You're joking, but something like year or two ago MS itself published an interview with Dave Cutler, who said that the name NT came from Intel's i960, code-named N-Ten, which was under construction at that time and was also the RISC chip that NT was originally coded for.
After it became clear for MS that i960 would never became a generic-purpose processor it was first meant to be, and that its release would get significally delayed, MS started quickly to work with an i386 port of NT. It did not took long, as at that time they did not have much except kernel ready, and it was quick to port as Cutler had insisted portable code without excessive asm optimisations.
No, no, it was just that Linus had really boring at school, so he hacked to the M$ network and stole this and related files from their labs, and put his name and street address under it.
It should have become the kernel of their new, more advanced version of Windows, but as the code was leaked they decided to abandon it, blamed the leakage to its head developer and fired him - some guy called Stallman - and hired Cutler to his place.
This was a brief history of Windows NT and Linux, and an explanaition why Windows sucks and Linux rocks today. Stallman, on the other hand, felt pissed and took the lead of certain miserable and insignificant foundation called FSF, which developed viral licenses to communistic IP-dishonoring hippies, and later on claimed himself its founder.
By they way, I also heard recently that Linus' file in Finnish citizenship registry keeps magically getting erased at random times ever since the said registry was moved to run on.NET platform.
But now you have to excuse me, as I'm out of crack and my hands are shaking too badly.
Yes, corporations probably have little less control over individual politicians due to tighter limits for electoral funding. However, companies still have powerful lobbyists; Here in Finland, for example, most politicians still seem to be for SW patents, mostly due to heavy lobbying of two largest IT corps, Nokia and TeliaSonera. (Actually, according to Electronic Frontier Finland Nokia is perhaps most powerful SW-patent proposer in the whole EU.)
According to international settings in Mac OS 10.3.3:
60,960.00 metres in UK 60,960.00 meters in US;-) 60.960,00 metres in Germany and Spain 60 960,00 metres in Finland, France, Russia and Sweden (I live in Finland) 60960.00 meters in US/POSIX
Actually, space as a thousand separator sucks ass. There are zillions of non-aware (i.e. english-centric) programs that want to wrap words in the middle of numbers...
I think a better example would be the present King of Spain, Juan Carlos. When Spanish dictator Fransico Franco died at 1975, he named Juan Carlos as his successor and the King of Spain. But to the disappointment of conservatives and military, Juan Carlos instantly turned the whole state to parliamentary democracy, and held for himself only a mostly seremonial position. More info here.
It only worked with the very first versions of WMP 7 for W9x/2k (when the MSDRM v2 first appeared), but MS soon patched it, and the patch was bundled with a security update.
And yes, I've tested it myself, back in 2002. I no longer have any machines running Windows, but i still have this screenshot, taken from WMP8.
As you can see, the DRM terms of the files were pretty draconian - one could not even back up licenses. As a result, when I was forced to re-installed Windows, the files were rendered unusable (as the licenses were lost). I still have them analogically re-recorded, but for my ears at least, the quality is not the same.
For anyone interested, the files were downloadable for those, who had purchased a limited edition of Nightwish album called Century Child. They included their old demo songs, which have never been published anywhere else.
Watch those news again. It was only the machines used by their office clerks, which malfunctioned - they're pretty far from anything that can be called "mission critical" (in the sense that "mission critical" means something that should be continuously available). All their background systems, including online banking, were working normally.
Well, that is iBook - their display adapters are ATIs. Only 12" PowerBooks have Nvidias.
I don't really think that we will see fix for the PM problem of Nvidia's cards anytime soon, as Nvidia does not disclosure any specs. On x86 laptops you can use their own proprietary binary drivers, but on PowerPCs you're out of luck.
If you want to buy an Apple's laptop and plan to run Linux on it, make sure to get either iBook or 15" PowerBook to avoid worst hassles.
(My information about the sleep problem being Nvidia related was aquired from some post on some mailing list - probably it was Debian-PPC.)
That's true. The power management on PPC Linux for powerbooks works wonderfully. Probably because the power management for powerbooks is all the same.
...unless you happen to have a machine with Nvidia display adapter (try any 12" PBook), in which case the sleep won't work, as the kernel does not know how to wake up the display adapter from sleep.
(It also seems that the thermal management in 17" PBooks isn't supported at all, which is rather severe).
The only linux I've ever attempted to run in my own 12" (non-DVI) PBook has been Gentoo 2004.0 LiveCD, and it regularly hanged in the very beginning of init - no kernel panics, after loading up the kernel it just said that init is booting, and stopped right there.
The interesting point here is that if you buy a retail version, you are eligible to Microsoft's own support. If you buy an OEM version, then you have to get your product support from that OEM too, if you need any.
And I don't think newegg.com will offer much support to you... although I don't really know about Microsoft's own support options, either. Probably just some crappy phone support for 90 day or so, unless you purchase a volume license.
I used to live in SE Asia too, and yeah, you can walk into any video shop and buy a VCD for about a buck. But that's not piracy either; piracy is robbing ships by force of arms. What those shops are doing is copyright infringement.
Bullshit. Meanings of words change over time. Let me quote an explanation for the word cache from Oxford English Dictionary, published at 1976:
Hiding-place for treasure, provisions, ammunition, etc.; what is hidden in a cache.
Surprisingly, it does not speak anything of semiconductor memory chips used in computers as a quickly-accessible intermediate memory meant to speed up actual memory operations, although, as a non-native English speaker that was the only meaning I knew for it until recently.
There sure are still pirates on open seas, too (at least Caribbean, Red Sea and South China Sea are quite likely places to get attacked, I think), but the word piracy has simply got another meaning, which means infringing of copyrights and/or trademarks - there are, for example, a loth of pirated clothes out there, too. That its trademark piracy, so it is not just copyright.
It is rather natural that the word "piracy" has came to mean copyright and trademark infringing, because "copyright infringment" probably sounds more like a legal jargon to Joe User.
As far as I've understood, it is a driver update for OS X, and FW update for Apple's AirPort (Extreme) base station.
As I don't own an APBS, I think this whole FW problem was more related to the APBS than AirPort cards. This is because though I do not have any access point at home, I've been able to roam around at school quite normally without any signal problems with my APE-equipped PBook. And no, the access points there are definitely not Apple ones...
Re:Not agreeing with Apple here
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Apple fans on Slashdot (disclaimer: I'm writing this on my PBook) always seem to claim that everyone willing to use iTMS should just obey Apple's TOS and never crack their DRM, because their DRM is fair as it can be circumvented by burning and re-ripping.
Well let me tell you: It is not fair. If one is a Hi-Fi geek, like I am, one wants to get rid of DRM without any additional quality loss.
Oh, but what I hear now: "128 kbit/s is not enough for Hi-Fi types, they want CDs nevertheless, regardless of their price". Sure - if CD's are available. But many songs are very, very hard to obtain on CD, if available at all, although they can be found from iTMS. And though 128 kbit AAC is barely adequate to my ears (my own iTunes library is mostly ripped as 224 kbit AAC), I can stand it if the alternative would be not having that song at all. But like hell will I accept any additional quality loss! And I still want to be able to play that song on Linux, too.
So, what options do I have left now? PlayFair. Would my intented use for it be within the limits of fair use? Yes. Would it be possible within the limits of Apple's DRM? No. Thus, the Apple's DRM is NOT fair. Would it be in violation of Apple's TOS? Yes. Thus, the TOS is not fair either. As it is a B2C standard-term contract, I seriously doubt it would hold any water in most courts here in Europe.
Yes, I live in EU (Finland), so no iTMS here, and the question is purely academic. But may be iTMS will be here one day.
That said, the EUCD is going to be applied in Finland pretty soon, but although that will probably make distributing of PlayFair illegal here, it seems the Finnish implementation won't outlaw its private use.
And what would make Apple's DRM fair to me? If the songs would be losslessly compressed in first place. Now the quality would be good enough even if an analog re-recording would be required (that is, no CD burning would be allowed).
Do you have any idea, to which models it applies to? I just tested it with my 1st generation (no DVI) 12-inch PowerBook; I put it to sleep (lid down), and removed the battery... only for 10 seconds or so, but off it went, and instantly. So, did not work here...:-(
Now this is news. I thought it would have had to be plugged to charger for this to be possible. Well, better than nothing, although separate spare batteries are still not very good solution IMO.
Btw, do you have any idea how long it can maintain the sleep when neither of the batteries are in their place during the change...?
Apple laptops have ordinary Synaptic's touchpads. You just need a better driver. See here.
Voilá, scrolling areas and tap corners (==5 mouse buttons). Also a Windows-style acceleration mode, which IMO makes the whole touchpad much more useable.
For me the issue is the fan, not the heat, so I changed it back instantly. Note that (at least when I last cheked) Silent Night downgrades AppleADM103x and AppleADT746x.kexts back to the version shipped with OS 10.2.8, when all what you need to do is downgrade AppleADM103x.kext to the version shipped with OS 10.3.0 (update to 10.3.1 did not alter it).
To do this, you need to extract the kext from Panther's install medium - you can naturally use Pacifist for this, but you can also do it with command line tools shipped with OS X (as Pacifist is shareware). I have done it using command line, but I don't remember anymore how I did it - Google for it.;-) The hardest part in whole process was to find the right package from install medium.
>7 hours probably assumes that you've replaced the optical drive with extra battery. In most x86 laptops you can do that, but in Macs you can't, as the drive is not in modular bay. This is the single thing that most sucks in my 12" PowerBook - if I would be able to replace the mostly useless optical drive with another battery, the battery life of my box would likely exceed 8 hours.
But the problem is, that a T40 with the same features than my PBook has would probably cost 500 euros more than that...
Something here makes me doubtful... has anyone here examined tthat EULA already? Are there any paragraphs, which try to limit compiling and/or redistibuting GPL et. al. -licensed FOSS programs?
If something happens to your original CD you're stuck doing a conversion from one lossy format to another, which is less than ideal.
Except that as an ordinary home user (oh yeah, I'm a geek, but still...) I find the risk of my (pressed) CD collection to get destroyed to be rather small - much, much smaller than my computer's hard disk to malfunction. The highest risk for my CD's would probably be a fire in my apartment, and would that happen, I would have much more important things to worry about than a lost music collection (most of it would anyway be covered by my home insurance, although not all titles would be easy to rebought).
And, no I'm not going to backup those gigabytes and gigabytes of losslessly compressed music (assuming about 50% compression ratio), as there is no convient and inexpensive way for home user to do that - that data is simply not important enough that I would care that much.
According to my experience, the Explorer in WXP does start new instance of itself with different priviledges when called by RunAs. In Windows 2000 instead - although the new instance of Explorer starts - it still seems to have only those priviledges that your regular account has.
This annoyance is why I normally prefer using WXP as a non-admin user and running RunAs whenever I need, but give in in W2k and log in as an administrator right away.
For the n^th time, WMP for OS X does not support WMA's DRM scheme. Or, to be a bit more specific, it only supports it's first version, which never became generally used and is now practically obsolete.
Every online music store out there uses version 2 of WMA's DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
You're joking, but something like year or two ago MS itself published an interview with Dave Cutler, who said that the name NT came from Intel's i960, code-named N-Ten, which was under construction at that time and was also the RISC chip that NT was originally coded for.
After it became clear for MS that i960 would never became a generic-purpose processor it was first meant to be, and that its release would get significally delayed, MS started quickly to work with an i386 port of NT. It did not took long, as at that time they did not have much except kernel ready, and it was quick to port as Cutler had insisted portable code without excessive asm optimisations.
(Disclaimer: everything IIRC)
No, no, it was just that Linus had really boring at school, so he hacked to the M$ network and stole this and related files from their labs, and put his name and street address under it.
.NET platform.
It should have become the kernel of their new, more advanced version of Windows, but as the code was leaked they decided to abandon it, blamed the leakage to its head developer and fired him - some guy called Stallman - and hired Cutler to his place.
This was a brief history of Windows NT and Linux, and an explanaition why Windows sucks and Linux rocks today. Stallman, on the other hand, felt pissed and took the lead of certain miserable and insignificant foundation called FSF, which developed viral licenses to communistic IP-dishonoring hippies, and later on claimed himself its founder.
By they way, I also heard recently that Linus' file in Finnish citizenship registry keeps magically getting erased at random times ever since the said registry was moved to run on
But now you have to excuse me, as I'm out of crack and my hands are shaking too badly.
Yes, corporations probably have little less control over individual politicians due to tighter limits for electoral funding. However, companies still have powerful lobbyists; Here in Finland, for example, most politicians still seem to be for SW patents, mostly due to heavy lobbying of two largest IT corps, Nokia and TeliaSonera. (Actually, according to Electronic Frontier Finland Nokia is perhaps most powerful SW-patent proposer in the whole EU.)
According to international settings in Mac OS 10.3.3:
;-)
60,960.00 metres in UK
60,960.00 meters in US
60.960,00 metres in Germany and Spain
60 960,00 metres in Finland, France, Russia and Sweden (I live in Finland)
60960.00 meters in US/POSIX
Actually, space as a thousand separator sucks ass. There are zillions of non-aware (i.e. english-centric) programs that want to wrap words in the middle of numbers...
You mean PHBs run Linux? Come on, you must be dreaming.
I'm personally ready to use ANY modern DE if that gets PHBs to run Linux.
I think a better example would be the present King of Spain, Juan Carlos. When Spanish dictator Fransico Franco died at 1975, he named Juan Carlos as his successor and the King of Spain. But to the disappointment of conservatives and military, Juan Carlos instantly turned the whole state to parliamentary democracy, and held for himself only a mostly seremonial position. More info here.
It only worked with the very first versions of WMP 7 for W9x/2k (when the MSDRM v2 first appeared), but MS soon patched it, and the patch was bundled with a security update.
And yes, I've tested it myself, back in 2002. I no longer have any machines running Windows, but i still have this screenshot, taken from WMP8.
As you can see, the DRM terms of the files were pretty draconian - one could not even back up licenses. As a result, when I was forced to re-installed Windows, the files were rendered unusable (as the licenses were lost). I still have them analogically re-recorded, but for my ears at least, the quality is not the same.
For anyone interested, the files were downloadable for those, who had purchased a limited edition of Nightwish album called Century Child. They included their old demo songs, which have never been published anywhere else.
Watch those news again. It was only the machines used by their office clerks, which malfunctioned - they're pretty far from anything that can be called "mission critical" (in the sense that "mission critical" means something that should be continuously available). All their background systems, including online banking, were working normally.
Well, that is iBook - their display adapters are ATIs. Only 12" PowerBooks have Nvidias.
I don't really think that we will see fix for the PM problem of Nvidia's cards anytime soon, as Nvidia does not disclosure any specs. On x86 laptops you can use their own proprietary binary drivers, but on PowerPCs you're out of luck.
If you want to buy an Apple's laptop and plan to run Linux on it, make sure to get either iBook or 15" PowerBook to avoid worst hassles.
(My information about the sleep problem being Nvidia related was aquired from some post on some mailing list - probably it was Debian-PPC.)
That's true. The power management on PPC Linux for powerbooks works wonderfully. Probably because the power management for powerbooks is all the same.
...unless you happen to have a machine with Nvidia display adapter (try any 12" PBook), in which case the sleep won't work, as the kernel does not know how to wake up the display adapter from sleep.
See here.
(It also seems that the thermal management in 17" PBooks isn't supported at all, which is rather severe).
The only linux I've ever attempted to run in my own 12" (non-DVI) PBook has been Gentoo 2004.0 LiveCD, and it regularly hanged in the very beginning of init - no kernel panics, after loading up the kernel it just said that init is booting, and stopped right there.
The interesting point here is that if you buy a retail version, you are eligible to Microsoft's own support. If you buy an OEM version, then you have to get your product support from that OEM too, if you need any.
And I don't think newegg.com will offer much support to you... although I don't really know about Microsoft's own support options, either. Probably just some crappy phone support for 90 day or so, unless you purchase a volume license.
I used to live in SE Asia too, and yeah, you can walk into any video shop and buy a VCD for about a buck. But that's not piracy either; piracy is robbing ships by force of arms. What those shops are doing is copyright infringement.
Bullshit. Meanings of words change over time. Let me quote an explanation for the word cache from Oxford English Dictionary, published at 1976:
Hiding-place for treasure, provisions, ammunition, etc.; what is hidden in a cache.
Surprisingly, it does not speak anything of semiconductor memory chips used in computers as a quickly-accessible intermediate memory meant to speed up actual memory operations, although, as a non-native English speaker that was the only meaning I knew for it until recently.
There sure are still pirates on open seas, too (at least Caribbean, Red Sea and South China Sea are quite likely places to get attacked, I think), but the word piracy has simply got another meaning, which means infringing of copyrights and/or trademarks - there are, for example, a loth of pirated clothes out there, too. That its trademark piracy, so it is not just copyright.
It is rather natural that the word "piracy" has came to mean copyright and trademark infringing, because "copyright infringment" probably sounds more like a legal jargon to Joe User.
As far as I've understood, it is a driver update for OS X, and FW update for Apple's AirPort (Extreme) base station.
As I don't own an APBS, I think this whole FW problem was more related to the APBS than AirPort cards. This is because though I do not have any access point at home, I've been able to roam around at school quite normally without any signal problems with my APE-equipped PBook. And no, the access points there are definitely not Apple ones...
Apple fans on Slashdot (disclaimer: I'm writing this on my PBook) always seem to claim that everyone willing to use iTMS should just obey Apple's TOS and never crack their DRM, because their DRM is fair as it can be circumvented by burning and re-ripping.
Well let me tell you: It is not fair. If one is a Hi-Fi geek, like I am, one wants to get rid of DRM without any additional quality loss.
Oh, but what I hear now: "128 kbit/s is not enough for Hi-Fi types, they want CDs nevertheless, regardless of their price". Sure - if CD's are available. But many songs are very, very hard to obtain on CD, if available at all, although they can be found from iTMS. And though 128 kbit AAC is barely adequate to my ears (my own iTunes library is mostly ripped as 224 kbit AAC), I can stand it if the alternative would be not having that song at all. But like hell will I accept any additional quality loss! And I still want to be able to play that song on Linux, too.
So, what options do I have left now? PlayFair. Would my intented use for it be within the limits of fair use? Yes. Would it be possible within the limits of Apple's DRM? No. Thus, the Apple's DRM is NOT fair. Would it be in violation of Apple's TOS? Yes. Thus, the TOS is not fair either. As it is a B2C standard-term contract, I seriously doubt it would hold any water in most courts here in Europe.
Yes, I live in EU (Finland), so no iTMS here, and the question is purely academic. But may be iTMS will be here one day.
That said, the EUCD is going to be applied in Finland pretty soon, but although that will probably make distributing of PlayFair illegal here, it seems the Finnish implementation won't outlaw its private use.
And what would make Apple's DRM fair to me? If the songs would be losslessly compressed in first place. Now the quality would be good enough even if an analog re-recording would be required (that is, no CD burning would be allowed).
Do you have any idea, to which models it applies to? I just tested it with my 1st generation (no DVI) 12-inch PowerBook; I put it to sleep (lid down), and removed the battery... only for 10 seconds or so, but off it went, and instantly. So, did not work here... :-(
Now this is news. I thought it would have had to be plugged to charger for this to be possible. Well, better than nothing, although separate spare batteries are still not very good solution IMO.
Btw, do you have any idea how long it can maintain the sleep when neither of the batteries are in their place during the change...?
Apple laptops have ordinary Synaptic's touchpads. You just need a better driver. See here.
Voilá, scrolling areas and tap corners (==5 mouse buttons). Also a Windows-style acceleration mode, which IMO makes the whole touchpad much more useable.
For me the issue is the fan, not the heat, so I changed it back instantly. Note that (at least when I last cheked) Silent Night downgrades AppleADM103x and AppleADT746x .kexts back to the version shipped with OS 10.2.8, when all what you need to do is downgrade AppleADM103x.kext to the version shipped with OS 10.3.0 (update to 10.3.1 did not alter it).
;-) The hardest part in whole process was to find the right package from install medium.
To do this, you need to extract the kext from Panther's install medium - you can naturally use Pacifist for this, but you can also do it with command line tools shipped with OS X (as Pacifist is shareware). I have done it using command line, but I don't remember anymore how I did it - Google for it.
>7 hours probably assumes that you've replaced the optical drive with extra battery. In most x86 laptops you can do that, but in Macs you can't, as the drive is not in modular bay. This is the single thing that most sucks in my 12" PowerBook - if I would be able to replace the mostly useless optical drive with another battery, the battery life of my box would likely exceed 8 hours.
But the problem is, that a T40 with the same features than my PBook has would probably cost 500 euros more than that...
Bullshit - or at least I'm not the one flaming here. Here is some information about Microsoft's past behaviour.
Something here makes me doubtful... has anyone here examined tthat EULA already? Are there any paragraphs, which try to limit compiling and/or redistibuting GPL et. al. -licensed FOSS programs?
If something happens to your original CD you're stuck doing a conversion from one lossy format to another, which is less than ideal.
Except that as an ordinary home user (oh yeah, I'm a geek, but still...) I find the risk of my (pressed) CD collection to get destroyed to be rather small - much, much smaller than my computer's hard disk to malfunction. The highest risk for my CD's would probably be a fire in my apartment, and would that happen, I would have much more important things to worry about than a lost music collection (most of it would anyway be covered by my home insurance, although not all titles would be easy to rebought).
And, no I'm not going to backup those gigabytes and gigabytes of losslessly compressed music (assuming about 50% compression ratio), as there is no convient and inexpensive way for home user to do that - that data is simply not important enough that I would care that much.
According to my experience, the Explorer in WXP does start new instance of itself with different priviledges when called by RunAs. In Windows 2000 instead - although the new instance of Explorer starts - it still seems to have only those priviledges that your regular account has.
This annoyance is why I normally prefer using WXP as a non-admin user and running RunAs whenever I need, but give in in W2k and log in as an administrator right away.
For the n^th time, WMP for OS X does not support WMA's DRM scheme. Or, to be a bit more specific, it only supports it's first version, which never became generally used and is now practically obsolete.
Every online music store out there uses version 2 of WMA's DRM.
And if any moderators are still around, please mod parent up.