No; surely the prior art is Excel v5, which has a built-in capacity for running plugins, not the mere fact that some kid decided to write this particular one. That he did so just makes it clear that Excel had this capability all along. It's Excel that's the prior art here, not this guy's plugin. As always, IANAL.
This could be good news - if it's a bit more fine-grained than the pre-existing NSA B3, B2, etc. classification which is great for "their" kind of computer needs, but rather too rigorous for everyday computing needs - to get A1 I recall a system has to be mathematically proven to be uncrackable. I'm not sure where it would leave the free distros, especially with upgrades put out the whole time; maybe they'd have to specify a core system to be classified (or face massive expense with every update...)
If the previous agreement could have been said to be broken by allowing music to be played through speakers, and this one is said to be broken by allowing music to be played on an iPod it seems:
(a) that someone's been agreeing to idiotic things (restricting how someone can listen to music? Even the RIAA don't go much further), and (b) the lawyers are still on the gravy train...
My first mouse was a 3-button AMX mouse that came bundled with an extremely primitive art package, AMX Art, for the Amstrad CPC. The mouse had some kind of weird connection to a large box that plugged into a serial port. It was horrid and plasticky, the ball was very light so it didn't track properly (ever!), it only worked with the one program with which it came (which wasn't much use anyway...) and eventually someone did the decent thing and spilled cola inside it. I think I've still got it somewhere.....
It took me ages to realise that "FPS games" were "first-person shooter games" - owing to all the hardcore gamers posting on/., losing sleep over small video card performance enhancements I always thought it meant "frames per second games"...
I'm still using WindowMaker (not solely for speed, I love the way I have my dockapps set up now), but the way the focus flickers badly with gtk2 apps really bites. It looks like it's been fixed in CVS though, so here's hoping Alfredo and Dan have time to get another release out soon!
KDE is at the stage where new releases are really adding polish rather than making major changes
(Disclaimer: I use KDE myself quite a lot, and like it in many respects.) KDE is at the stage where new releases really ought to be about adding a hell of a lot of speed, rather than major changes. It takes almost as long for KDE to start once I've logged in than the entire rest of the boot sequence took, which is very unacceptable.
So find the su executable and chmod it to 754, chown it to root:wheel. It's not as fine-grained as the 'only-wheel-can-su-to-root-while-others-can-su-to- other-users' usage, but I have a hard time imagining why normal users should be allowed to su to other normal users anyway. Proper permissions can generally be set up to allow the correct access without all that malarkey.
I've had pam_time running on a Linux box to do exactly this in 2001. I was trying to revise for finals but kept on being distracted by slashdot, so set up pam_time to only allow logins between 9pm and 9:30pm and had a root cronjob that killed all my normal user's processes at 10pm (and sounded a loud and annoying alarm at 7:30am!). It was a completely fascist system, but it did keep my computer usage reasonable for the term it mattered, and allowed me to get a 2:1. (Between hacking and climbing, physics came a close 3rd in terms of priorities!)
Deny everything. Apple has put their fingers in their ears and are sitting in the corner singing "la la la I can't hear you". Technically they are probably right, this is not very practical - but the legal validity of such a sale still needs clarifying as it has ramifications for other applications of copyright law to digital (by which the lawyers seem to mean "downloaded"[0]) content.
[0] They don't (yet) seem to claim this legal dilemma would apply if the music was on a CD, only if it's downloaded... This, to me, seems nuts - why does the medium in which you obtained the content make a difference?
On the mining side, is it possible with near-future technology to mine the 3He, ship it back to Earth and use it to generate energy and still end up with more energy out than went into the whole process? Or would it require esoteric tech like those magnetic railguns to launch cargo back towards the Earth?
(Not trolling, I'm just curious.)
You mean "muons".
Also: fusion isn't defined by neutron production, though that does occur in many fusion reactions. (A counterexample would be the fusion of two Helium-3 atoms.)
It's not a lock, as such. More like an electric fence; you/can/ cross it, if you want to, but it's going to be unpleasant and while the grass might be greener on the other side it's still just about edible over here.
There are problems with ditching Windows: while OOo etc. make it fairly easy to ditch Office these days it's harder to ditch Outlook if your customer insists on your having an MS Exchange server to sync business appointments etc., and although it can probably be done with a minimum of Windows machines and everything else running codeweavers plugins to Evolution it's just so much less hassle to keep running Windows. (There isn't actually much economic sense in ditching it as it's so difficult to get bare metal PCs in the first place: businesses have already paid the Microsoft tax.)
I think you and Cringeley are making the same point. M$ has just repackaged and changed these ideas in a way they can profit from but which doesn't necessarily add much value. Cringeley is suggesting that had they created the first operating system it would have been an "invention", rather than an "innovation", which he regards as smaller and generally less worthwhile/reputable. Semantics, I know, but I think the two of you are coming from the same place on this one.
It's not just the few like Enron that get onto the front pages, it's all the other businesses that it never quite seems to be worth anyone's while to bust (but damn well should be!) There are several extremely obvious examples in IT (cough*MS*cough*SCO*cough), to the extent that reading/. or any of the techy press it's hard not to see most of the industry as riddled with corruption, and I'm sure the same is true in other areas of business.
The thing is, I bet there are a lot of cases where one or two bad guys not necessarily right at the top can turn a whole company crooked (or at least semi-crooked) just because everyone else is too apathetic - or frightened - to shop them.
Of course, when the crooks really are at the top then it really sucks.
In the original IBM lawsuit it occurred to me that it isn't SCO that's going to be using the Chewbacca defence after all, but IBM. After all, isn't it wookies that rip people's arms off if they lose?;-)
They're going right to the source after that...
on
SCO's Next Target: SGI?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
When they're done with SGI they'll probably track down Ken Thompson and try to claim that he somehow infringed their IP by writing UNIX in the first place. After all, anything and everything to do with UNIX is clearly SCO's by god-given right.
Is it just me that sees this as a really bad idea? Nothing against the gnome project, you understand, but I see no earthly reason why a filesystem should require X Windows, let alone a full-blown desktop environment. Surely this kind of thing should be a kernel-level project which userspace tools can hook into as needed, whether from gnome or KDE or the CLI?
Anyway, I thought Reiser4 was doing exactly what this promises, but with the advantage of a proven track record on high-performance filesystems. Perhaps, if gnome wants this kind of functionality, they should base it on Reiser4 which will at least be widely-used and not locked into the gnome project.
I like the sound of this car, but for different reasons. It would totally suck as a way to avoid congestion (unless both your house and your office are on the riverbank and have convenient moorings you'll have to transition from car to boat and back to car again, and still use the roads, and if you're travelling a long way on the river the speed isn't/that/ great [30mph is good for a boat but slow by commuter standards]) but would be an awesome piece of kit for climbers wanting to reach inaccessible sea cliffs without the hassle of towing a RIB on a trailer, or people wanting to indulge in a spot of sea fishing, or who live in the Hebrides.
If this is a standalone mail component why the hell does it weigh as much as the complete mozilla builds used to? I take it they're doing something dumb like including the gecko source with thunderbird/and/ firebird, rather than as a separately downloadable library...?
Why would they need to provide paperwork? If you take a CD down to the local second-hand CD shop you don't have to prove you didn't rip all the tracks first - or simply make a duplicate of the CD. I suppose in that case the default action is that you haven't bothered to rip the CD whereas here the default action is that you haven't bothered to erase the mp3 file - perhaps that makes a difference. As is traditional for those offering semi-legalistic opinions on slashdot, I ANAL.
Slashdot Mirror
No; surely the prior art is Excel v5, which has a built-in capacity for running plugins, not the mere fact that some kid decided to write this particular one. That he did so just makes it clear that Excel had this capability all along. It's Excel that's the prior art here, not this guy's plugin. As always, IANAL.
This could be good news - if it's a bit more fine-grained than the pre-existing NSA B3, B2, etc. classification which is great for "their" kind of computer needs, but rather too rigorous for everyday computing needs - to get A1 I recall a system has to be mathematically proven to be uncrackable. I'm not sure where it would leave the free distros, especially with upgrades put out the whole time; maybe they'd have to specify a core system to be classified (or face massive expense with every update...)
If the previous agreement could have been said to be broken by allowing music to be played through speakers, and this one is said to be broken by allowing music to be played on an iPod it seems:
(a) that someone's been agreeing to idiotic things (restricting how someone can listen to music? Even the RIAA don't go much further), and
(b) the lawyers are still on the gravy train...
My first mouse was a 3-button AMX mouse that came bundled with an extremely primitive art package, AMX Art, for the Amstrad CPC. The mouse had some kind of weird connection to a large box that plugged into a serial port. It was horrid and plasticky, the ball was very light so it didn't track properly (ever!), it only worked with the one program with which it came (which wasn't much use anyway...) and eventually someone did the decent thing and spilled cola inside it. I think I've still got it somewhere.....
This presumably means more patent litigation, more money for the lawyers and... oh. That kind of IP.
vi is better than emacs and WindowMaker is better than both KDE and gnome.
It took me ages to realise that "FPS games" were "first-person shooter games" - owing to all the hardcore gamers posting on /., losing sleep over small video card performance enhancements I always thought it meant "frames per second games"...
I'm still using WindowMaker (not solely for speed, I love the way I have my dockapps set up now), but the way the focus flickers badly with gtk2 apps really bites. It looks like it's been fixed in CVS though, so here's hoping Alfredo and Dan have time to get another release out soon!
KDE is at the stage where new releases are really adding polish rather than making major changes
(Disclaimer: I use KDE myself quite a lot, and like it in many respects.) KDE is at the stage where new releases really ought to be about adding a hell of a lot of speed, rather than major changes. It takes almost as long for KDE to start once I've logged in than the entire rest of the boot sequence took, which is very unacceptable.
You seem to have mis-spelled "McBride" as "Hitler".
dammit, you can have my l-shaped enter key when you prise it from my cold dead hands.
So find the su executable and chmod it to 754, chown it to root:wheel. It's not as fine-grained as the 'only-wheel-can-su-to-root-while-others-can-su-to- other-users' usage, but I have a hard time imagining why normal users should be allowed to su to other normal users anyway. Proper permissions can generally be set up to allow the correct access without all that malarkey.
I've had pam_time running on a Linux box to do exactly this in 2001. I was trying to revise for finals but kept on being distracted by slashdot, so set up pam_time to only allow logins between 9pm and 9:30pm and had a root cronjob that killed all my normal user's processes at 10pm (and sounded a loud and annoying alarm at 7:30am!). It was a completely fascist system, but it did keep my computer usage reasonable for the term it mattered, and allowed me to get a 2:1. (Between hacking and climbing, physics came a close 3rd in terms of priorities!)
Deny everything. Apple has put their fingers in their ears and are sitting in the corner singing "la la la I can't hear you". Technically they are probably right, this is not very practical - but the legal validity of such a sale still needs clarifying as it has ramifications for other applications of copyright law to digital (by which the lawyers seem to mean "downloaded"[0]) content.
[0] They don't (yet) seem to claim this legal dilemma would apply if the music was on a CD, only if it's downloaded... This, to me, seems nuts - why does the medium in which you obtained the content make a difference?
On the mining side, is it possible with near-future technology to mine the 3He, ship it back to Earth and use it to generate energy and still end up with more energy out than went into the whole process? Or would it require esoteric tech like those magnetic railguns to launch cargo back towards the Earth?
(Not trolling, I'm just curious.)
You mean "muons". Also: fusion isn't defined by neutron production, though that does occur in many fusion reactions. (A counterexample would be the fusion of two Helium-3 atoms.)
It's not a lock, as such. More like an electric fence; you /can/ cross it, if you want to, but it's going to be unpleasant and while the grass might be greener on the other side it's still just about edible over here.
There are problems with ditching Windows: while OOo etc. make it fairly easy to ditch Office these days it's harder to ditch Outlook if your customer insists on your having an MS Exchange server to sync business appointments etc., and although it can probably be done with a minimum of Windows machines and everything else running codeweavers plugins to Evolution it's just so much less hassle to keep running Windows. (There isn't actually much economic sense in ditching it as it's so difficult to get bare metal PCs in the first place: businesses have already paid the Microsoft tax.)
I think you and Cringeley are making the same point. M$ has just repackaged and changed these ideas in a way they can profit from but which doesn't necessarily add much value. Cringeley is suggesting that had they created the first operating system it would have been an "invention", rather than an "innovation", which he regards as smaller and generally less worthwhile/reputable. Semantics, I know, but I think the two of you are coming from the same place on this one.
It's not just the few like Enron that get onto the front pages, it's all the other businesses that it never quite seems to be worth anyone's while to bust (but damn well should be!) There are several extremely obvious examples in IT (cough*MS*cough*SCO*cough), to the extent that reading /. or any of the techy press it's hard not to see most of the industry as riddled with corruption, and I'm sure the same is true in other areas of business.
The thing is, I bet there are a lot of cases where one or two bad guys not necessarily right at the top can turn a whole company crooked (or at least semi-crooked) just because everyone else is too apathetic - or frightened - to shop them.
Of course, when the crooks really are at the top then it really sucks.
In the original IBM lawsuit it occurred to me that it isn't SCO that's going to be using the Chewbacca defence after all, but IBM. After all, isn't it wookies that rip people's arms off if they lose? ;-)
When they're done with SGI they'll probably track down Ken Thompson and try to claim that he somehow infringed their IP by writing UNIX in the first place. After all, anything and everything to do with UNIX is clearly SCO's by god-given right.
Morons.
Is it just me that sees this as a really bad idea? Nothing against the gnome project, you understand, but I see no earthly reason why a filesystem should require X Windows, let alone a full-blown desktop environment. Surely this kind of thing should be a kernel-level project which userspace tools can hook into as needed, whether from gnome or KDE or the CLI?
Anyway, I thought Reiser4 was doing exactly what this promises, but with the advantage of a proven track record on high-performance filesystems. Perhaps, if gnome wants this kind of functionality, they should base it on Reiser4 which will at least be widely-used and not locked into the gnome project.
I like the sound of this car, but for different reasons. It would totally suck as a way to avoid congestion (unless both your house and your office are on the riverbank and have convenient moorings you'll have to transition from car to boat and back to car again, and still use the roads, and if you're travelling a long way on the river the speed isn't /that/ great [30mph is good for a boat but slow by commuter standards]) but would be an awesome piece of kit for climbers wanting to reach inaccessible sea cliffs without the hassle of towing a RIB on a trailer, or people wanting to indulge in a spot of sea fishing, or who live in the Hebrides.
If this is a standalone mail component why the hell does it weigh as much as the complete mozilla builds used to? I take it they're doing something dumb like including the gecko source with thunderbird /and/ firebird, rather than as a separately downloadable library...?
Why would they need to provide paperwork? If you take a CD down to the local second-hand CD shop you don't have to prove you didn't rip all the tracks first - or simply make a duplicate of the CD. I suppose in that case the default action is that you haven't bothered to rip the CD whereas here the default action is that you haven't bothered to erase the mp3 file - perhaps that makes a difference. As is traditional for those offering semi-legalistic opinions on slashdot, I ANAL.