They probably test installers on VM snapshots like every other sane developer these days.
Firstly, I'm not even sure that VMs *use* boot.ini. Secondly, even if they do, they probably test the installer, say "yup, that works" and then trash the snapshot.
You actually need to get excited to get a woody with Viagra ; it's one of the things that made the drug so ideal for it's market. All the other medical solutions for erectile dysfunction require mechanical components, or needles, and produce "unnatural" erections which are "up" before they are desired and sometimes persist long past their useful life. Viagra is by far the most elegant solution, in both it's pharmaceutical action and it's function ; the erection is as close to natural in behaviour as you are going to get.
Putting him on it in a solitary cell just guarantees that he'll be able to get a good boner to whack off with whenever he likes.
I suggest putting him in a cell with "Bubba", and injecting him with enough prostaglandin (in the penis) to give him an erection that lasts for many hours... and is, alas, the last he'll ever have in his life. Then he goes through the exquisite mental torture of deciding whether to use it for the last time on Bubba, or never have sex again. I guess you can call me cruel and unusual.
understood the concept of a section break. I only got this yesterday, and it took OpenOffice to teach me:-)
Well, I may have learned it once, using WP 5.1 for DOS, but I've never used it in Word. Note that I am a programmer and I use Word for precisely two things ; reading bureaucracy, and writing it (requisition forms, etc). Everything else goes in Notepad2, vim, XMLSpy, or an IDE.
In this case, I was doing my CV. I couldn't kludge my way through getting the columns right like I did when I used to do my CV in Word... OOo kinda forced me to learn to do it properly.
ID is proposed as a negation of evolution because that's its entire raison d'etre.
Modern evidence and discussion of Evolution from the likes of Stephen Jay Gould and Dawkins have made the subject far more accessible to the point where even schoolchildren can "get it".
Until ID, the only thing that Creationism had in its armoury was repeated assertion that "we're really sure that it was all God." They realised that this was inadequate in the withering light of accumulating archaeology, molecular biology and evolutionary theory.
Hence ID ; it moves aggressively into the area that is most dangerous yet most vulnerable. The only defence against archaeology is to claim hoaxes or to pretend that carbon dating is wrong in ways that violate the observed laws of physics. There's no point arguing evolutionary theory with someone "whose job depends on them not understanding it" - they won't engage because they know they can gain no traction in an arena where one side is providing arguments and the other is just saying "you're wrong because God did it".
ID moves into an area where there are enough gaps in the knowledge to exploit. All the "evidence" they do present is of the same form ; "hey look at this, it's so complicated that it's just not possible it could have evolved!". This strategy can enjoy a measure of success for quite some time to come, simply because the field is complex, and experimentation is difficult. The argument may seem credible to many because these structures genuinely are complex in seemingly irreducible ways.
I myself feel that ID will find itself more and more pinched for space as computing power improves and starts to reduce some of those "irreducibly complex" problems. Subsequent applications of Occams Razor should reduce the ID crown back to the tried and trusted yelps of "But we're SURE it was God!",
They'd pounce on that as a form of recursive income generation ; not only do they get to sue the first sharer for the copies he shared, plus all subsequent copies shared down the line, they could do that for ALL participants.
It could actually turn out to be far more lucrative than selling records....
You're right ; in fact, what I would consider ideal would be for people to just travel less, particularly office workers.
I'm an extreme case ; I can spend up to 20 hours a week commuting, but for me there is no correlation between being in the office and being more productive ; I got much more done this weekend at home than I did in the first two days of this week.
So ; yes, if people cared about aesthetics less, PRT in cities would be ideal. Hell, it would be pretty good on the suburban scale in places like the UK where things are rather more compressed than they are in the States. Public transport having been deregulated here, bus companies fight for road space in rush hour, and cancel all their services after 2330. PRT would solve this because it costs the same to provide the same service 24 hours a day, and because the quantization is small.
They fit in with the western "everything personalised" thinking. Because they are a monorail based system, they can be erected alongside existing street plans thus increasing people-throughput by actually adding another conduit of transit. Street-level trams and bus lanes remove a conduit of transit for cars and are thus never popular. Underground trains have expensive (or impossible) infrastructure requirements. In contrast, the only onsite construction for a monorail is driving pylons. The rest can be prefabricated and hung in a short time.
For intra-city travel, the idea seems to be ideal.
I considered 2.5" drives, but they are too small in terms of data. And to get my current capacity in 250GB drives would mean doubling my drive count, which wouldn't be sensible. I presently have just over a TB of storage (as two 3.5" drives) in this machine. A single drive that was quieter than one of the units I have now would be a serious improvement.
My wife and I are both heavy hoarders of video. With the UK phasing out analogue broadcast in 2012, the media server is going to be the only source of TV in the house (it's the only DVB-T capable device). And it sees a lot of use now. I could hide the storage on a NAS in the loft, but that just moves the problem upstairs and leaves it vulnerable to squirrels (!). It also just hides the energy consumption, rather than leaving the side effects (noise) in my face.
Pending the arrival of an economic bulk storage scale non-volatile RAM technology, quieter hard disk seems like a great idea.
I'll be seriously looking at getting one or more of these. My home media server is under the television and the bulk of the noise is drive vibration.
If these drives consume less power, then they are going to be quieter. I don't care about the performance ; as people are pointing out, it will be more than good enough to for media service, which doesn't need low seek times. At most my server only ever copes with five streams (three tuners recording and two pre-recorded streams being watched) with a potential total IO of 40MBit/s.
If a couple of these could increase my storage space and decrease drive noise I'll jump at it. And the Wife Acceptance Factor will be awesome - she loves all that green stuff almost as much as she loves having all the Scrubs she can watch on tap.
Zenn is an investor in EEStor, which is supposed to be producing a supercap that can cope with 52kWh in a 400 pound unit. That sort of energy density would basically give a car the kind of ranges that hydrocarbon fuels can, once you lose some weight (from the combustion engine, perhaps).
Of course, the technology has never been demonstrated. But Zenn has a real product, and could be regarded as sensible. They have a stake worth millions of dollars in EEStor. Hopefully they are not just being fooled.
A unit with those specs would revolutionize both the auto industry and the home energy market.
I was also thinking why did they even have to send data - if they audit office want to audit the data, give them the schema, let the audit office send them a query that returns a summary for their records, and send them back the summary.
Ok, you can't trust the results. But you can't trust them to send a representative sample either.
I'd lay odds that "password protected" means "password protected ZIP file", in other words, virtually unprotected, especially since there are enormous numbers of cribs in a data sample containing so many names and addresses.
The debate in parliament was using the words "encrypted" and "password protected" but at no time was the lost data ever accused of being "encrypted". This suggests that they are aware of the correct usage and that the data concerned was not encrypted using any strong algorithm.
The first time this happened was in March - the discs were not lost, and were returned to sender after use, not that that actually makes any difference, since the data could easily have been copied.
The real WTFs here are
That the database was being sent in it's entirety to the audit office when they only asked for a sample.
That the whole data was sent when they only wanted a subset of the fields.
That junior officers in the civil service have enough access to dump entire databases.
That they trusted a third-party courier instead of delivering it by hand.
That the files were "password protected", which is clearly code for "not encrypted properly" (probably a ZIP file..).
I wasn't aware that you could use nLite to slim an existing installation ; thanks for that.
To the sibling, I believe that WGA works fine inside a virtual machine, although you might run into some licensing wrinkles (but it sounds like you aren't running any "real" installations). It should also work in Wine, as long as you're in WinXP mode (unless MS have changed the anti-wine checking code).
In addition, the redistributable installer for.NET 2.0 is not currently a WGA authenticated download.
If MySQL was distributed under it, then everyone who built a web app using MySQL, would also have to give away the source code for their web app, if they make it available to users. Or they will have to pay for a commercial license. Spookily, something aimed at strengthening the sharing aspect of the FLOSS movement may just also increase revenues for companies with FLOSS products tremendously ; any commercial concern who doesn't want people to see their secret sauce is going to have to cough up for a license.
Specific to RDBMs ; GPL only kicks in if you compile in GPL code, or if you link directly to a GPL licensed library. Most RDBMs software is not directly linked to the application it is serving data to ; clients use sockets to communicate with MySQL. Now, if you link the GPL licensed MySQL client library, your code would also be subject to GPL... if it wasn't for the specific exception that MySQL make for FLOSS projects only.
If you link commercial code to a MySQL client library, you're going to have to pay for the licensed version. But nothing actually stops you from writing your own client library. In fact, nothing stops a third party from writing a compatible client library and distributing it under commercial terms at a cost lower than the price that MySQL AB are charging, because communicating over a socket is not linking. You just can't fork the MySQL code to do it. I'd imagine it would be far easier than doing the same thing for Oracle or SQL Server, simply because the protocol is much better documented (you can look at the source, the best source of documentation there is). Not that you'd bother for MSSQL or Oracle because the cost is in the per-CPU license.
So as a commercial concern your options are not "dump MySQL or post our source on the web". They are
Give some money to MySQL AB for this marvellous product that helps us make money too
Dump MySQL and port to another RDBMs which may also go AGPL (Postgres) or cost lots of money (MS, Oracle, etc)
Write our own MySQL compatible client library
Post our source in compliance to AGPL, thus contributing in a way other than money
If MySQL goes AGPL, it just means that the free ride isn't free anymore ; you pay for the software with something, whether that be money, effort, or source sharing. And that's the whole idea of copyleft licenses. It's not about getting a free ride ; it's about getting a ride and paying it forward (or backward, or sideways ; just so long as you don't pocket the proceeds and give nothing back).
nLite requires.NET 2.0 to create an install disk, it doesn't require.NET 2.0 to be present on that disk.
It's not that large anyway. It's a 22.4MB download, so it can't be much more than 60MB installed. A fair fraction of 350MB, yes, but very useful. And much smaller than Java.
This must be down to using EFS (Encrypting File System). The master key is derived from your user account and password (which is why a forced password reset by an admin also has the same effect). Unless you designate a recovery agent or backup your certificates.
In the modern world, people really need to learn more about data hygiene and security. If criminal charges are what it takes for large organizations and also the general public to become more serious about the routine security of information, then perhaps this is not such a bad thing.
A couple of examples ;
My wife wanted to use my credit card (she doesn't have one) to pay the fees for a educational conference. The conference organisers had a system for collecting payment ; just email all your credit card details (in plaintext) to the secretary! She looked a bit surprised when I refused. When I explained that it would be like writing my card information on a postcard, with a postal service composed of, well, anyone, who would be at liberty to take "photocopies" of the postcard anywhere along it's journey, she was a little more understanding. (I made her telephone the person concerned instead). Perhaps if the iconography of email programs was more "postcardy" instead of "envelopy", this would happen less.
Our office VPN is secured at the concentrator by two-factor authentication. Each user is issued an RSA SecureID token. Last year, they issed the PIN correctly ; the administrator pushes a button and says "NOW" and you remember the first four digits the token is showing - and then you are only person who knows it. This year, they preset them all and mailed them out. Email, that is. In plaintext. This undermines the basic security of the system ; anyone who gains access to those emails now has a list of PINs, most people clip them to the same lanyard as their security pass, identifying the token user. Or even easier, they can do what I did, walk into the office, say "Hi there, can I have my new token...." only to be waved towards the table where they ALL sat, in named envelopes, without my ID even being checked. And this is from people who are supposed to know about information security.
Hopefully the stick of criminal penalties will be wielded diffidently. But people have to shift their perceptions ; data on paper is treated with reverence and locked in a safe, when the data on the computer is left lying around for literally anyone to get hold of. Perhaps this attitude comes from the ease with which computers generate the data in the first place ; it feels cheap and thus "disposable". Which seems silly to a person who knows that a properly managed digital signature is MUCH more secure and reliable than its paper equivalent, but is counter-intuitive to anyone else who still thinks the gold standard is a notary.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably test installers on VM snapshots like every other sane developer these days.
Firstly, I'm not even sure that VMs *use* boot.ini. Secondly, even if they do, they probably test the installer, say "yup, that works" and then trash the snapshot.
You actually need to get excited to get a woody with Viagra ; it's one of the things that made the drug so ideal for it's market. All the other medical solutions for erectile dysfunction require mechanical components, or needles, and produce "unnatural" erections which are "up" before they are desired and sometimes persist long past their useful life. Viagra is by far the most elegant solution, in both it's pharmaceutical action and it's function ; the erection is as close to natural in behaviour as you are going to get.
Putting him on it in a solitary cell just guarantees that he'll be able to get a good boner to whack off with whenever he likes.
I suggest putting him in a cell with "Bubba", and injecting him with enough prostaglandin (in the penis) to give him an erection that lasts for many hours... and is, alas, the last he'll ever have in his life. Then he goes through the exquisite mental torture of deciding whether to use it for the last time on Bubba, or never have sex again. I guess you can call me cruel and unusual.
Well, I may have learned it once, using WP 5.1 for DOS, but I've never used it in Word. Note that I am a programmer and I use Word for precisely two things ; reading bureaucracy, and writing it (requisition forms, etc). Everything else goes in Notepad2, vim, XMLSpy, or an IDE.
In this case, I was doing my CV. I couldn't kludge my way through getting the columns right like I did when I used to do my CV in Word... OOo kinda forced me to learn to do it properly.
Microsoft wrote the software for the HD interactive, which means they must be getting a royalty for each machine.
What's a few $100M here and there when you have the potential to collect so many licenses from consumer boxes?
Plus, the Blu-Ray content software is written in Java. What better reason for MS to hate it?
No, definitely Snow Crash.
The US Government Programmers office.
I think this one counts as "playing around"
http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-chocolate-printer-made-from-LEGO/
The RepRap guys have played around with the IDEA (and lots of other material ideas)
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/MaterialsScience
And Fab@Home has been used with chocolate - shame it's the most expensive by far.
http://3dprinterusers.blogspot.com/2007/05/more-than-chocolate-cornells-fabhome.html
ID is proposed as a negation of evolution because that's its entire raison d'etre.
Modern evidence and discussion of Evolution from the likes of Stephen Jay Gould and Dawkins have made the subject far more accessible to the point where even schoolchildren can "get it".
Until ID, the only thing that Creationism had in its armoury was repeated assertion that "we're really sure that it was all God." They realised that this was inadequate in the withering light of accumulating archaeology, molecular biology and evolutionary theory.
Hence ID ; it moves aggressively into the area that is most dangerous yet most vulnerable. The only defence against archaeology is to claim hoaxes or to pretend that carbon dating is wrong in ways that violate the observed laws of physics. There's no point arguing evolutionary theory with someone "whose job depends on them not understanding it" - they won't engage because they know they can gain no traction in an arena where one side is providing arguments and the other is just saying "you're wrong because God did it".
ID moves into an area where there are enough gaps in the knowledge to exploit. All the "evidence" they do present is of the same form ; "hey look at this, it's so complicated that it's just not possible it could have evolved!". This strategy can enjoy a measure of success for quite some time to come, simply because the field is complex, and experimentation is difficult. The argument may seem credible to many because these structures genuinely are complex in seemingly irreducible ways.
I myself feel that ID will find itself more and more pinched for space as computing power improves and starts to reduce some of those "irreducibly complex" problems. Subsequent applications of Occams Razor should reduce the ID crown back to the tried and trusted yelps of "But we're SURE it was God!",
They'd pounce on that as a form of recursive income generation ; not only do they get to sue the first sharer for the copies he shared, plus all subsequent copies shared down the line, they could do that for ALL participants.
It could actually turn out to be far more lucrative than selling records....
You're right ; in fact, what I would consider ideal would be for people to just travel less, particularly office workers.
I'm an extreme case ; I can spend up to 20 hours a week commuting, but for me there is no correlation between being in the office and being more productive ; I got much more done this weekend at home than I did in the first two days of this week.
So ; yes, if people cared about aesthetics less, PRT in cities would be ideal. Hell, it would be pretty good on the suburban scale in places like the UK where things are rather more compressed than they are in the States. Public transport having been deregulated here, bus companies fight for road space in rush hour, and cancel all their services after 2330. PRT would solve this because it costs the same to provide the same service 24 hours a day, and because the quantization is small.
Personal Rapid Transit systems would seem to be much smarter.
They fit in with the western "everything personalised" thinking. Because they are a monorail based system, they can be erected alongside existing street plans thus increasing people-throughput by actually adding another conduit of transit. Street-level trams and bus lanes remove a conduit of transit for cars and are thus never popular. Underground trains have expensive (or impossible) infrastructure requirements. In contrast, the only onsite construction for a monorail is driving pylons. The rest can be prefabricated and hung in a short time.
For intra-city travel, the idea seems to be ideal.
Yeah, the size thing really blows.
I considered 2.5" drives, but they are too small in terms of data. And to get my current capacity in 250GB drives would mean doubling my drive count, which wouldn't be sensible. I presently have just over a TB of storage (as two 3.5" drives) in this machine. A single drive that was quieter than one of the units I have now would be a serious improvement.
My wife and I are both heavy hoarders of video. With the UK phasing out analogue broadcast in 2012, the media server is going to be the only source of TV in the house (it's the only DVB-T capable device). And it sees a lot of use now. I could hide the storage on a NAS in the loft, but that just moves the problem upstairs and leaves it vulnerable to squirrels (!). It also just hides the energy consumption, rather than leaving the side effects (noise) in my face.
Pending the arrival of an economic bulk storage scale non-volatile RAM technology, quieter hard disk seems like a great idea.
I'll be seriously looking at getting one or more of these. My home media server is under the television and the bulk of the noise is drive vibration.
If these drives consume less power, then they are going to be quieter. I don't care about the performance ; as people are pointing out, it will be more than good enough to for media service, which doesn't need low seek times. At most my server only ever copes with five streams (three tuners recording and two pre-recorded streams being watched) with a potential total IO of 40MBit/s.
If a couple of these could increase my storage space and decrease drive noise I'll jump at it. And the Wife Acceptance Factor will be awesome - she loves all that green stuff almost as much as she loves having all the Scrubs she can watch on tap.
I think the suggestion linked about "MooXML" is very apt and short.
Not every 5 1/4 inch silvered polycarbonate disk containing 44.1 MHz PCM digital audio is a "CD" though. Ask Philips.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD#Copy_protection
Christmas is a neverending chore as soon as you're perceived to be have enough disposable income to buy presents.
November? The mince pies, xmas cake, and xmas puddings, were on the shelf in the local Tesco at the end of September this year.
I'd heartily support a ban on all Xmas activity until December, if it wasn't such a nanny state thing to do.
Zenn is an investor in EEStor, which is supposed to be producing a supercap that can cope with 52kWh in a 400 pound unit. That sort of energy density would basically give a car the kind of ranges that hydrocarbon fuels can, once you lose some weight (from the combustion engine, perhaps).
Of course, the technology has never been demonstrated. But Zenn has a real product, and could be regarded as sensible. They have a stake worth millions of dollars in EEStor. Hopefully they are not just being fooled.
A unit with those specs would revolutionize both the auto industry and the home energy market.
I was also thinking why did they even have to send data - if they audit office want to audit the data, give them the schema, let the audit office send them a query that returns a summary for their records, and send them back the summary.
Ok, you can't trust the results. But you can't trust them to send a representative sample either.
I'd lay odds that "password protected" means "password protected ZIP file", in other words, virtually unprotected, especially since there are enormous numbers of cribs in a data sample containing so many names and addresses.
The debate in parliament was using the words "encrypted" and "password protected" but at no time was the lost data ever accused of being "encrypted". This suggests that they are aware of the correct usage and that the data concerned was not encrypted using any strong algorithm.
The real WTFs here are
Ok, it's probably worse than that though.
I wasn't aware that you could use nLite to slim an existing installation ; thanks for that.
.NET 2.0 is not currently a WGA authenticated download.
To the sibling, I believe that WGA works fine inside a virtual machine, although you might run into some licensing wrinkles (but it sounds like you aren't running any "real" installations). It should also work in Wine, as long as you're in WinXP mode (unless MS have changed the anti-wine checking code).
In addition, the redistributable installer for
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&displaylang=en
Specific to RDBMs ; GPL only kicks in if you compile in GPL code, or if you link directly to a GPL licensed library. Most RDBMs software is not directly linked to the application it is serving data to ; clients use sockets to communicate with MySQL. Now, if you link the GPL licensed MySQL client library, your code would also be subject to GPL
If you link commercial code to a MySQL client library, you're going to have to pay for the licensed version. But nothing actually stops you from writing your own client library. In fact, nothing stops a third party from writing a compatible client library and distributing it under commercial terms at a cost lower than the price that MySQL AB are charging, because communicating over a socket is not linking. You just can't fork the MySQL code to do it. I'd imagine it would be far easier than doing the same thing for Oracle or SQL Server, simply because the protocol is much better documented (you can look at the source, the best source of documentation there is). Not that you'd bother for MSSQL or Oracle because the cost is in the per-CPU license.
So as a commercial concern your options are not "dump MySQL or post our source on the web". They are
If MySQL goes AGPL, it just means that the free ride isn't free anymore ; you pay for the software with something, whether that be money, effort, or source sharing. And that's the whole idea of copyleft licenses. It's not about getting a free ride ; it's about getting a ride and paying it forward (or backward, or sideways ; just so long as you don't pocket the proceeds and give nothing back).
nLite requires .NET 2.0 to create an install disk, it doesn't require .NET 2.0 to be present on that disk.
It's not that large anyway. It's a 22.4MB download, so it can't be much more than 60MB installed. A fair fraction of 350MB, yes, but very useful. And much smaller than Java.
This must be down to using EFS (Encrypting File System). The master key is derived from your user account and password (which is why a forced password reset by an admin also has the same effect). Unless you designate a recovery agent or backup your certificates.
http://davidbrunelle.com/2007/03/25/how-to-backup-your-efs-recovery-certificates-in-windows-vista/
In the modern world, people really need to learn more about data hygiene and security. If criminal charges are what it takes for large organizations and also the general public to become more serious about the routine security of information, then perhaps this is not such a bad thing.
A couple of examples ;
My wife wanted to use my credit card (she doesn't have one) to pay the fees for a educational conference. The conference organisers had a system for collecting payment ; just email all your credit card details (in plaintext) to the secretary! She looked a bit surprised when I refused. When I explained that it would be like writing my card information on a postcard, with a postal service composed of, well, anyone, who would be at liberty to take "photocopies" of the postcard anywhere along it's journey, she was a little more understanding. (I made her telephone the person concerned instead). Perhaps if the iconography of email programs was more "postcardy" instead of "envelopy", this would happen less.
Our office VPN is secured at the concentrator by two-factor authentication. Each user is issued an RSA SecureID token. Last year, they issed the PIN correctly ; the administrator pushes a button and says "NOW" and you remember the first four digits the token is showing - and then you are only person who knows it. This year, they preset them all and mailed them out. Email, that is. In plaintext. This undermines the basic security of the system ; anyone who gains access to those emails now has a list of PINs, most people clip them to the same lanyard as their security pass, identifying the token user. Or even easier, they can do what I did, walk into the office, say "Hi there, can I have my new token...." only to be waved towards the table where they ALL sat, in named envelopes, without my ID even being checked. And this is from people who are supposed to know about information security.
Hopefully the stick of criminal penalties will be wielded diffidently. But people have to shift their perceptions ; data on paper is treated with reverence and locked in a safe, when the data on the computer is left lying around for literally anyone to get hold of. Perhaps this attitude comes from the ease with which computers generate the data in the first place ; it feels cheap and thus "disposable". Which seems silly to a person who knows that a properly managed digital signature is MUCH more secure and reliable than its paper equivalent, but is counter-intuitive to anyone else who still thinks the gold standard is a notary.