Most of the replies seem to be focused on music file sharing. This is a result of the RIAA and MPAA demonizing P2P in order to protect themselves without regard to the legal uses of P2P. I believe that P2P democratizes the Internet, it gives a developer the opportunity to distribute something that he/she has created without incurring the costs of bandwidth. It gives a new band without a recording contract a way to distribute their music. It gives a filmmaker without a studio "deal" an affordable way to distribute a film . In the 90s the mantra of many businesses was that by using the Internet a small business could look like one of the big guys and compete on quality, service and price. The fight to keep P2P alive is about a lot more than stealing. Their are many ways to prevent the illegal use of P2P without destroying it. Let's get on that bandwagon before it is destroyed so that a few very rich companies and individuals can protect their wealth.
After the way he twisted the "facts" of the Kevin Mitnick story I just don't trust him at all. It seems that every time he has done a story on any topic that I have personal knowledge of, he gets it wrong. So I will take a pass on this book.
My son bought Half Life and had all sorts of problems with Steam. Through him I have heard a litany of problems that others are having. Frankly, I understand that sometimes there are problems with technology, what I can't understand is the arrogance and unresponsiveness of Steam.
My suggestion is that the next game that comes out requiring Steam, be massively boycotted. Even if the company goes out of business, the coders will be employed quickly elswhere or start their own businesses, the business people will go on to oblivion where they deserve to be. Just my 2 cents worth.
My experience over the years trying to volunteer my IT and Network Security expertise to the local school system has been very disappointing. Most recently our Board of Ed decided every kid in the high school should have a laptop. Many of us felt strongly that the decision was made without the proper research and thought. They had visited one single school and decided to adopt that school's plan verbatim.
The results have been poor, the kids have had a field day loading porn and games onto the computers. The school has accused many of the kids of using the laptops to cheat. They have had to hire three full time employees to fix the laptop's OS (Yup you guessed it, Windoze). They never looked at any other operating system, and they blew off any suggestion of evaluating Open Office, though they could not tell us why they absolutely needed Microsoft Office. When I suggested desktops instead of laptops so that the image could be reloaded nightly as other schools do, I was rebuffed. They actually implied that I didn't want the kids to have computers. They assumed that every kid would have a printer that worked with the laptop (A Sony model that doesn't show up on the Sony site or Google.) Tests have had to be postponed because teacher's computer's have failed, imagine they don't have back up machines for the teachers. Once they realized that they would have to provide printers for at least some of the kids they scrambled to get a printer on the network, no luck so far. The laptops sound is software controlled so the first 15 minutes of each class is spent listening to 20 or so laptops booting up. I could go on but I think you get the point.
In short it has been one disaster after another. Tonight my wife and I will be attending yet another Board of Ed meeting. I will be announcing the formation of a committee to elect a competent Board of Ed. Maybe then you kind folks can come here and help us clean up the mess.
If Dell really wanted a price adjustment from RedHat they would engage them in confidential talks. This sounds more like a prison movie, you know, the one where Dell tells RH to bend over and pick up the soap.
As one earlier poster suggested, Dell has become the WalMart of computer vendors. And in my opinion, that is not a good thing.
of several distros that IBM uses. If he really believes that buying Novel would make IBM dependant on SUN, then there is a lot more wrong at Sun than first glance would suggest.
These are of course the companies who have shown themselves to be the least cluefull in the past. If they were serious about establishing best practices, they would have included in the list things like having a cluefull helpdesk that does more than send a canned response to complaints. All help desk employees working on spam issues should be required to know how to read email headers. Part of best practices would include a requirement to shut down web sites that benefit from spam or phising.
Nope, sadly these guys are not yet serious, and its obvious.
Because these warnings are sent with every e-mail and annoyingly to many mailing lists they are legally untenable. In order for these warnings to have real meaning they should only be used on mail that is actually private and meant for one individual or organization. When you send an e-mail to a mailing list, for instance, you should know that most of them are archived and certainly your e-mail will have a long life in the google archives.
I don't imagine that you will have a good outcome in court when you ask the judge to sanction one reader who violated the warning. Your honor, here are ten e-mails that the same person sent to mailing lists with the same warning, how can I take the warning seriously when the sender doesn't?
Brad Spender is truly an Internet hero, a pioneer who made us all safer. He went about his work selflessly, with precision and excellence.
If ever there was a time to band together to save one of our own this is it. Brad has gone into debt while helping to make multi-billion dollar corporations safer. Perhaps at the end of the day they will come through for Brad, perhaps they will not. There must be some way that we can all help him regardless of what his corporate sponsors do.
These are two companies on the ropes. One of them has decided that litigation is a viable survival strategy. Say what you will about either of these companies, this litigation is not a good thing for either of them.
In the beginning the recording industry ripped off poor (especially black) artists. The film industry moved west in order to avoid payment for their use of patented technology. These two industries are the original pirates, that's why they are so frightened of modern day pirates.
It is only natural that they feed like pigs at the trough that contains the tax receipts. Industries built on theft don't stop doing it once they become "successful", they do more of it and on a much grander scale.
Did anyone else notice that his defense is not that what he is doing is in fact good for the country.
He wishes not to be called a Benedict Arnold then he shouldn't act like one. CEO's have fed this pablam to us for years that what is good for business is good for America.
Some time ago my GPU fan started making more noise than usual. I took it apart, remounted it, etc. etc. nothing seemed to work. Then in desperation I thought to clean it, there was a lot of dust on the blades, I wiped it all off with a q-tip, washed the blades with a damp q-tip, put it all back together and booted up. The GPU fan was/is silent, I cleaned all of the other fans in the same way and it definitely quieted down my PC.
An industry built on piracy sees pirates as their biggest threat. Talk about karma coming back to bite your butt.
I am so fed up with hearing about the the RIAA and the MPAA - how the big bad pirates are ripping them off. These are the same assholes that have ripped off everyone who they've come into contact with over the years. I for one see this piracy as divine justice.(And I'm an atheist)
He mentions that he is installing on a virtual machine - yet he doesn't mention which virtual machine. Since he seems to lean heavily towards Microsoft I'd guess its not VMWare. Since he doesn't tell us and I have to guess I'd guess it the one that Microsoft recently bought, didn't they virtually cripple Linux support?
Come on Mr. Lang if your are going to compare, how about comparing oranges and oranges, not Microsoft in a fully enabled environment and Linux in a crippled one.
What is amusing to me is that whenever the "Linux is too hard to install" argument comes up, I ask the person if they have ever installed windows. Invariably the answer is no. Frankly, I find a Linux install much easier.
That said, I hope that this argument goes on for a long long time. The longer it goes on, the easier it becomes to install Linux.
I think a face off today between a windows and a Linux install would end the argument once and for all in favor of Linux.
When the music industry starts paying back all the musicians that they have ripped off, then and only then will I consider the piracy being perpetrated against them wrong.
So you're saying it's okay for YOU to deprive musicians of what's rightfully theirs, as long as the record companies are ALSO doing it.
Nope that's not what I said at all, I was talking about whether I consider it to be wrong. I never anywhere said that I do it. Go home and do your homework them come back to class prepared.
How exactly does that put you on high moral ground?
You think this has anything to do with moral ground, you're dumber than I thought.
The record companies are robbing their artists a hell of a lot less because now we have 20 years olds earning 100 million dollars a year and that buys some very powerful legal teams.
What I was saying is that it is ironic that the record companies who built their empires upon piracy are now fighting so hard to get rid of it. Do you not see the irony here? Oh well you just want to fight and I'm not here to fight.
When the music industry starts paying back all the musicians that they have ripped off, then and only then will I consider the piracy being perpetrated against them wrong.
These are the people who caused many of the founders of jazz, blues and rock and roll to die in poverty. What is happing now is not piracy, it is devine justice.
"He's reporting about Boston and Boston's issues," said Peter Casey, director of news and programming at WBZ Radio. "Where he's reporting from is irrelevant. I'm not wasting my airtime to tell people where Gary is."
Ahem, you air time? I think not. It's our air which you are being allowed to use "for the public good". As soon as we decide that you are not in our best interests you are history dude.
OMFG, what am I saying, Bush in the White House and Powell at the FCC, never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the replies seem to be focused on music file sharing. This is a result of the RIAA and MPAA demonizing P2P in order to protect themselves without regard to the legal uses of P2P. I believe that P2P democratizes the Internet, it gives a developer the opportunity to distribute something that he/she has created without incurring the costs of bandwidth. It gives a new band without a recording contract a way to distribute their music. It gives a filmmaker without a studio "deal" an affordable way to distribute a film . In the 90s the mantra of many businesses was that by using the Internet a small business could look like one of the big guys and compete on quality, service and price. The fight to keep P2P alive is about a lot more than stealing. Their are many ways to prevent the illegal use of P2P without destroying it. Let's get on that bandwagon before it is destroyed so that a few very rich companies and individuals can protect their wealth.
"All traffic is monitored" "zero admin overhead" you can pick one but not both.
...and I just don't believe in it.
After the way he twisted the "facts" of the Kevin Mitnick story I just don't trust him at all. It seems that every time he has done a story on any topic that I have personal knowledge of, he gets it wrong. So I will take a pass on this book.
...the farming industry has mandated new rules for the automotive industry, who in turn have mandated new rules for the perfume industry...
My son bought Half Life and had all sorts of problems with Steam. Through him I have heard a litany of problems that others are having. Frankly, I understand that sometimes there are problems with technology, what I can't understand is the arrogance and unresponsiveness of Steam.
My suggestion is that the next game that comes out requiring Steam, be massively boycotted. Even if the company goes out of business, the coders will be employed quickly elswhere or start their own businesses, the business people will go on to oblivion where they deserve to be. Just my 2 cents worth.
P2P Does Not Break the Law
People Do
My experience over the years trying to volunteer my IT and Network Security expertise to the local school system has been very disappointing. Most recently our Board of Ed decided every kid in the high school should have a laptop. Many of us felt strongly that the decision was made without the proper research and thought. They had visited one single school and decided to adopt that school's plan verbatim.
The results have been poor, the kids have had a field day loading porn and games onto the computers. The school has accused many of the kids of using the laptops to cheat. They have had to hire three full time employees to fix the laptop's OS (Yup you guessed it, Windoze). They never looked at any other operating system, and they blew off any suggestion of evaluating Open Office, though they could not tell us why they absolutely needed Microsoft Office. When I suggested desktops instead of laptops so that the image could be reloaded nightly as other schools do, I was rebuffed. They actually implied that I didn't want the kids to have computers. They assumed that every kid would have a printer that worked with the laptop (A Sony model that doesn't show up on the Sony site or Google.) Tests have had to be postponed because teacher's computer's have failed, imagine they don't have back up machines for the teachers. Once they realized that they would have to provide printers for at least some of the kids they scrambled to get a printer on the network, no luck so far. The laptops sound is software controlled so the first 15 minutes of each class is spent listening to 20 or so laptops booting up. I could go on but I think you get the point.
In short it has been one disaster after another. Tonight my wife and I will be attending yet another Board of Ed meeting. I will be announcing the formation of a committee to elect a competent Board of Ed. Maybe then you kind folks can come here and help us clean up the mess.
If Dell really wanted a price adjustment from RedHat they would engage them in confidential talks. This sounds more like a prison movie, you know, the one where Dell tells RH to bend over and pick up the soap.
As one earlier poster suggested, Dell has become the WalMart of computer vendors. And in my opinion, that is not a good thing.
of several distros that IBM uses. If he really believes that buying Novel would make IBM dependant on SUN, then there is a lot more wrong at Sun than first glance would suggest.
These are of course the companies who have shown themselves to be the least cluefull in the past. If they were serious about establishing best practices, they would have included in the list things like having a cluefull helpdesk that does more than send a canned response to complaints. All help desk employees working on spam issues should be required to know how to read email headers. Part of best practices would include a requirement to shut down web sites that benefit from spam or phising. Nope, sadly these guys are not yet serious, and its obvious.
Because these warnings are sent with every e-mail and annoyingly to many mailing lists they are legally untenable. In order for these warnings to have real meaning they should only be used on mail that is actually private and meant for one individual or organization. When you send an e-mail to a mailing list, for instance, you should know that most of them are archived and certainly your e-mail will have a long life in the google archives.
I don't imagine that you will have a good outcome in court when you ask the judge to sanction one reader who violated the warning. Your honor, here are ten e-mails that the same person sent to mailing lists with the same warning, how can I take the warning seriously when the sender doesn't?
Brad Spender is truly an Internet hero, a pioneer who made us all safer. He went about his work selflessly, with precision and excellence.
If ever there was a time to band together to save one of our own this is it. Brad has gone into debt while helping to make multi-billion dollar corporations safer. Perhaps at the end of the day they will come through for Brad, perhaps they will not. There must be some way that we can all help him regardless of what his corporate sponsors do.
These are two companies on the ropes. One of them has decided that litigation is a viable survival strategy. Say what you will about either of these companies, this litigation is not a good thing for either of them.
In the beginning the recording industry ripped off poor (especially black) artists. The film industry moved west in order to avoid payment for their use of patented technology. These two industries are the original pirates, that's why they are so frightened of modern day pirates.
It is only natural that they feed like pigs at the trough that contains the tax receipts. Industries built on theft don't stop doing it once they become "successful", they do more of it and on a much grander scale.
Did anyone else notice that his defense is not that what he is doing is in fact good for the country.
He wishes not to be called a Benedict Arnold then he shouldn't act like one. CEO's have fed this pablam to us for years that what is good for business is good for America.
Some time ago my GPU fan started making more noise than usual. I took it apart, remounted it, etc. etc. nothing seemed to work. Then in desperation I thought to clean it, there was a lot of dust on the blades, I wiped it all off with a q-tip, washed the blades with a damp q-tip, put it all back together and booted up. The GPU fan was/is silent, I cleaned all of the other fans in the same way and it definitely quieted down my PC.
Just my 2
An industry built on piracy sees pirates as their biggest threat. Talk about karma coming back to bite your butt.
I am so fed up with hearing about the the RIAA and the MPAA - how the big bad pirates are ripping them off. These are the same assholes that have ripped off everyone who they've come into contact with over the years. I for one see this piracy as divine justice.(And I'm an atheist)
He mentions that he is installing on a virtual machine - yet he doesn't mention which virtual machine. Since he seems to lean heavily towards Microsoft I'd guess its not VMWare. Since he doesn't tell us and I have to guess I'd guess it the one that Microsoft recently bought, didn't they virtually cripple Linux support?
Come on Mr. Lang if your are going to compare, how about comparing oranges and oranges, not Microsoft in a fully enabled environment and Linux in a crippled one.
Will Mel Gibson be making a movie based on RFC 1?
Well, can it?
What is amusing to me is that whenever the "Linux is too hard to install" argument comes up, I ask the person if they have ever installed windows. Invariably the answer is no. Frankly, I find a Linux install much easier.
That said, I hope that this argument goes on for a long long time. The longer it goes on, the easier it becomes to install Linux.
I think a face off today between a windows and a Linux install would end the argument once and for all in favor of Linux.
When the music industry starts paying back all the musicians that they have ripped off, then and only then will I consider the piracy being perpetrated against them wrong.
So you're saying it's okay for YOU to deprive musicians of what's rightfully theirs, as long as the record companies are ALSO doing it.
Nope that's not what I said at all, I was talking about whether I consider it to be wrong. I never anywhere said that I do it. Go home and do your homework them come back to class prepared.
How exactly does that put you on high moral ground?
You think this has anything to do with moral ground, you're dumber than I thought.
The record companies are robbing their artists a hell of a lot less because now we have 20 years olds earning 100 million dollars a year and that buys some very powerful legal teams.
What I was saying is that it is ironic that the record companies who built their empires upon piracy are now fighting so hard to get rid of it. Do you not see the irony here? Oh well you just want to fight and I'm not here to fight.
When the music industry starts paying back all the musicians that they have ripped off, then and only then will I consider the piracy being perpetrated against them wrong.
These are the people who caused many of the founders of jazz, blues and rock and roll to die in poverty. What is happing now is not piracy, it is devine justice.
"He's reporting about Boston and Boston's issues," said Peter Casey, director of news and programming at WBZ Radio. "Where he's reporting from is irrelevant. I'm not wasting my airtime to tell people where Gary is."
Ahem, you air time? I think not. It's our air which you are being allowed to use "for the public good". As soon as we decide that you are not in our best interests you are history dude.
OMFG, what am I saying, Bush in the White House and Powell at the FCC, never mind.