If so, congratulations, you are one of the very few who actually seem to have understood what capitalism and socialism are REALLY about rather than parroting the usual tripe.
The big problem with both is that people are involved, so neither really ever exists in a pure form, for which we should probably be truly grateful because life under either of them in pure form would be unimaginably dull and constricting.
Its a delicate job trying to implement the best of both and keep everything in balance, which is why western societies (which all do this, with different balances) are so "dynamic". They need to be or they will slide to one side or the other and fail.
Before car manufacturers spend money on Microsoft shit, I would much prefer them to add a small system to display and interpret the engine diagnostics rather than having to take it to the dealership and be charged a small fortune for connecting their maufacturer supplied diagnostic unit (which cost them a LARGE fortune).
I have a built-in GPS in my Jeep. I didn't want one, it just came with the car. I gave away my Megallan GPS to my son, and have regretted it ever since. The POS installed in the Jeep doesn't cover turn-by-turn for the whole US, just around big cities (in a JEEP !!!).
I paid a fortune for an "upgrade" CD. Turns out about the only difference between that and the one I had was basically the part number. Maps were still 5 years out of date.
As fot Sync -- that would be a deal killer for me. Even if they tried to give it away for free, I would go somewhere else and pay more before allowing that crap anywhere near a car of mine.
The big difference between document processing and word processing is that with something like Word you are constantly having to play with layout, fonts etc.
There is some rudimentary stuff to set styles, but when you push it (and not even hard) it breaks, and then you are back to trying to reformat your own document, and as you make changes to the malformed part, other parts of the document change.
With a document processor, you specify a document format and then just throw test at it, with directives to sat what part of the format to apply. There is a HUGE amount of complex logic which applies various rulesets to format each part of the document very nicely, and do so within the context of the document.
Word was designed initially to work with things like daisy wheel printers etc. FrameMaker Tex etc. were designed to work with typesetters which have much more flexibility (and thus require much more logic to drive them).
The end result is that the same paper prepared with word and LaTex is night and day - even on the same output device.
And despite what the original poster has to say about using LaTex, once its set up you concentrate on the content, not on the formatting. If set up correctly it behaves somewhat like CSS in that you can go and play with the document formatting and output a paper in a completely different style, never having to go touch the content at all.
The UofA website really doesn't work well with FireFox. Half the time you click on a thumbnail and don't get the the image to show, and the downloads just doesn't work at all.
I would have expected a university run show to do much better than this.
Unfortunately, that precedent already exists. If you have the components available to create a short barreled rifle, which requires the payment of a $200 tax, the BATFE can (and will) prosecute you for "constructive intent".
In other words, you possess a collection of components which are all individually legal to possess, but.gov can argue that because it is possible to construct something illegal, you intend to do so, and therefore you are guilty of a felony (not paying the $200 tax).
You don't have to express any intent to do so, you don't have to assemble anything. Just being in a position to do so makes you a criminal.
The next logical extension if this case is allowed to stand is that you can be prosecuted for putting down a book you are reading in a public place and not taking adequate care to secure it.
Then you were walking around with your eyes closed.
I grew up in England, but the England I knew is no more. Now when I visit there I am so aware of the changes, the CCTV towers across the countryside peering over trees and hedgerows like war of the worlds Martian invaders, more yellow paint than road surface showing, photo radar every 1/4 mile and speed bumps on main roads.
My bank uses this as the biometric factor required to access online services.
When they announced this change I expected to be having to respond to my additional ID challenges almost every time I logged in. That hasn't turned out to be the case, I have only tripped up on it once.
I suspect that it is not a strong enough test in itself to rely upon, but when combined with having to know the password it probably does add an extra layer of security.
I entirely agree that YOU, the AUTHOR should have the right to get the fruits of your labor. You should be protected by copyright, for a reasonable time.
However, what typically happens is that your publisher will only publish your work if you assign the copyright to them. You will get something, but it probably won't bear a direct relationship to the success of your work, simply what the publisher thinks they can make and how badly they can screw you.
Copyright (and patent) law needs to be changed to make it impossible for copyrights or patents to be sold. They were intended to benefit the authors/inventors, not multi-national mega corporations.
What you say has a lot of truth behind it. Unfortunately, Microsoft can see the writing on the wall for their current software products. Their OS market share has reached saturation, attempts to persuade people to dump their current Windows for the flashy new one are becoming less and less successful. The end of the road for their office products is similarly in view. The trick of adding new bells and whistles and forcing upgrades with a format change has been used once too many times.
They are desperately looking around to diversify, to enter new markets with new products to build up new revenue streams before the Windows/Office cow dies.
They have tried to break into so many different product areas and markets that its almost funny. None of the attempts have been a great success.
They tried to change the rules of the game and make customers subscribe to software if they couldn't re-sell the same thing with new bells and whistles. That pissed off customers to the point where they bit the bullet and started looking at the alternatives, and what a move to Linix might really entail.
They tried to become the owner of the gateway to multi-media distribution. They went as far as building a whole new OS to support this attempt, and bludgeoned a lot of hardware manufacturers into producing HW to support it. They actually sold the idea to a few media creators, and those that bit are finding that the only thing they really bought was yet another way to alienate their own customers.
Consumer hardware is just another branch they are trying. Unfortunately, like Sony they are letting their various product branches force requirements on others. It makes for a nice consistent story, and the different different branches reinforce each other -- but at the price of producing products that consumers just don't want because of the broken aspects in there simply to support restrictions that some other branch of the company wants to see.
Microsoft should by Sony. Their two brain-dead executive managements seem to have a lot in common.
Actually, I think the consensus is that the Wehrmacht were no more evil than any other army. In fact, the reverse may be true since they tended to hold the old fashioned chivalry ideals.
What I think you are referring to are the SS and allied groups, which were much more political than military in nature - they just used military means to enforce their political ideals.
The SS is a much closer parallel to RIAA than is the Wehrmacht.
There are actually two types of voting cards in Oregon.
One is as mentioned above where ovals have to be filled in. Others use a set of big arrows pointing at the person/thing you are voting for. The arrows have a gap - you draw a line in the gap to complete the arrow.
Jimmy Carter, who has participated in the monitoring of many elections in all sorts of countries is on record as saying that if he had to monitor US elections, he would have to declare them as unfair and open to abuse.
There are jokes made about dead people voting. Unfortunately, its true. As are the votes of the same person multiple times and the votes of people ineligible to vote.
Until those problems are fixed, how the votes are counted it really irrelevant, and a distraction from the real issue.
He said paper ballots. The same thing that 99% of the rest of the world uses.
You use a PENCIL to put a big X in the box next to the name of the person you are voting for.
Now I know that the Democratic party* claims that a large number of their supporters don't know which end of a pencil to use, but we can fix that by sharpening both ends (presumably, the Democrats will then claim its a Republican trick to get their supporters to poke themselves in the eye and blind them!)
* - Dems. in Florida. The ones around here seem pretty normal.
When I connect to a https site, during the handshake the remote site gives me a copy of its certificate. I (my browser) do two things with that certificate: I validate that the domain name embedded in the certificate matches the name of the website I was asking to connect to, and I verify the signature on the certificate using the public key of the signing authority.
Unless the ISP has private key of the signer, there is no way that they could possibly generate a false certificate on the fly - so I *know* I am talking to the server I wanted to connect to, not to an intermediate proxy server.
once that handshake is complete, I and the remote site have a private encryption key which we both use to encrypt/decrypt traffic between us. The ISP can't do anything with that traffic but pass it through (or block it).
The *only* way that an ISP could get in the middle would be for them to block ports 80 and 443 and insist that you configure your browser to use *their* proxy server. If you ever come across an ISP that does this, don't walk, run, to another ISP.
Suze/Novell may get bitten badly at some point by their embrace of mono (and other Microsoft technologies). Aggressively forcing those into their core product is a risk. For them and for their clients.
Xen is interesting, but as a non-transparent virtualization system it probably has a limited future.
Novell have systematically screwed up every attempt they have made to become a real player in the *nix market. I don't think they are going to do much better with Suze from all I have seen.
In the dim and distant days when programers were lazy bastards, and the 'who' command did many less things, one of the documented options was "who am i", which printed out the information for the user of the controlling terminal. It was usefull to see who the session belonged to on a logged in terminal.
Well, the lazy bastard who programmed it didn't check for arguments "am" and "i", but just checked to see if the argument count was 2, all other valid arguments being single items.
So it was sometimes amusing to find an unattended logged in terminal, type in:
SAP customers mostly won't use free, unsupported software. They are betting their existence on the SAP products and all their ancilliary supporting infrastructure (such as the database) working. They want guarantees.
They could get those guarantees from "MySQL the company", but not from "MySQL as dowloaded from the net".
Oracle now basically control the backend that SAP relies upon, and Oracle can manipulate various aspects of both DBs to make their own SAP cometitive products look attractive. SAP can no longer point to MySQL as a backup solution in the case of problems with Oracle.
The references to PostGreSQL and Ingress are really red herrings - as far as I know SAP has never suggested that they might be suitable backends for SAP, and its unlikely that they will do any work in that direction as Oracle could pull the rug out from under them again in the same way.
This is a BIG blow for SAP -- unless SAP want to either get into the DB business themselves, or make their own DB backend for SAP, which would probably not be attractive to their customers.
The article is factually correct. Ps does include shared libraries in its size, so the incremental amount of memory used by an application may well be much less than the total of its memory footprint -- assuming that the shared libraries are already loaded by some other application.
However, this still does not excuse a text editor for having a 25MB footprint!
When that editor runs it WILL require 25MB of memory to run (well, the working set may be a little smaller, but if we don't want any paging we need the full 25MB).
The "oh well its only shared libraries" excuse is just that - an excuse. Admittedly, the fault may not be with the author of the text editor application but more with the hyper-bloated "desktop" that he links to his application -- however, he should be aware of the implication of using those bloated desktop libraries, and probably do a bit more work to avoid their use.
The thrust of the article should not have been to excuse the size of those applications because "they are only shared libraries", but to make developers, particularly desktop developers ashamed of the bloated, slow systems that they produce -- seemingly in a never ending attempt to make Windows look fast and lightweight.
Re:Mostly OT: How long for MX record propagation?
on
Secure DNS a Hard Sell
·
· Score: 1
As you said, it should be no longer than the TTL. But in the real world there are some truely evil DNS implementations out there (Microsoft comes to mind) who choose not to follow standards, including not paying attention to TTL.
My own attitiude to people who accept and run such systems is simply "screw 'em". But you might want to be a little more caring than that...
What you can do is add your new MX records and leave the old ones in place, with a lower priority. Then just monitor the traffic to the old MX systems, which should drop dramatically as the TTL expires -- then its up to you to decide at what point to pull the plug and remove the old MX records.
So where are all the WMA hacks?
That has been around for a while and has enough content to make it an interesting target -- such as the copies produced by the Sony DRM.
As far as I am aware it has not been broken, and shows no sign of being broken.
Their ultimate weapon - the lawmakers that they own.
Together with Microsoft and the "trusted computing" initiative, you may well find that your computer/dvd player/cd player refuses to play *any* content unless it is digitally signed by a "trustworthy" mega corporation.
Its for the children.
To protect them from evil cyber terrorists.
See how far your indie bands get then.
First, you didn't look hard enough. The LAME code is not executed in the easy to get to binary on the CD, but buried inside an XML file are other binaries which include LAME, and in those cases it does get executed. Go do a bit more research.
Also, do you think that Sony (et al.) would buy the excuse that I copied their music just so that I could compare my downloads with it to ensure that I didn't infringe their copyrights?
The non-execution is a red herring. Particularly when copied millions of times.
If you care to look at the background of the founders and current executives of that "little company", you will find that they are ex-Sony VPs and executives.
Its just a shell company which can be thrown to the wolves if the scheme backfires and someone has to take the heat - Sony will disclaim all responsibility -- its all the fault of that dumb little UK company...
The arguments for not doing this are really pretty weak.
Reserving the right to change kernel interfaces is the weakest of all. At the upper level the kernel has no option but to adhere to the POSIX system call interface APIs, and I don't hear too many people whining about the the inability to change the system call APIs stifling innovation.
Wanting to have drivers only in source form "so that people can fix them" is a weak argument. The same argument should the be extended to the other end of the stack, and refusing binary applications - "because people can't fix them". Stallman would agree, as would his diciples, most other people have a more flexible view of the world. Don't want to use binary dirivers/ Fine. Don't use them, but give those people who do a chance to do so -- won't the famous "natural selection" have everyone opting for the open source drivers after a while anyway?
With virtualisation technology there is very little to prevent the creation of a firewalled environment to run these drivers in. That of course, would require a well thought-out, documented and supported set of APIs.
Perhaps the biggest reason to do this is that if we don't, a consortium of vendors/distros will. That will split Linux into the "profesional" version targeted by commercial products, and the "hackers playground" where greg KH, Linus and Stallman can play whatever games they like.
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Are you an American?
If so, congratulations, you are one of the very few who actually seem to have understood what capitalism and socialism are REALLY about rather than parroting the usual tripe.
The big problem with both is that people are involved, so neither really ever exists in a pure form, for which we should probably be truly grateful because life under either of them in pure form would be unimaginably dull and constricting.
Its a delicate job trying to implement the best of both and keep everything in balance, which is why western societies (which all do this, with different balances) are so "dynamic". They need to be or they will slide to one side or the other and fail.
Before car manufacturers spend money on Microsoft shit, I would much prefer them to add a small system to display and interpret the engine diagnostics rather than having to take it to the dealership and be charged a small fortune for connecting their maufacturer supplied diagnostic unit (which cost them a LARGE fortune).
I have a built-in GPS in my Jeep. I didn't want one, it just came with the car. I gave away my Megallan GPS to my son, and have regretted it ever since. The POS installed in the Jeep doesn't cover turn-by-turn for the whole US, just around big cities (in a JEEP !!!).
I paid a fortune for an "upgrade" CD. Turns out about the only difference between that and the one I had was basically the part number. Maps were still 5 years out of date.
As fot Sync -- that would be a deal killer for me. Even if they tried to give it away for free, I would go somewhere else and pay more before allowing that crap anywhere near a car of mine.
The short answer is no.
The big difference between document processing and word processing is that with something like Word you are constantly having to play with layout, fonts etc.
There is some rudimentary stuff to set styles, but when you push it (and not even hard) it breaks, and then you are back to trying to reformat your own document, and as you make changes to the malformed part, other parts of the document change.
With a document processor, you specify a document format and then just throw test at it, with directives to sat what part of the format to apply. There is a HUGE amount of complex logic which applies various rulesets to format each part of the document very nicely, and do so within the context of the document.
Word was designed initially to work with things like daisy wheel printers etc. FrameMaker Tex etc. were designed to work with typesetters which have much more flexibility (and thus require much more logic to drive them).
The end result is that the same paper prepared with word and LaTex is night and day - even on the same output device.
And despite what the original poster has to say about using LaTex, once its set up you concentrate on the content, not on the formatting. If set up correctly it behaves somewhat like CSS in that you can go and play with the document formatting and output a paper in a completely different style, never having to go touch the content at all.
The UofA website really doesn't work well with FireFox. Half the time you click on a thumbnail and don't get the the image to show, and the downloads just doesn't work at all.
I would have expected a university run show to do much better than this.
Unfortunately, that precedent already exists. If you have the components available to create a short barreled rifle, which requires the payment of a $200 tax, the BATFE can (and will) prosecute you for "constructive intent".
.gov can argue that because it is possible to construct something illegal, you intend to do so, and therefore you are guilty of a felony (not paying the $200 tax).
In other words, you possess a collection of components which are all individually legal to possess, but
You don't have to express any intent to do so, you don't have to assemble anything. Just being in a position to do so makes you a criminal.
Exactly.
The next logical extension if this case is allowed to stand is that you can be prosecuted for putting down a book you are reading in a public place and not taking adequate care to secure it.
Then you were walking around with your eyes closed. I grew up in England, but the England I knew is no more. Now when I visit there I am so aware of the changes, the CCTV towers across the countryside peering over trees and hedgerows like war of the worlds Martian invaders, more yellow paint than road surface showing, photo radar every 1/4 mile and speed bumps on main roads.
My bank uses this as the biometric factor required to access online services. When they announced this change I expected to be having to respond to my additional ID challenges almost every time I logged in. That hasn't turned out to be the case, I have only tripped up on it once. I suspect that it is not a strong enough test in itself to rely upon, but when combined with having to know the password it probably does add an extra layer of security.
And the best of luck to you!
I entirely agree that YOU, the AUTHOR should have the right to get the fruits of your labor.
You should be protected by copyright, for a reasonable time.
However, what typically happens is that your publisher will only publish your work if you assign the copyright to them. You will get something, but it probably won't bear a direct relationship to the success of your work, simply what the publisher thinks they can make and how badly they can screw you.
Copyright (and patent) law needs to be changed to make it impossible for copyrights or patents to be sold. They were intended to benefit the authors/inventors, not multi-national mega corporations.
What you say has a lot of truth behind it. Unfortunately, Microsoft can see the writing on the wall for their current software products. Their OS market share has reached saturation, attempts to persuade people to dump their current Windows for the flashy new one are becoming less and less successful. The end of the road for their office products is similarly in view. The trick of adding new bells and whistles and forcing upgrades with a format change has been used once too many times.
They are desperately looking around to diversify, to enter new markets with new products to build up new revenue streams before the Windows/Office cow dies.
They have tried to break into so many different product areas and markets that its almost funny. None of the attempts have been a great success.
They tried to change the rules of the game and make customers subscribe to software if they couldn't re-sell the same thing with new bells and whistles. That pissed off customers to the point where they bit the bullet and started looking at the alternatives, and what a move to Linix might really entail.
They tried to become the owner of the gateway to multi-media distribution. They went as far as building a whole new OS to support this attempt, and bludgeoned a lot of hardware manufacturers into producing HW to support it. They actually sold the idea to a few media creators, and those that bit are finding that the only thing they really bought was yet another way to alienate their own customers.
Consumer hardware is just another branch they are trying. Unfortunately, like Sony they are letting their various product branches force requirements on others. It makes for a nice consistent story, and the different different branches reinforce each other -- but at the price of producing products that consumers just don't want because of the broken aspects in there simply to support restrictions that some other branch of the company wants to see.
Microsoft should by Sony. Their two brain-dead executive managements seem to have a lot in common.
Actually, I think the consensus is that the Wehrmacht were no more evil than any other army. In fact, the reverse may be true since they tended to hold the old fashioned chivalry ideals.
What I think you are referring to are the SS and allied groups, which were much more political than military in nature - they just used military means to enforce their political ideals.
The SS is a much closer parallel to RIAA than is the Wehrmacht.
There are actually two types of voting cards in Oregon.
One is as mentioned above where ovals have to be filled in.
Others use a set of big arrows pointing at the person/thing you are voting for.
The arrows have a gap - you draw a line in the gap to complete the arrow.
There is something to be said for this idea.
Jimmy Carter, who has participated in the monitoring of many elections in all sorts of countries is on record as saying that if he had to monitor US elections, he would have to declare them as unfair and open to abuse.
There are jokes made about dead people voting. Unfortunately, its true. As are the votes of the same person multiple times and the votes of people ineligible to vote.
Until those problems are fixed, how the votes are counted it really irrelevant, and a distraction from the real issue.
He said paper ballots.
The same thing that 99% of the rest of the world uses.
You use a PENCIL to put a big X in the box next to the name of the person you are voting for.
Now I know that the Democratic party* claims that a large number of their supporters don't know which end of a pencil to use, but we can fix that by sharpening both ends (presumably, the Democrats will then claim its a Republican trick to get their supporters to poke themselves in the eye and blind them!)
* - Dems. in Florida. The ones around here seem pretty normal.
You misunderstand how HTTPS works.
When I connect to a https site, during the handshake the remote site gives me a copy of its certificate. I (my browser) do two things with that certificate: I validate that the domain name embedded in the certificate matches the name of the website I was asking to connect to, and I verify the signature on the certificate using the public key of the signing authority.
Unless the ISP has private key of the signer, there is no way that they could possibly generate a false certificate on the fly - so I *know* I am talking to the server I wanted to connect to, not to an intermediate proxy server.
once that handshake is complete, I and the remote site have a private encryption key which we both use to encrypt/decrypt traffic between us. The ISP can't do anything with that traffic but pass it through (or block it).
The *only* way that an ISP could get in the middle would be for them to block ports 80 and 443 and insist that you configure your browser to use *their* proxy server. If you ever come across an ISP that does this, don't walk, run, to another ISP.
Suze/Novell may get bitten badly at some point by their embrace of mono (and other Microsoft technologies). Aggressively forcing those into their core product is a risk. For them and for their clients.
Xen is interesting, but as a non-transparent virtualization system it probably has a limited future.
Novell have systematically screwed up every attempt they have made to become a real player in the *nix market. I don't think they are going to do much better with Suze from all I have seen.
In the dim and distant days when programers were lazy bastards, and the 'who' command did many less things, one of the documented options was "who am i", which printed out the information for the user of the controlling terminal. It was usefull to see who the session belonged to on a logged in terminal.
Well, the lazy bastard who programmed it didn't check for arguments "am" and "i", but just checked to see if the argument count was 2, all other valid arguments being single items.
So it was sometimes amusing to find an unattended logged in terminal, type in:
$ who screws sheep
and walk away....
SAP customers mostly won't use free, unsupported software. They are betting their existence on the SAP products and all their ancilliary supporting infrastructure (such as the database) working. They want guarantees.
They could get those guarantees from "MySQL the company", but not from "MySQL as dowloaded from the net".
Oracle now basically control the backend that SAP relies upon, and Oracle can manipulate various aspects of both DBs to make their own SAP cometitive products look attractive. SAP can no longer point to MySQL as a backup solution in the case of problems with Oracle.
The references to PostGreSQL and Ingress are really red herrings - as far as I know SAP has never suggested that they might be suitable backends for SAP, and its unlikely that they will do any work in that direction as Oracle could pull the rug out from under them again in the same way.
This is a BIG blow for SAP -- unless SAP want to either get into the DB business themselves, or make their own DB backend for SAP, which would probably not be attractive to their customers.
However, this still does not excuse a text editor for having a 25MB footprint!
When that editor runs it WILL require 25MB of memory to run (well, the working set may be a little smaller, but if we don't want any paging we need the full 25MB).
The "oh well its only shared libraries" excuse is just that - an excuse. Admittedly, the fault may not be with the author of the text editor application but more with the hyper-bloated "desktop" that he links to his application -- however, he should be aware of the implication of using those bloated desktop libraries, and probably do a bit more work to avoid their use.
The thrust of the article should not have been to excuse the size of those applications because "they are only shared libraries", but to make developers, particularly desktop developers ashamed of the bloated, slow systems that they produce -- seemingly in a never ending attempt to make Windows look fast and lightweight.
My own attitiude to people who accept and run such systems is simply "screw 'em". But you might want to be a little more caring than that ...
What you can do is add your new MX records and leave the old ones in place, with a lower priority. Then just monitor the traffic to the old MX systems, which should drop dramatically as the TTL expires -- then its up to you to decide at what point to pull the plug and remove the old MX records.
So where are all the WMA hacks? That has been around for a while and has enough content to make it an interesting target -- such as the copies produced by the Sony DRM. As far as I am aware it has not been broken, and shows no sign of being broken.
Its for the children.
To protect them from evil cyber terrorists.
See how far your indie bands get then.
Also, do you think that Sony (et al.) would buy the excuse that I copied their music just so that I could compare my downloads with it to ensure that I didn't infringe their copyrights?
The non-execution is a red herring. Particularly when copied millions of times.
If you care to look at the background of the founders and current executives of that "little company", you will find that they are ex-Sony VPs and executives. Its just a shell company which can be thrown to the wolves if the scheme backfires and someone has to take the heat - Sony will disclaim all responsibility -- its all the fault of that dumb little UK company...
The arguments for not doing this are really pretty weak. Reserving the right to change kernel interfaces is the weakest of all. At the upper level the kernel has no option but to adhere to the POSIX system call interface APIs, and I don't hear too many people whining about the the inability to change the system call APIs stifling innovation. Wanting to have drivers only in source form "so that people can fix them" is a weak argument. The same argument should the be extended to the other end of the stack, and refusing binary applications - "because people can't fix them". Stallman would agree, as would his diciples, most other people have a more flexible view of the world. Don't want to use binary dirivers/ Fine. Don't use them, but give those people who do a chance to do so -- won't the famous "natural selection" have everyone opting for the open source drivers after a while anyway? With virtualisation technology there is very little to prevent the creation of a firewalled environment to run these drivers in. That of course, would require a well thought-out, documented and supported set of APIs. Perhaps the biggest reason to do this is that if we don't, a consortium of vendors/distros will. That will split Linux into the "profesional" version targeted by commercial products, and the "hackers playground" where greg KH, Linus and Stallman can play whatever games they like.