I can install Windows. Even Windows 2000. And I can have a GUI file-manager that does damn near everything.
And get this. I can do it all on less that 100MB of RAM. Unlike nautilus, which, according to my system, requires 180 - 220 MB RAM at all times. This sucks, because I'm on an old box with 256 Physical. That means that I am constantly swapping. a lot.
and yes, the idea is to remove bloat in the name of userfriendliness. Not eliminate userfriendlyness. There is a way to have friendly apps that dont take a gig of RAM to run.
-- Stop sending me HTML mail. telnet is my POP client and I am not an HTML/4.0-compatible rendering engine
I just want you to realize (if you didn't already) how broken deregulation is in California.
Because of deregulation + Enron + incompetant state government, I now pay a nice low rate of 12.9 cents per kWh.
And thats just on the "baseline amount" Myself, being only somewhat conservative in my use of power, consume about 275% of baseline, and my price works something like this
0% - 100% of baseline : 12.9 cents / kWh 101 - 130%: 13.6 cents / kWh 131 - 200%: 14.9 cents / kWh 201 - 300%: I forget, but probably about a penny more.
Electricity is electricity. Why should it cost more than 3 times as much in California as in Canada, and more that 6 times as much as in Arizona.
Especially when I pay huge freakin taxes so the government can subsidize my rates. BTW: those rates are AFTER the 20-some-odd-percent "subsidy"
No disagreements here, but that wasn't the point I was making. I was just helping to define "use" of IP according to US copyright law. That is not to say that, in this particular case, I think it will come out that way.
Just read SCO's outlandishly absurd reasoning why the GPL is invalid. It went something like: 'Copyright law gives right X, no contract that can be construed as granting any rights beyond X are valid'
Woah!!! but... what if I buy 5000 licenses to SCO's bullshitware. Those licenses would also be invalid by the same logic: after all, they grant me the right to make 5000 copies. 5000 is more than one, thus: not valid
Oh, and about not being liable because IBM is? Assume, for the moment, that SCO owned IP that IBM gave to Linux. I know, it could never happen, but... just pretend for a minute.
Also lets assume that you are using Linux.
In this case, SCO can sue IBM for trade-secrets violations for giving code to Linux that is wasn't allowed to give away.
Additionally, however, you are using SCO IP without permission. Since IBM (or your distro) chose not to indemnify you against IP claims, you COULD (not necessarily, but quite possibly) be liable for damages. If you are a public library or educational institution and had a valid reason to believe that you had the right to use the IP (like you acquired a license that said you could from a provider without the authority to make that claim) then you would be allowed to remove the IP and avoid paying damages.
Otherwise its up to the judge.
Oh. I missed one other essential assumption: SCO never released a copy of its IP under a license that allows limitless copying (such as, say, Caldera under the GPL) Because, you see, if I am offered a license (a contract granting me certain rights, and forbidding me others in exchange for some (possibly monetary) value) to duplicate the software, and the organization granting the license had the right to do so, then I can do whatever the license says I can do. After all, thats what we agreed to. Contracts are binding like that. If you sign on the dotted line you are stuck. Especially if you wrote the contract (or offered the boiler-plate contract)
In short: because SCO released a copy of Linux under the GPL (assuming it survives a court test), and especially because it can be easily proven hat they know they did so (I'm sure it had a copy of the license on it) they are SOL.
Yes, because by copying then to your hard drive you have made a copy. If SCO actually does own a piece of the code in Linux, AND it is decided that the GPL is meaningless, (or only applies when big companies feel like it) THEN simply copying the code (in source or binary form) to your system constitutes "use"
Thus, if SCO were right in all of their claims (highly unlikely the way I read it), you would be allowed to use Linux only if you did not have any copies of the SCO code anywhere on your system (or if you bought a license to use them)
So, yes. If you simply disabled those features, you'd still potentially be liable -- if you physically uninstalled them? you should be fine.
you could use the Dynamic Volume support of Win2k and later, but... I imagine that even NTFS is more portable than this...
Windows isn't really the limiting factor though. Each operating system has formats they accept.
Linux supports ext* , fat* , and a few other random (but not much used) formats.
Windows supports fat* , ntfs* (there are multiple versions, currently version 4 or 5 (i forget which) and windows dynamic volume, which is a bizarre thing I never quite understood (except that it can be forced into doing something akin to software RAID)
Mac OS supports... I don't really know what formats, but apparently fat* and probably ext*
Its OK to bash Microsoft, but please, be honest about it.
I think that * should not be expanded by the shell, but I know that I'm not likely to win -- mainly because the aforementioned millions of lines of scripts out there expect it that way.
and I don't like what ' rm -i' does much better to give me only one prompt, instead of the one-per-file that rm -i gives. Why? Because you and I both know that, as soon as we learn that '-f' turns off the millions of prompts, we'll always use it. If I only got one prompt, I'd be happy enough. at least with rm. I am very likely to write my own -- you see, I'm a programmer, so I can. it won't even be hard. But... we can't expect that every person who uses a computer (or even every advanced user is)
command-lines are fast. thats why we like them. Somewhere between what *nix provides and what windows provides is something that people and scripts can both use.
besides. anybody, and I mean anybody could make the *> instead of *. mistake. its really easy to do, even if you know what you are doing.
I like downloading binaries. Its a real shame that many programs are not available in binary form, or that, when I go looking for help, people complain . Oh, well, its probably a bad binary, you should have installed from source.
What if I'm not a programmer and don't want to be manually compiling other people's code
As for the rm thing: there is a difference between obnoxious prompting, such as every time you do everyting, and useful prompting: only when you do something that either looks like a mistype or is really really dangerous
such as the 'rm -r *' that my friend accidentally executed from '/' (his previous command was 'cd/some/dir' -- he forgot the space, so it didn't work, and he didn't notice. His mistake, but... couldn't rm have said 'you sure you want to wipe out everything on every filesystem currently mounted?'
thankfully he did this only 2 hours after that servers most recent backup, so we lost little data and weren't down for too long.
besides, thats what the '-f' option is for. Ask for a confirmation on and 'rm *' command unless -f is present (instead of what many distros now do by default, which is confirm for every single file -- too annoying, so we all just automatically add the '-f' Or what my college campus does: rm always prompts for every file, even if I use '-f'. This is insanity! I end up doing an FTP to localhost and using the FTP delete becuase it takes about 10 hours less
Isn't it funny when this happens? See, I tihnk its funny because these are the same goons who are saying Linux on the Desktop is not a toy, and saying things that sound an aweful lot like everyone should use Linux
Ok... at work, sadly, those of us who are running windows (YAY, not me!!!) are forced to use Outlook. this is a terrible thing.
One recent (or not-so-recent) 'security update' for Outlook made it so that if you want another program to send mail through Outlook (such as, say, an e-mail newsletter that we created -- like we do weekly) a dialog box pops up, and you have to click the 'Yes' button for each message.
Even better: you have to wait 5 seconds first.
So, what do we do? We have a program called 'push the freakin button' that we run, and, after a few hours (durinig which we cant use that machine bacause modal boxes keep opening and closing) the newsletter is out.
This is the kind of crappy 'do what we want, not what you want' kind of things that one might expect from MS. But... on Linux things are supposed to obey me for I am root, and know God's password.
So, if this is the case, then why does umount ignore me when I try and unmount a volume (nfs/smb share or cdrom) that is in use? Why does the button on my CDROM drive not work all the time?
umount even has a force option: -f
If I use this, instead of doing what I want (forcing a dismount and ejecting the freakin disk) it just prints a more technical error message as to why I can't.
I just tried this again...
$umount/mnt/cdrom umount: device is busy
$umount -f/mnt/cdrom umount: only root can do that
$su -c "umount -f/mnt/cdrom" password: umount2: device or resource busy umount:/dev/cdrom: not mounted umount:/mnt/cdrom: Illegal seek
WTF??? not mounted? an MP3 on that disk is currently playing in mpg123. I can here it.
there should NOT be a '-f' option if it doesnt FORCE a dismount. and I should not need to be root to eject a freakin' CDRom...
its cool that *nix can treat a CD or a fileshare or a hard drive partition the same, but perhaps different permissions for different types of things to mount? Nah, that'd be way to useful... besides, you can always just su right? After all, everyone knows root password on their box...
see, here's the thing.
You don't have to be the worlds next super-genius (or, for that matter, even 100% accurate) to use the Windows/DOS command-line.
most commands are intuitive and DONT BARF IF YOU SCREW UP.
show of hands: how many of you have ever typed 'rm -r *>class,' or similar meaning for the '>' to be a '.'
On any sane operating system, rm should be able to tell what command-line was passed to it so that it could decide to bring up a prompt "you are about to empty this directory. Is that ok? [y/n]"
instead, rm just gets an expanded list of files (shell expands the *) and so happily deletes everything.
Or, not much better, you have the always prompt option set. Then it bitches about every single file so that it is impossible to use rm -r. Thus, users will always always use -rf which, rightfully so, hapilly does whatever the hell you ask of it.
show of hands again: tar.
ever type 'tar cvf myarchive' and meant the character right next to c, 'tar xvf myarchive'
did tar just blow away your archive? yes. Are you screwed? but of course.
I could go on and on, as countless others have (such as here, I find it amusing that MS is hosting this page, but whatever...
UNIX Hater's Handbook
My personal pet peeve? why is it that with >75% of apps that I download as source have either configure scripts that simply don't work, or include code that doesn't compile.
I know I'm not alone here. I refuse to install stuff from source these days, because I'm not willing to go find the compiler errors in your package, I'm too busy trying to find a piece of software to use to help me with whatever I am trying to make.
I had myself a cable internet conenction this year.
I liked the speed, frequently between 2 and 3 mbps.
But, I complained about the lag. My ISP didn't get a complaint phonecall until my GATEWAY became at least 150ms away (instead of the normal 75ms), let alone the internet...
I found that average internet ping time was 600ms. this was a problem. I was used to a fast cable provider which could offer internet ping times in the 150-250ms range. (and gateway pings in the 20-40ms)
So please, stop complaining that your internet access is only instantaneous.
You are of course right. Change MD5 Sum to Number of times any of the strings "AB", "CD", or "EF" appear in the body of the article and it meets my original claim of impossibility.
and then realize that, if you are looking for information in/about the binaries, you have to assemble the many pieces of the binary, and then decode them.
Ahh... but the subpoena is going to the ISP to get your information, not to you directly (although the ISP will likely inform you -- I think they have to, but I'm not sure)
So, in this case, the RIAA would be telling the ISP that you are an infringer of copyright. And since, in response, the ISP would treat you differently (namely, pass out to the RIAA your contact information) you would probably have a decent defamation case here.
Only one problem. Defamation of character (slander/libel -- libel in this case) is a civil matter, which means you are on your own to respond. Good luck suing the RIAA. They could and would throw their enormous mass behind destroying the first few such claims to discourage people from presenting others.
Before you knew it, they'd have won with their millions of dollars worth of legal help, and you'd be stuck paying their legal fees...
this is the biggest of the problems... it is simply impossible to sue companies so very much more powerful than you without enormous help as the "dream team" always wins.
Actually, I do not believe that I did, and the reason is that any time they want to use my essay as an example of how not to write an essay (or how to write one) they ask my permission, and I have to sign a little form.
Generally, I let them seeing as I have no real intention to make any money from the papers, and I see no reason to withold permission, but the fact that they ask makes me think that they do not have permission.
Incidentally, they just added a new term. I am now required to turn in an electronic copy of all essays to any anti-plagiarism website that they choose, provided that they inform me of where and how to do so in advance.
The new terms work like this: if you purchase a Microsoft product, and you are sued becaues of IP that Microsoft should have kept out of the code, Microsoft will pay for the lawsuit.
The old terms were identical except that if the price of the product was greater than the cost of the lawsuit (always) then they would only refund the purchase price of the product.
So. This seems to be a GOOD THING that Microsoft is doing. Are they doing this with the hope that companies will see this as an advantage for Windows? YES! Is this somehow immoral and evil? NO! Is there something inherently evil in Microsoft making Windows a more attractive product? NO!
Every time Microsoft does anything bad, people here jump all over them for being the evil empire.
Every time Microsoft does anything good, people here jump all over them for "spreading FUD" and being the evil empire.
Would you all equally cry foul should, say, Red Hat tomorrow decide to add similar terms to their license? I think not!
Oh, and one more thing. Why is it "evil" and "wrong" for SCO to sue over Linux IP violations, but somehow you will be the Champion of Justice by doing exactly the same thing to Windows users???
1: valid. 2: truth. 3: quite possibly, not too likely for this
the comment about password protection was under the assumption that this was some sort of raid either sponsored by a corporation and aided by campus cops, or by campus cops of their own volition, and either way, using landlord's right-of-entry as opposed to a warrant -- in which case they could enter but not mess with your stuff
hmm... you know... I could probably subpoena and sue my university. I gave them a single copy of my papers. I guess I agreed to it in fair exchange for a passing grade, but... I bet that sometimes they make copies so that the prof and a TA, or two different TAs / graders can read them... I didn't authorize that! YAY... LAWSUIT TIME!!!!!!
As for federal prison: I don't think that the FBI or the DOJ wants to get too heavily into this until it starts to sort itself out, though I could be wrong. The RIAA is after money, not higher taxes due to the need to build prisons for the however-many-million kazaa members out there. Besides, if all the people who listen to music are in jail, they won't be able to go to the store to buy music!
This is a very "special" piece of legislation that I suspect will be destroyed before too long, even given the current Supreme Court's tendencies to do what they want instead of what the Constitution demands.
See... if any copyright holder can issue any subpoena for any reason without a judge's support then...
hey... guess what...
Every paper I've ever written is copyrighted by me. I could register one/all of these, and then go off sending these subpoenas out at... everybody on the entire internet, and since no judge has to approve it, and the recipients are legally obligated to respond, I could build lists of persons names, addresses, telephone numbers, ISPs, and IP addresses...
now, dial-up users would change IPs frequently, but not broadband users.
Now, thanks to all the information I'll get from the ISPs I could even see where these users have been going on the internet. (if such logs are available -- and if not, well, then pretend that instead of me doing this its doubleclick, which has ads (and thus tracking) on more webpages than anyone could hope to ever count), and do all sorts of cool things: identity theft (ok, that would be illegal, but easy), very targetted marketing (very valuable -- go from what URLs surfed to stuff in your physical mail box) or just sell these lists to other companies who didn't want to go through the hassle of collecting the info, or any other number of things that would be bad.
So. Verizon, keep on appealling, I think you will win, and in the meanwhile know that we support your efforts!
Oh, and yay to the schools too, please continue to fight!
I am curious, was there a warrant of any sort? Or did the University police (they are not allowed, at least in CA, to call themselves police unless they have true police powers, IIRC) just abuse their right-of-entry as landlords to enter the dorms.
As for deliberately planning it around the student's schedule so as to catch them out, this seems both unnecessary (right-of-entry and warrants both work regardless of presence of student) and unethical/below the belt.
As for even touching the student's computer, sans warrant it seems that that ought to be some sort of crime.
Sounds like a good time to password-protect your computer (a good idea in dorm rooms anyway, just to prevent being the target of some prankster) because if they actually dismantled your computer to scan hard drives (sans warrant) you could definitely report it as either theft (if they took it) or willful destruction of property / vandalism / something of the like if they just scanned it.
I have a Philips High-Definition TV. I have a Toshiba Progressive-Scan DVD player, these two "toys" are connected via Monster Cable that cost about $60 (using component connectors, of course)
This is what I have noticed: 1 in 10 DVDs that I *RENT* have some degree of damage that hinders the watching experience. This has gotten better over time (used to be 1 in 6), and Blockbuster will usually refund me the rental price if I complain. Only one movie I ever bought (Spaceballs) developed this kind of damage, and I think that has something to do with it being used as a drink coaster by my brother once...
With a few notable exceptions (especially older movies, Mel Brooks films, and some TV series) the compression damage is rarely even visible, and overall image clarity far surpasses anything that my brand new high-end VHS player (purchased for archival purposes, figuring that in a decade or so VCRs might be hard to find) even on good quality tape.
Biggest disadvantage to DVD/HDTV setup: things that are interlaced, like analog TV, VHS tapes, and certain DVDs look better when connected to my 4:3 TV, because the new TV does the deinterlacing only *almost* right, and so sometimes the edges of people will tear. Part of the problem is that 525 (#lines on a 4:3 TV) doesn't scale evenly to 1080 (#lines in HDTV, although not the #lines on DVDs or digital television... I'm a little confused as to why this is... DVDs are typicallly 720Xsomething less that 480)
Anywat, on the old setup, colors might be a bit warmer, but everything gets too soft around the edges, and, of course, its only truly good for the first few viewings... I'm not willing to buy new tapes every other time I watch them...
As for the violet-laser thing. Don't think for a minute that whatever standard they come out with will even more severely limit what you can do with your movies... Disney, among others, is already playing with movies that are only good for so many days or viewings
actually, he secifically told me that is was because the sources were electronic.
See, we had to turn n copies of the "important parts" of our sources. One of my book sources I chose to scan & print because I was at home already, and don't own a copier. Well... he docked me because the printout "looked" electronic.
OK, Apple is both a hardware and a software company, correct?
Apple hardware counts for what, 3% of the consumer market? I don't know for sure, but its at least 2%-ish and not more than 5%-ish. Now. Apple makes Mac computers. Mac computers cost more than PCs per unit of computing power.
Yes, I will grant, for the sake of argument, that Mac's G4 architecture is superior to that of, say Intel's P4 and P4-Xeon. But, for approximately the price of a high-end G4 ~1Ghz, I could easily get a 3.06Ghz P4 system, and likely even a dual 2.4 or 2.8 Xeon system...
Mac cloning would put downward pressure on the hardware prices. Suddenly Macs would not cost thousands of dollars while PCs cost only hundreds. Thus, it is likely that Mac hardware would take a larger chunk of the market, perhaps, say, 10-15% of the total market.
That means that Apple could sell 3-5 times as many copies of the latest version of OS X. And many more copies of all their other software. Thus, Apple could become a real player in the marketplace, instead of the little guy on the side.
And, correect me if I'm wrong, but it would not be a crime (under the DMCA or any other law) to reverse engineer the core Mac architecture and produce a compatible product.
On the other hand, it would be a violation of the DMCA to reverse engineer the print cartridges in the same manner because the DMCA protects the copyright protected code.
Oh, and another thing. If you've ever read the text of the DMCA, you will find that it does not prohibit the circumventing of access control mechanisms, but only the circumvention of EFFECTIVE access control mechanisms. (by my reading, IANAL) If you can prove that the Lexmark mechanism is ineffective (as stands) then you should be home free as far as circumvention is concerned... but the courts have yet to define "effective" here
precisely, and this is why I do not believe that it would work at my school. Most of the student body would cheat, because they feel that most of the others would to, and so they would be at a disadvantage if they (and only they) did not
Brand owners are very protective. Some will hold the game dev's hand, some will be truly destructive, and others will trust the developer to do what is right for the game.
It is always hard to tell in advance what kind of brand owner you are dealing with, but I believe that the more freedom hte developer has, the better the game could be. Unfortunately, it could be much worse, as well...
So... when deciding whether or not to pick up the license, spend a lot of time looking at the terms of the license, as well as the track record of the brand owner
Well, see I am a little concerned here. For the most part, I suspect that this law is well intentioned, and perhaps even well-drafted.
But something that you may miss at first. Take a look at the annoying spam you get. Look at the e-mail headers. How many of those, do you suppose, accurately reflect the spammer? Any? probably, Most? doubtful.
Now, I recall reading proposed legislation somewhere to ban header forging, but again... if the header lies about where the mail came from, and it was sent through some poor open relay somewhere, how are you supposed to find the owners.
A $10,000 fine is great, except that the real spammers are not likely to get themselves caught.
Besides. I don't want to get spam. Putting some junk in the subject telling me it is spam doesn't make it go away. Yes, I can auto-delete it, but I've still got to download it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can install Windows. Even Windows 2000. And I can have a GUI file-manager that does damn near everything.
And get this. I can do it all on less that 100MB of RAM. Unlike nautilus, which, according to my system, requires 180 - 220 MB RAM at all times. This sucks, because I'm on an old box with 256 Physical. That means that I am constantly swapping. a lot.
and yes, the idea is to remove bloat in the name of userfriendliness. Not eliminate userfriendlyness. There is a way to have friendly apps that dont take a gig of RAM to run.
-- Stop sending me HTML mail. telnet is my POP client and I am not an HTML/4.0-compatible rendering engine
well... now hang on one minute...
I just want you to realize (if you didn't already) how broken deregulation is in California.
Because of deregulation + Enron + incompetant state government, I now pay a nice low rate of 12.9 cents per kWh.
And thats just on the "baseline amount" Myself, being only somewhat conservative in my use of power, consume about 275% of baseline, and my price works something like this
0% - 100% of baseline : 12.9 cents / kWh
101 - 130%: 13.6 cents / kWh
131 - 200%: 14.9 cents / kWh
201 - 300%: I forget, but probably about a penny more.
Electricity is electricity. Why should it cost more than 3 times as much in California as in Canada, and more that 6 times as much as in Arizona.
Especially when I pay huge freakin taxes so the government can subsidize my rates. BTW: those rates are AFTER the 20-some-odd-percent "subsidy"
But of course they are little shits.
No disagreements here, but that wasn't the point I was making. I was just helping to define "use" of IP according to US copyright law. That is not to say that, in this particular case, I think it will come out that way.
Just read SCO's outlandishly absurd reasoning why the GPL is invalid. It went something like: 'Copyright law gives right X, no contract that can be construed as granting any rights beyond X are valid'
Woah!!! but... what if I buy 5000 licenses to SCO's bullshitware. Those licenses would also be invalid by the same logic: after all, they grant me the right to make 5000 copies. 5000 is more than one, thus: not valid
Oh, and about not being liable because IBM is?
Assume, for the moment, that SCO owned IP that IBM gave to Linux. I know, it could never happen, but... just pretend for a minute.
Also lets assume that you are using Linux.
In this case, SCO can sue IBM for trade-secrets violations for giving code to Linux that is wasn't allowed to give away.
Additionally, however, you are using SCO IP without permission. Since IBM (or your distro) chose not to indemnify you against IP claims, you COULD (not necessarily, but quite possibly) be liable for damages. If you are a public library or educational institution and had a valid reason to believe that you had the right to use the IP (like you acquired a license that said you could from a provider without the authority to make that claim) then you would be allowed to remove the IP and avoid paying damages.
Otherwise its up to the judge.
Oh. I missed one other essential assumption: SCO never released a copy of its IP under a license that allows limitless copying (such as, say, Caldera under the GPL) Because, you see, if I am offered a license (a contract granting me certain rights, and forbidding me others in exchange for some (possibly monetary) value) to duplicate the software, and the organization granting the license had the right to do so, then I can do whatever the license says I can do. After all, thats what we agreed to. Contracts are binding like that. If you sign on the dotted line you are stuck. Especially if you wrote the contract (or offered the boiler-plate contract)
In short: because SCO released a copy of Linux under the GPL (assuming it survives a court test), and especially because it can be easily proven hat they know they did so (I'm sure it had a copy of the license on it) they are SOL.
Yes, because by copying then to your hard drive you have made a copy. If SCO actually does own a piece of the code in Linux, AND it is decided that the GPL is meaningless, (or only applies when big companies feel like it) THEN simply copying the code (in source or binary form) to your system constitutes "use"
Thus, if SCO were right in all of their claims (highly unlikely the way I read it), you would be allowed to use Linux only if you did not have any copies of the SCO code anywhere on your system (or if you bought a license to use them)
So, yes. If you simply disabled those features, you'd still potentially be liable -- if you physically uninstalled them? you should be fine.
other choice:
you could use the Dynamic Volume support of Win2k and later, but... I imagine that even NTFS is more portable than this...
Windows isn't really the limiting factor though. Each operating system has formats they accept.
Linux supports ext* , fat* , and a few other random (but not much used) formats.
Windows supports fat* , ntfs* (there are multiple versions, currently version 4 or 5 (i forget which) and windows dynamic volume, which is a bizarre thing I never quite understood (except that it can be forced into doing something akin to software RAID)
Mac OS supports... I don't really know what formats, but apparently fat* and probably ext*
Its OK to bash Microsoft, but please, be honest about it.
true.
I think that * should not be expanded by the shell, but I know that I'm not likely to win -- mainly because the aforementioned millions of lines of scripts out there expect it that way.
and I don't like what ' rm -i' does
much better to give me only one prompt, instead of the one-per-file that rm -i gives. Why? Because you and I both know that, as soon as we learn that '-f' turns off the millions of prompts, we'll always use it. If I only got one prompt, I'd be happy enough. at least with rm. I am very likely to write my own -- you see, I'm a programmer, so I can. it won't even be hard. But... we can't expect that every person who uses a computer (or even every advanced user is)
command-lines are fast. thats why we like them. Somewhere between what *nix provides and what windows provides is something that people and scripts can both use.
besides. anybody, and I mean anybody could make the *> instead of *. mistake. its really easy to do, even if you know what you are doing.
I like downloading binaries.
Its a real shame that many programs are not available in binary form, or that, when I go looking for help, people complain . Oh, well, its probably a bad binary, you should have installed from source.
What if I'm not a programmer and don't want to be manually compiling other people's code
As for the rm thing: there is a difference between obnoxious prompting, such as every time you do everyting, and useful prompting: only when you do something that either looks like a mistype or is really really dangerous
such as the 'rm -r *' that my friend accidentally executed from '/' (his previous command was 'cd/some/dir' -- he forgot the space, so it didn't work, and he didn't notice. His mistake, but... couldn't rm have said 'you sure you want to wipe out everything on every filesystem currently mounted?'
thankfully he did this only 2 hours after that servers most recent backup, so we lost little data and weren't down for too long.
besides, thats what the '-f' option is for. Ask for a confirmation on and 'rm *' command unless -f is present (instead of what many distros now do by default, which is confirm for every single file -- too annoying, so we all just automatically add the '-f' Or what my college campus does: rm always prompts for every file, even if I use '-f'. This is insanity! I end up doing an FTP to localhost and using the FTP delete becuase it takes about 10 hours less
Isn't it funny when this happens? See, I tihnk its funny because these are the same goons who are saying Linux on the Desktop is not a toy, and saying things that sound an aweful lot like everyone should use Linux
HERE, HERE!!!
/mnt/cdrom
/mnt/cdrom
/mnt/cdrom" /dev/cdrom: not mounted /mnt/cdrom: Illegal seek
Ok... at work, sadly, those of us who are running windows (YAY, not me!!!) are forced to use Outlook. this is a terrible thing.
One recent (or not-so-recent) 'security update' for Outlook made it so that if you want another program to send mail through Outlook (such as, say, an e-mail newsletter that we created -- like we do weekly) a dialog box pops up, and you have to click the 'Yes' button for each message.
Even better: you have to wait 5 seconds first.
So, what do we do? We have a program called 'push the freakin button' that we run, and, after a few hours (durinig which we cant use that machine bacause modal boxes keep opening and closing) the newsletter is out.
This is the kind of crappy 'do what we want, not what you want' kind of things that one might expect from MS. But... on Linux things are supposed to obey me for I am root, and know God's password.
So, if this is the case, then why does umount ignore me when I try and unmount a volume (nfs/smb share or cdrom) that is in use? Why does the button on my CDROM drive not work all the time?
umount even has a force option: -f
If I use this, instead of doing what I want (forcing a dismount and ejecting the freakin disk) it just prints a more technical error message as to why I can't.
I just tried this again...
$umount
umount: device is busy
$umount -f
umount: only root can do that
$su -c "umount -f
password:
umount2: device or resource busy
umount:
umount:
WTF??? not mounted? an MP3 on that disk is currently playing in mpg123. I can here it.
there should NOT be a '-f' option if it doesnt FORCE a dismount. and I should not need to be root to eject a freakin' CDRom...
its cool that *nix can treat a CD or a fileshare or a hard drive partition the same, but perhaps different permissions for different types of things to mount? Nah, that'd be way to useful... besides, you can always just su right? After all, everyone knows root password on their box...
show of hands: how many of you have ever typed 'rm -r *>class,' or similar meaning for the '>' to be a '.'
On any sane operating system, rm should be able to tell what command-line was passed to it so that it could decide to bring up a prompt "you are about to empty this directory. Is that ok? [y/n]"
instead, rm just gets an expanded list of files (shell expands the *) and so happily deletes everything.
Or, not much better, you have the always prompt option set. Then it bitches about every single file so that it is impossible to use rm -r. Thus, users will always always use -rf which, rightfully so, hapilly does whatever the hell you ask of it.
show of hands again: tar. ever type 'tar cvf myarchive' and meant the character right next to c, 'tar xvf myarchive'
did tar just blow away your archive? yes. Are you screwed? but of course.
I could go on and on, as countless others have (such as here, I find it amusing that MS is hosting this page, but whatever... UNIX Hater's Handbook
My personal pet peeve? why is it that with >75% of apps that I download as source have either configure scripts that simply don't work, or include code that doesn't compile. I know I'm not alone here. I refuse to install stuff from source these days, because I'm not willing to go find the compiler errors in your package, I'm too busy trying to find a piece of software to use to help me with whatever I am trying to make.
I had myself a cable internet conenction this year.
I liked the speed, frequently between 2 and 3 mbps. But, I complained about the lag. My ISP didn't get a complaint phonecall until my GATEWAY became at least 150ms away (instead of the normal 75ms), let alone the internet...
I found that average internet ping time was 600ms. this was a problem. I was used to a fast cable provider which could offer internet ping times in the 150-250ms range. (and gateway pings in the 20-40ms)
So please, stop complaining that your internet access is only instantaneous.
You are of course right. Change MD5 Sum to Number of times any of the strings "AB", "CD", or "EF" appear in the body of the article and it meets my original claim of impossibility.
and then realize that, if you are looking for information in/about the binaries, you have to assemble the many pieces of the binary, and then decode them.
only if that website can prove, in a court of law, that their methods are "effective" which should be easy to do.
Ahh... but the subpoena is going to the ISP to get your information, not to you directly (although the ISP will likely inform you -- I think they have to, but I'm not sure)
So, in this case, the RIAA would be telling the ISP that you are an infringer of copyright. And since, in response, the ISP would treat you differently (namely, pass out to the RIAA your contact information) you would probably have a decent defamation case here.
Only one problem. Defamation of character (slander/libel -- libel in this case) is a civil matter, which means you are on your own to respond. Good luck suing the RIAA. They could and would throw their enormous mass behind destroying the first few such claims to discourage people from presenting others.
Before you knew it, they'd have won with their millions of dollars worth of legal help, and you'd be stuck paying their legal fees...
this is the biggest of the problems... it is simply impossible to sue companies so very much more powerful than you without enormous help as the "dream team" always wins.
Actually, I do not believe that I did, and the reason is that any time they want to use my essay as an example of how not to write an essay (or how to write one) they ask my permission, and I have to sign a little form.
Generally, I let them seeing as I have no real intention to make any money from the papers, and I see no reason to withold permission, but the fact that they ask makes me think that they do not have permission.
Incidentally, they just added a new term. I am now required to turn in an electronic copy of all essays to any anti-plagiarism website that they choose, provided that they inform me of where and how to do so in advance.
I love this.
The reason I love this is simple.
The new terms work like this: if you purchase a Microsoft product, and you are sued becaues of IP that Microsoft should have kept out of the code, Microsoft will pay for the lawsuit.
The old terms were identical except that if the price of the product was greater than the cost of the lawsuit (always) then they would only refund the purchase price of the product.
So. This seems to be a GOOD THING that Microsoft is doing. Are they doing this with the hope that companies will see this as an advantage for Windows? YES! Is this somehow immoral and evil? NO! Is there something inherently evil in Microsoft making Windows a more attractive product? NO!
Every time Microsoft does anything bad, people here jump all over them for being the evil empire.
Every time Microsoft does anything good, people here jump all over them for "spreading FUD" and being the evil empire.
Would you all equally cry foul should, say, Red Hat tomorrow decide to add similar terms to their license? I think not!
Oh, and one more thing. Why is it "evil" and "wrong" for SCO to sue over Linux IP violations, but somehow you will be the Champion of Justice by doing exactly the same thing to Windows users???
1: valid.
2: truth.
3: quite possibly, not too likely for this
the comment about password protection was under the assumption that this was some sort of raid either sponsored by a corporation and aided by campus cops, or by campus cops of their own volition, and either way, using landlord's right-of-entry as opposed to a warrant -- in which case they could enter but not mess with your stuff
hmm... you know... I could probably subpoena and sue my university. I gave them a single copy of my papers. I guess I agreed to it in fair exchange for a passing grade, but... I bet that sometimes they make copies so that the prof and a TA, or two different TAs / graders can read them...
I didn't authorize that! YAY... LAWSUIT TIME!!!!!!
As for federal prison: I don't think that the FBI or the DOJ wants to get too heavily into this until it starts to sort itself out, though I could be wrong. The RIAA is after money, not higher taxes due to the need to build prisons for the however-many-million kazaa members out there. Besides, if all the people who listen to music are in jail, they won't be able to go to the store to buy music!
This is a very "special" piece of legislation that I suspect will be destroyed before too long, even given the current Supreme Court's tendencies to do what they want instead of what the Constitution demands.
See... if any copyright holder can issue any subpoena for any reason without a judge's support then...
hey... guess what...
Every paper I've ever written is copyrighted by me. I could register one/all of these, and then go off sending these subpoenas out at... everybody on the entire internet, and since no judge has to approve it, and the recipients are legally obligated to respond, I could build lists of persons names, addresses, telephone numbers, ISPs, and IP addresses...
now, dial-up users would change IPs frequently, but not broadband users.
Now, thanks to all the information I'll get from the ISPs I could even see where these users have been going on the internet. (if such logs are available -- and if not, well, then pretend that instead of me doing this its doubleclick, which has ads (and thus tracking) on more webpages than anyone could hope to ever count), and do all sorts of cool things: identity theft (ok, that would be illegal, but easy), very targetted marketing (very valuable -- go from what URLs surfed to stuff in your physical mail box) or just sell these lists to other companies who didn't want to go through the hassle of collecting the info, or any other number of things that would be bad.
So. Verizon, keep on appealling, I think you will win, and in the meanwhile know that we support your efforts!
Oh, and yay to the schools too, please continue to fight!
Now that is very interesting.
I am curious, was there a warrant of any sort? Or did the University police (they are not allowed, at least in CA, to call themselves police unless they have true police powers, IIRC) just abuse their right-of-entry as landlords to enter the dorms.
As for deliberately planning it around the student's schedule so as to catch them out, this seems both unnecessary (right-of-entry and warrants both work regardless of presence of student) and unethical/below the belt.
As for even touching the student's computer, sans warrant it seems that that ought to be some sort of crime.
Sounds like a good time to password-protect your computer (a good idea in dorm rooms anyway, just to prevent being the target of some prankster) because if they actually dismantled your computer to scan hard drives (sans warrant) you could definitely report it as either theft (if they took it) or willful destruction of property / vandalism / something of the like if they just scanned it.
the funny thing is:
I have a Philips High-Definition TV. I have a Toshiba Progressive-Scan DVD player, these two "toys" are connected via Monster Cable that cost about $60 (using component connectors, of course)
This is what I have noticed:
1 in 10 DVDs that I *RENT* have some degree of damage that hinders the watching experience. This has gotten better over time (used to be 1 in 6), and Blockbuster will usually refund me the rental price if I complain. Only one movie I ever bought (Spaceballs) developed this kind of damage, and I think that has something to do with it being used as a drink coaster by my brother once...
With a few notable exceptions (especially older movies, Mel Brooks films, and some TV series) the compression damage is rarely even visible, and overall image clarity far surpasses anything that my brand new high-end VHS player (purchased for archival purposes, figuring that in a decade or so VCRs might be hard to find) even on good quality tape.
Biggest disadvantage to DVD/HDTV setup: things that are interlaced, like analog TV, VHS tapes, and certain DVDs look better when connected to my 4:3 TV, because the new TV does the deinterlacing only *almost* right, and so sometimes the edges of people will tear. Part of the problem is that 525 (#lines on a 4:3 TV) doesn't scale evenly to 1080 (#lines in HDTV, although not the #lines on DVDs or digital television... I'm a little confused as to why this is... DVDs are typicallly 720Xsomething less that 480)
Anywat, on the old setup, colors might be a bit warmer, but everything gets too soft around the edges, and, of course, its only truly good for the first few viewings... I'm not willing to buy new tapes every other time I watch them...
As for the violet-laser thing. Don't think for a minute that whatever standard they come out with will even more severely limit what you can do with your movies... Disney, among others, is already playing with movies that are only good for so many days or viewings
actually, he secifically told me that is was because the sources were electronic.
See, we had to turn n copies of the "important parts" of our sources. One of my book sources I chose to scan & print because I was at home already, and don't own a copier. Well... he docked me because the printout "looked" electronic.
OK, Apple is both a hardware and a software company, correct?
Apple hardware counts for what, 3% of the consumer market? I don't know for sure, but its at least 2%-ish and not more than 5%-ish.
Now. Apple makes Mac computers. Mac computers cost more than PCs per unit of computing power.
Yes, I will grant, for the sake of argument, that Mac's G4 architecture is superior to that of, say Intel's P4 and P4-Xeon.
But, for approximately the price of a high-end G4 ~1Ghz, I could easily get a 3.06Ghz P4 system, and likely even a dual 2.4 or 2.8 Xeon system...
Mac cloning would put downward pressure on the hardware prices. Suddenly Macs would not cost thousands of dollars while PCs cost only hundreds.
Thus, it is likely that Mac hardware would take a larger chunk of the market, perhaps, say, 10-15% of the total market.
That means that Apple could sell 3-5 times as many copies of the latest version of OS X. And many more copies of all their other software.
Thus, Apple could become a real player in the marketplace, instead of the little guy on the side.
And, correect me if I'm wrong, but it would not be a crime (under the DMCA or any other law) to reverse engineer the core Mac architecture and produce a compatible product.
On the other hand, it would be a violation of the DMCA to reverse engineer the print cartridges in the same manner because the DMCA protects the copyright protected code.
Oh, and another thing. If you've ever read the text of the DMCA, you will find that it does not prohibit the circumventing of access control mechanisms, but only the circumvention of EFFECTIVE access control mechanisms. (by my reading, IANAL)
If you can prove that the Lexmark mechanism is ineffective (as stands) then you should be home free as far as circumvention is concerned...
but the courts have yet to define "effective" here
precisely, and this is why I do not believe that it would work at my school. Most of the student body would cheat, because they feel that most of the others would to, and so they would be at a disadvantage if they (and only they) did not
I think here you've hit the nail on the head.
Brand owners are very protective. Some will hold the game dev's hand, some will be truly destructive, and others will trust the developer to do what is right for the game.
It is always hard to tell in advance what kind of brand owner you are dealing with, but I believe that the more freedom hte developer has, the better the game could be. Unfortunately, it could be much worse, as well...
So... when deciding whether or not to pick up the license, spend a lot of time looking at the terms of the license, as well as the track record of the brand owner
Well, see I am a little concerned here. For the most part, I suspect that this law is well intentioned, and perhaps even well-drafted.
But something that you may miss at first. Take a look at the annoying spam you get. Look at the e-mail headers. How many of those, do you suppose, accurately reflect the spammer? Any? probably, Most? doubtful.
Now, I recall reading proposed legislation somewhere to ban header forging, but again... if the header lies about where the mail came from, and it was sent through some poor open relay somewhere, how are you supposed to find the owners.
A $10,000 fine is great, except that the real spammers are not likely to get themselves caught.
Besides. I don't want to get spam. Putting some junk in the subject telling me it is spam doesn't make it go away. Yes, I can auto-delete it, but I've still got to download it.