. They're still a long way from release though, so I'm hopeful that they'll get those upgraded.
I think this is a variant of this story where every friday night, a cleaning lady would unplug the life support to a particular hospital bed to plug in a floor polisher, killing a patient every friday that the bed was occupied. The article mentions several variants, including one where a system goes down the same time each day for several minutes.
You may expect a program CD to auto-run, but nobody expects a music CD to run executable code. You expect music CD's to simply be read and played, which does not involve running code from the CD. Music and data CD's are even encoded differently. Pure music CD's have no filesystem. If you look carefully on the surface of a DRM'd CD, you'll see two faint bands, a large outer band for audio, and a thin, almost invisible inner band for data. For a long time, CD's were either all-audio, or all-data, and almost never hybrid, and for the most part that's how it still is, which leads some people to the false assumption that music CD's can't infect their system.
The amount of harm in installing a rootkit is often uncertain, except that there's always some harm. They modify internal operating system structures, and can cause quirks and instability. Rootkits simply do not get the same quality of testing as mature operating system code. We already know that Sony's DRM'd CD's will crash Windows Vista. At the very least, they cause a slight slowdown and make it easier for other unwanted programs to hide from the user. At the worst, any patch to the operating system which changes one of those internal structures could render a system running the rootkit unbootable, which for an average user (not most skilled users) means the loss of everything they had on the system, if they're forced to reformat and reinstall the system using the restore CD that came with the system. For such an inexperienced user, the damage caused by the rootkit could be in the tens of thousands of dollars.
I got a computer science degree from Southern Oregon University, and I've taken a few classes on computer related legal issues, but none of which (as far as I can remember) has any relation to what I just said.
Eventually hardware fails, always. Notice the signs that something is about to fail so that you can replace it when in a timely manner and with little downtime, or none in some cases. If you know you'll have to take a server down, figure out how to replace it without data loss or downtime. With an MSDFS root, which Samba does well, phasing out a dying or obsolete server is relatively easy. Otherwise, you'll just have to fiddle with the DNS and maybe give the new server the same IP. You can also look into clustering, but the cost and complexity can be prohibitive for smaller companies, and possibly for home experimentation.
Always keep good backups. If someone comes to you and says they deleted an important file last week, be able to get it back without a full restore. Also, be able to do a full restore of a server, and know it'll work. If the server catches fire, have a plan to replace it within the hour.
Make some ethernet cables. Buy some raw cable, and end plugs, and put them together the right way. The ordering is very important. Not only must each end match, but the color coded twisted wire pairs must be arranged in a certain, non-obvious way or else you'll experience severe noise and crosstalk problems.
Mix older (bargain) gigabit hardware, different brands. Some card-switch or switch-switch combinations have slightly hard to diagnose problems. If you ping, you'll have zero packet loss. But if you transfer a file, sometimes speed will drop down to 20kb/s or so, and it'll only happen in one direction. I've seen buggy drivers cause this too. When packets are sent in rapid sequence, every other packet is lost, and the send window shrinks until it's sending only one packet at a time, and waiting for an ack before sending the next.
Get a really, really long ethernet cable and use it to plug a windows pc to a switch. Let it autodetect the speed. If it's long enough, it'll still detect 100mbit or 1 gigabit, and then fail to connect. You'll have to force it to 10mbit, or get better cabling, or use a switch, hub, or some other repeater to break it into two short connections.
Again, get a really long ethernet cable, and put a sharp kink in it. You do this by making a small loop, then trying to force it straight by pulling instead of carefully undoing the loop. Line quality will suffer dearly, even though you may still be able to connect. The best fix is often to buy a new cable. Any sort of sharp bend will cause problems.
Have fun with Windows name resolution. Windows PC's seem to be able to find each other pretty well just using WINS or broadcasts, but only after checking DNS first, which goes out to your ISP's servers if you don't have your own DNS server(s) set up. These requests tend to fail almost immediately without delay, so the issue can go unnoticed. This allows your network to be hacked a bit more easily from the outside, and also allows internet problems to translate into delays in local name resolution. This sort of problem is easy to create and easy to fix, and plagues some small businesses that lack experienced or knowledgeable IT staff.
It'd help if you gave a model number and firmware version.
Microsoft did very well with their boot prefetch optimization in XP. Most distros still run startup programs one at a time, waiting for each to exit before starting the next. It simplifies configuration, only having to specify loading order than specify dependencies for each startup item, but it's really slow, and will continue to be slow unless the distros want to break some backward compatibility. That's my guess anyways.
s/ memory//g
It's not so bad. I tried running firefox on a 233mhz debian system with 96mb and it took over a minute to load. I was using icewm, which is supposed to be pretty light. Times are changing I guess. Back in '95, Windows 95 was seen as bloatware. Nowadays, we look at Win2k which wants at least 16-32x as much ram minimum as 95 and think of how light 2k it is compared to XP.
Do I have to buy new games? Or what if I upgrade to a newer release of their console that claims backward compatibility, but most of my games won't work because they're locked into the older, obsolete console?
I then treat the high quality oggs as though they were my masters. I transcode them to other formats as necessary. For example, 128k mp3's for mp3 cd players, or 96k oggs to fit on my 1gb usb key.
Which ones? A quick search on uspto.gov for "perpetual motion" returns 65 patents, with another 41 applications pending. Not all of them claim to achieve perpetual motion though. One, for example, describes the invention as a perfect universal translator capable of decoding unknown languages on the fly, and suggests the idea of someday embedding it into an android, which by then might be driven by perpetual motion.
Home, Non upgrade, OEM :), $89.99
TigerDirect will sell you XP Home for $89.99, and it's not the upgrade version. That's not the retail price, but nobody buys at retail price these days. If I search Froogle, I can find much lower prices, but I wouldn't trust anyone selling below $60 or so.
My Ubuntu system at home came with thousands of programs, with many thousand more available in their repositories. An Office suite is installed whether you want it or not, unless you choose the minimal install, which few people do. The whole thing leaves very room for commercial competition for what runs on my desktop. Whatever someone wants to sell me, I probably already have some preinstalled equivalent on my Ubuntu system. Maybe this is unfair to others who would like to sell me something, but as a user I really don't mind getting a better system for the same price. Anti-virus vendors have had over 20 years to find other avenues of business, and now they're upset that after all this time Microsoft has decided to compete with them, not to sell as a standalone program, but to improve the security of their desktop operating systems. I'd actually like to see Windows bundled with Office and Visual Studio. Hell, why not throw in the whole enchilada? Because it saves consumers money at the expense of third parties software publishers?
Traditionally, a lot of OEM's have been bundling antivirus/antimalware trialware with systems, which times out after usually 60 days, leaving the system worse off than if it had no antivirus at all, unprotected but with all the slowness and instability that comes with running antivirus software.
In that universe, SCO wins its lawsuit, the US outlaws Linux and uses political pressure to force others to do the same, the nations of earth fall to Microsoft's armies after a malicious Windows Update takes over all the smart weapons, aircrafts, cell phones, servers, and desktops running Windows, and the Terran Empire is founded.
Dynamic linking of GPL licensed and closed source binaries together is only a violation if you distribute them together, IIRC. There's certainly nothing preventing an end user from installing proprietary software on their home system running Linux, that would be ludicrous, so they should be able to run proprietary drivers as well.
That said, I'm 100% certain that Linux already does this to an extent. Binary compatibility from one version to the next seems to not be as good as many would like, though I have no first hand knowledge of any of this.
That was a feature, not a bug.
Would your minor code changes somehow taint all the other packages on the system? If I install a single third party RPM on a Red Hat system, you think they'll simply refuse to provide support for anything else running on that system? And how would they know? "Oh, and by the way, I made a source modification to a program completely unrelated to the problem we're experiencing. Is that alright?" Even if they discover you slightly broke the agreement, they hope you'll renew next year, and they can't afford frequent bad press, so they'll still provide support to the extent that it's still worthwhile.
The internet is a good support tool. If that's not enough, there are people and companies other than Red Hat who can be hired in an emergency. There aren't many things that you can't fix anyways. If you can't get an answer from support, the source is always available. If your job is on the line, you'll dig in and find the answer, though it may take a while. And if the problem is serious enough, costly enough, just pay RH what it takes to get support.
Even with Windows, there are a lot of problems that I can't fix and they won't fix, but there are almost always somewhat obvious workarounds, harder and less desirable as they may be. I've never called Microsoft's tech support, and I generally have little faith in tech support. I feel like I'd spend more time trying to explain my problem and trying all the "standard solutions" that they make everyone try than I would troubleshooting the problem myself. The people and businesses who are likely to benefit the most from paid tech support are also the least likely to modify the source code.
No kidding. I know an MSCE who absolutely won't allow any open source whatsoever on the hundreds of desktops and several servers he manages because he heard that open source was horribly insecure, like spyware and crap. If it didn't come from Microsoft, and it's not Microsoft certified, he won't trust it at all.