What you describe is "the poor man's copyright," and it's of absolutely no value in the US, and I doubt it's worth bothering with anywhere. There's nothing to show that you didn't mail yourself an empty, unsealed envelope to get a postmark on it and seal the CD in at some later date. If you tried to use this as proof of ownership or date of creation in a law suit, you'd be laughed out of court.
Couldn't this be a case where *both* sides are partially right? Microsoft filesystems could be better designed. Linux filesystems could use a defragger. I'm certainly not too proud to admit defragging is a good idea!
There actually are defraggers for Linux, I'm told, but it's rare to need one. And, because they shove everything down to one end of the drive, they spoil the advantage in seek time that comes from keeping the heads halfway up. I've seen it claimed that it's better to back everything up, reformat and restore so that you end up with everything well spread out again but I'd not argue the point.
And, while I'm thinking about it, it's not that the Microsoft filesystems are badly designed, it's that Windows is programmed to put files one right after the other so that there's no room for growth and files quickly fragment. Microsoft doesn't need to rework NTFS, they need to rework their file location algorithm.
No, it does less seeking, because it doesn't have to go from one part of the partition to another just to read the rest of the file. And, I've been told (but can't cite sources) that Linux keeps the read/write head halfway up the disk instead of at the edge so that the average seek time is lower. Check out the section on disk defragging on Why Linux is better for more details. Also, next time you're talking to that friend of yours, ask why, if Linux does need defragging, no distro includes a defragger. (I gather that some did at one point but dropped it because nobody ever needed it.)
You ask some good questions and make some good points. However, I can tell you one place where Linux (and, AFAIK FreeBSD) are light years ahead of anything from Microsoft and have been for years: Linux partitions don't need regular defragging. They can go for years without needing one and, unless they're over 80% full or so and have large files that are constantly changing they probably never will. This isn't because the file system itself is better, but because Linux doesn't jam the files one right next to the other like Windows does; it leaves room between them for growth. If MS really wanted to "embrace and extend," they'd rewrite the part of the OS that decides where files go to be more like the Linux model and do away with defrag altogether.
With the speed of current connections, one could probably get the entire human race indicted for child pornography in under a week.
Why bother? All you really need to do is identify a few of the people in charge of this and target them. Once they're under arrest for kiddy pr0n and their replacements are selected, lather, rinse repeat until the whole house of cards falls apart.
The last three times I rebooted it was for a kernel upgrade. My laptop is an old P II with 96Meg RAM (maxed out) and it boots to a usable desktop in about 90 seconds or so with full access to every program on it. Who needs "instant on" if comes up crippled?
Let's say I have five different encryption programs, some of which have names that don't look like they're crypto. How are they going to know which one to use, or how, if there's no documentation? What if I've been a tad devious in writing the program and it expects to be given the output file, the key file. an authorization code and the input file on the command line, in that order, and will produce random junk unless the authorization code is what it's expecting? AIUI, the law will require you to turn over your key, not tell them how to use it.
This leads to some interesting possibilities. Years ago I wrote a little RSA program to see if I understood it correctly. As I didn't want to muck about with writing my own arbitrary-precision arithmetic routines, I used very short keys: two bytes in became three out in encryption and the reverse, of course. Not exactly secure, I'll grant, but it was just a toy for personal use. Now, let's say that I re-wrote the program that generated keys so that it generated keys of traditional RSA length with most of it padding, and started using it in email with somebody in the UK. My correspondent could hand over the keys to the authorities if asked, but it wouldn't do any good because they wouldn't know the correct algorithm. If that's not good enough for you, I'm sure there are ways to mis-identify PGP keys as RSA keys or visa-versa without the programs being affected.
That depends on where you are. In some places, like New York City, there's very good public transport and everybody uses it. In Los Angeles, the local transit authority (The MTA) agrees with you and the service is rotten. Not only that, it's a "spoke system" designed strictly to get people to and from Central LA and it's almost impossible to move from one outlying area to another without going downtown even if the two areas are almost adjacent.
They are brute-forcing email addresses rather than spamming from a list of known good addresses.
Some of them certainly are. There are days that I'll see six or eight identical spams in my junk folder, one right after the other. I've sometimes wondered if the senders were too stupid to know that they're doing it or if they think that I'm more likely to open their message if I see they've sent it repeatedly.
Either you're very, very new here or you've never participated in a discussion of spam here before. That list has been around for well over a decade and pops up at least once whenever spam or spam prevention gets mentioned. The poster probably posted as AC because that's often modded into oblivion as Redundant and the poster didn't want to waste karma on it.
IMHO, shipping RH would be better than shipping Fedora because we don't want users to feel like the entire Linux world is as alpha-quality as Fedora.
I use Fedora, and I wouldn't recommend it for this. Although I wouldn't call it "alpha-quality," it's certainly an endless beta, considering that it started out as a test-bed for RHEL. No, I'd give them something that didn't need constant updates, and was easy for them to maintain on their own. From all I've seen about the various flavors of Ubuntu, they'd be a good choice.
Many issues have more than one possible fix. Speaking from years of experience in tech support, knowledge bases of fixes are of limited usefulness and are often misused because all they have are cheat-sheets on fixes. That means that unless the tech knows how to tell which fix to use (and only needs the cheat-sheet as a memory aid) they're going to pick one at random and hope for the best. Then, they'll either guess again or escalate the call and let some more senior tech try to clean up the mess.
Granted, this can still happen (and often does) when the tech has access to other techs for suggestions, but it doesn't have to. If the company had (let's say) a private chat server and one or more chat rooms for techs only, somebody who couldn't tell which of several fixes to try first could ask questions and get back suggestions as to how to narrow the possibilities down. Management might go for this because it would be easy for them to monitor and keep the techs from using it for time wasting. (Just like you they don't have to monitor every call for it to have an effect; just knowing they might be listening in can keep you on your toes.)
Fragmentation should be handled by the OS and should NOT be a standard user activity. What? The OS isnt smart enough to connect disjoined files? Linux does. OSX does. FreeBSD does. Why not Windows?
Not only does Linux know how to deal with fragmented files, it knows how to avoid letting it happen in the first place. Instead of cramming each file into the first open spot on the disk, even it it's just one cluster, Linux tries to find a place on the disk where there's room for the file to grow. That way, until your disk is getting very full, or you've got a lot of files that you're constantly updating and re-writing to different places (e.g., large databases) you'll never have to worry about defragging. Over the years, Microsoft has been very good at taking technology developed elsewhere and making it part of their OS, and they'd be doing their customers a good turn if they re-wrote the algorithm used to decide where on the disk the file goes.
No, no, no, no, no! It goes like this: "Windows has detected an attempt to make Firefox your primary Web browser in place of Internet Explorer. Cancel or Cancel?"
Little disconcerting, especially when venturing onto a Motorway in the knowledge that your car may break down is an offense.
Well, isn't that convenient for the bobbies? Especially when you consider that any car can break down at any time and every driver should be aware of that.
it is better to simply make another work and wait for someone to use your idea and sue them for violation.
That would be true if you could copyright ideas, but of course, you can't. One of the main ideas behind the first Harry Potter book is that of a boy finding out he can do magic (and that magic exists) when he's accepted as a student at a school for wizardry. Among other things, I'm a writer. If I wanted, I could write a book based on exactly that idea and Rowling couldn't do one thing about it as long as I don't steal any of the locations, characters or spells from her or lift passages out of her books and claim them for my own. No, if you write a book but never publish it, you can't sue any and everybody who uses the same ideas. You can only sue if they steal your words, and then, you can only win if you can prove they had access to your work.
Slashdot Mirror
What you describe is "the poor man's copyright," and it's of absolutely no value in the US, and I doubt it's worth bothering with anywhere. There's nothing to show that you didn't mail yourself an empty, unsealed envelope to get a postmark on it and seal the CD in at some later date. If you tried to use this as proof of ownership or date of creation in a law suit, you'd be laughed out of court.
Thank you. I hope that every Slashdotter who reads that will click on the link at least once. Maybe we can slashdot them...
There actually are defraggers for Linux, I'm told, but it's rare to need one. And, because they shove everything down to one end of the drive, they spoil the advantage in seek time that comes from keeping the heads halfway up. I've seen it claimed that it's better to back everything up, reformat and restore so that you end up with everything well spread out again but I'd not argue the point.
And, while I'm thinking about it, it's not that the Microsoft filesystems are badly designed, it's that Windows is programmed to put files one right after the other so that there's no room for growth and files quickly fragment. Microsoft doesn't need to rework NTFS, they need to rework their file location algorithm.
Shouldn't that be an Imperial pain in the ass?
Many supermarkets print up charts of where various types of groceries can be found in their store. Could you copyright that? If not, why not?
No, it does less seeking, because it doesn't have to go from one part of the partition to another just to read the rest of the file. And, I've been told (but can't cite sources) that Linux keeps the read/write head halfway up the disk instead of at the edge so that the average seek time is lower. Check out the section on disk defragging on Why Linux is better for more details. Also, next time you're talking to that friend of yours, ask why, if Linux does need defragging, no distro includes a defragger. (I gather that some did at one point but dropped it because nobody ever needed it.)
And now, if TFA can be believed, Ballmer is going to put lipstick on it.
You ask some good questions and make some good points. However, I can tell you one place where Linux (and, AFAIK FreeBSD) are light years ahead of anything from Microsoft and have been for years: Linux partitions don't need regular defragging. They can go for years without needing one and, unless they're over 80% full or so and have large files that are constantly changing they probably never will. This isn't because the file system itself is better, but because Linux doesn't jam the files one right next to the other like Windows does; it leaves room between them for growth. If MS really wanted to "embrace and extend," they'd rewrite the part of the OS that decides where files go to be more like the Linux model and do away with defrag altogether.
You do realize, don't you, that the Old Testament is also sacred to Judaism while the New Testament isn't?
Why bother? All you really need to do is identify a few of the people in charge of this and target them. Once they're under arrest for kiddy pr0n and their replacements are selected, lather, rinse repeat until the whole house of cards falls apart.
There's one site that I certainly hope is unique: goatse.cx.
Uptime: 11:50:35 up 4 days, 16:39, 2 users, load average: 1.17, 0.97, 0.98
The last three times I rebooted it was for a kernel upgrade. My laptop is an old P II with 96Meg RAM (maxed out) and it boots to a usable desktop in about 90 seconds or so with full access to every program on it. Who needs "instant on" if comes up crippled?
Let's say I have five different encryption programs, some of which have names that don't look like they're crypto. How are they going to know which one to use, or how, if there's no documentation? What if I've been a tad devious in writing the program and it expects to be given the output file, the key file. an authorization code and the input file on the command line, in that order, and will produce random junk unless the authorization code is what it's expecting? AIUI, the law will require you to turn over your key, not tell them how to use it.
This leads to some interesting possibilities. Years ago I wrote a little RSA program to see if I understood it correctly. As I didn't want to muck about with writing my own arbitrary-precision arithmetic routines, I used very short keys: two bytes in became three out in encryption and the reverse, of course. Not exactly secure, I'll grant, but it was just a toy for personal use. Now, let's say that I re-wrote the program that generated keys so that it generated keys of traditional RSA length with most of it padding, and started using it in email with somebody in the UK. My correspondent could hand over the keys to the authorities if asked, but it wouldn't do any good because they wouldn't know the correct algorithm. If that's not good enough for you, I'm sure there are ways to mis-identify PGP keys as RSA keys or visa-versa without the programs being affected.
No there isn't, and don't call me Shirley.
That depends on where you are. In some places, like New York City, there's very good public transport and everybody uses it. In Los Angeles, the local transit authority (The MTA) agrees with you and the service is rotten. Not only that, it's a "spoke system" designed strictly to get people to and from Central LA and it's almost impossible to move from one outlying area to another without going downtown even if the two areas are almost adjacent.
Some of them certainly are. There are days that I'll see six or eight identical spams in my junk folder, one right after the other. I've sometimes wondered if the senders were too stupid to know that they're doing it or if they think that I'm more likely to open their message if I see they've sent it repeatedly.
Either you're very, very new here or you've never participated in a discussion of spam here before. That list has been around for well over a decade and pops up at least once whenever spam or spam prevention gets mentioned. The poster probably posted as AC because that's often modded into oblivion as Redundant and the poster didn't want to waste karma on it.
I use Fedora, and I wouldn't recommend it for this. Although I wouldn't call it "alpha-quality," it's certainly an endless beta, considering that it started out as a test-bed for RHEL. No, I'd give them something that didn't need constant updates, and was easy for them to maintain on their own. From all I've seen about the various flavors of Ubuntu, they'd be a good choice.
Granted, this can still happen (and often does) when the tech has access to other techs for suggestions, but it doesn't have to. If the company had (let's say) a private chat server and one or more chat rooms for techs only, somebody who couldn't tell which of several fixes to try first could ask questions and get back suggestions as to how to narrow the possibilities down. Management might go for this because it would be easy for them to monitor and keep the techs from using it for time wasting. (Just like you they don't have to monitor every call for it to have an effect; just knowing they might be listening in can keep you on your toes.)
Relax; it's probably just another case of using Insightful instead of Funny to give the poster an undeserved karma point.
Not only does Linux know how to deal with fragmented files, it knows how to avoid letting it happen in the first place. Instead of cramming each file into the first open spot on the disk, even it it's just one cluster, Linux tries to find a place on the disk where there's room for the file to grow. That way, until your disk is getting very full, or you've got a lot of files that you're constantly updating and re-writing to different places (e.g., large databases) you'll never have to worry about defragging. Over the years, Microsoft has been very good at taking technology developed elsewhere and making it part of their OS, and they'd be doing their customers a good turn if they re-wrote the algorithm used to decide where on the disk the file goes.
No, no, no, no, no! It goes like this: "Windows has detected an attempt to make Firefox your primary Web browser in place of Internet Explorer. Cancel or Cancel?"
Well, isn't that convenient for the bobbies? Especially when you consider that any car can break down at any time and every driver should be aware of that.
That would be true if you could copyright ideas, but of course, you can't. One of the main ideas behind the first Harry Potter book is that of a boy finding out he can do magic (and that magic exists) when he's accepted as a student at a school for wizardry. Among other things, I'm a writer. If I wanted, I could write a book based on exactly that idea and Rowling couldn't do one thing about it as long as I don't steal any of the locations, characters or spells from her or lift passages out of her books and claim them for my own. No, if you write a book but never publish it, you can't sue any and everybody who uses the same ideas. You can only sue if they steal your words, and then, you can only win if you can prove they had access to your work.